Jim, Hugh and Sally gave lots of hints and tips on what makes great online engagment!

Hugh Wallace & Sally Manuireva from National Museums Scotland reminded us that ‘Stuff is social now’  and it is our challenge to get that same level of personal connection in the museum experience,  as you can get connecting with your friends and families on facebook.  The challenge is the hunt for this connection point.

Hugh’s had a lot of tips which were really easy to digest, and it shows how simple ideas can help to develop an exciting digital strategy and embed public engagement in their programmes.  Hugh expressed that you need to figure out which platforms are right for your museum, figure out the platforms you want to be on and how they complement each other and your collections.  And whilst you’re at it look outside the museum sector for inspiration, pay attention to tech trends, this will help no end.

3 simple things:

• Try New Things
• Be Responsive
• Know Why you’re doing it

NMS digital engagement tips:

• Have snackable content that is readily available
• online world facilitates real world behaviour
• People share their experiences
• Dialogue is the expected
• Information needs to be accessible

My favourite tips:

• Ask Questions first
• Don’t ignore what’s gone before
• Don’t get distracted by shiny things
• Make time for, and pay attention to, analysing your stats
• Employ a great team

Hugh also mentioned that No mobile strategy = no future strategy, I agree, but I think that mobile is the short term future. What’s past that? Is the Horizon report correct? What’s next is Gesture based computing and the Semantic web? Bring on the Computer vision!

Jim Richardson from Sumo, also had tips for us. 7 of them. 7 amazing tips on how encouraging audience participation can be an effective marketing tool. Jim is renowned for his excellent ideas and enthusiasm for audience engagement.  It was great to hear him speak, I’ve been a fan of Jim’s blog for yonks.   Jim Richardson from Sumo, is renowned for his excellent ideas and enthusiasm for audience engagement.  It was great to hear him speak, I’ve been a fan of Jim’s blog for yonks.  The Line between marketing and public enagagment is really becoming blured, particularly with digital marketing, but its very easy to slip into old marketing habits with digital media – broadcasting does not engage your audience. It’s all too easy to slip into old marketing habits with digital media – broadcasting does not engage your audience

top 7 tips for online engagement:

• Make Friends of your superfans.

Digging deeper into your followers- they do have influence Highlight talented followers. Get social media superfans to do your talking for you.

• Make content sharable and make it easy

put share buttons on every page.  Facebook “like” buttons can increase traffic by 1000%.  Personally I dont know if ‘liking’ something actually counts as a rich engaging activity for museum visitors, but you cant really argue with the increased traffic figures.  But Ideally I would want deeper engagement.  Like is the first step, but needs to be intwined with the other enagement possibilities.

• Encourage reviews and Guest Blog
  

do it and do it now

• Photography is your Friend –Dont ban it.

Ive never really understood why many museums still stick to his ‘no photogrpahy’ attitude, what exactly are they going to do? Please  facilitate visitor it is a quick win for making visitors happy. Jim pointed to the recent #museumpics project which generated 7,000 photographs and 4,000 tweets in 48 hours. Also Wikipedia Loves Art is similarly excellent!  Combing a wiki scavenger hunt and free content photography contest in museums!

• Take a lodger.

This I love! I would love to be a museum lodger for a month. Please somebody let me be a lodger! please please please! The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago did an inspired Month at the Museum, because quite simply science never sleeps.

• Run a Competition

online or off. A great example of this is Yorkshire Favourite Paintings

• Treat Bloggers like Rockstars!! Play ARG with your audience.

 A great example here was the V&A Cold War Exhibition who created a ARG for bloggers. You can find out the whole story over at We Made This. Its brilliant.  It is also similar to the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Ghosts of a Chance. Georgina Bath Goodlander really rocked this, and went as far as tattooing a body builder! All in the name of audience engagement.