Museum Strategy

#CTM11 Online, First Figures and Press Review, What to do Post-Conference

The 11th Communicating the Museum conference was held last 6-8 July 2011 at the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, Germany.
While we are still counting and assembling stats, we wanted to thank the 204 twitterers (and counting) all over the world whot took part to the conference in and outside the room, and helped us reach almost 1800 tweets in three days following the #CTM11 hashtag.

The @agendaparis  Twitter account from which you were able to follow the conference rose by 89% during the conference thanks to the attention you helped us get. Thanks also do @DianeDrubay and @C_S_Media for their contribution in spreading the news from the conference.  Continue using the hashtag #CTM11 to mention conference-related themes.

Our #CTM11 Tumblr account created especially for the event is now aggregating presentations, tweets and pictures from the conference. In the followoing days, all the presentations from the conference will be available on Tumblr so feel free to visit regularly. You can directly submit your photos, contents and presentations to the account, and provided they are in touch with the conference, we will publish. Remember: Content only, no advertising!

We agree to disagree: let us know what you think

The conference is also on Facebook and has its website.

La 11ème conférence Communicating the Museum s'est tenue du 6 au 8 juillet dernier au Museum Kunstpalast de Düsseldorf en Allemagne. Nous sommes toujours en phase de comptage, mais nous voulions dores et déjà remercier les 204 comptes Twittos déjà répertoriés du monde entier, qui nous ont aidé à amasser près de 1800 twitts en suivant le hashtag #CTM11.

 Le compte Twitter @agendaparis duquel nous avons commenté la conférence a augmenté son following de 89%, donc un grand merci pour cela, ainsi qu'à @DianeDrubay et @C_S_Media qui nous ont aidé à répandre l'info de la conférence. Vous pouvez continuer à discuter sur la conférence en utilisant le hashtag #CTM11.

Le compte Tumblr sépcialement créé pour #CTM11  agrège à présent les twits, photos, présentations et contenus de la conférence. Dans les jours à venir, l'ensemble des présentations faîtes à la conférence seront disponibles sur le compte, donc nous vous conseillons de visiter ce dernier régulièrement. Vous pouvez également nous soummettre vos photos de la conférence, impressions, points de vues et présentations pour peu qu'elles soient en ligne avec les thèmes abordés à Düsseldorf. Nous comptons sur vous: pas de pub, juste du contenu!

Museum Strategy & Agenda wish you an exciting year 2011

Somewhere in between Christmas and New Year, Museum Strategy and Agenda agency for the Arts wish you a merry and rich year 2011.

This blog will continue dealing with branding, communication and marketing issues, making it a space for scholars, students, our conference's participants, professionals and all of our readers to discuss trends and bring your contribution to how the arts sector can be actively part of people's lives through communication and technological development.

It all starts with someone's amazement at an art somewhere in the world so as a window on year 2011, here is a quotation of actor, writer, blogger, TV host and film director Stephen Fry:

«To stand in front of an artwork can cause bursts of excitement and surges of pleasure and thumps of intense feeling that are not unlike those an adolescent experiences when glimpsing someone who stirs desire in them.»

 

Let's keep this never-fading feeling as a driving force to share the love with others.
Happy new year 2011!

(Cloud Gate, Anish Kapoor)

Multiple Failure Lead us to New Accounts...

.....And to let you know via this blog which would normally not be the case.

After a Twitter tragedy wher we lost our Agenda account, followed by multiple widget problems featured on this very blog, we figured it would be useful to let you know we do have

- A new Twitter account: @agendaparis

- A new Facebook page :Agenda, International Agency for the Arts

Our accounts feature our news, exhibition and trips, and news about the events we organise.

And, this is it so far.
Stay tuned! 

 

Welcome!

Hello everyone, and welcome to CTM10 from Vienna, where it is currently thirty-five degrees in the shade and sunnier even than London.

I’m Richard, and along with Claire who normally writes this blog, we will be blogging throughout the conference, bringing you summaries, insights and (hopefully) some sharp dissection of the speeches, masterclasses and various sessions of Communicating The Museum 10: ‘Audiences: Keeping the Old, Finding The New’.

Just so you know (if you are already looking at this blog through the iPhone app, it seems you do), we have a CTM10 iPhone app available to download now. (Search for ‘Communicating The Museum’.)

We will be updating the blog daily, so stay tuned, connected and thoroughly wired. For those who cannot wait for the blog updates, follow us in truncated form on Twitter (agenda_paris), live from the Berger Saal at the Kunsthistorisches Museum from 9am tomorrow.

See you tomorrow,

Claire and Richard.

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

 

Guest post no. 2 , Alice Lebredonchel, My Museum Next Review

As you may have noticed, I was finally not at the Museum Next conference last 22 -23 October, but present and thus giving us the opportunity of a second guest post was Alice Lebredonchel, French consultant in cultural communication and owner of Innovart, a blog specialising in innovations in culture, particularly dedicated to the theme of growing audiences through marketing. She provided us with a full account of her experience at Museum Next that you can only read with profit. The layout slightly differ, so you can find the original post at Innovart.

"Back from Newcastle, here is my report on Museum Next, a conference for worldwide museum professionals based on a great interaction between its participants through workshops, “unconference” sessions  and other debates, that is to say two intense days of sharing, exchanging and brainstorming among the participants. Approximately 70 professionals of the museum world were there among whom artists, curators, institutions directors, members of  education departments or consultants, an eclectic mix to think together about tools and strategies for involving audiences in museums in order to make them more lively and interactive.

This event was held at the Great North Museum  for the first day and at the Center for Life  for the second day

 

 Day One :

For the first moments of exchange between participants of Museum Next we went to a space specifically aimed for the young audiences of the museum imagined by the collective [re] design   , a sustainable exhibition designer group. Each participant was asked to test the scenery in groups,  from the design of a monster with a sock or a sculpture with paper cups.

 

  After these first moments of chatting and “creative stimulation”, we got to work with a presentation of every "wild ideas"  submitted by some participants

 Once these presentations were made, work could begin and groups were formed  each treating on one of the 6 “wild ideas”

Day two :

The second day began with a fascinating presentation by Nina Simon (slides available here ). The content of her inspiring remarks , relevant examples that she has contributed to, and the conceptualisation of ideas she presented - and the quality of the layout of her power point presentation:)-  have been, I think, an inspiration for all participants until the end of the conference.

Then followed 8 “unconferences” submitted by participants during the previous evening, two sessions of approximately 45 minutes held on topics as diverse as:

- How can we measure success?
- How to manage  visitors who came because they had to?
- How can social interactions be facilitated by digital devices in museums and so on and so forth

Then we got back to our  “wild ideas”.

During  lunch break I had the chance to visit the exhibition “Democracy” with some attendees accompanied by its designer Jim Richardson. This exhibition aims at being  as democratic as possible, with works chosen through a voting system which is continuously updated. You can visit the website of this incredible exhibition here  or listen to Jim himself :

 

 

Back to the Center for Life, we had the opportunity to finalise our proposals before presenting them to the rest of the participants.

All the videos are available here.Congratulations to Jim Richardson and Nina Simon for giving us the opportunity to think and create together and to leave Newcastle with our head full of ideas!"

 

 

Word of Mouth: We all love to talk

“I am not buying this idea according to which we are becoming robots” were the words of Molly Flatt when asked about the changes an intense usage of social media can bring about, this June at Communicating the Museum. I find this very true for my personal case, as I sometimes have to take a break and remember that the internet is not transforming us people into something else, it is a medium through which we can pass our own ideas. Long story made short, internet is a means not an end.

In this respect I found Molly Flatt’s discussion both important and refreshing. Molly is a London-based “Word of Mouth Evangelist” working at the 1000 Heads agency. Her job roughly consists of devising campaigns using social media and other tools to create an important volume of conversations around her clients’ brands. In Malaga she gave a jam-packed, well-documented and lively presentation about what Word of Mouth (WOM) means today and how it can work more specifically for museums. Among the elements which Molly used to describe WOM, from its origins to its practical implementation, I will single out one that was key to me: WOM is an ancient mode of communication, it has been proven to work and internet has emerged as an immensely powerful vehicle for spreading Word of Mouth.

During her presentation, Molly went back to basics. She focused on how Museums should turn to having discussions with an audience craving to give museums their (precious) input. She explained how museums had always been the perfect place to spread Word of Mouth, as people would come to discuss the ideas of the day, and come to see, be seen and have a gossip, for example during the Great Exhibition. She wondered how this element had become lost over time. One of the reasons I love museums is precisely this : they create events and question their public. They have us talk and think and what comes from this process is priceless to me and should be to museums executives too. Museums themselves are the valuable object of conversation per se, internet only enhances them. Social media are about communities, about what comes from the heart of people.

That’s why I really liked the fact that Molly used an example of a fan-maker’s marketing campaign in the 19th century (before there was internet) to describe WOM. The language of the fan did not, as many people believe, evolve from some sort of unwritten social code but was in fact the result of a leaflet provided by Duvelleroy with every fan they sold. It was a genius marketing campaign that got people talking about a product. There are huge similarities between this stategy and the campaign 1000 Heads conducted for the “Cold War Modern” exhibition at the V&A, with the creation of a tailored, mutlifaceted game in London to lead selected internet users to an evening premiere of the exhibition. With a strategy like this, not only do you create buzz, not only do you promote, but what’s more, you leave real, lasting impressions on people about one object or event – they won’t forget about it as soon as it is over. It remains special and engages people not only as customers but as members of communities. Molly’s presentation’s final slide said: “She loves to talk”. Well, in truth, we all love to. It’s the conversation that’s important.

If you want to download a synthesis of Molly's talk, click here.

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.

Podcast with Jérômbe Lascombe, CEO of French internet communication agency Hopscotch

Download Museum Strategy Podcasts - Jerome Lascombe, Founder and CEO, Hopscotch

For the latest installment in our ongoing series of Museum Strategy podcasts, we visited Monsieur Jerome Lascombe at his Paris headquarters. Jerome is the CEO of Hopscotch, a leading agency of over 100 consultants specialising in PR and internet communication. He is also the founder of blogSpirit, a leading French provider of services and programmes, which he created in 2004. We chatted about the development of new media and how it can be applied to cultural institutions. Jerome's thoughts on how European countries are using social media differently were particularly interesting. Here at AGENDA we're really excited that Jerome is going to be speaking at Communicating the Museum this year. If you like what you hear, click here for more info on the conference...

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