Posted: March 16th, 2010 | Author: Jasper Visser | Filed under: Lessons learned, Social media | Tags: conversation, do's and don'ts, guidelines, inspiration, lessons, practice, strategy | No Comments »
Lately I’ve been getting a lot of questions about social media guidelines for museums. There’s been a lot written about the use of social media guidelines, so I’ll limit this post to my experiences.
Why use social media guidelines?
More and more people join social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook or blog about their life or work. Not everybody is a digital native with perfect understanding of the subtleties of the web. I think guidelines are to guide these people towards a rewarding and safe use of social media.
Social media guidelines help people:
- To benefit from the opportunities of social media.
- To engage in a constructive way in online conversation, be it about a museum or their favourite pet.
- To avoid doing things online they might regret, personally or professionally.
- To find their way in your organisation when they discover conversations about your organisation on the web.
- To feel comfortable while writing about their work online.
Social media guidelines are meant to enrich people’s online behaviour, not to limit it.
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Posted: January 28th, 2010 | Author: Jasper Visser | Filed under: Interaction, Social media | Tags: Audience, communication, community, conversation, do's and don'ts, museums, strategy, twitter | 3 Comments »
Next Monday, February 1st, 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.) Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: July 23rd, 2009 | Author: Jasper Visser | Filed under: Social media | Tags: Audience, communication, community, conversation | 1 Comment »
I love social media. And I think part of the future of museums is in social media. The future of museums is their community, how they can truly connect with their audience. In that, I am not alone.
This morning I received a link to a rather interesting article called “Museum’s new mantra: Connect with community”. A short Twitter discussion ensued between Jim Richardson, Jon Pratty and me. A conclusion for museums: “Conversation is king”. Later today Ryan Donahue added that if conversation is king, content should be its queen: “One by itself is uninteresting.”
Now I don’t know about the monarchy in your country, but ours has quite some difficulties connecting with the regular people. And I think that analogy applies to museums as well. And I don’t think social media can easily take that away.
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