We’d like to share our thoughts on the latest trends impacting our clients. In this section, we give you access to the theory behind our work on visitor participation and interactive storytelling.
At AAM this weekend, I was on a panel session Museum as Platform, discussing the use of social media tools fostering and enhancing the dialog between museums their visitors. The session explored various online museum projects that encourage visitors to be creators and contributors in the online museum exhibit.
During the session, attendees were invited to tweet their thoughts, feedback and questions, but we didn’t have an opportunity to respond afterward- here are some thoughts that I have, and I will encourage my fellow session panelists to respond here as well.
Matthew Fisher and co-panelists reflect on and critique an extensive year-long collaboration to develop and launch the University of Michigan Museum of Art’s new DialogTable at the National Art Education Association national convention in Minneapolis.
This is an excellent presentation on Social Media Marketing by Marta Kagan. I like it because it combines clear, jargon-free statements "social media is people having conversations online") with a host of powerful statistics ("73% of active users have read a blog", "57% have joined a social network"). She clearly states what social media is, why it’s important, why it’s here to stay, and even gets into some of the hows. Her presentation is aptly titled:
This is a wonderful quote I recently came across that I think accurately reflects why social media is so important:
“Content isn’t king. If I sent you to a desert island and gave you the choice of taking your friends or your movies, you’d choose your friends - if you chose the movies, we’d call you a sociopath. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.”
So often our clients become so focused on presenting their content to the audience they do not stop to consider what their visitors really want from them. Yes, they want engaging content and, yes, they want authoritative stories and information illuminating collections and artifacts. But that is just the beginning. What audiences desire more and more is to enter into meaningful conversations on the topics that interest them.
The social media release is useful tool for getting the word out about your project launch. Just like a press release, a good social media release concisely relays the key facts of your announcement. So how is a social media release different from a press release? And why do you need one?
Words are powerful things: they can at once convey the essence of something or make a subject seem more obtuse than necessary. Take the term “visitor-contributed content”, for example; it’s just one of the terms we use to refer to museum projects that invite visitors to contribute their voices to an online exhibit or collection. Sometimes we just call it “VCC”, but there are other terms for capturing these types of projects, among them, “visitor narratives” and “community-creation.”
What’s a virtual visitor worth? That’s the latest topic at Museum 2.0, a blog for anyone interested in how museums can engage, embrace, and thrive on a participatory model. Written by museum consultant Nina Simon, it presents frequent posts on why museums should conceptually embrace what Web 2.0 stands for and informative tips on how specific tools, from Flickr to Twitter, can help museums become more participatory.
Recently, a PANMA mailing list discussion focused on how to do Javascript to Actionsript communication, and vice-versa. A few people answered, and the topic turned to ExternalInterface in general.
With over 800 million visitors each year, museums are big business – and face big challenges related to increasing visitation, maintaining the integrity of its collections, and keeping up with a tech-savvy audience. These issues are a few of the topics to be explored in NPR’s new series on museums in the 21st Century. Here’s a cheat sheet if you’ve missed any of the stories:
