Tag Archives: Twitter

When progress usurps progress

With the World Wide Web twenty years old today, this post takes a cursory glance at how online tools have evolved over the past two decades.

The internet was brand new and shiny in the early 1990s, but I’m not sure anyone really knew quite how dramatically it would change the world. Nowadays, almost every company or organisation has a web presence. Everyone from my local Indian takeaway shop to the museum down the road has a comprehensive homepage. These were, no doubt, contracted out to professional web developer companies or freelancers.

There is, however, a shift towards a more DIY ethos. @drewb alluded to this shift the other day by drawing attention to Cyclonix – a consultancy that moved its entire website over to Pinterest. This is an example of technological progress – Pinterest is easy to use and encourages interactivity – usurping what was once considered the height of technological innovation – an internet webpage.

wip

Another, slightly different, example of progress usurping progress can be seen in the demise of Google Reader. When Google announced it was ending its RSS service, there were incandescent howls of protest. What would we do without our beloved content aggregator? Move elsewhere, to Feedly or Reeder, perhaps?

Well for some, Google Reader’s replacement is the very thing it could have once claimed to have buried – the e-newsletter. Email round-ups from sources such as Newsle follow the old tried and tested e-newsletter formula. They are just much better at it now compared to a few years back.  The e-newsletter is also useful since the emails can be archived in your inbox if you wish to revisit specific items at a later time. Furthermore, the fact that e-newsletters direct traffic to websites is beneficial to companies in terms of ad revenues. The RSS model, as Google have known for a long time, is simply unsustainable in pure business terms.

The progress usurping progress theory has, of course, been over-egged in the past. Cast your mind back a couple of years and there was a lot of talk about new-fangled micro-blogging sites i.e. Twitter and Tumblr replacing the mighty blog – a medium itself once viewed with suspicion by written print columnists and traditional journalists.

The point remains, nevertheless, that many innovations made online in the past two decades, once viewed as revolutionary, dangerous even, are now themselves beginning to be usurped. The World Wide Web is past adolescence and is now entering its twenties. Exciting times.

*image courtesy of @perconstantine

What I learnt from a week @LondonIsYours

I was privileged to be asked to guest ‘curate’ the @Londonisyours Twitter from 28th January for a week. For those unfamiliar with the account, it’s the big smoke’s equivalent to @sweden. A platform for Londoners to sound off about anything they so please.

london3

One of the first things I asked my new – temporary – army of followers was: which is your favourite museum or gallery in London? I was, to my delight, inundated with responses. What was telling, however, was that the vast majority of people didn’t name-check the museum’s twitter handle. Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but it struck me as rather peculiar. It was almost as if most people didn’t know that their favourite museum was on Twitter. Or at least, if they did, it wasn’t worth interacting with them.

Another thing that struck me was that most people’s favourite museums/galleries tended to be ‘nationals’. Hardly surprising I suppose. They are popular for a reason. All of them are world-leaders in their field. Their reputation for excellence means their visitor numbers far exceed small to medium sized institutions. As a result, they get more funding from government and corporate sponsors. A vicious circle if ever there was one.

No doubt many smaller, or ‘niche’, London museums do a stellar job in promoting themselves online. Indeed, they have to punch above their weight and intrigue audiences in ways that others don’t.

But are they really engaging potential visitors? Or are they essentially just talking shop to us, fellow museum types?

Twitter accounts run by animals

Which museum first handed their Twitter account over to an animal? Whoever it was, they were pioneers in the field. Because there are now an abundance of them.

Oisin (pronounced ‘o-sheen’) rules the roost in Warwickshire. He is a Giant Irish Deer who lives in the Market Hall Museum in Warwick. Although officially extinct, Oisin is very much alive and kicking on Twitter @OisinTheDeer.

The Museum of Old and New Art’s Twitter is run by the MONA Monkey and it’s thoroughly entertaining. They’ve also got a cracking website and highly entertaining blog. @monamuseum

monkey

The Natural History Museum Dublin has its very own tweeting Giraffe, Spotticus. @SpotticusNH is very chatty.

SpotticusNH_sharpened_border

The Museum of Hartlepool has the cute cartoon character @YuffyMOH.

Thanks to @JackShoulder for pointing out that @GlassJarOfMoles proudly resides at the Grant Museum.* The highly esteemed Haslemere Educational Museum is lucky to have Siberian @Arthur_the_bear as their mascot. At the Natural History Museum in London, a 20 tonne Diplodocus Carnegii looks after proceedings. @NHM_Dippy is 150, 000, 107 years young.

bearDippy-at-NHM-LondonThere’s also a whale on the ceiling of the Natural History Museum in New York City. @NatHistoryWhale

The Horniman Museum have their very own celebrity Walrus. Need we say more? @HornimanWalrus

walrus

Getting a bit niche now. Cornwall’s St Agnes Museum have a leatherback turtle. @stagnesturtle

Special mention must also go to @kidsinmuseums who celebrated their 10th Birthday at the Royal Academy last night. Their Twitter account, which is run by the prolific @MarDixon, features a beautiful Quentin Blake illustration of a mammoth.

Did I miss any out? Let me know @davementi

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+ Update: Courtesy of @jennifuchs we have A list of tweeting museum objects, animals and other mascots. And more on #MuseumMascots on Social Media.

+ By popular demand, we have added the Postal Museum‘s very own @OWNEYtheDOG to the list.

*Thanks also to @ShapaBegum, @steveslack, @tonybutler1 and @AboutLondon for pointers!

What the Rise of China Means for Museums

At the end of the year, all provincial and State-run museums in China will open to the public free of charge. So China is bucking the trend. Free entry for all. In a country of 1.3 billion people! But at what cost? I explore how mobile technology is taking off in China and how we, in the ‘west’, might learn. Could this be the end of the traditional, static, four-walled museum?

Read full article at Museum iD

How (some) museums use Twitter well

The last post was very critical of how many museums use Twitter. This time I thought I’d highlight some things I think particular museums do well.

  • The @Tate’s #TateWeather hashtag is very clever. They mirror, often uncannily so, the weather forecast and/or current conditions with a piece of art from their collections.
  • The @DesignMuseum’s #FontSunday is a real favourite of mine. Each weekend they request followers to send in examples of a themed font. Recently this has included gold, and the letter ‘O’. Never thought fonts could be quite so fascinating.
  • @NMMGreenwich’s #ODTH (on this day in history) thread is a great idea. Relevant bit.ly links to the museum’s extensive collections page are given for those wanting to buff up on their naval history.

So, who is missing from the list? I realise it’s rather dominated by hashtags so it would be good to hear if any museums are particularly good at other stuff. Do they speak with a human, rather than institutional, voice? Do they tweet/RT interesting links, twitpics or Instagram snaps? Do they engage with their followers?

 

Why I unfollowed museums

Who controls museum Twitter accounts? The bookings team? Communications? The Events department? Robots?

The other day I went on an *unfollow* frenzy. I decided to stop following museums who tweeted stuff that I could just as well find out myself from the front-page of their website.

Image

Perhaps the question museums should ask themselves is who follows them on Twitter. And why.  I suspect it is people with a pre-existing interest in their museum or subject area. And these people probably know how to find their way around a website. If they are like me, they don’t follow a museum for hourly repeats of its opening hours.

I propose that museums embrace the idea of having multiple Twitter handles to better engage past, present, and future visitors.

e.g. @MuseumofXYZ_Curator/ Marketing/VisitorAssistant/Institutional_Voice

I would also encourage the users of such accounts to include a human name and picture alongside their handle. If the account has more than one user, then name and describe them in the profile.

For the time being, I’ll stick to following real people who work in, or are passionate about, museums.  Hopefully it won’t be too long before I re-follow a bunch of museums.

The end of Social Media Managers?

Well done Museums Sheffield! Their Twitter handle (@MuseumSheffield) claims that tweets come from a range of people – curators, educators, marketeers, visitor assistants and others. How many other museums encourage such a variety of voices to be heard?

I suspect that in the future, there will be a trend towards this dispersal of power within museums. After all, what does the professional ‘Social Media Manager’ really know about what is happening ‘on the ground’ in a museum or gallery? It is the Visitor Assistants (those working on the shop floor, so to speak) who are on the frontline. They see and hear things when they work weekends and late openings that their office-bound seniors don’t.

‘Rebel Mouse’ for museums?

Rebel Mouse, a new ‘social front page’ founded by former Huffington Post CTO Paul Berry, launched a couple of weeks ago.

In form and function, Rebel Mouse is a cross between About.me, Paper.li, Storify, Tumblr, WordPress and Pinterest. It aggregates the links and photos that you share on Facebook or Twitter and feeds these in to your Rebel Mouse homepage.

The beauty of Rebel Mouse is that it can be as hands-on or hands-off as you wish. It automatically updates your page in line with your Twitter/Facebook account. There are also settings enabling you to feed in specific hashtags and an option that saves all imported items as drafts allowing you to edit your content at a later time.

So what’s the big deal? Isn’t this just another social media site to play with? What’s in it for museums?

The achievement of Rebel Mouse is its simplicity. Rather than send people off to your various different social media pages, direct them to Rebel Mouse. It is here that one will get a general, overall view and feeling of your organisation.

In the future, there is the potential for Rebel Mouse to host topic/category pages like Pinterest. Can you imagine the interest in a ‘museums’ stream that collated the social media content from different organisations?

You can find us on Rebel Mouse here.

5 point plan: Digital technology in museums

  • Museums should make every effort to build their mobile app catalogue. It could be a Collection app like at the Design Museum or location-based apps like Magic Tate Ball. Some museums might argue the cost of developing apps is uneconomical in today’s financial climate. We disagree. If restaurants, coffee shops and football teams recognise the need to engage their customers digitally to meet their expectations, why shouldn’t museums? If you look after your brand, then the pounds will take care of themselves.
  • Don’t replicate material. We said don’t replicate material. As tempting as it might be, visitors to your Facebook page will not be impressed if it’s just a rehash of your website. If someone wants your opening hours or to know if there is a café on one of the levels, in all likelihood they’ll go straight to your website. Or they’ll tweet you. Your Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Flickr and Youtube pages should ideally be very different from each other. They should reflect certain parts of your personality and, for that reason, will probably appeal to different people for different reasons.
  • If you want your visitors to engage with you, listen. And show you’re listening. With big bright flashing lights. Host a Tweet wall like the Museum of London. Better still – install a Tweet wall at the entrance, around the galleries and at the exit. The Tweet wall allows visitors and passers-by to see what they have written, and know it is not disappearing into the ether. They now have a stake in the wall and may want to hang around to see their message flash up and to interact with other visitors. It would be great if museum staff responded to these tweets on-the-spot. An ‘AskTheCurator’ hashtag would surely prove popular.
  • Learn to reward your visitors more. Having near-mastered the art of asking for money, it’s time to give something back. In the same vein as the Tweet wall, encourage visitors to post their Instagram snaps or Draw Something pictures to a ‘Vis-wall’. The author of the most popular content – measured by crowdvoting – wins fame, glory and perhaps even a prize from the museum shop.
  • Don’t introduce new technologies to your museum just for the sake of it. Ask yourself what purpose it serves. If you don’t know, how are your visitors supposed to? Whilst it’s tempting to show off to the world that your museum is with it, so to speak, without a clear and integrated strategy, chances are it will just look like a desperate gimmick. Remember, technology is servant, not master.

Ai Weiwei: The Serpentine, Censorship, and Skype

For the twelfth year running, London’s Serpentine Gallery has commissioned an artist to design the summer pavilion. In this Olympic year, the project has been awarded to the designers of Beijing’s iconic Bird’s Nest stadium – Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei.

Under virtual house arrest for his opposition to the Chinese government, Ai Weiwei has been unable to travel to London. He has had to communicate with his colleagues via Skype.

Newsnight’s Gavin Esler interviewed Wei last week. You can also follow Wei on Twitter – what better way to learn Mandarin.