Tying it all together (with an ethernet cord)

So we’ve got all these technological tools, and each one has the potential to be useful for museums (and their audiences) in a significant way.  Our goal in doing this tech-newbie project was specifically to discover ways we can use technology to reach new audiences; that endeavor requires overcoming boundaries of perception (from both institution and individual), socioeconomic standing, location, culture, knowledge, interest, and accessibility.

So where can we take it from there?

As museum enthusiasts as well as educators, we are wont to aim for rather lofty goals.  Social justice!  Universal literacy!  Worldwide understanding!  Productive dialogues!  Sustainable practices!

Courtesy of Silver Glimmer Dust

Before the doubts creep in about whether these things could be accomplished by new technologies like social media, think back to the protests and triumphs of Arab Spring.  Would that revolution have been (or continue to be) possible in a world without Twitter and Facebook?  And even if it was, would we really hear about it on this side of the pond?  

Take another lofty example: think about the obstacles overcome by the Occupy Wall Street movement; its core is a forum for the fielding of ideas, solutions, changes to be made, and those ideas are primarily shared across social media platforms.  In addition to live-tweeting their protests and events, Occupiers use social media to publicize their committee meetings.

Occupy Wall Street march, courtesy of The Atlantic

It’s a wonder the whole thing didn’t start on the steps of the Met, home to ageless depictions of human trials and victories.

Is the museum field really itching to jump into the middle of a political fight?  Probably not.  But can we be facilitators in the dialogue that coaches the players?  Absolutely.  Learning is the only way we can overcome the issues that face us as a society; if we already knew what we needed to know, the problems would cease to exist.

The 2012 Trends Report from the Center for the Future of Museums highlights seven significant trends in the museum world.  One of them is the possibility that the educational system will eventually blend with the museum network to create a multi-location, place-based, passion-driven learning environment.  As places of informal learning with a long history, museums can lead the formation of a new educational framework that is based on individual interests, motivations, learning styles and collaboratively solving real-world problems by developing 21st-century skills.

Courtesy of The Red Balloon

Those 21st-century skills will undoubtedly involve using and understanding technology. So will fully participating in our democracy and being members of an "enlightened, humane citizenry" (Excellence and Equity, AAM 2008) that can take the country, even the world, in a new and better direction. 

Museums have quite a trove of resources at their disposal; we have vast collections that can represent many different times, places, and peoples.  We have objects, images, and stories that can provoke intense conversation and perhaps allow us to see through one another's eyes to a better understanding.  If we don't shy away from controversy and difficulty, we can foster the kind of multi-perspective thinking that will be necessary to solve some of the world's social injustices.  

A few specific ways to use technology for furthering social justice:

• Holding events with a keynote speaker, panelists, or a town hall meeting and streaming it live as a webcast with the invitation for people to Tweet/email responses and join the conversation that way.
• The Tweets/emails could even be projected onto the screen in the lecture hall and made an integral part of the event. 
• The conversation could later be made available as a podcast or YouTube video.
• Polling the public about controversial or complicated topics to get a sense of the feelings, opinions, and priorities that affect it; this information would guide how the museum approaches an exhibition or program on that topic.
• This data collection could be done through the museum's website, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or more visually through Pinterest.
• In the spirit of learning for the future by studying the past, Historypin could be used to examine a particular area's visual history in detail.
• The changes that have taken place since the time of the photographs could be discussed as a jumping-off point for analyzing what is changing now.
• Connecting experts with laypeople so the general public can learn about ways to make their daily living choices more sustainable, culturally-aware, or otherwise sensitive to needs beyond their own.
• This could be done through podcasts, live streaming video on the web, Twitter conversations, exhibitions and related programming with feedback submitted by visitors through various means.
• Museums could create an app or mobile website in which users could log sustainable or culturally-aware actions anytime, anywhere.  Recycling could earn you rewards (Check out RecycleBank to see this idea in action).

The possibilities are nearly endless, but that's what will make our jobs fun and interesting in the future; figuring out the new ways to connect with new people and make big things happen.

You never know, maybe we'll start the next revolution!

Courtesy of http://www.pophistorydig.com

The "Pin" Phenomenon

Before Liz and I started this project, I had never heard of Pinterest or Historypin and I had no idea what they were all about.  They are both relative newcomers to the social media scene (Pinterest went live in 2010 and Historypin in 2011).  There are actually quite a few similarities between the two sites; they both give people the opportunity to upload and share information and resources, usually images, links, videos, or audio clips.  Each service offers a new way for museums to engage with their public, which I will explore in more detail below.

Pinterest

Possibly the fastest-growing social media network right now, Pinterest is essentially a digital bulletin board; you share things (pictures, links, videos, etc.) that are labeled with a category so people can search for postings based on interest.  In the Pinterest world, the term "pin" is both a noun and a verb; "pinning" refers to the act of posting something, and a "pin" is the item that has been posted.  You can "re-pin" other people's postings, as well as "liking" them (such as you do on Facebook).  You create "boards" that you pin things to, and the boards can have a certain theme or they may just be a mish-mash of things you find interesting.

Much like Twitter, you can "follow" other users, or you can choose to follow only some of their boards.  Right now, in order to join Pinterest you have to go on the wait list for a few days or be invited by an existing member, but I imagine that will probably go away soon (like Gmail did after the beta-test phase).  I recently created my own Pinterest page to see what it's all about.

My verdict: there is some really cool stuff being shared, and there aren't enough hours in the day to browse it all!  Part of the reason I can get Wikipedia-style lost in the pins is that the "search" feature of Pinterest is very inconsistent.  I have found I'm better off finding things I like by clicking to people who have re-pinned items of interest to me, rathern than by typing into the search box (although I still do that too).

Recently, this article was published about the copyright risk of Pinterest, and I do not know the current status of that debate.  However, pinning things that you have complete ownership over does not appear to pose a legal risk, as long as you understand that (like the rest of the internet) you're putting your work into the Creative Commons world and are giving your implied consent to have those things be re-pinned and/or used by the public.  Of course, that kind of open sharing seems to be the exact goal of Pinterest's creators.

Quite a few museums are already active on Pinterest and are using the service to showcase their collections, list items from the museum shop, present albums of their beautiful facilities, and get input from visitors.  One should be aware, as Jenni Fuchs points out, that the etiquette guidelines of Pinterest include a suggestion that you "not use Pinterest purely for self-promotion." As such, museums would do well to create boards that go beyond showcasing and into the realm of something more far-reaching.  Audience input is certainly a first step down that path; the SFMOMA has often tweeted to ask their followers what the theme of their next Pinterest board should be! 

Given the museum profession's shift of focus onto the audience, and the description of Pinterest as "curating what you love," it would be interesting to see a museum organize a "citizen curator collection" through Pinterest.  It is possible to set up a board with multiple contributors, so a museum could start a board and ask its visitors to post things that are related (the theme, or themes, could be decided by the visitors as well!).  It would be like a digital, graphic oral-history project. The Center for the Future of Museums already had a collaborative inspirations board where people are pinning their visions of how museums will be in the future (you can request to become a contributor, see the CFM blog for details).

One good example of a museum on Pinterest is the National Museum of Natural History, which has an entire board of podcasts, collections of "science things we like," images of current and past exhibits, images from Tweetups, and citizen science projects.  While more of their pins relate to the museum's collections and facilities, the contributions of the audience are represented as well.

Another museum that is continually growing its Pinterest presence is the Children's Museum in Easton, Massachusetts.  Since collections are not the focus of what they do, the museum's 8 Pinterest boards include things like craft ideas, activities for parents to do with their children, and book suggestions, in addition to pictures of events and programs at the museum.

As a museum educator who has spent countless hours looking for ideas and developing activities, I find it very encouraging to know that there is a simple way to share (and find!) those kinds of things with categories to help narrow them down.  Perhaps in the future the "search" function will get smoother, although I'm beginning to think that having more options for categorizing and tagging pins will be the first step in streamlining search results.

For more reading, Greg Landgraf has a great listing of some other museums that are using Pinterest, and the CFM Blog has a great write-up of the crossover between Pinterest and museums.  There's also this great New York Times article about Pinterest as it relates to small businesses, and I think it applies to museums and non-profits as well.  This blog is also full of great examples and other social media information for non-profits, and this primer has five links to good sources for further information.

Historypin

I could try to describe Historypin, but this video does it best:

In this case, "pinning" refers to attaching a photograph, video or audio file to a specific location on the map.  It is similar to Pinterest's use of the word, but is based on location rather than category.

While Pinterest seems to focus on collecting and organizing what is now, Historypin seems to be doing the same thing with what has been.  It's a worldwide oral history project on steroids.  How could museums use it?  I can think of a number of ways.

First, it's a source.  Historic photographs are great for setting the scene of an exhibit and can be good tools in conducting research for a living-history or similar program.  Along with that, it connects you to the people who posted those photographs, who can then become resources and collaborators with the museum. 

Second, it's a medium for creating a simple online exhibition.  Let's say a historic house museum wants to create a timeline of photographs showing its building, and the neighborhood, as they have evolved and changed.  The museum puts out a call for photographs from their visitors and community members, those people contact their relatives and friends, they go searching through their grandmothers' scrapbooks, and chances are some of those people will find pictures and stories that fit the bill.  This crowd-sourced exhibition of pictures (and stories) can enrich the museum's portrayal of their own background, as well as that of their community.

Along those lines, Historypin recently added the feature of "channels", similar to YouTube channels, which allow the user to collect all of their postings in one place.  The Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia and the Missouri History Museum are two examples of how this can be done. 

Third, it's a way to disseminate knowledge.  Most museums have at least some photographs or prints in their collections; that treasure trove of captured moments could be shared with the world (including people who may never be able to walk through the museum's doors).  Museums are highly trusted by the public as sources of accurate and reliable information.  Who better to help contribute to this worldwide visual history project?  The Brooklyn Museum has already done this with great success.  Imagine if even half of the museums, historical societies and cultural organizations posted just a few of their pictures from the past; what a richly-illustrated history we would start to see! 

Fourth, it's a way to make history real, especially for people who prefer interactive or multi-sensory learning.  It's one thing to look at a black-and-white photograph from your hometown and think, "wow, that looks old."  It's a totally different experience (at least for me) to see it juxtaposed over the real, street-level view that you know and grew up around.  I just did a search for my hometown (Livermore, CA) and found a picture of the Carnegie Library just before it was finished in 1911.

I've always known that building was historic and beautiful, and I drove past it a lot because my family's church was across the street.  But there's something magical about seeing the old photograph held up against the building that I am so familiar with.  It makes me feel as though everything that has been before is still lingering in the air around us, we just don't always get to see it.

(Perhaps I'm a bit of a romantic... anyway, off-topic.)

A museum could make use of the "history coming alive" effect in a number of ways, perhaps by linking to Historypin from their website, or including computer consoles of interactive Historypin maps within exhibits.  Also, while most of what's on Historypin is photographs, we can't forget that sound and video clips can be pinned as well.  A museum or other organization may be more likely than an individual to have the means for digitizing old film or cassette recordings.  However, these institutions could also be the instigators of such a project and collect, digitize and pin those historic elements provided by their visitors and communities. 

For more reading, check out this student blog with a number of Historypin-based projects exploring how museums can make online exhibits this way.  There's also this partnership between Historypin and the Smithsonian that happened last September.  There are other good examples on that blog; try the "exhibitions," "heritage" and "local projects" tags.


Do you have suggestions or good examples of how museums are or could be using Pinterest or Historypin?  Please share them in the comments!

Guest post part 1: social media communities

A nickel for your thoughts: Growing and sustaining museums’ social media communities

Guest post by Erin Blasco, public programs coordinator and manager of the National Postal Museum’s Facebook and Twitter accounts. Find her on Twitter as @erinblasco

Whether you manage social media accounts for a museum or follow a museum or two on your preferred social network, consider the following statement: “Museum social media communities grow quickly and are relatively self-sustaining.”

Whether it’s a “duh” nod or an exasperated sigh, I’d love to hear your reaction to this statement. Here’s why: at the 2012 Museums & the Web conference in April, a panel of museum social media practitioners will invite consideration of some of the most commonly heard truisms about social media among our colleagues. But you don’t have to be in San Diego to participate. In order to include a variety of voices from around the country, we’re kicking off the conversation early and will continue it both during and after the session. Comment here and your thoughts will filter into the session and the conversation surrounding it.

What do you get for sharing your thoughts, comments, and case studies?

1. The opportunity to step back from drafting tweets and deleting spam YouTube comments to re-discover why museums participate in social media and what we can reasonably hope to gain.

2. Advancing the dialog beyond assumptions will allow us to establish a thoughtful foundation of social media best practices to build upon.

3. Communicating about social media myths not only moves the profession forward but also sharpens our skills at discussing social media goals and myths in our own institutions. This conversation will make us better advocates for our museums’ goals and audiences.

So, do museum social media communities grow quickly and sustain themselves? If you’ve never heard this truism before, consider these: “Let’s make a Facebook page so that hundreds of people will gather to discuss our exhibits.” “There are a lot of people out there who like Civil War stuff; we should start a Twitter account to bring them in.” “Social media is huge; we should make a video and ‘go viral,’ too.” “We’re not reaching enough teens; social media is the answer.” How have you heard this sentiment phrased at your institution? We know some of you have. In fact, when we asked museum professionals to vote on the top “social media myths” meriting deeper discussion, this one was a big winner.

In Part II of this post, we'll pick apart the issue in more detail.

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!