Museum Strategy

Being a French Webmaster - and Making it Happen- A Crossed Interview

Hello everyone! After a long time of technical difficulties of all sorts, I am more than glad to announce that Museum Strategy is alive and running! It was a long-time wish to be able to give our readers a taste of how it is about working online for a French museum. You would think that to get there we had to go interview the staff of the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay or the Centre Pompidou. Well whatever your expectations were if you had some, you probably did not think two of the most active webmasters in France are to be found in the beautiful and thriving southern city of Toulouse. Samuel Bausson - The Museum de Toulouse, second biggest natural history museum in France - and Alain Romang, - Les Abattoirs, a leading contemporary art museum - are some of  the people you want to talk to to get valuable insights. Discover their impressions on being proactive in the French museum world, committing oneself to a public institution and dealing with your private/public persona online. French version available very soon!

1. Where are you from initially and how did you come to be museum webmasters? 

 Samuel: I am originally from Brittany and came to Toulouse to take part in the grand reopening of the Museum de Toulouse. The museum had been fully refurbished and its direction entirely rethought, putting the focus on visitor experience. The museum’s approach was fresh and new, implementing a non-centralised managing pattern and expressing the desire to give audiences a more proactive role, which in turn was very much in tune with  how one works online. This was an opportunity that allowed me to continue working as a cultural editorial  webmaster as well as to get back in touch with a line of work that really matters to me : I majored in  Cultural Anthropology -Grinnell College- where I originally studied ethnology.

Alain: I have lived in Toulouse for fifteen years and thanks to les Abattoirs I have had the opportunity to put my technical skills in website management and DTP into practice, as well as new technologies and contemporary art, at the service of a wider audience.

2. You work for two regional institutions that do not rank among the most important French museums. However, you remain as a major presence on the web. How can you explain this?

Alain: Both our institutions recognised, from a pretty early stage, the importance of exploiting online social networks as they have proved to be very time-effective in circulating information and creating interactivity with audiences. Given that larger museums do not tend to venture into these unchartered waters, our own initiatives naturally draw attention in the same way that some Anglo-Saxon institutions do.

Samuel: I don’t think there’s anything particularly special about us, except that perhaps we were able to migrate and articulate the museum’s offers to differents platforms and online services quite early on. When major French museums decide to invest in a real presence and strategy online, they will no doubt take over with their wider-reaching influence. It also has to be said that in comparison to the larger Anglo-Saxon museums -The MoMa, the Brooklyn Museum or the Tate-, our presence online remains relatively insignificant. Those museums lead the way and I'm very impressed by their online offers.

Alain: We are also in the habit of thinking globally, keeping an open mind and constantly looking to build closer ties between the museum’s website, blog and social networks. This has probably had a lot to do with our relatively significant online influence.

3. What are some of the common difficulties that you have to deal with on a daily basis?  How do you feel about your role within the museum?

Alain: The museum places a lot of trust in me and so I have a lot of freedom. I need to take great care in my daily organisation as I am also in charge of printed communication media - leaflets, banners and so on.

Samuel: It’s certainly true that we have a lot of freedom and I appreciate the fact that the museum trusts us. This being said, I don’t think that we are integrated enough into the structure of the institution. Being cut off from the rest of the staff is pretty normal for a lot of webmasters, who tend to end up doing their own onlin e strategy rather than that of the museum.

 

Over time I have met with other museum staff who were willing to work with me and I was able to translate many of their job experiences online, such as the records department on Netvibes and Twitter and the museum’s conferences on Facebook.

 

I think that it is important to add that I’m not working alone: Maud Dahlem, a sciences mediator at the museums, works with me and is in charge of the contents. This has enabled us to delve into a lot of other areas, especially FlickR.

 

The museum’s organisation is currently in the process of being completely restructured and this will change the way in which we work. For the moment, the plan is to work closely with the department dealing with audiences which is a rather positive step, in view of the work we have accomplished so far. Ideally, I would like to form a real team of people committed online. 

5. You both have Twitter accounts. What are they about and what do they say about you? Do you run them alongside your Museums' Twitter accounts? Do you think more generally that you have to devote your entire self online when you’re a webmaster?

Alain : @alainromang, I take information that might potentially regard my job as a webmaster and circulate it. Twitter has proved to be a very useful daily tool to both monitor and share information. Thanks to ‘direct messages’ I can also send and receive message through another account other than just my job email address. Last but not least, @alainromang allows me to focus on and clarify any details or requests originally coming from the official museum’s Twitter @lesabattoirs so as to avoid disrupting its coherence.  

Samuel : On @samuelbausson, I tweet almost exclusively on museums and the web. I do a considerable amount of monitoring and find the platform quite a pleasant way to get to know people and engage in conversations with them.  On the museums account, I tweet about the life of the museums and more generally, I take part in the museum ‘conversations’. Elodie Guiraud, who works as an archivist, is my ‘ally’ on the board: she enriches the museum’s threads with a daily scientific monitoring. Sometimes our paths cross but not too often fortunately.

I personally think that you should never devote yourself one hundred percent to an online persona. I use my real name because it is far simpler for professional contacts to find me if needed though I think that it’s understandable to have different pseudonyms online. The frontiers between professional and private life are becoming more and more blurred, as they are inscribed in a conversation flux and so it’s difficult to completely separate things, places and time. Perhaps, my point is best exemplified by the fact that I am answering your questions on a Saturday afternoon!

Alain : That is a tricky question and I don’t really have a proper answer. One part of the solution lies in creating an online identity which is halfway between your work-self and your private persona. This way, you can really give as much of yourself as you want online, with due protection. However, the question of what one can and cannot say remains a burning issue, especially when one works for a public service. In some cases, this seems quite incompatible with personalising your interactions online. 

6. In terms of the museum’s image, what real changes have you brought about through your work? Did your work create bonds between the two institutions?

Samuel: I really have trouble perceiving the museum’s image from an outsider’s perspective and I am well aware that the internet users who follow us closely form a very minor part of the museum’s audience. I have bonded with fellow webmasters and people in charge of media in museums but at the institutional level these relationships prove harder to establish, as institutions are rarely able to concretise bonds made online. Despite very tough conditions, the institution’s online presence as I know it owes its success to the small few who are willing to work on it.

Alain: I have had a lot of positive feedback but I agree that it’s hard to measure the real impact of our work on the web without resorting say, to an in-depth survey of a large population sample. But we can safely assume that these new ways of informing and interacting with people contribute to creating a positive image of the museums. As regards the bonding with the institutions, I would agree with Samuel.

7. So, what’s on the cards for the near future?

Alain: Well, we started dabbling in social networks in 2007 and 2008. Ideally, we would like to take the work that we’ve already started and make it durable, before moving on to the refurbishing of the new website and the circulation of information through mobile phone devices. We need to attract a greater audience in our communities and improve the quality of our interactions with them, drawing inspiration from the Museum on Flickr. We will continue to closely monitor what we are doing because in this relatively new arena, you never know where the work is going to take you. The constant evolution in this field of work means that we need to think of new approaches all the time.

 

Samuel: As far as we -the museum- are concerned, our main goal is to continue strengthening the museum’s online community. I am also working hard on a project for mobile phone apps that for accompanying museum visits. But it’s still early days….

Interview by Claire Solery

 

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.

Some of our favourite museum blogs

Just for some ideas, we have picked out three of our favourite museum blogs which are doing cool things in the blogosphere:

>> Photo of the Day, Powerhouse Museum

Powerhouse Museum, based in Sydney Australia, has a daily blog entitled Photo of the Day. Everyday the museum’s team of bloggers upload a photo from the site’s Powerhouse Photo Library along with a post about it. Images come from events, exhibitions and behind the scenes at the museum and are incredibly varied, ranging from photos of the museum’s photography studio, images of the museum’s new acquisitions or of interesting buildings nearby. It’s a great way to be able to talk about all the diverse and fascinating aspects of running a museum which might seem a bit random in a normal blog format. With this focus on behind the scenes activities, it also really opens up the museum to readers, which is exactly what a museum blog should do.

(Image by Geoff Friend) 

>> bloggers@brooklynmuseum, Brooklyn Museum

The minute you enter cyberspace and scratch the surface of the Museum Web 2.0 phenomenon, it is clear that one institution is just streets ahead of the rest. Shelley Bernstein, Head of Technology at Brooklyn Museum, has created a warm and inviting log cabin of a community for all the museum’s visitors, admirers and employees. The Brooklyn Museum blog, bloggers@brooklynmuseum, has around fifty authors, all of whom work behind the scenes at the museum and post about exhibitions or events they’re working on. The number of authors is definitely something to consider before starting a blog; too many can sometimes make a blog inconsistent and impersonal but Brooklyn Museum makes it work. All the writers have a profile detailing their speciality and so you can follow one writer, specialising in for example the Museum’s Asian Art collections if that floats your boat, or all the writers to get a great overview of all the museum’s goings-on. Posts are well illustrated and often contain video too. We’re thrilled that Shelley is going to be speaking at Communicating the Museum this summer and imparting some of her knowledge of all things social media and her experience working to build the excellent Brooklyn Museum community.

>> Art Matters, The Art Gallery of Ontario

Art Matters, by the Art Gallery of Ontario, is a blog which makes excellent use of multimedia opportunities presented by platforms such as youtube, flickr and iTunes with regular videos and podcasts of talks with artists or discussions with curators and project managers from the museum. Our favourite thing on Art Matters is their gallery of pictures they have asked visitors to draw in response to art works around the museum (as part of a project called In Your Face Projects). It’s a very effective way to make visitors and readers feel like part of the community and get discussion going about exhibitions and artworks in the gallery.

One thing to add when talking about museum blogs is that they rarely have extensive comments from readers. Looking at a thread on Museum 3.0 about the best museum blogs, there seemed to be a general consensus that museum blogs are often quite specific and so, while they get a lot of page hits and RSS subscriptions, people feel less able to comment on posts. For discussions, most agreed that social networks like Facebook actually work better to create an informal atmosphere where people feel more able to comment.

In spite of this, here at Museum Strategy, we’d like to know, do you have a favourite museum blog? Why does it work? Why doesn’t it work? Feel free to leave us comments/links below.

Image: Behind-the-scenes - Photography Studio by Geoff Friend

Interview with Buzzeum's Diane Drubay: Blogging the Museum

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.

Top Twittering Institutions

For your inspiration: a sample of cultural institutions using Twitter in different ways...

The Natural History Whale - @NatHistoryWhale – 10,855 followers

New York’s Natural History Museum twitters via the life-size blue whale on its ceiling. It’s a great approach; the whale gives information about exhibitions but also makes funny remarks about visitors below and the existential trials of being a whale stuck on a ceiling. He also provides links to poems he has written and whale-related news stories. An amazing balance of information and whale-style wit. 

"Everyone’s talking about how it’s snowing outside. Hello? Why isn’t anyone talking about the 21,000-pound whale in the room? 10:37 AM Feb 18th from web"

Maryland Zoo - @marylandzoo – 1,074 followers

Maryland Zoo’s Twitterfeed is everything a Twitterfeed should be – informative, funny and not just a series of posts about exhibition times which, let’s face it, are easily the lowest common denominator of Twitter post. Exhibition info is interspersed with bite-sized information about the zoo’s many species of animal with links to further information and the feed is updated several times a day.

"Rock hyraxes look like oversized guinea pigs but actually are most closely related to elephants! http://ow.ly/qQz 7:35 AM Mar 28th from HootSuite"

Brooklyn Museum - @brooklynmuseum – 21,650 followers

Widely regarded as one of the best museums using social media today, Brooklyn Museum is also one of the first institutions to monetize their Twitterfeed. @BrooklynMuseum provides a dynamic feed with exhibition info and constant dialogue between the museum and its followers. However, for a paltry sum of $20 a year, visitors gain access to an exclusive feed called @1stfans where they can talk directly to artists and get invitations to special events. The mastermind behind this scheme, Shelley Bernstein will be speaking at Communicating the Museum. It’s definitely going to be a highlight. 

"Lovely visitor response on the last day of The Black List Project http://bit.ly/2nDnxf (love that this was the last video recorded) 2:23 PM Mar 29^th from Tweetdeck"

The Imperial War Museum - @IMWF – 48 followers

The Imperial War Museum is comparatively new to Twitter but in a month it has already found a way to communicate something interesting to its followers with regular “On this day in...” posts. A simple but effective way to give a Twitterfeed another dimension beyond institutional information.  

"On this day in... 1943: assassination attempt made on Hitler in Smolensk, Russia 6:53 AM Mar 13^thfrom web"

The New Museum - @the_new_museum – 229 followers

The New Museum is a museum currently being built on Liverpool’s waterfront, due for opening in 2010. The museum twitters from the perspective of the actual building, which discusses its new roof, the view from its new windows etc. Hearing the thoughts of a building is a strange existential experience at first but then becomes quite entertaining. The New Museum shows that Twitter needn’t include any exhibition info at all and will still appeal to followers who feel involved in the museum’s ongoing development.

"I love a good sunset. Here's some new pics of me enjoying one on Friday - with the obligatory seagull of course! http://twurl.nl/vz74dz 1:36 AM Mar 24th from web"

NB. We enjoyed this yesterday (Apr 1st)... Britain's The Guardian announced that it would be the only newspaper in the world to transmit news solely via Twitter. You can read all about it here. (And be sure to read the comments at the bottom.)