What would Lady Gaga do if she were a museum?

Posted: August 12th, 2010 | Author: Jasper Visser | Filed under: Inspiration, Thoughts about museums | Tags: , , , , , , , , | View Comments

Inspired by the thought-provoking presentation below and the fact Lady Gaga has almost 80 million scrobbles on last.fm, all-time second after only the Beatles, I wondered: What would Lady Gaga do if she were a museum?

Read the rest of this entry »


What will you do with your new followers?

Posted: January 28th, 2010 | Author: Jasper Visser | Filed under: People, Technology | Tags: , , , , , , | View 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 »


Conversation is King, but how can he reach his people?

Posted: July 23rd, 2009 | Author: Jasper Visser | Filed under: Thoughts about museums | Tags: , , | View Comments

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.

Read the rest of this entry »