Museum Strategy

Guest Post no. 1: "The museum as a meeting platform" by Corinne Estrada

We’ve got our first ever guest post from the Agenda bit of “Agenda + friends”. Corinne Estrada is the founder and managing director of Agenda, a European communications firm. Corinne's 15-year professional experience includes successful projects in arts and culture, tourism, and entertainment. She also teaches International Marketing at the Ecole d'Economie Art et de Communication. She is currently busy organising the Communicating the Museum conference but took a bit of time away from that to write about how museums are branching out to entice visitors in.

The museum is going out to meet its public. The past 20 years in marketing have revolutionised museums’ commercial practices. Bold actions are becoming the norm: museums are stepping outside of their walls into airports and train stations, places used by millions of people, and using these sites as a new media platform with the aim of winning over a new and wider audience. In Amsterdam, a permanent extension of the Rijksmuseum at Schipol Airport (since 2004); London saw an exhibition of old masters from the permanent collection at the National Gallery in Kings Cross St Pancras for the opening of the new Eurostar terminal in 2007; and in Paris, the installation of a giant dragon in Gare d’Austerlitz for the opening of the exhibition ‘Dragon’ at the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle in 2008.

But are these actions a success? Are these awareness campaigns, like those of massive brands, really targeted? They expose a message to a wide public, but is it the right public, the public that goes to museums? Yes, they are a success because these marketing campaigns reach millions of visitors. Yes, because they please sponsors who can be shown to be innovative and go beyond just having a logo on a poster. Yes, because they help balance the books by increasing interest in the museum’s merchandising. Brand image and positioning are bandied about by these types of actions. But with such campaigns, it is impossible to measure return on investment to evaluate the number of people reached. And passenger does not mean visitor. So, should we treat culture in the same way we treat a mass market product? The winners of these types of campaigns are surely the stations and airports who benefit from an image of high quality and cultural added value. So where does that leave the cultural venue in trying to attract new audiences?

In the face of these mass market campaigns, the web offers today an alternative commercial approach, one that is richer and more intelligent. It’s called ‘triggered marketing’. It’s a way of knowing your public in much finer detail and thereby engaging with them in a much more precise fashion. The web makes analysis more accurate, return on actions easier to quantify. For several years now, the Barbican Centre in London has been heading down the route of ‘triggered marketing’. In 5 years, tickets sales online have gone from being 5% of total to sales to 80%, a total of 12 million tickets sold. Printed material has been reduced following the same proportions. By surveying their public online, the Barbican has come to know its audience intimately and is now in a position to communicate directly with different groups according to their interests only.

But the Barbican goes even further – and it lets go. They are eager to encourage dialogue between separate groups directly, that don’t necessarily need to pass through the Barbican to exist. Marketing is no longer a bilateral rapport between museum and public, but is tripartite, with conversation happening between different groups. Chris Denton, who heads the marketing and new media at the Barbican Centre, is behind this community building and dialogue sharing, and is convinced by this concept of museum as venue. With a 2 person team in the new media department, the Barbican has learnt how to construct a targeted dialogue with its public by internet. For each event, they action a digital marketing campaign of promotion before, enrichment of content during, and initiation of experience after the event. What is important is that each step is commercial and has the primary aim of making the centre money. The Barbican goes against mass marketing. Their approach is much more sophisticated, costs less and is more efficient. Chris Denton is a visionary who has been putting his institution on the path to the future since 2002 and by doing so is perhaps helping shape the museum landscape of the future.

© Corinne Estrada, March 2009

That's Twittertainment! - The Twitter phenomenon and how museums are using it

 

After months and months of resistance, yesterday I signed up to Twitter. I can’t really say why I’ve been put off the site for so long. A Facebook keen-bean, I suppose I couldn’t really see the point of a site whose entire attraction is simply a watered-down version of a Facebook status update.

There’s also the question of the ever growing Twitter lexicon: tweet, twittering, twitterati and, even here in the French office, “tweeter” the verb “to tweet” – je tweete, tu tweetes, il/est tweete... It’s not that it gets on my nerves, more that I find it quite alarming and possibly all a little intimidating.

For those who remain in the un-twittering zone as I did yesterday, Twitter is the simplest of social networks. You create a username, you get a home page. You get a box which asks you what you are doing and you duly type in a response, known as a “tweet”. This is published on your page for everyone to see. You can search other “twitterers” and follow their responses and comment on them. That’s about it.

For any cultural institutions looking to use Twitter, its brilliance lies in this simplicity. Unlike a Facebook page with photos, videos and all manner of fluff, it takes truly minimal effort to post a sentence with what you’re doing on Twitter. The New York Times ran a piece on Twitter in which the writer describes how a judge asked his Twitter followers if a certain project had been tried before. In just 15 seconds, his Twitter followers had provided him with links to all the relevant information he needed.

For both museums and visitors, Twitter has the ability to enhance everything. Like with Facebook, museums can post links to exhibitions and visitors can respond. But unlike Facebook, Twitter can be easily used during exhibitions or talks. The speaker speaks and the audience tweets – all in real time. And it’s completely free. For example, over on Museum 3.0, Maria Gilbert from the Getty has posted about how, during a talk by light and space artist Robert Irwin at the Getty Centre, employees tweeted with links to relevant online Irwin-related resources and listeners tweeted with comments. All this activity was then collated into a special Twitter feed where others could access all the information and reaction later. Molly Flatt from 1000heads did the same during a talk she gave to a group of “geek girl” bloggers and it’s something we are definitely looking into here for the Communicating the Museum conference in June.

For an excellent post about how museums should be using Twitter, read Nina Simon’s “An open letter to Museums on Twitter.” Elsewhere in the blogosphere, there is an important warning for all museums on the Museum Branding Blog. Whether they want to use Twitter or not, it is imperative that museums at least sign up for usernames now before their name is taken, such is the speed of the Twitter explosion.

Meanwhile, the Facebook/Twitter debate continues. It’s undoubtedly best to be on as many social networks as possible to insure increased visibility. But in terms of efficacity for museums, it seems Twitter has the edge: just take a look at Brooklyn Museum which has 7,223 fans on Facebook and 21,331 followers on Twitter....

(Find us on Twitter! - @agenda_paris..............Find me on Twitter! - @elishkaflint)

MUSEUM BRANDING: “A new age for museums : not cathedrals but bazaars”

This week Agenda published the results of a branding survey conducted by Robert Jones, Head of New Thinking at Wolff Olins, during the Communicating the Museum conference held in Venice in June 2008. A few months after Robert leapt into the cultural psyche of the event’s 274 participants, the report still proves fascinating reading for anyone looking for an insight into the current mindset of museum professionals with regards to branding. The full 9-page report can be read in full here but we just wanted to pick out a few of Robert’s most interesting findings here on the blog.

First, a considerable number of museum professionals underestimate the power and scope of branding. 65% of conference participants said that their brand merely “determines the look of stationary, signs and leaflets.” Only  23% claimed that it “guides our exhibition programme.” What’s more, museum professionals don’t seem to like the idea of branding all that much. 23% of participants agreed that brand is “a dirty word – too commercial,” happy to leave it to the marketing department. Robert’s report has a very interesting take on what branding should be – and it’s anything but dirty.

The strongest point throughout Robert’s report is that branding is a vision of a museum’s personality and purpose long before it is a logo. Internally, it is an essential tool in helping employees to adhere to the direction or philosophy of their institution; as Robert puts it “brand is a contemporary tool for management. By asserting what a museum stands for, it suggests what it should and shouldn’t do.” Most conference participants had not yet embraced this side of branding. Just 17% agreed that branding “guides how our staff behave”. 

And the report touches on what will be one of this blog’s most current themes; the fact that museums are a-changing. The gradual migration of both museums and visitors into the buzzing hyper-connected universe of Web 2.0 means that the relationship between museum and visitor is ever more dynamic. Branding is key in facilitating museums’ mutation from teaching institutions into cultural platforms for discussion and sharing. Take the Tate as an example. Its branding is an invitation to “look again, think again,” an invitation which is equally applicable in a museum or in the online community and transforms the museum into a participatory platform.

Interestingly, the report shows that it is museums in the Asia Pacific region and the US which are most keen to harness this new connectivity. Just looking at the number of blogs in Australia and the States dealing with this subject in comparison to those in Europe would seem to confirm this trend.

Anyway, we heartily advise you to go and check out the report itself. We can’t really do justice to all 8 pages here and they are all certainly worth a read.

Picture: Adactio (Some rights reserved)