Museumnext Conferentie

Museumnext is a new event organised in the UK that examines how museums are embracing social media, how websites are being designed differently and what the implications are of new (mobile) devices for museums. On 30th April the Museumnext conference brought some 100 museum practitioners and speakers from Europe and the US to London to share their experiences. MuseumNext is run by Jim Richardson of Museum Marketing. The event was a good opportunity to hear from museum experts from institutions that don't often hop over to Europe, particularly the large US museums, which are often considered to be at the forefront of museum innovation. The focus was primarily on social media and on the practicial implementation of projects in specific museums. Below a summary of the key points from these presentations.

For slides of the presentations: museumnext.ning.com

 

Victor Samra, MoMA

The MoMA increasingly uses social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to attract traffic to their blog. Content on the museum's social media outputs are not limited to information about their own events, but also related issues that the audience would be interested in elsewhere. Samra's approach could be summed up in the quote he took from Charles Leadbeater's 'We Think': 'In the past you were what you owned, now you are what you share'. He has managed to involve many levels of museum staff in creating online content.

 

John Stack, Tate Online

Museumnext gave us a sneak preview of the Tate's new web stategy. A radical new approach is being adopted based on the needs/wants of audiences rather than the museum's collections. Stack outlined the Tate's '10 principles' for Tate Online. Some of the key issues included making content shareable and social, giving the blog a central role, the 'collection 2.0' perspective, i.e. making a customisable user interface that allows multiple formats for the same page but different audiences. Large, well-known museums like the Tate are to some extent limited by their strong brand and it is dificult to find a balance between maintaining the brand and opening up, but this new strategy aims to change that.

The Tate Online Strategy can be found at

tate.org.uk/go/tateonlinestrategy

 

Elyse Topalian, Metropolitan Museum of Art, with Arthur Cohen, LaPlaca Cohen

How to build a marketing strategy around new media? The Met's strategy was based on the premise that 'these are good times for culture if we get the offer right'. The Met had commissioned research on the value of the arts and in particular what audiences think about cultural participation in a period of economic recession. Arthur Cohen explained how they examined what engages audiences and emphasised the importance of participation, i.e. the importance of creating a need to want to participate. They then looked at the role technology could play in achieving this goal. The findings included the message that enjoyment was a priority, and that social factors such as recommendation from peers were key. It was essential for arts organisations to 'provide value' and respond to the current mindset. The results of the research were deemed 'hopeful' in the sense that only 6% said they would cut their level of cultural participation if the value was good. The concept of the museum as a 'safe haven' appears to be holding strong in the US, with 76% of people claiming that they enjoy learning through the arts. The outcome of this research was the basis for the briefing given to the Met on a new approach to audiences (online). The result was the 'It's time we Met' campaign which used photos visitors had taken of themselves at the Met and posted to Flickr in a photo contest. The rationale for this was trying to directly connect people with art and allowing them to publicly participate and contribute to it.

 

Diane Drubay, Buzzeum

Drubay analysed two digital campaigns she had headed, one for a small though nationally focused museum in Paris, the Musee Henner, and a campaign for the international Museum Night.

The key concept behind the Musee Henner campaign was to provide exclusive content for different audiences. Drubay used 'intimate' content from social media sites in conjunction with cooperation with artists/cartoonists and a website specialised in cosmetics, as well as an exclusive 'real' event featuring beautiful Henner model look-a-likes. The Nuit des Musees, a Europe-wide version of Museum N8, focused on Twitter feeds between all the French museums, mobile content and posters with QR codes.

 

Jan Willem Sieburgh, RijksMuseum

The Rijksmuseum's director presented a complex customer relations management system with different roles based on the concept that 'a museum is a conversation' rather than merely an art-historical institution. People, objects and knowledge for the triangle of key focus for the museum and the Rijksmuseum has invested in work at the backend for enable a series of new services, evidenced last year in the 'For the Love of God' website, which not only allowed visitors to voice their opinions on the Damien Hurst exhibition, but also offered a visual interpretation of the market research and allowed communication.

 

Robert Stein, Indianapolis Museum of Art on ArtBabble

ArtBabble, a collaborative video platform dedicated to the creation and sharing of video about art and artists, is at an interesting stage of development, with 23 museums and cultural organisations involved. It serves as an interesting example of collaborative content platforms and niche portals. It recently won the 2010 Museums and the Web best overall site award. ArtBabble brings visitors out of thei 'internet-local silos' and stimulates cross-pollination between museums with similar content. It has developed a number of tools that could be used as a model for other online services, such as the Babblebuilders tool for storytelling and teaching, and the 'notes' mode that allow you to annotate the videos could become a key tool for other formats.

 

Smithsonian Luce Centre of American Art

The focus was on the role of museums in education and the tension that sometimes exists between providing links with formal education and school curricula versus informal learning experiences. The Luce Centre experimented with a variety of formats using low and high tech (with cell phones, text tours to link objects, Facebook games similar to Farmville). More recently it has focused on ARGs, most famously with Ghosts of a Chance in 2008 (this was presented in detail at the DEN conference 2008 by Nancy Proctor) and its follow-up Return of the Spirits. In the summer of 2010 the Centre will launch the Mymuseum game and from Autumn 2010 a new game called Pheon will run for a year. It is an online, mission based, real world game some of which can be uploaded to a website. It's designed for multiple institutions, involving different missions from different museums.

For more information see: futureofmuseums.blogspot.com

 

Gail Durbin, Victoria & Albert Museum

The Victoria & Albert Museum is also working on a new website which will place more emphasis on crowd-sourcing linked with an object database. The museum has been experimenting with social media on projects such as the upcoming exhibition on wedding fashion. People were asked to send in photos of wedding fashion, and the museum has made links with genealogy sites and vintage fashion blogs to spread its message. Their aim is to move from user generated content per se towards communities based on specific interests (a recent example being the Quilts community but other areas will include photography and drawing). Gail Durbin also emphasised that projects such as this can be done at a low budget and encouraged the audience to just get on with it!

 

Mike Ellis, Eduserv

With smartphones making up more than 40% of current mobile phone sales, museums need to look at how to use mobile technology. Mike Ellis looked at some of the factors that make mobile experiences compelling. Among the advantages of mobile applications for museums: they are always on, intimate, multisensory, contextual, ubiquitous, parallel and always at hand. Ellis talked about research done in to the differences between the desktop and mobile experience, varying from applications to use on the way to the museum to a game that is separate from the visit. He got down to the nitty gritty of how to actually 'do mobile', either adapting existing sites ('sniffing'), building a separate site (Powerhouse Museum), building an app. (Brooklyn Museum), or a stand alone game (Science Museum, UK). Issues such as cross-platform compatability and cost were also mentioned: according to Ellis an app could cost as little as 10.000 Uk pounds. A range of tools are now mushrooming to build apps on the back of existing platforms (eg. Titanium Accelerator). Yet another option is to build a mobile web appl that lives in the browser, and last but not least use old school tools such as SMS or MMS. Ellis briefly looked at new location based tools, citing AR as an example of technology driving content. Predictions for the future were the rise of GPS, QR, RFID and more accuracy in internal waypointing: 'the future is location based mobile experiences'. Take heed.