By Lovelynn Hansen,
Event Coordinator, Japenese Friendship Garden
I attended the session for
“Promoting Small Museum Content with Digital Social Networking Media.” This was
the perfect session for me attend on behalf of the Japanese Friendship Garden
because we are a small but growing organization making advances in expanding
our audiences and outreach with the use of social networking media.
This was my favorite session
because I had the opportunity to learn and brainstorm with these smaller institutions.
It was also less intimidating because many of us were not IT professionals and
as tech savvy as many of the participants in the conference. The majority of us
were in the beginning stages of learning how to better use the web to promote
our institutions and reach our audiences.
It was interesting to learn which
types of social media outlets they are participating in to promote their
museums and reach out to their audiences. Many of them were already using
Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. Some of the organizations maintained blogs and
also used WetPaint Wiki to communicate with their followers. This is something
I hadn’t considered but plan to look into.
It was fascinating to learn about
the McCormack Freedom Project. With the use of their website, blog and other
social media outlets, they are still able to continue the mission of their
organization after closing their physical museum. However, with the use of
blogs and other social media networks they have been able to continue to reach,
communicate and organize a number of events with their members and donors. We
also covered important information about the use of copyrights and to be
careful of the images and content we share on the web.
I had the opportunity to share with
the other participants our successes using Twitter and Facebook. Some of the
participants expressed they wanted to increase visitor attendance. I suggested
to them to look into posting a Twitter coupon for 2-for-1 admission. This is
something that some museums in Balboa Park have done to increase attendance.
They were delighted with the idea because it was absolutely free marketing and
in complete control how often they wanted to run the coupon.
I also shared with them how we
tweeted about “Survivor” our only surviving koi of 23 fish from the tragic
accident back in October ’08. It was a favorite fish with many members and
visitors to the Garden. He suffered from a tumor and I would send tweets about
his condition. Many followers sent their sentiments. One follower even offered
to perform reiki healing on the fish.
Recently, the fish was put down to
reduce suffering. Within 30 minutes we had the Union Tribune covering a story
and by that afternoon it was on the SignonSanDiego.com website and ran in the
paper the next morning. They thought it was great because they found tweeting
or blog posts can also be a source for getting news tips or ideas for media for
human interest stories.
Overall, it was a nice refresher to
meet with participants from these small museums. This made me realize with the
advances in technology how vast our reach can be around the world with or
without a physical location.
Thank you BPOC for giving
JFGSD the opportunity to attend this conference, to know we’re not alone in our
goals learning better ways to reach our audiences, and that BPOC will provide
us with the resources to help us reach those milestones every step of the way.