All right. . . Now that we’ve taken a whirlwind tour of some of the web’s most popular social networking sites, let’s take a moment, sit back, and enjoy a cup of a favorite beverage. (In the 100+ degree heat we’ve been experiencing here lately, I assure you that for me, it’s not coffee.) Let’s pretend I’m a good hostess and for those of you in cooler climes, I’ve put on a pot of coffee to, well, percolate.
As I said in part I of this series, museums’ participation in social networking sites should allow museum content to percolate, to recirculate and gain flavor as that content is passed among Internet users and, we hope, among visitors to museums, who then return to the Web to post their thoughts–and thus museum content persists. Which of the sites I’ve discussed are most successful in allowing for percolation?
1. Flickr: Flickr is a flexible site who usefulness to museums is limited only by museum professionals’ imagination. Best of all, museums’ Flickr projects may be driven by users rather than by museum staff.
2. Twitter: Twitter is labor-intensive in that it requires staff to post frequent “tweets.” But it doesn’t take a lot of staff time, and there’s no learning curve to speak of. And if you did take the time to plan out a marketing campaign, Twitter would allow for a good deal of creativity–and keep your institution in front of Twitter users. Imagine, for example, the tweets of a charismatic and quirky (or, even better, well-recognized) historical figure. Robert E. Lee posts from Gettysburg. Harriet Tubman from the Underground Railroad. (Who wouldn’t add Harriet Tubman as a friend?) The folks at Plimoth Plantation share their daily trials and joys, all in their particular dialect.
3. YouTube: YouTube is fun, and used properly–for contests, to hype exhibits, to add extend exhibit content and concepts–it could be a useful tool. Look around to see what other museums are doing–and then call their marketing departments to gauge their understanding of their YouTube campaigns’ success–before you invest in the hardware and staff training (or expensive video consultants’ fees) necessary to produce quality serialized video.
4. MySpace: Edgier than Facebook, MySpace can give museums an online presence among a younger crowd. But it’s not clear to me how MySpace will keep your institution’s name regularly in front of MySpace users.
5. Facebook: Facebook is a good way to connect with existing communities–for example, to pull together a group of docents–but it’s probably not the place where your museum is going to take off among the younger set.
6. LinkedIn: Little percolation here, but lots of possibility for back-room dealings among donors and muckety-mucks who, used strategically, might raise the profile of your museum. I’d use LinkedIn to open a dialogue with key players in museum- or technology-related fields.
So. . . the salon is open in the comments. What are your thoughts?
Additional Resources
There’s a ton of good writing and thinking out there about museums and the social web, including social teworking sites and mashups. Here are a few that deserve further mention, along with some quotes from each article or post.
So….should museums be on Facebook? Yes, probably, if that presence does something interesting and motivating for users. Should museums be on Facebook just because it’s there? Obviously not.
Maybe museums would be better off developing some simple Facebook apps -
for example to let users search (and use) their images. See Photobubbles
as one simple idea (http://apps.facebook.com/photobubbles) - if you let
users add captions and bubbles to a selection of images from your
collection you’d be immediately capturing a young and viral audience.Just creating a group “Museum of ****” probably wouldn’t cut it, except
with the same old audience you already had, or people you already work
with…
At roots.lab, there’s an excellent post that claims to be “Social Web 101 for Nonprofits, Or, How the ‘Live’ Read/Write Web Can Help Your Organization Achieve Amazing Things.” An excerpt:
The social web is about:expressing identity. The social web allows individuals to share aspects of their lives with friends, family, or anyone at all, via easy-to-use online tools. It allows people, whatever their motives — and the motives of a MySpacer, a business blogger, a “wikipedian” and so forth are surely very different — to reveal a tangible sense of who they are and what they’re interested in.
relationships and trust. The social web makes it easy to find and start talking with others who share your interests, whose ideas you like, who make pictures, videos, writings that you find appealing. Enjoy a few positive interactions with this sympatico person you’ve found, and trust will begin to ensue. People develop authentic bonds with others through the social web.
user-driven websites. The social web makes the little guy important — anyone can post videos to YouTube, engage in back-and-forth with the authors of widely read blogs, or help write and monitor wikipedia. It also makes the online behavior of the little guy important — each click matters, when giving the thumbs-up to an article on Digg, watching YouTube videos, or even using Google, and figures into these sites’ ranking of content. The social web allows users to be active, empowered participants in the production and distribution of media, the word-of-mouth reputation of a business, the grassroots support for a political candidate, and other tides that course through our culture.
Allowing users to generate their own content can also benefit those with different social, cultural and digital experience or expectations. With hard-to-reach groups, learning how to use these resources can be as important as the end result. At a time when museums and galleries are challenged to demonstrate their social relevance and inclusiveness, such content can be particularly helpful.
The first market for museum websites is the direct user community. These are the people who regularly visit both museums and museum websites, and who make use of their online databases to carry out detailed research into the objects in their collections.The second, much larger group, is the indirect community of millions upon millions of people for whom the Internet is both an information resource and a kind of hyper-connected valet, able to cater to their whims, needs and wishes 24 hours a day.
So far, the majority of our services have been targeted at the former. But who are these people? Do they really exist outside a small number of academic research institutions? Ask the majority of people about the information they want from a museum and they are likely to want to know things like where it is, when it’s open, and whether there’s somewhere for them to have a picnic with the kids. So why is it that we have spent so much time and effort delivering complex searchable databases of catalogue records?
As always, feel free to share your own links to resources in the comments.
Now that we’ve considered the museum presence on Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr, let’s take a quick look at a few other social networking sites.
YouTube
Chances are, even if you don’t know it, your museum is probably already on the video sharing site YouTube. Go ahead–open a new window and do a search for your institution’s name. You’ll probably find some stuff you like–and some that you really don’t. And some footage inhabits that hazy middle ground: that grainy video of children playing in what seem to be dimly lit and noisy science center exhibits may encourage some families to check out the exhibits, but might discourage others.
If you museum wants to share a more polished product on YouTube, participation in this virtual space may require more time and resources–a decent video camera, video editing software, and staff time and expertise–than some of the other sites considered in this series of posts.
The Ontario Science Center has a channel on YouTube, as does the Tech Museum of Innovation, but the two institutions are using YouTube in very different ways to reach (I’m guessing) divergent audiences. Ontario showcases its exhibits and goings-on, while the Tech shares interviews with experts in genetics. Here are two of their videos.
From the Ontario Science Center:
From the Tech Museum:
Which do you think is more successful, and what do you think these two museums hoped to achieve by posting videos on YouTube? Go check out the rest and share your thoughts in the comments of this post (or if you have a blog, write your own post and link back to this one).The American Heritage Museum in Britain posted this kind of cheesy video to promote its exhibitions:
And the Mountain-Plains Museum Association is collecting museum YouTube videos on its MySpace page.These examples, of course, represent just a sprinkling of the museujm videos out there. Know of other museums using YouTube? Leave links to their video in the comments of this post.
Twitter
Twitter seems one of those applications that you either “get” or really, really don’t. Twitter allows people to post messages of up to 144 characters on the site. Friends can “follow” each other’s messages, creating a community timeline. I find it fun to find out what my friends around the country are up to, but the whole public timeline thing is a bit overwhelming.
While posting fairly frequent “tweets” (what Twitterers call their brief messages) may be a good way for museums to keep fans updated on museum projects and events, these tweets do disappear very quickly from the timeline; that is, they don’t stay in Twitterers’ view for very long.
What are your ideas for Twitter?
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a professional networking site where users invite people they know professionally to connect with them and even vouch for their work. The hope of many users is that their friends–or their friends’ friends–are connected to someone influential in their field, someone who might help them.
I’m not an active user of LinkedIn–it’s just not that popular among academics, from what I’ve seen–but it seems to me that LinkedIn would not only prove useful among museum professionals who are looking for work, seeking greater connection in the museum community, and to exchange resources, but also for museums looking for donors (of money, art, technology, or other resources), for guest speakers at events, for heads of local organizations that might bring their members to the museum, and more.
Note: This is part III in a series. Read part I and part II. Flickr
When it comes to museums and social networking, Flickr is where the action is and should continue to be. Unlike Facebook and MySpace, where visitors can leave notes or comments, Flickr allows people to actively create the core content in what Flickr calls a “photostream” or “set.” And besides, people like pictures! Some people may feel intimidated by new media terms like blogs, Facebook, and MySpace (as well as our attempts to define them), but “photo sharing” is, in the industrialized world at least, just about universally understandable.
To say museumfolk have been thinking about Flickr is an understatement. We’re crazy about it, it seems, and there’s a ton of good writing about using Flickr. Accordingly, I’m going to create a handy-dandy link list here, and you can visit those articles and Flickr pages that most interest you, ‘K?
Note: This is part II of a series. Be sure to check out part I as well.
MySpace
Museums appear to be colonizing MySpace at a much faster pace than they are participating in Facebook. It’s not surprising that MySpace is so popular with museum marketers, as it’s not only among the most-trafficked social networking sites, but also may be number six on the list of the world’s most popular English-language websites. MySpace also attracts the participation of a young audience that most museums would love to capture as lifelong patrons.
Museums have approached MySpace in a variety of ways. See, for example, the Henry Art Gallery on MySpace (598 friends) and the MOCA (LA) MySpace profile (9016 friends). The MOCA profile looks much more polished and approximates a more traditional website. The Henry profile embraces the cluttered, haphazard aesthetic of the typical MySpace page. The Brooklyn Museum (9181 friends) combines elements of both approaches.
There’s also a small MySpace page called “I like museums,”, which seeks to make museum-going in the northeast UK more appealing to teens through cross-marketing efforts by a number of museums. Thus far it has fewer than 40 friends, but the comments section could prove to be an interesting place for fans to rave about their favorite museum and exhibits–as seems to already be happening, albeit in a very small way.
As a field, we need more research on how museums define and measure a successful MySpace presence.
MySpace vs. Facebook
Danah Boyd recently shared some reflections on the class differences between the typical Facebook and MySpace users. Her observations include these:
The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other “good” kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we’d call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, “burnouts,” “alternative kids,” “art fags,” punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn’t go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. These are the teens who plan to go into the military immediately after schools. Teens who are really into music or in a band are also on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.
If Boyd is correct in her observations–and as you can see from the comments on this blog post a lot of people think she’s on to something–institutions need to be thinking about which venue is a more appropriate place to connect with constituents. Are you looking to connect with Facebook’s more conventionally/traditionally cultured/educated “hegemonic” users or MySpace’s “subaltern” participants? (I’m borrowing Boyd’s terminology here.)
As Boyd’s commenters discuss, Facebook allows for more controlled, tighter-knit connections. Users can specify how and when they met each of their Facebook friends, and it appears (from my observations anyway) that Facebook replicates offline patterns of friendship and acquaintance. MySpace, on the other hand, provides a less tightly networked approach, with hundreds, if not thousands, of complete strangers befriending the same user.
Why not use both Facebook and MySpace?
Don’t be fooled into thinking social networking sites take the guesswork out of outreach.
There are some serious challenges for those institutions brave enough enter these spaces. First of all there are serious identity issues, ads (some of which might be considered inappropriate), and the issue of resources in maintaining multiple web identities. The fact that many of these sites may be short-lived is also a concern. In looking beyond the more established spaces, how much time would you want to invest in start-up social networking site?There are copyright issues: who owns the content that is posted on these sites? Finally, there is the persistent issue of measuring success. I think the museum field does a fairly lousy job of measuring the impact of our various websites and online exhibits. How do we measure the success of a presence in Flickr, YouTube, or MySpace?
Bingo. . . As I said above, we don’t as a field have clear metrics as to whether the investment of staff time into maintaining such virtual profiles pays off in visits, contributions, gift store purchases, and whatever else it is institutions desire.
Percolating. That’s what numberless posts on museums and social networking sites have been doing in the mind of this particular blog curator. The addled perfectionist in me wanted to create an entire series of posts looking at individual instances of museums using social networking sites well or ill.
Instead, I’m going to bring together a lot of that material into this One Big Post.
And so: percolations.
Wikipedia explains that “Percolation is properly a type of drip-brew process in which steam pressure recirculates hot water for multiple brewing passes. In percolation, water moves passively (percolates) down through the coffee due to gravity and is recirculated.”
And isn’t that, in the end, what we want museum content–in the museum and online–to do? To brew, to make several passes, to recirculate because it’s hot hot hot?
That’s what the blogosphere does well, albeit in the museum blogosphere largely among professionals. The social networking sites also accomplish this percolation to some extent, I think–a bit less well than the blogosphere might–but the advantage these sites have is their sheer numbers of users. If museums approach these sites thoughtfully and courageously, museum “content”–by which I mean such information as construction updates, new exhibition announcements, mashup applications that draw on museum collections, and more–can circulate through key constituencies on these sites.
Many people who climb Everest because it’s a popular challenge end up dead. Similarly, museums that venture haphazardly into the wilderness of social networking sites may end up looking stiff and frozen. Institutions need to enter these spaces with firm answers to these questions:
What audience(s) are we trying to reach, and why?
What information do we want to convey to these people?
What actions do we want them to take?
Demographically, where do these constituents congregate online?
Do these virtual spaces provide the tools that will allow us to circulate our message?
Do the sites then provide ways for users to circulate our message without too much futher effort from us–that is, do the sites allow for percolation, or will our message merely appear for a moment and then pass quickly from users’ radar?
I think, used well and targeted toward niche audiences, many social networking sites will allow museums to meet their goals.
Don’t let your institution become lured into social networking sites just because they’re new! beautiful! and modern!
Let’s take a look at some of the more popular English-language sites:
Facebook
Facebook began as a site for college students, and required a .edu e-mail address for registration. Facebook has since opened itself up to all comers and, more recently, shared its API so that people could tweak existing applications (or develop new ones) to help Facebook users share content.
I think the best feature of Facebook, as far as museums are concerned, is the news feed. Every time you update your profile with a sentence about what you are doing, all of your “friends” receive the update on their Facebook home pages.
You can also start a group dedicated to your institution. Groups built around institutions work a little bit differently, allowing you to provide news updates. But, based on my experience on Facebook, there doesn’t seem to be a way for groups to feed their updates into individual users’ news feeds. Instead, users learn when their friends join or leave groups. In fact, this feed is the primary way I learn about new or existing groups–my friends join them and I check them out. I’d feel more confident about the usefulness of groups in Facebook if I received updates about them in my news feed.
Here’s a sample group on Facebook, the Public Library of Science (PLoS):
Members of the group can exchange messages, but in order to see these messages, members must visit the group page–the messages aren’t fed onto individual users’ home pages. And unless your group makes very clear what action you want users to take, you may get questions like this one posted at PLoS:
While it’s terrific that group members want to support the project, users shouldn’t have to ask such questions. And Facebook, in my opinion, doesn’t make it particularly easy for institutions to share their messages or to recruit members to their groups.
A much more effective way to put your institution in front of its constituents is to create an account for an especially wired and charismatic member of your staff (someone who would, of course, appeal to your target demographic) who will befriend users and keep them updated on your museum’s activities through pithy news updates, e.g. for a maritime museum, “Lucy is bound to her chair by old sailors’ knots: http://tinyurl.com/2osjo9″ with a TinyURL link to relevant content. The downside? I believe users will have to copy and paste the TinyURL (or whatever other short link you generate) into their browsers–it won’t be a live link, and the updates form won’t accept HTML tags for links.
In recent years many museums have begun to emerge from their longtime stodginess in favor of exhibits and activities that appeal to, well, people. In the 1960s and 1970s, museums embraced more interactive exhibits–inspired, no doubt, by the success of Charles and Ray Eames’s exhibit Mathematica, which brought complex math to the masses (although not without, I noticed on my last visit to the exhibit, at least one sexist joke in the labels).
Institutions like The Exploratorium and the California Museum of Science and Industry (now the California Science Center) extended this mission with more manipulatives. Parents and kids alike enjoyed their romps through the galleries.
Fast forward to the present. Museums are embracing the Web, and now you can watch webcasts of Iron Science Teacher, go behind the scenes with the Smithsonian’s Office of Exhibits Central blog, and learn about art from the assiduously edited Eye Level, the blog of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Museum employees and aficionados are jumping into the blogosphere as well, championed in no small way by Jim Spadaccini of Ideum. Women make up a large portion of this corner of the blogosphere. It’s no wonder–women have long been the forces driving education (in art, history, and–yes–especially science) in museums, and the museum professional blogosphere is very much about sharing ideas and learning from one another.
Here’s a sampling of the best:
The Museum Detective writes about museums and interviews fascinating museum people. Don’t miss her series of blog posts on museum women (a topic so near and dear to my heart I wrote my dissertation on it).
Mª Soledad Gómez Vílchez blogs (in Spanish) at MediaMusea about the possibilities Web 2.0 holds for the cultural sector. For those who aren’t fluent in Spanish, the blogger kindly includes an “automatic translation” link to an English version.
If you read Portuguese (or have a good translation program), you should check out Ana Carvalho’s blog No Mundo Dos Museus, where Carvalho blogs about a wide range of museum topics, including conservation, exhibition documentation, registration, education, management, marketing, and tangible and intangible patrimony. She invites everyone to join in the discussion.
Among my favorite museum blogs is Nina Simon’s Museum 2.0, which addresses quite a few different topics, among them games and books, but which focuses on the ways Web 2.0 philosophies might play out in physical museums.
Into art? Visit e-artcasting. This Spanish/English blog “is a non-profit research project on sociable technologies in art museums from all over the World.”
Don’t let the fact that you’re not multilingual limit your exploration of this corner of the blogosphere. My experience in the museum blogosphere as a mostly monolingual American has been very reasonable, as most of these bloggers have been able to read and respond to my comments left in English.
Leslie Madsen-Brooks, Ph.D., has a passion for museums. Her research has examined the history of women scientists working in natural history museums, the ways science centers encourage or discourage girls, how best to present American material culture to lay audiences, and more.
In addition to this research, Leslie has worked in museum education, exhibition development, arts marketing, journalism, educational publishing, and university development. She has taught literature, writing, and American Studies at the university level. She also holds degrees in English and writing.
