A presentation I gave at Museum Next in 2014.

1. Personalising the Museum Experience
via social media

2. Personalising the Museum Experience
via social media
By complimenting traditional marketing with personalised
social media experiences, museums and art institutions
can reach a broader, younger, international demographic.

3. Let’s talk…
Underlying themes
Personalisation

4. Underlying themes
You can market relatively obscure and specialist art fields
to a much broader international audience by focusing on
the underlying themes in the works and personalizing
them for the audience.

5. Not so much this…

6. More like this…

7. Reshaping your social media to be more
inclusive
accessible
personal

8. Everyone is ‘using’ social media

9. Everyone is ‘using’ social media
Virtually every art institutions and museums has a social
media presence. But simply having a Facebook account
or Instagram doesn’t cut it these days.
You’re competing against every other art institution, paid
advertisement, and friend’s status updates for people’s
attention.
To make matters worse, changes to Facebook’s policy
mean only a small percentage of your followers will ever
see what you upload.
As low as 2-3% organic audience reach without payment.

10. Let’s talk about emotions

11. Let’s talk about emotions
To cut through all the social media noise you need to
create campaigns that both personalise the experience
and elicit some sort of emotional response.
A recent article in the New York times about viral videos
said, “People share things they have strong emotional
reactions to.”
Promoting underlying themes, and personalising them for
an audience help campaigns to trigger emotional
responses in audiences. In other words – it makes them
care.

12. Can haz feels?
Social
media
Personalisation
‘feels’

13. What is Orientalist Art?

14. What is Orientalist Art?
Don’t know anything about Orientalist art?
That’s okay, because when it comes to marketing
museums and art (or anything else for that matter),
ignorance can be an asset.
Curators and art professionals don’t see exhibitions from
the same perspective as the public and can assume that
just because they care, so should everyone else.
Marketing’s job is to make the work relevant to a broad,
general audience.

15. Curators are not people, people

16. Because it’s art?

17. Because it’s art?
“Because it’s art” is not going to get a disinterested public
tearing down the doors to attend your exhibition.
You need to make the artwork or exhibition somehow
relevant to your audience.
This is the challenge we faced with our exhibition – ‘The
Art of Travel: Bartholomäus Schachman (1559-1614)’.

18. The Art of Travel

19. The Art of Travel
The exhibition focused on a Polish mayor from the 16th
century who travelled down through North Africa and the
Middle East on a diplomatic mission to the Ottoman
Empire. Along the way he commissioned artists to paint
pictures of the people and places he encountered. These
illustrations formed the centerpiece of our exhibition, with
over 100 on display.
The problem we faced was selling this exhibition to the
public in Doha.

20. The Art of Travel

21. The Art of Travel

22. But what about Qatar?

23. But what about Qatar?
While Qatar is investing heavily in the arts, for the majority
of the population visiting a museum simply isn’t something
they would consider. This is especially true when the
exhibit focuses on topics that aren’t obviously relevant to
local culture.
That’s when we decided to look at ways to make the
exhibition relevant to not only a local audience, but a
much broader international audience.
And so the first thing we did was look at the underlying
themes of the exhibition.

24. What are we actually selling here

25. Travel is a Universal Theme

26. Travel is a Universal Theme
Travel is a universal theme
And if you get to the exhibitions core, the ‘Art of Travel’ is
a story about capturing your travel experiences.
Question is - how do people document their travel photos
these days?

27. The Instagram campaign

28. The Instagram campaign
1. We partnered with Qatar Airways and asked people to
tag their best travel photos on Instagram #ArtofTravel
2. We shared the best images to our Instagram account
and asked people to vote for them
3. The person with the most popular photo would be
awarded two return flights to anywhere in the world

29. The Instagram finalists

30. The Instagram finalists

31. The Instagram finalists

32. How did we go?
Over 6000 entries were submitted
Approximately 2000 people participated
65 photos were shortlisted for the competition (which
people could vote on)
15,397 ‘likes’ were generated on our Instagram page from
entries
265 comments were posted about the 65 featured photos
Total views = 400,000 + people

33. The viral element
What’s really interesting about these numbers is the
overall reach.
According to online figures, the typical Instagram account
has 200 followers.
So if we had 2000 people enter and post their entries
online, that means 400,000 people saw the competition on
their friends Instagram accounts (2000 x 200 = 400,000).
That’s a huge audience for a comparatively niche exhibit
which we reached without using a single advertising
dollar.

34. The Pinterest contest

35. The Pinterst idea
1. We’re going to upload approximately 100 paintings
from our collection to Pinterest and ask people to
create their own board featuring their 10 favourites.
2. The public will then vote on these Pinterest boards
3. The most popular entry will become a fully fledged
temporary installation at a Doha art space.

36. A successful media campaign

37. A successful media campaign
1. Immediacy – can you explain the concept in a
sentence
2. Personalisation – can the audience add to the overall
experience
3. Ease of entry – limit the barriers to participation
4. Viral element – encourage people to share the contest
around
5. Reward – make participation worthwhile for people

38. A successful media campaign

39. A successful media campaign
Even the most obscure and niche of museum exhibitions
can be marketed to a broader audience by personalising
and simplifying the marketing campaign.
You can do this by finding the underlying universal theme
at its core.
By honing in on this theme and linking it with an
appropriate social media campaign you can greatly
broaden the reach of your exhibit.

40. An underlying theme - food

41. An underlying theme - family

42. An underlying theme - nature

43. An underlying theme - travel

44. It’s all about you, and you, and you

45. It’s all about you, and you, and you
More than ever, content needs to be personalised to make
an impact.
Sure, museums still need to run traditional campaigns to
reach their core audiences and the general public, but
creative use of social media and the personalization it
affords can reap huge dividends.

46. A new audience

47. Free Publicity

48. Increased attendance

49. It’s all about you, and you, and you
And you can do all this while spending a fraction of a
traditional marketing budget

50. Money ain’t a thing

51. Thank you
Twitter: @ArtsDigital101 / @mikolai
Email: mikolai.napieralski@gmail.com