Social Media in the ABM (MLA) Sector: opportunities and challenges

Social Media in the ABM (MLA) Sector opportunities and challenges

Hei! Jeg heter Mia I work for the Science Museum, London. I’ve also worked for the Museum of London (UK), the Çatalhöyük Research Project (Turkey), Museum Victoria (Australia), the State Library of Victoria (Australia). I’ve been working on the internet since 1994. Blog: http:// openobjects.org.uk |Twitter: @ mia_out

What about you? How many of you are active on: Facebook? MySpace? LinkedIn? Twitter? Flickr? specialist social networking sites? mailing lists? YouTube/Vimeo? How many of you actively create and share content on: blogs tweets photos Videos Podcasts?

Opportunities
build relationships with audiences
demonstrate relevance
improve content discoverability
take ABM to your audiences
enhance your collections
increase visits to your venues
re-use existing work

Challenges
from one official voice to many
resources - content creation, community management
new models of authority and trust
popping the ‘bubble’ - bring audiences on social media back into ABM
audiences will talk back if you get it wrong - but don’t panic
getting the project design right

Improve discoverability
discoverability means making content more findable
making it easier for the right people to discover your content when they want it
bringing engaged users directly to your content
improving the search engine visibility of your content

Improve discoverability

Increase visits http://mymuseumoflondon.org.uk/blogs/blog/museum-of-london-and-social-software-effectiveness-of-facebook-on-museum/ 18% of group members attended an event because they found out about it on the Facebook pages for the Museum of London

Enhance your collections
Opportunities to collect within ‘living memory’
‘ Great War Archive’ asked the general public for digitised versions of items in their possession relating to the First World War.
More than 6,000 submissions, including:
...diaries from Gallipoli, love letters from France, audio interviews with veterans, signals sent on Armistice, and a bullet dented tea tin that saved a soldier's life.

Enhance your collections

Re-use existing work

Audiences The web has changed our audiences and changed their expectations about content and interactivity: mash-up, re-use, re-mix

It’s 2009 “ The ten most heavily used web brands account for 45% of total UK internet time . Facebook is the most heavily used web brand, accounting for 13 percent of all UK Internet time – or one in every eight minutes . Communication and entertainment are central themes amongst most heavily used web brands” http://www.nielsen-online.com/pr/pr_090513_UK.pdf

Go where your audiences are
UK government:
Using existing social networks can “open doors for cultural organisations trying to attract new, more diverse audiences ”
Forrester Research on young people and social media:
much bigger users of multimedia content online: podcasts, music, video
every day, half of younger teens use IM, a third visit YouTube and a quarter use social networking sites
young people read blogs and use social networking much more than average internet users - and nearly one in three are active bloggers
but they aren't social media geeks : they comment on things, but very few use RSS, wikis, tagging

Go where your audiences are

Go where your audiences are In the first year on Flickr Commons: “ over 750,000 image views , with around 2,000 comments and 4,000 tags .” Photographer Hope’s images had previously been viewed “irregularly – perhaps 20 times” since the museum had owned them. By mid-2009 “the Hope photographs have been viewed around 400,000 times on Flickr Commons.”

Getting the project design right
pitch the goal, not the method - don’t pick a solution too early
balance between audience, your goals, the content
questions to guide the process

Questions?

Questions about audience
Where do they already congregate online?
How will they discover your content?
What physical or digital metaphors are they already familiar with?
How would the project integrate with their physical experience of the museum or exhibition?

Are they experts or novices?
How will they negotiate issues of authority and trust?
How will they engage with your content?

Will they contribute to your own knowledge?
Will their questions require a researched response or a simple acknowledgement?
If creating or sharing content, is it specialist material, reminiscence, “I like it/I've got one of those”, a creative response or a challenge?

Questions about goals
Is this really a web project?
What does your organisation want to get out of this?
How open are you to learning from your audience?
How does this particular mode of access relate to your overall mission?
What's your appetite or capacity for risk?
How will you recognise success?
How would you alleviate failure?

What resources are available during the content development and technical implementation phases, and on an on-going basis?
Is funding time-limited, or does it require core resources for long-term success?

Metrics are measurable outcomes
Start by asking ‘what is both useful and measurable?’
Metrics and project design should be primarily driven by audience needs, not internal politics or concerns.
How well do your metrics match those set by the project funders or sponsors?
Can you measure a positive engagement or merely register a site visit?

How will content and functionality be archived?
How sustainable is the infrastructure?
What's your 'exit strategy' to allow for the failure of commercial or public partners?
Which existing standards and technologies can you use?

Which existing standards and technologies can you use?
How can you enable re-use of the museum- or user-generated content, both in terms of rights and programmatically re-usable data?
Can you re-use existing data produced by other organisations, or partner with others in the same field or aiming at the same audiences?
Can you publicly reflect on the lessons you'll learn during this project, to share both successes and failures?

Questions about content
What will draw audiences to your website, out of all the other sites on the internet?
What types of content – how much interpretation, what media, which sources?
What is your content modelled on – wall captions, learning objectives, live tours, traditional museum models or something drawn from more general models – books, television, film, social media, debates?

Who creates the content – the organisation, the audience?
Should the site provide for collaboration or comment?
How much room is there for audiences to make their own meaning?
Can audiences augment or edit museum content?

How much authority can the museum share with audiences while remaining a trustworthy resource?
Can content be re-used outside the project?
How much context and knowledge is assumed about the topic, theory or object?

Thank you. Questions? Blog: http:// openobjects.org.uk Twitter: @ mia_out

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Social Media in the ABM (MLA) Sector: opportunities and challenges

by Mia on Jan 24, 2010

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