The Museum of the Future

What will you do with your new followers?

Next Monday, February 1^st, is “follow a museum” day. As there are a lot of museum with quite extraordinary collections, I think it’s worth following one or two for inspiration, information and entertainment. Therefore, I applaud the idea of follow a museum day.

However, I also have my doubts.

Followers seem to be the new currency. The more followers, the better. I strongly disagree. It’s involvement that matters. It’s not about the number of followers a museum has, but about the communication with its audience a museum has.

Jim hinted using Ad.ly Analytics to measure the involvement of your followers. I say 100 involved followers beats 100.000 uninvolved ones. (Read about the “benefits” of being on Twitter’s Suggested Users List by Anil Dash.)

So why try to get more followers? Aim at increasing conversation!

Two examples of starting a conversation with your followers I’d like to share, both from Holland, are Museum Boerhaave’s MBtrail and the Museum of National History’s INNL series (this last institutions pays me, so I don’t claim to be objective.)

Each Friday employees of Museum Boerhaave take their followers on a trail through their museum wonderful collection. Questions about objects or topics are answered and people are triggered to discover more about the museum. Considering the amount of retweets and interaction, the MBtrail engages (a part of) their followers.

The Museum of National History has by now done three INNL interactive history themes, using Twitter to engage people. We take a subject, like winter, and trigger people with historical objects and stories to add their own content. Their contributions are then used to update the “file” on the subject. We reach some 10-20 people intensely with each edition of INNL and many hundreds who read and enjoy the end result.

Internationally, there are other great examples of museum engaging in conversation with their followers over Twitter.

So, with “follow a museum” day coming up, I’d like to ask you: what will you do with your new followers? Will you bombard them with publicity for your institution, or will you focus at increasing conversation with them?

Dea Birkett proposed “follow a visitor” day for museum. This will be March 1^st. Another great initiative, but too long after the first. I say: make sure your new followers of next Monday are welcomed with some good engaging conversation. As a museum, do something special next Monday for your new and old followers.

I will think about something to do now. What will you do?

Intimate Strangers – A special exhibition experience in FOAM

Yesterday during the MuseumNacht (Museum Night) in Amsterdam, I had the chance to visit ‘Intimate Strangers‘, a temporary exhibition in the FOAM Photography Museum on the work of the Dutch photographer Sanne Sannes.

The MuseumNacht is an annual event in which 26,000 people visit the museums of Amsterdam at night, often for the first time in their lives. Sanne’s work is slightly erotic and intimate in its nature. On top of that, although photography is a very popular form of art, I think it’s one of the more difficult ones to engage your audience with. It’s easily accessible, but difficult to have people take their time to really discover the layered experience good photography can give you.

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Testing Amsterdam museums with Seb Chan

Last week I had the honour of having Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney around. One of the things we did was drop by a number of museums in Amsterdam to see how they designed their audience experience, what was good about it, and what could have been better. This taught me a handful of useful things about audience engagement and interaction design I’d like to share.

Museums we visited were: the Tropenmuseum, the Amsterdam Historic Museum, NEMO, the public library, FOAM Fotography Museum, the Tassenmuseum. In addition I included the Hermitage which I visited alone.

1. Deliver what the visitor expects

Museums are basically boring. They’re not amusement parks and shouldn’t be. A lot of multimedia and interaction in museums does not convey the museum’s basic objective, which is to show beautiful artefacts. Therefore, as Seb noted, “most interaction in museums is like an action-packed trailer to a slow-moving French movie.”

The ‘Tassenmuseum’ (Bags Museum) is a small, privately held museum in Amsterdam with a predominantly elder female audience. They come to see beautiful bags and have tea. They come for the traditional museum experience. The Tassenmuseum delivers exactly this, with a very traditional exhibition approach and a comfortable café. The museum delivers what the visitor expects.

NEMO is a typical science centre. The second you walk into the museum, you hear and see kids running around. There’s lots of opportunity for them to engage with the installations and discover the fun side of science. That’s what parents expect when they take their kids to NEMO.

Interaction would be completely out of its place in the Tassenmuseum, whereas it’s a necessity in NEMO. The lesson: Use interaction only when the audience expects it.

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