Some thoughts on different types of advocates and communities

Photo by Niall Kennedy on Flickr.

The happy end result of most ‘community building’ processes is an army of advocates. These enthusiasts recruit new members, keep the community healthy and lively, take responsibility for its daily operations and – if you’re lucky – attract funding and publicity.

The advocate – or enthusiast – in a well-designed project is the pinnacle of the community building efforts. It might take years for an army of advocates to develop. I call these advocates the “raised advocate”, as they’re raised by the community.

Because of their PR strength and their potential to attract new members to communities, people have been trying to start communities with some advocates already in place. Often, these people are paid in money (think Hollywood actors) or rewards (iPads are popular) for advocate-like behaviour.

There’s no denying the strength of Angelina Jolie or Al Gore promoting your cause, but in online projects and new media minded settings, I’ve seen and experienced some challenges with “bought advocates”. Read the rest of this entry »

What makes visitors come (back)?

Photo by Omar Bárcena on Flickr.

Here’s the textbook example of the development of something online AD 2011. It’s a post on this blog, but in my experience represents most of our online work. In this example, exactly seven days separate launch and oblivion.

Fortunately, the fate of one post does not represent the fate of this blog (or you wouldn’t be reading this, would you?). I write another post, and another, and tweet, and write another post, and tweet. As long as I keep pushing out new content (and preferably a lot) I will not be forgotten.

Having people return to our websites has been one of the things we’ve done some work on at the Museum of National History. Our online KPIs put quite some significance on return rates, loyalty, brand awareness, successful registrations, etc.

The dynamics of returning visitors are completely different from those of new visitors. On innl.nl in Q2, return visitors visited 35% more pages, spent 74% more time and were roughly 26% more likely to visit content pages (rather than ‘corporate’ pages). Other data shows there’s a correlation between return rates and participation with content.

Correlation does not mean causation and it might very well be that visitors who spent more time on the website, visit content pages, etc. are more likely to return.

So, what makes visitors return to a website? And more importantly: what makes visitors come back to old content, rather than continuously having to add new content?

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A quest for relevance

Photo by Stephanie Schuldes on Flickr.

To succeed in our never-ending quest to make culture and the arts more relevant in the lives of people, all we have to do (online) is approach the right people at the right time and place with the right message through the right communication channel.

Simply put, don’t tweet about overflowing toilets unless you want to make a point about the pressing need for maintenance funds. And in that case, be sure to ask at the beginning of the month, when people just received their paychecks.

The museum of the 21^st century is as successful in being relevant to people, as Google and Facebook ads are. (Or, if you prefer, will be in the near future.) In fact, we can use the very tools Google and Facebook ads provide us to prove that the more relevant we make our content, the more likely they are to engage with it.

In the chart below I’ve plotted a number of Facebook ads we ran. The potential reach of the ad is on the horizontal axis, on the vertical each ads true reach (normalized to a similar number of impressions per ad). The CTR chart of the same data is very much alike.

Without a doubt, ads aimed at a specific target group, with a specific message, almost always outperform the more general ads.

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Does a semantic network improve the quality of museum website visits? Some stats from the INNL network

Photo by Dan Brickley on Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA)

It’s been more than three months since we at the Museum of National History launched our new website. And, apart from the usual glitches, it pretty much does the trick we expected it to do. Besides the website, we also launched the INNL network, a semantic network of historical websites. At the moment it connects over 200,000 stories, photos, people and events from different websites in a – hopefully – meaningful way.

The INNL network is built on the premises that providing your data in a meaningful way to a larger network of websites provides 1) more context for your online information and 2) a wider reach for your information. For a website owner this should mean more high-quality visits and less hours of editing. (I wrote a post about how the network works earlier.)

So, were these assumptions correct? Does a semantic network improve the quality of museum website visits? It’s a bit early to give a definite answer, but with 3 months of stats I feel I should be able to say something about the “semantic visitor” (the visitor coming to our website through the INNL network). The table below shows some indicators I believe are related to the quality of a visit:

* Non-flirts is a term I borrowed from Avinash Kaushik and adjusted to mean visits with either depth equal to or greater than 3 or a duration equal to or greater than 2 minutes. These visits are more than merely ‘flirts’ (hits from Google or Twitter, quick checks to see if anything changed) but potentially interested visits. I’ve added Twitter to compare statistics.

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Three possible designs for architecture of the museum of the future

Yesterday we presented the book Sketches for a National History Museum. However, flipping through the book and talking with the young architects involved, I realise it could also be called “Sketches for a Museum in the 21^st century”. Three young European architecture firms came up with three different possibilities for future museum architecture. Here’s how they envision the architecture of the museum of the future.

An enormous hall

An extremely spacious central hall makes me think immediately of Tate Modern. If you think that is cool architecture, however, 51N4E’s proposal might be your dream come true. Their design “Hall of History” consists of a ten-storeys-high wall with exposition spaces, overlooking an enormous hall where flexible expositions of all sizes can be organised. From the “wall” a visitor can look out at what happens in the “hall”, and vice versa.

I love how this design makes it possible to tell larger stories. Imagine the wall being a timeline of art history. From the hall you can get a sense of what influenced who etc. whereas in the spaces in the wall you can see individual art works from a certain period.

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