Museum Strategy is happy to post its first guest interview with Diane Drubay, creator of the French reference blog Buzzeum. She will attend Communicating the Museum in June where Digital Networking will be the main theme. She took a bit of time to explain why blogs are essential in communication and digital networking today and to give some insight into the future of communication in museums…which is already here
Hello Diane and thanks for giving us this interview. Could you start by telling us a bit about your blogging activities?
Well, it all started when I specialised in marketing at my business school and concepts such as communication, advertising and target became part of my daily life. To me it was a whole new way of understanding interactions between people. I created Buzzeum as an experimenting tool for my jobs in communication and new media in museums. I could analyse the way bloggers responded to communication case studies I posted. Buzzeum quickly got to be an intelligence tool enabling me to stay updated with the latest trends, as well as for other experts to explore and learn from them.
Do you know the profile of Buzzeum readers?
Buzzeum is read by some art amateurs but mostly by museum professionals, in which term I include a wide range of jobs and areas of expertise: communication, visual- and digital-related work or heritage to give a few examples.
Is the blogosphere very active in those areas?
I would say that there are few real actors in the museums blogosphere but that this small number is conversely very proactive and innovative. On a worldwide scale, there are about 50 truly influential bloggers if I include some museum webmasters who share ideas and experiences with us.
Your blog ranks incredibly well given its specificity (it is in the top 30 marketing blogs on Wikio). Where does all this interest come from?
The specificity of bloggers is that they are constantly looking for different types of information, other than that which they can find in newspapers, tv and the radio. Following a blog is a thrilling experience for a lot of different people, as it is a way of staying in touch with a museum’s activities, its evolution and daily life in a more fluid way than campaigns or cultural publications.
What
constitutes successful buzz for a cultural institution?
Successful buzz is first and foremost about successfully targeting a specific audience, especially people not used to going to the museum. Buzz can be considered successful when a message is well defined and the means of communication used are the right ones at the right time. There is an infinite flux of information today on the web, and using time and money-consuming strategies are not necessarily a good idea. Being simple, clear and efficient remains the best ingredients for creating a good buzz. Only once you have a clear message should buzz start to be entertaining or provocative.
Among the latest sites, blogs, online and offline campaigns you have blogged about, which are your favourites and why?
Cross-disciplinary projects which work at the same time on exhibition spaces, interactivity, innovative online tools and which are concerned with creating a community on the web truly bring something new to both blogging and the way an exhibition is conceived in the first place. Among my favourites in this area are The Black List Project at the Brooklyn Museum which puts emphasis on interactive visitors’ feedback, Click! by the Smithsonian which explores photography through the eyes of artists, thinkers and researchers, and My Yard Our Message, the Walker Art Center open source online gallery. The website created for the Bacon exhibition at the Tate is strikes me as a breakthrough in terms of online browsing, discovering an exhibition space through virtual experience.
Do you consider museum professionals today to be reasonably aware of new media and new technologies or on the contrary is there a real need for improvement for museums in this area?
I’ve had the opportunity to meet a growing number of professionals who are genuinely interested in developing new ways to reach new audiences. Having profiles that are not exclusively cultural anymore, they are the central actors of these processes. The opportunities are there to be taken, each museum has to find its own way now without blindly following the great digital trends at any cost.
Just to finish with, what do you expect from the Communicating the Museum "Making the most of the connected world" conference?
I‘m looking forward to it in so far as it will enable everyone to share their experiences and to make them part of their future plans and visions for their museums. Hopefully we can begin to connect museums so that they can be better connected to the world.
If your French is up to it, you can see a pdf file of the original uncut version of the interview with Diane here.
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