Claire Bailey-Ross

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Digital engagement

10 good habits for museum online engagement

April 7, 2015 / claireyross / Leave a comment

A few weeks ago now, Mike Ellis from Thirty8 Digital presented at Show Us Your Assets – “Just Because Your Objects Are Online Doesn’t Make It Interesting”.  The slides are above.

Mike suggested 10 good habits for museums to get into when it comes down to thinking, showcasing and engaging with online collections. I always like Mike’s presentations because there are always handy lists and graphs.  Two of my favourite things.

  1. Be less museum and more audiency

Mike advocated for talking to your visitors – whether that is face to face, via the website or via social media.  Just talk to them find out what they like, what they want to know about objects and where they want the content

  1. Understand the importance of Google

Whether you love or hate Google, it is the main search engine that the visiting public use to access museum content.  Ultimately on the web, visibility is authority.  Mike’s provocation was that if museum objects can’t be found on Google, they are invisible to the world.  Going on to suggest if museum objects are invisible then there is no point in them being online. This produced lots of discussion on Twitter about how true this is – I’m a little bit on the fence.   Mike discussed SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and provided details of a handy SEO starter guide.

  1. Social/ Sociable objects

Let museum objects be the engines of socially networked experiences.  The hook around which conversations happen.  Sociable objects online are those that allow users to easily interact with them and with other people.  Mike also advocated for objects having a clear call to action.

  1. Not just “Fire and Forget”

Digital is iterative,  be continuously thinking about what and who your online collection is for, and how you measure success.

  1. Focus on Stories

Stories should be drillable.  Build a environment where museum object stories can evolve.

  1. Make informed tech choices

Unfortuantely technologies can’t be second guessed, but don’t be afraid to ask about formats, costs, standards and risks.  Also ask for help when you need it.  Mike discussed the MCG email list as a good place to go to for help and support.

  1. Knowing what users do

Measure everything you can.  Some questions that museums should be able to answer. What do people do with your objects? Which is the most popular? and why?

  1. Do less, better

There is a disconnect between what audiences and museums and funders want.  Museums & funders want a large quantity of object records online, whereas users want high quality object records with pictures.

  1. Don’t be afraid of marketing

  2. Be visual, designed and playful

I ran out of brain space for points 9 & 10 but the slides can do the talking for me.

Digital Engagement – The Bowes Museum Experience: From a whisper to a roar- dealing with YSL coming to town

April 7, 2015 / claireyross / Leave a comment

As you may have heard, Yves Saint Laurent: Style is Eternal’ the UK’s first ever YSL retrospective  will open this  summer at The Bowes Museum in collaboration with Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent.  A few weeks ago at Show us Your Assets, Alison Nicholson, Digital Communications Officer at the Bowes Museum discussed how she dealt with all the digital activity associated with the announcement of the exhibition.

This post will focus on how Alison tried to gain the maximum advantage from the YSL exhibition announcement in January utilising digital tools to build interest and momentum around Bowes Collections and the forthcoming exhibition.

Co-ordinate Activity, Share ideas regularly & get away from your desks

2 weeks before YSL announcement day: They formed a small cross departmental team with members from marketing, IT, exhibitions, and the fashion & textiles curators.   They met every morning for two weeks prior to the exhibition announcement to share ideas and creativity and record completed actions.  Cutting across departments and sharing ideas regularly, kept the team motivated and proactive.

2 Days before YSL announcement day: The team came together in a dedicated room, taking them away from their desks, enabling them to work closely together.

Announcement day: When the exhibition was announced in the press (there was an awful lot of press coverage – which completely exceeded their expectations), the cross departmental team set up a sort of ‘war room’ so they could deal with the press reaction, social media interactions and engagement with audiences in real time.

Create content for a specialist audience

fashionatbowes

A key element of the Bowes digital activity to compliment the YSL exhibition was to reactivate an existing Fashion at Bowes Twitter account which has previously lain dormant.  This account would provide exhibition specific content to a specialist fashion audience.

This account was not instead of the Bowes museum main channel, rather to complement the planned social media activity on the Museum’s main channels.  They also wanted to develop a dedicated specific following of fashion contacts which would build momentum and interest towards the opening of the exhibition in July 2015.

To rejuvenate the twitter account they started by following prominent fashion bloggers and members of the British Fashion Council.  Other museums with significant fashion collections and special interest textile groups and societies were also followed.

The fashion curator developed a range of fashion and textile content from the collection and shares lots of exhibition installation updates.  Alison noted whilst using curatorial time to generate content has had an impact on a limited staff resource; the quality of the content is rich and attractive to the specialist fashion audience.

Use Free trails to measure your success

Money is tight for the Bowes Museum, so they don’t have annual subscriptions to a range of analytics tools.  Instead for the intensive digital activity related to the YSL exhibition they signed up for free 30 day trials to a number of analytical tools, along with monitoring the impact on the free Twitter analytics and Facebook Insights.

The tools Bowes tried were:

  • Moz
  • Web CEO
  • Simply Measured
  • True Social Metrics
  • Klout
  • Topsy
  • Follwerwonk

They found Moz to be a useful tool for measuring social authority, of both the fashion account and the main Bowes Museum twitter account.  It provided  a useful insight into the influence they have on social media, rather than purely focusing on growth of followers.  The Bowes museum would like to grow the social authority and influence of Fashion at Bowes in the lead up to the YSL exhibition opening.  From the analytics tools they were able to follow the metrics produced from the announcement.  For example: The main Bowes Museum Twitter account has a strong existing following and this was used to increase the reach of the YSL announcement by engaging with followers.  The impressions on Twitter are normally around 5,000 per day.  Over the weekend of the YSL announcement, impressions peaked at 30,000.

Curious Conversations with the Curious Public: Digital Engagement – the Wellcome Collection Experience

March 9, 2015March 9, 2015 / claireyross / Leave a comment

Following on from my last post about Museums and Digital Engagement, which covered the experiences of the Horniman Museum.  This post turns to the Wellcome Collection and their digital engagement activities.

The next presentation at Show Us Your Assets was by Russell Dornan, Web editor at the Wellcome Collection.  Russell gave a really great overview of the Wellcome Collection’s digital activities, from using social media, blogging, to digital storytelling and video projects. He then focused on three tools (Instagram, using hashtags and blogging stories) that have been particularly successful for the Wellcome Collection.  The nice thing being that these three things can be scaled up and down and applied to any other museum with little or no cost (other than staff time). Finally, Russell provided a range of really helpful dos and don’ts. (NB.  All images are screen grabs from Russell’s prezi which is available online)

Below are the three key things I cam away with:

Be a big tease on Instagram

Wellcome1

Instagram is Russell’s favourite platform for regularly sharing and speaking to audiences.   He is a big advocate for being a big tease on Instagram by sharing behind the scenes images for exhibitions. It makes followers curious and intrigued to find out more. Russell gave a great example from their Idiosyncratic A to Z of the Human Condition exhibition where visitors were invited to contribute to the gallery in different ways, submitting Instagram photos for a few of the themes explored in the gallery was one way to participate.   Particularly the theme on individuality where visitors could become part of the exhibition by taking a self-portrait in the mirror in the exhibition share it on Instagram, to extent this engagement activity Russell printed the photos out and put them up in the exhibition.  It’s a bit meta, but there’s something really nice about creating a physical manifestation of a digital output.  Many visitors seemed to like it, and went back to take a selfie of them by their printed instagram photo, and the whole process started again,  creating a circular physical/digital engagement.  Russell also discussed the idea of inviting instagramers and local photography groups into the gallery is a nice way of getting new social content.

Instagram Do’s and Don’t’s

Do

  • Be spontaneous
  • Use your imagination
  • Engage with followers
  • Search hashtags
  • Encourage visitors (…and reap the rewards)

Don’t

  • Be precious
  • Just post marketing material
  • Post boring pictures
  • Fight the format (use filters, be laid back and casual)

 

Have and encourage Curious Conversations

Wellcome2

Russell then discussed how they have used the hashtag #CuriousConversations on Twitter and in the gallery to engage visitors by asking questions and entering into conversations.  Every couple of weeks a new question is asked on Twitter and in the Wellcome’s Medicine Now gallery.  The responses are gathered and discussed and a staff member who also happens to have a secret skill as an illustrator interprets the public responses. This is a really nice way to incorporate staff skills in new ways.  This is also another example of how the Wellcome Collection has mixed up physical and digital elements online and in the gallery space.

Do’s and Don’t’s

Do

  • Engage with followers
  • Enjoy followers talking to each other
  • Find out and use staff secret skills
  • Have fun
  • Relax

Don’t

  • Be too stiff
  • Try to control the conversation
  • Just use RT’s or Favs to measure ‘success’

 

Blogging Museum Stories

Wellcome3

Russell discussed how the Wellcome Collections blog is used to enlighten and inform but also entertain readers.  The blog is used in numerous ways:

  • Explore themes presented in exhibition and events
  • Provide more detail about objects, themes and activities
  • Use prior or after an exhibition or events to build a buzz or reflect upon.

Russell also highlighted the example of using the blog to not only talk about Wellcome Collection themes but more general museology questions and issues – like the use of no photography in the galleries.

Blogging Do’s and Don’t’s

Do

  • Make noise in museum sector
  • Use internal and external contributions – guest posts are useful
  • Experiment with content types
  • Find that unique hook
  • Use lots of images
  • Post regularly
  • Publisice posts
  • Jump on relevant hashtags (#museumcats, #museumselfie, #musbuliding were Russell’s key examples)
  • Use different voices

Don’t

  • Make posts too long (under 800 words is good)
  • Just use text
  • Think people aren’t interested
  • Give up

Russell’s main takeaways:

  • Be creative and experimental
  • Trust your staff and your audience
  • Find and use what makes your museum unique
  • Build a network with museums and museum professionals online to support you no matter how small you are physically
  • Transform existing content into new content
  • Digital and social media is fun; make sure you’re having some

Show Us Your Assets:Museums & Digital Engagement – The Horniman Experience

March 6, 2015March 9, 2015 / claireyross / Leave a comment

For the past while Jane Audas and I have been working on a project for Museum Development North East called Engage + Digital. The overall aim of Engage + Digital being to support North East Museums to create dynamic, appropriate and achievable digital engagement strategies.

We’ve been working with three museums: Bailiffgate Museum, Bede’s World and Killhope Lead Mining Museum.  The focus is on improving access to each museum collection predominately using social media and by providing practical support, evaluating current initiatives, identifying opportunities for engagement, and embedding learning.

But we are also have been doing a range of workshops for the wider North East museum sector, culminating with Show Us Your Assets at MIMA (Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art).

There is a lot written about digital activity and social media in museums and how it might help museums become more participatory and engaging for visitors.   But when it comes down to it there’s nothing quite like hearing from some passionate people who enthuse about the opportunities digital engagement offers.

Show Us Your Assets focused on a range of inspiring case studies to get museums thinking about how digital can be used more effectively to open up collections and how to connect with audiences in new ways.

This post looks at the first presentation from Show Us Your Assets, by Adrian Murphy, Digital and Marketing Manager at Horniman Museum and Gardens entitled Making Museums Social on Social Media.

Horniman1

What is fantastic about the Horniman Museum is that they are not afraid to try new tools and technologies to see what works and what doesn’t.  The Horniman has been continuously experimenting with their digital initiatives, the museum lets the audience discover and explore its collections, in a range of ways (have a look at twitter, facebook, instagram, pinterest, flickr, tumblr for a few examples).  They are very good at visually storytelling and encouraging the curious.

Three key things I came away with are:

  1. Social Media is Like a Party – Don’t be the person that everyone wants to avoid

The Horniman Museum use social media for two key reasons:

  1. To encourage people to visit the Horniman
  2. To tell people about the collections

When using social media they keep these two things at the forefront.

Most of the discussion was around the Horniman’s Twitter activity.  Adrian advocated for using normal language in tweets, believing it’s important to sound like a real person not a robot.   The way you write and the tone of voice is important. The Horniman aim to try to write with a tone that is not necessarily a ‘marketing tone’. But something that is friendly, human, and interested in people’s opinions.  For example, on Twitter they ask a lot of questions to their followers.  But they style of question are ones that can actually be answered easily.  Making it too hard can put people off.

Horniman2

Additionally throughout Adrian’s examples of tweets, there were lots of compelling images. Highlighting that visual posts are very important.  It’s not all about text.

 

  1. Torturing Curators is a good idea

To coincide with one of the Horniman’s exhibitions, Extremes which explored what it takes for animals and plants to survive in some of the most hostile environments on Earth. The Horniman decided to challenge their Deputy Keeper of Natural History to become a #ExtremeCurator by making him venture into cold, heat, darkness and oxygen deprivation.   They captured all the #ExtremeCurator action and shared widely on different social media platforms giving the audience a first-hand look at the effects on the human body. This is an excellent example of being playful and informative about a forthcoming exhibition without broadcasting static marketing content.

 

  1. Talk about weird & wonderful objects

Adrian gave a range of examples of how they highlight the Horniman’s varied collections.  As part of a large project to review their anthropology collections, they started an account on Tumblr 2012. The site is updated by staff working directly on the collections review, not only making visible a previously hidden process but also opened their content to a new, wider audience.

Tumblr provided an channel for staff to share their enthusiasm for the Horniman collection by highlighting when they found something interesting, fascinating or unusual.

Adrian talked about a couple of the fascinating finds which have been featured on tumblr including a small horse made of cheese from Poland and a vulture skull in a leather glove worn as a charm.

Horniman3Horniman4

 

 

Adrian discussed that by focusing on the unusual and unique objects in the collection it is a great way to enthuse, intrigue and fascinate others by sharing staff enthusiasm, excitement and wonder about their museum collections.

Tumblr in particular is working really not only because it’s a platform that likes lots of visual content but also because Tumblr users like to find out something unusual and unexpected. The Horniman’s collection is full of the unusual and unexpected.

tweets

  • RT @gquaggiotto: Why we opted not to go for an ethical code for AI in museums and focused on practitioners' tools instead. Enjoyed @OonaghT… 3 months ago
  • Being in isolation has its perks. Getting to listen to @OonaghTweets dealing with tech issues like a champ. Excell… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 3 months ago
  • Looking forward to this @MuseumNext Museums, Games & Play Summit ti.to/nxt/museums-ga… 4 months ago
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