Shelley Bernstein and Will Cary from the Brooklyn Museum take the floor

From the moment that Shelley Bernstein and Will Cary agreed to speak at this year’s conference, I joked about in the office that they were our Bruce Springsteen-style headliners. Anyone who has scratched the surface of museum use of social media knows that Brooklyn Museum is just hands down the best example of how to build a brilliant community online.

Their talk on the Friday morning of the conference was easily one of the most inspiring. For 60 minutes (that flew by far too quickly), Shelley and Will shared their key learnings in creating, managing and growing a museum community both online and offline.

You can read a full synthesis of the talk online by visiting www.communicatingthemuseum.com. Here I’d like to pick out a couple of points which I found most interesting. 

• Give your social media a personal face >> One of Shelley’s first points was that the person behind the Tweets, Facebook page, blog must be a real person with a real personality. This is something which Jerome Lascombe had emphasised earlier; social media should not be about organisation talking to client, but a person from the organisation talking to the client. Brooklyn Museum bloggers all have a biography so readers feel like they are getting to know the person behind the post. Something which helps with this is the fact that the bloggers are never censored. There is an overarching set of (fairly) strict guidelines but within these, they are free to write whatever they like. This freedom is an important part of making the Brooklyn Museum blogs honest and of course interesting to read.

• Twenty four hours a day, seven days a week >> For Shelley and her team, social media is a fulltime job – full full time that is. Saturday, Sunday, midnight. Shelley believes that to use social media properly, the institution must live through platforms in the same way that its audience does, not just 9 to 5.

• Transparency >> Transparency is also key for the Brooklyn Museum strategy. Too often, organisations are tempted to use Twitter feeds to broadcast rosy exhibition news when perhaps the reality is that behind the scenes, people are being laid off because of whatever reason. Shelley believes that being honest about such things will help your community gain trust in your organisation and make for a better and richer exchange.

• Ask and listen >> Online conversations follow the same rules as ordinary ones. If someone asks a question, always respond. If someone has a suggestion, make sure you think it through and talk about that process. If you’ve made a mistake, take feedback, discuss it and rectify it if possible/necessary. Brooklyn Museum have replaced all comment books with electronic versions so that feedback can be viewed by all concerned easily via the web.

• Online/Offline >> Be creative in helping the online experience complement and enhance the offline experience, and vice versa. Brooklyn Museum created a graffiti wall which was tagged by visitors during a graffiti exhibition. Photos were then uploaded to Flickr on a weekly basis for all to see and discuss afterwards. For the Black List Project they created a Youtube channel, where visitors could discuss their feelings after the exhibition and others could watch online. These things all add to an event at the time and afterwards – enhancing both the online and offline experience

The Brooklyn Museum chat was by far the most controversial of the conference. If I’m going to be honest (organisations with blogs should strive for transparency right?), the fact that Shelley Bernstein and her team were present and correct on social networks 24/7 both scared and annoyed a number of participants. “I mean come on, get a life” and “if I start using Twitter like that, I wonder if I’ll still be alive next year” were both phrases I heard at the conference after Shelley and Will’s presentation.

As a child of the social network generation, I personally don’t think that being on Facebook or Twitter 24/7 for work is a particularly big deal, it’s pretty much what I’m doing anyway with my friends and family, I regularly find myself on networks at the weekend or strange hours of the morning – I wrote most of this post sitting at Malaga airport waiting to board my horribly early flight to London. The brilliance of the Brooklyn Museum lies in the fact that they have created a community of friends around their museum; surely Shelley’s “work” must quite closely resemble my pattern of personal use of social networks? Having said that, I totally understand many of the participants’ concerns. For people who didn’t grow up on social networks, the idea of existing so prolifically in the virtual world must be a very alien concept. One thing that came out of some of the sessions is that museums really need to use their young people to help them understand these networks and why people use them; you can’t even think about an online strategy until you get why social networks are so popular and what they can offer their millions of users.

Getting Molly Flatt’s thoughts on the Brooklyn Museum session was great. She was very impressed by their work with social media but right to point out that you need to find exactly the right kind of person to manage a project like that. Shelley is clearly highly motivated, creative and dedicated; not every institution is lucky enough to have someone like that managing their online projects.

In the end, the Brooklyn Museum team is right at one end of the “use of social media in museums” spectrum. There’s definitely a balance to be found. It goes without saying that not all museums are going to be able to emulate their use of social media, nor should they expect to or feel they have to. As speakers and participants said over and over again, it’s about finding what works for your institution, your mission and your public and building a project around that. But with their online/offline projects, their monetized twitter feed and their unbelievably dedicated public, Shelley and Will definitely gave a lot of people quite a bit of food for thought.

Comments

[Shelley Bernstein]

Thanks for the great post on the session and interesting to see how controversial 24/7 can be. I agree with you that to a degree we all live with this kind of thing differently. For me, it's just part of my life, so having multiple accounts running at the same time is not stressful it's just what it is - some people can do that easily without even thinking about it, but others won't want to go there :) Normally, I make sure to point that out, but the session flew by really fast!

That said, I've seen fantastic examples of institutions finding that right person, setting 9 to 5 boundaries and running great feeds - here's one example:

http://librarytechnz.natlib.govt.nz/2009/05/this-is-how-we-do-it-nlnz-on-twitter.html

So, as you say, doing what's right for your org is the key and that can mean a lot of different things.