Planning Social Media for Museums
MW2009 Morning Workshop
15 Apr 2009 9:00
3rd time, new format
Flicker commons book (similar to Apple's offering via iPhoto)
Encourages participation and examples from our institutions.
Why use social media?
Social media allows technology to connect with our visitors in a more participatory fashion than traditional methods. Not necessarily Twitter or Facebook used by individuals. Rather how the output impacts the institutions.
Offers a chance to bring new, often younger, audiences to the institutions.
Right now there's an issue where less authoritative sources of cultural knowledge are gaining ground against the traditional cultural institutions.
Although technically simple to set up, getting the institutions to use it is a challenge.
Presentation less about technology than the changes to the institutions.
Consider what we are offering now, what does it say about the org.
Write a 100-word summary of the service and the experience it offers.
In the presenter's new feature to present curator blogs, there was strong resistance to having photos of the people. Comments on the blogs, as they introduced themselves or presented a favorite item from the collection, some of the more pointed comments focused on the appearance of the person rather than the content of the post.
Quilting Wiki
Hard to transform lurkers into users who contribute.
Science Center (Ontario Science Center)
For a museum who posted science videos, what is the end result? Does it motivate merely comments or can it encourage visits or parody videos?
BlipTV evoked frat house comments. YouTube was more mixed in its comments. Of the nearly 2 dozen video sharing services, few have generated comments outside the like/dislike/LOL simple responses.
What works? Is Twitter a waste of time? Sometimes social media efforts work but not all the time.
Social Media Strategy
Engagement (different methods needed for different situations)
1->many
many->many
hybrid (eg Amazon)
Experience
Knowledge sharing (eg educate -- most common initial goal)
Voice (eg curators blogging gives them voice, share opinions)
Education
Communication Strategies (ranges from conversation -> collaboration)
Purposes may include rapid publication, personalization, content sharing, cocreation. To achieve these you may use blogs; podcasts, vodcasts; tags, social bookmarks; online audio/video; creation & distribution tools.
Sometimes it is easier to achieve the purposes in the traditional sense than with the technology.
Figure out what you want to achieve and pick the tools most likely to facilitate that.
Flicker Commons characterized as a 3rd generation project with many people contributing and using the content.
Moderation requirements higher as the strategies move from conversation to collaboration.
Blog examples (http://discussions.mnhs.org/collections/index.php)
Is the success measured by the views or comments? Web or digital team tracks these.
Curator blogs in the presenters' example were written by the curators themselves rather than the media department or IT folks.
London Transport Museum (http://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/collections/default.aspx") has a "share a story" feature which requires a lot of personal information to post a comment. This tends to discourage comments (perhaps by intent).
Indianapolis Zoo has http://www.mycarbonpledge.com to let people identify their location as they replace bulbs with CFLs. (No word about the Hg impact).
The pushpins are much larger than the houses so it exaggerates the "impact". Meets their mission is met because climate change affects animal habitat. A lot of negative feedback. If the people had contact information, they were contacted to discuss their disagreement.
Spread by word of mouth to 42 states and several countries.
Reports # people, # bulbs, total CO2 reduction (over what time period?)
http://www.whostalkin.com is a site to see what sort of references to a site are being made.
Kentucky Historical Society (http://history.ky.gov). Good looking but a lot going on. People get lost and don't always drill down from the first page.
http://search.twitter.com is another tool to see who is referring to a site.
People tend to give freely of their time when participating in social media sites. When you show that you are aware of these tools, you build loyalty and trust by giving the participants a voice. Sometimes this is called "radical trust". It can be fragile and easily damaged.
How do people react when contacted about their blog content which refers to an institution? It depends on whether the blog is directed towards a narrow or broad audience.
Marketing team should be monitoring blogs and other social media references and selecting which ones to contact.
Often a video criticism may cause you to change how you present information if it is not possible to change the actual source.
If your institution has a liberal photography policy, encourage Flicker posting and tag so it can be found by others -- and us.
For museums where the marketing department feels they must control everything, often this distorts or changes the message. You could overload the marketing department to the point where they are overwhelmed.
Presenters found a blog called MuseumsSuck.com which was specific and articulate and irreverent about what is wrong with museums. Museum 3.0--what will the future be like? Site since taken down because author had a lot more comment than he anticipated and that he did not feel like he had enough authority to speak on museums to such a large audience.
Many photos on Flickr probably aren't intended to be public.
Implementation (Part 1)
What is the objective, audience, tools & technology?
Consider the sustainability/scalability, evaluation methods
Prepare a budget/resourcing.
Curator blog budgeting
Curators wanted monthly. Web people wanted daily. Settled on weekly object descriptions. Estimated that each curator would take about 2 days for write up. Many objects needed cataloging and photography and/or digitization.
Although the software (WordPress) was free, the manpower was fairly high, about 100FTE/yr.
Directive: one less day on academic writing for this sort of writing.
Experience: underestimated work required. Have about 100 images up.
Noted that Flickr allows annotations of portions of an image.
So far, giving the photos away from the Power House has not reduced income but it has not significantly increased it. Lowers requests for PD material from other departments.
Flickr meetups every 6 months. After hours.
Estimate it now costs AU$20,000/yr to run. About one full-time position.
Seems to be encouraging more visits and interest. About 300 people locally, 700,000 views of photos.
Estimate running a blog takes 10 hrs/wk for blogger.
RSS feeds are a little difficult to measure success. Google Analytics being used to look at site. Would be good if traffic could be identified at one level and note differences and compare with goals. Some people who are "fans" of the RSS can be contacted to find ways to improve communication.
Wikirank.com
Closing thoughts
How does your organization view its role in guardianship? How is it changing?