We invited some of the world’s leading museum innovators to talk about the benefits and challenges of social media. This is what they told us...

Nancy Proctor, Head of New Media, Smithsonian American Art Museum
In 2006, a study by José-Marie Griffiths and Donald W. King of the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, revealed that 45 percent of museum visits are by online visitors. Many museums now report 3-10 times the number of online visitors that they get in person. And interaction with museum content – both published by the museum and authored by its visitors – is increasing exponentially in social media sites. So museums can now be said to encompass not just the platforms they control – from their bricks and mortar buildings to their own websites, Facebook pages, Flickr groups etc. – but also the spaces where online audiences publish their own images, videos, texts and more about museum collections and events without any editorial recourse to museum staff at all.

As I have said elsewhere,  I find myself increasingly compelled by these trends to ask the questions: What is the museum’s responsibility to those who may never be able to visit the physical museum in person? How can the “real world” museum-encounter with the artifact be communicated to remote audiences on all the many different platforms they now use?

I think we need new strategies for content and experience design to address our audiences effectively and efficiently across these many platforms, both those controlled by the museum and those that are entirely user-generated. These new methods will take us beyond a simple “Multi-platform Museum” model to a more radical “Distributed Network,” proving, perhaps, that the humble crabgrass is better than even the spoke and wheel in carrying the museum’s messages to its many audiences.

In the next issue of Museum identity, Nancy Proctor will examine the “multi-platform museum” & “distributed network” as metaphors that lead us to different and new methodologies for cross-platform content and experience design.

Kathy Jaller, Senior Associate, Design & Social Media, Contemporary Jewish Museum
Social Media is tool through which I’ve had the privilege of making a lot of little failures in the service of understanding our audience.

This may sound like a problem, it’s actually an incredible gift. Best practices in the use of social media are evolving, and the role it can play in nonprofits and cultural institutions is in the process of being defined, challenged, and innovated upon. Everyone is figuring it out as we go along, based on the needs of their institution and audience. Such an open field is rare in a Museum context, as is the level of direct interaction with one’s audience. This technology, far from making things cold and automated, humanizes institutions that might otherwise seem impenetrable, and facilitates conversation that is available to the public and to the institution, as opposed to being contained within tour groups, classrooms, or visitors on date night.

Upon starting our twitter account and selecting our iconic architecture as our avatar, my first question was, “who wants to hear what a building has to say?” I still ask myself this everyday, working to strike the balance between content delivery and relationship building (much like the institution I represent), and creating a tone that is at once relate-able and authoritative. This work can sometimes be messy, fraught with all the delights and potential missteps of other forms of human communication; misspellings happen, rumors are disseminated. However, more often than not interactions are supremely positive, with our audience delighted to sense and interact with a human presence instead of just a building. Seeing cultural institutions in my own facebook and twitter feeds sandwiched between friend updates, news sources, and pop culture icons, I am further inspired to make sure museums have an equal presence in this realm as another aspect of engaged and connected lives.

Devon Akmon, Deputy Director, Arab American National Museum
Similar to other institutions, the Arab American National Museum (AANM) began using social media in a rather piecemeal fashion.   The community-based museum opened to the public in May 2005 and, with a relatively young staff, immediately began finding ways to incorporate social media into its outreach strategies.  

The nature of social media lends itself well to an institution so rooted in its community. Usually, a staff member would propose using a particular social media platform, present to staff on how it could benefit the institution, and adopt the day-to-day management and oversight of it.

In September 2009, we hired our first Social Media Marketing Coordinator. Shortly thereafter, the Community Foundation of Southeastern Michigan (CFSEM) launched its inaugural Challenge Arts and Culture, which sought to help raise much needed funds for the 75 cultural arts organizations that make up the Cultural Alliance of Southeastern Michigan.  Recognizing the importance of individual giving via the Internet, the CFSEM online Challenge required institutions to use social media as a primary tool for raising funds. The Challenge lasted approximately 12 hours, and the AANM placed fourth among all institutions, raising over $300,000 in unrestricted funds.

Currently, the Social Media Marketing Coordinator manages the oversight of all social media tools at the AANM. At this time, the Coordinator is developing a social media strategy and works within the Marketing and Communication Department to produce online messages while also monitoring conversations relevant to the AANM.

We are currently utilizing several social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Delicious, blogs and iTunes. Further, we are developing other social media tools for collecting community history and building community (e.g. Wikis). And finally, social media tools are now being used within exhibits. 

Diane Drubay, On-line Communication Consultant, author of the blog ‘Buzzeum’
The internet is a communication tool full of promise for museums. But we still need to know what to use, how to use it and what conversations to have.

With social networks and new media we try and imagine the museum like an actor rather than as a center of online relations; learning from the online community as much as they learn from museums.

Within the National Museum Jean-Jacques Henner (Paris), we tried to establish a new relationship between the museum and the online community by integrating them fully into our project. We wanted to effect exchanges with users that went  beyond simple reviews or the creation or customization of content. 

Recognizing we were going to re-open a monographic museum on an artist no one really knows, we decided to build a community around his artistic universe. In fact, over the past few decades advertisers, poets and painters have learned to appreciate the work of Jean-Jacques Henner, borrowing its aesthetic codes without spreading its name. To help increase awareness and the online presence of Jean-Jacques Henner we decided to create a community of passionate people inspired by Henner’ universe.

Facebook has been a place of rebirth for Henner whcih allows people to better understand his life and works. Flickr has become the primary source of images of his works. Dailymotion is a witness to museum life via bloggers and artists interviews. And finally, the blog “Henner intime” is the union of the whole community.

Thus, we create a new community around the museum with blogs, Facebook, Flickr and Dailymotion. Now you can find online Henner communities and future players like a comic book artist inspired by the universe of Henner or a fashion blogger who analyzed the aesthetics of Henner and how it influences our world.

Victor Samra, Digital Media Marketing Manager, The Museum of Modern Art
When people hear about the number of Twitter “followers” and Facebook “fans”  MoMA has, their eyes open in disbelief. “How’d you do that?” they’ll ask. The large numbers of followers and fans is not due to any great brilliance on my part, but due, of course, to MoMA’s name and world-renowned collection.

The number of followers a cultural institution has on Twitter, Facebook, or any other social network, however, is not as important as the quality of engagement an institution has with its audience. These tools should be used to engage a community of people who are passionate about your institution and its content. These platforms allow us to create a direct line of communication with our audience, and engage in conversation. It is about making your content available on these networks, and allowing others to share the content with their friends. It’s about putting a human face on your institution and engaging people rather than viewing  new technology as a marketing device.

It is also, and perhaps most importantly, about listening: Listening to conversations about your institution. Before technology made these platforms possible, people were talking about our organizations. Now many are taking these discussions to these digital platforms, whether your institution is there or not. It is uncensored feedback. And after listening carefully, you can then engage in conversations with your audience, enabling them to realize they have a direct connection to your organization.

The art of conversation is the key here. It is about having a voice that is approachable and not intimidating. It’s not about broadcasting one-way messages into the ether; rather it is about sharing content that you think your audience is interested in, and wants to engage in, whether it’s inside your institution’s walls or not.

It’s really very simple: technology is enabling us to have good conversations.

Tony Butler, Director, Museum of East Anglian Life
The Museum of East Anglian Life (MEAL) has taken advantage of the gift of Social Media to make new connections and creative conversations with our users. We use cheap and user friendly applications like Facebook flickr, and twitter.

MEAL has a strong sense of social purpose. We set up the only social enterprise to be based in a UK museum and the ethos of the museum is to be an open organisation. We rely on the support of the community in so many ways, from governance to fundraising,  from providing support at events to working on our collections. Smaller museums are comfortable with co-producing activity. We want to exploit the potential of social media to collaborate more with our users and the community.

The museum website is powered by wordpress which makes it a glorified blog. This means that a member of staff even with limited knowledge of IT can up load content.  There’s no need to pay web designers to maintain the site and we pay only paltry sum of £50 a year to the web host. We have a facebook ‘Fan’ page (rather than a group) which is ideal for providing short bits of information about upcoming activities to individuals who might not readily visit our home page.

Our flickr pages have provided us with some great content which we have been able to use in promotional material much to the delight of the amateur snappers who uploaded images. We’ve discovered new stories and connections reading the conversations between flickr users discussing photos of items from the museums collections.

My twitter feed appears on our website home page. Many museums are ‘corporately’ twittering but I think the public would rather read tweets from a person than an organisation.  A parent from a school in Lavenham contacted us after she had followed a tweet of mine about well-being. The school is now working with us on a project called Happy Days which examines empathy and happiness in the context of the social history of the region. There is also a link to my own blog from the museums website.

People are demanding unique content which pertains to their particular interests, in a medium of their choosing. In order to retain the sense of a museum as a shared endeavour, more and more content must be co-produced. Social media will make the presentation of material culture an iterative process where objectivity becomes less sacrosanct and user and museum person both  prepared to take on the role of author. The myriads of individual stories and responses which social media can facilitate are better able to relate the peculiarities, muddle and complexities of the world in which we live.

A special guide to museums and social media from Museum Identity magazine. All rights reserved.