Social media: the big players

When you think of "social media," what comes to mind?  Facebook and Twitter are the biggest right now, although there are certainly many other players in the game. I recently learned about foursquare, which seems to be the Facebook "check-in" feature on steroids.  Then there's LinkedIn and Google+, although those sites are really designed for use by individual people rather than institutions.  Obviously there are many other new social media sites emerging (give me more ideas in the comments!), but I want to focus on the established ones for this post.

Most museums have made some attempt to utilize these kinds of services; there are 32 Twitter accounts just for the Smithsonian Institution.  But what are the most effective ways to use social media?  There's got to be more substance behind it than just tweeting random tidbits because it's "the hip thing to do." 

As Jeff Haden wrote recently on inc.com, Facebook and Twitter are tools; they don't make connections on their own unless you, the human being, maintain them.  And just putting information out there ad nauseum does not mean that everyone (or anyone) is reading your tweets or updates.

Courtesy of http://www.frombogotawithlove.com

The great thing about services like Facebook and Twitter is that they are multi-way communication; the museum can generate content and post it, but so can visitors, and their friends, and their friends' friends, and so on.  Anything that is posted can be responded to with more content, responses and comments, or retweeted and shared with more people.  In theory, for a museum, social media can create a great ripple effect that results in more visibility and participation from the public.  But is it working?  What are museums posting about, and are people really joining in the conversation?

Technology In Museums recently wrote that technology needs to be in service of the audience in order to be successful.  If it's not relevant or engaging to the visitors, why would they use it?  Just in the course of researching this post, the overwhelming amount of information, twitter accounts, blogs, and articles made my head spin.  As a relative newbie to all this, it made me want the why to be obvious up front.  In other words, when I find a blog or Twitter account with posts about technology or museums or both, what's in it that's useful to me?  Why should I follow it?  Is it worth spending my time to read it?

To get things back to a more real-life place, here is a discussion of the major social media services with some examples of museums that are using them in effective and interesting ways.  There's also this article (which I found through Twitter today!) about museums in Boston using social media.  Please add your own examples and ideas in the comments section!

Facebook

According to a limited study by Expose Your Museum, e-mail and Facebook are the two most common sites or apps that people visit first thing in the morning and last thing before bed.  Despite all the new technologies jumping into the market every day, we still tend to go for the most basic and familiar first.  Facebook has continued to evolve from its original interface, adding pages, check-ins, and other new features that are especially useful to institutions. 

The most obvious use of Facebook for museums is by having a "page" that people can "like."  Two good examples are the Brooklyn Museum and the Field Museum.  For both pages, anyone can write comments or post content on the wall, and the default view shows everyone's posts (not just those from the museum itself).  This setup indicates how much these museums value their visitors' input.  People can also "tag" their individual status updates with the name of a museum, which then adds that person's status to the museum's wall.

There are countless museums that use Facebook to post pictures, announce new exhibitions opening in the future, publicize events, show insider sneak peeks at renovations in progress, and broadcast daily tidbits of information like "this day in history."  In general, the posts on these museums' Facebook pages get a fair number of "likes" and comments from viewers.

Where it is allowed, viewers tend to post a lot of response content: interesting links about an artist the museum is exhibiting, personal photos from museum events, or links to their own artwork websites.  When the audience is actively posting and responding on the Facebook page, the wall turns into a forum for idea-sharing.  I'll speak for myself here, but the forum concept feels directly aligned with the museum profession's stated goal of making museums into places where communities can come together and learn from each other.  This is a great advantage of the multi-way format of services like Facebook.

From a personal standpoint, though, I don't habitually go to museums' Facebook pages to see what they're up to.  I either see something in my Facebook news feed by chance (which doesn't show much on my phone, the main way that I check Facebook), or I go to the museum's webpage to look up something.  More often I see things in my Twitter feed, since they're quick and short and more of them can fit on a page (and I have a Twitter list of museums!).  But I digress.

I think nowadays museums believe that having a Facebook page is like having a webpage was in the early 2000s: it's something you absolutely have to do to be perceived as relevant.  But while webpages have been around long enough for lots of creative uses to be developed, Facebook pages are still a bit limited in scope and, considering all of Facebook's facelifts, not capable of doing very many different things.

Nevertheless, given how many people use Facebook every single day (52% of the 800 million members, according to Mashable.com), it's still a vehicle for museums to get into the daily routines and consciousness of their visitors.

If you're looking for more Facebook tools, Seb Chan has some great tips for using Facbook, another good example, and a study of return website visitors on his blog, Fresh & New(er).

Twitter

Sometimes referred to as "microblogging," Twitter is the service of the soundbite; you have 140 characters to get your point across.  (That was only 133!)

Twitter is simpler than Facebook in many ways: no big detailed profiles, no apps, no "pages," just people posting bits of information, sharing with a "retweet," and using hashtags (#) to look up posts about a particular topic.  I personally haven't been on Twitter nearly as long as I've had a Facebook account, but as I said earlier, it's a faster way to find out more little bits of news.

While is it possible to set your Twitter privacy so that you have to approve the people who follow you, I've found a lot of great Twitter connections when those people (who I didn't know before) follow me, and I imagine they find me because of the users that I start to follow.  With everything public (who you're following, who your followers are following, etc.), Twitter makes it easy to find other users who share your interests.

Hashtags (#these) are also an interesting way of connecting over certain topics or interests.  In September of 2011, the National Museum of American History (@amhistorymuseum) used hashtags to create an online conversation during their 8-day exhibit around the tenth anniversary of September 11.  Through Twitter updates and signs in the exhibit itself, the museum invited visitors to share their reflections on the events of September 11 and their thoughts about the exhibit using the hashtag #sept11reflect.  Users could search for that hashtag in Twitter and connect with their fellow visitors' reactions and thoughts.

In my limited experience, there are some "do's and don'ts" for using Twitter as a museum. The above image is a snapshot from my Twitter homepage.  Out of six tweets from the span of about two minutes, there are two "this day in history" type posts, three photos (one of which is part of a regular weekly question to followers), and one informational tweet.  You can see that the National Air and Space Museum (@airandspace) authored two of those six tweets; they are one of the overachievers of the museum-tweeting world, with numerous "this day in history" posts and other announcements throughout the day. The following are some of my do/don't observations.

Do:
- Post things that are interesting to a wide range of followers
- Interact with your followers directly (retweeting, mentioning, etc.) as much as possible
- Post pictures, especially "sneak peek" type images of coming attractions
- Start hashtag-based conversations that allow people to connect
- Have weekly features like a question, contest, or something special just for followers
- Occassionally live-tweet an event or exhibition visit (but not too often!)

Don't:
- Fill people's Twitter feeds with lots of mundane posts just to stay in their consciousness
- Exactly replicate your Facebook page or blog (what's the point?)
- Tweet the same thing more than once a day (if you're trying to remind followers about a fundraiser or event, that's plenty! You'll annoy them away if you tweet like a broken record.)

Nina Simon has a great set of Twitter guidelines for museums on her blog, Museum 2.0.  She makes an excellent point that Twitter should be for things that you can't find on the museum's website; information that changes constantly, like what's blooming at the botanic garden or what's going on at an event right now, are easier to update by Twitter than going in to change the content on a website.  Besides, Twitter is all about the right now, so in a few hours no one will complain that your status is "out of date."

foursquare

(Yes, that is intentionally lowercase, that's the trademark!) So I've only heard about foursquare since I started this project.  foursquare is essentially an expansion of the "check-in" feature on Facebook; it's location-based networking.  The foursquare homepage currently has this short video explaining what the app allows you to do:


Hi! I want to learn more about foursquare! from foursquare on Vimeo.

The program offers incentives to people who frequently check in to the same place; if you have more check-ins than anyone else for a certain period of time, you get named the "mayor" of that location.  Businesses or institutions can offer deals, incentives, and other enticing rewards to get people to check in.  The idea is clearly about users finding good places to go based on their interests, and also about meeting up with friends who they might not realize are nearby.

Personally, I don't know that I would alter my plans if foursquare told me that two of my friends were at a restaurant around the corner.  But clearly it's a technology that has other benefits and multitudes of uses.

How can museums use foursquare?  It's hard to offer a "deal" if your museum is free, but there's always admission to a movie or planetarium show, a spot in a special behind-the-scenes tour, discounted membership, or the chance to weigh in on an upcoming exhibition.  The entrance hall could display a live screen showing how many people have checked in, which would in turn encourage more people to follow suit.  Repeat visitors could unlock rewards that have to do with the exhibits or answers to questions posed in the text panels.  There are also "badges" that can be created by the museum and earned by visitors who repeatedly check in; the whole concept of badging will be covered in more detail as part of an upcoming post on this blog.

This article from WPP talks about some other ways that museums can make use of foursquare.  The bottom line is, foursquare is an emerging technology; there are myriad possibilities, and the ways that people use it can influence how it evolves over time.

LinkedIn

The "Facebook for professionals," LinkedIn has fostered a number of connections in my personal experience (a friend of mine got her job at Apple just by putting up a profile; the recruiter called her within a week!).  In general, the service is designed to be used by individuals.  However, as museum professionals we can use our individual accounts to share ideas with other museums and build potential partnerships for both audience outreach and exhibition/program development.

The "groups" function of LinkedIn is especially useful for idea-sharing; discussions abound every day, and there are many museum-related groups on the site.  People can ask questions about an issue at their museums, and within hours their colleagues from all over the country have chimed in with suggestions and resources.

In terms of outreach for a museum, LinkedIn is probably more useful for identifying potential employees than new audiences.  However, the individual profiles can allow a museum to find new potential collaborators or contractors, and those people can bring in new audiences.

Google +

This is obviously a fairly new player in the social media game, but given that it's a Google product it is already integrated with everything else we already use (which was, I'm sure, their goal in creating it!).  I also think of this service as being geared toward individuals rather than institutions, but technically anyone with a Gmail account can make a Google+ profile.

The Penn Museum has a profile that looks like a Googleized Facebook page; there is some general information, photos and videos, links to their webpage and Flickr account, and then a wall of posts about interesting happenings at the museum.  At a quick glance, it's hard to see what the Google+ profile does that Facebook can't, beyond the obvious element of reaching visitors who don't use Facebook.

The "circles" feature in Google+, which allows grouping of friends and connections, could be useful for creating a "hangout", or group chat session.  The ability to video-conference or chat easily could allow for collaborations between people or institutions that were geographically too far apart to meet in person.

Because YouTube is also a Google product, videos already posted to YouTube could easily be linked to a Google+ profile, streamlining the work and getting more visibility for the same videos.  On the other hand, a video could be posted privately on Google+ so that only people in certain circles could see it.  The museum could create special behind-the-scenes movies to share with selected audiences, as an incentive to "follow" them or possibly as a collaborative tool for sharing ideas back and forth while working on an exhibition.  There is still more exploration to be done about what Google+ makes possible for museums.  Besides, knowing Google, they'll add more new features next week.

Summary...?

The beautiful thing about social media technologies is that they are what we make of them.  I've found just a few examples of what's already been done, but what more could we do with them and how can we reach new audiences through these media?


The floor is open for comments!