Telling great ideas and stories that stick

Photo by Andrew Beresford on Flickr.

Years ago I read the book Made to Stick by Dan and Chip Heath. Basically it’s about why some stories and ideas disappear and others stick with the receiver forever. What makes a successful story that is retold over and over again?

The book applied its own rules and stayed with me. Reading through a pile of unremarkable blog posts and museum brochures this week its lessons came to mind again. Here’s the slightly edited summary I wrote for internal use in 2007. I believe this message is worth sharing, even after some years. Useful for when you pitch your next innovative idea, give a presentation or simply write copy for an exhibition.

What makes a story or idea stick?

Successful communication alone is not enough to make ideas stick. An idea sticks when:

1. You can easily understand it,
2. You can remember it,
3. It’s effectively changing thoughts or behaviour.

To make sure your idea, story, pitch or presentation fits the above description, Dan and Chip propose the SUCCES criteria. Fulfilling these criteria will make your ideas powerful and successful. Read the rest of this entry »

I like museums – Using Facebook’s Like Button to connect with visitors

Facebook Like Button Stamp by design studio, Nation.

Facebook Like Buttons are revolutionising the web. There’re even rumours about Google going to use them in their search algorithm. Recently, at the museum, I’ve been adding Like Buttons to many of our websites and the results are significant.

Conversion is high and traffic from Facebook increased. Small and specific communities are built around projects, events and activities. We don’t have a physical collection, but I can see the same happening for objects in online collections.

Adding Like Buttons is as easy as copy-pasting. In fact, you can customise and copy the code on the Facebook developers website and have a Like Button online in under two minutes. Generic solutions might take a bit more skill and time (adding it to our 750+ activities in next week’s Week of History took about an hour).

With the ease and impact of the Like Button it’s an amazing tool for museums to connect with visitors and build useful connections online. Read the rest of this entry »

Stop talking, start sending – The information food chain and how museums should use Twitter

Photo by Pieter Pietserse on Flickr.

I read a newspaper. I read a newspaper because I believe a bunch of highly educated people are better at sorting through the myriad pieces of news the world produces daily than I am. My newspaper even prints the best tweet out of 90 million sent every day, that’s how good they are.

Newspapers don’t converse. Newspapers send information. And it’s good they do so, because they’re high up in the information food chain.

By now thousands of museums are on Twitter cs. There they sit and chat and retweet each other and make good initiatives trending worldwide. They’ve been told Twitter (and Facebook, blogs, etc.) is a conversation channel, not a publicity channel. They’ve been told to listen, not to send. So they desperately try to engage in conversation and mostly chat with each other.

Museums on Twitter shouldn’t converse. They should send information. That’s because museums, like newspapers, are high up in the information food chain. Maybe even higher up than newspapers.

I don’t say museums should use Twitter to shamelessly publicise their events and opening hours. I mean they should sort through the millions of tweets, status updates, blogposts, etc. to pick the best things and share these in a meaningful way with their audience. They should respect their position in the information food chain.

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Building our community of objects with visitors of the Uitmarkt

Update 09/09/2010: Nina Simon posted this post as a guest post on her (amazing) Museum 2.0 blog. Thanks!

Last weekend my museum presented itself at the Uitmarkt in Amsterdam. The Uitmarkt is an annual festival that opens the new cultural year. Instead of handing out flyers about our upcoming expositions, we decided to ask the visitors to contribute to our ongoing project the National Vending Machine. The National Vending Machine is a travelling exposition that tells the historical and personal story behind everyday objects. All these objects and stories together we call our ‘community of objects’.

I thought it was a perfect chance to put one of the ideas in Nina Simon’s book The Participatory Museum to the test. Her case study about Structured Dialogue in the Signtific Game in chapter 3 describes a project where people engaged in conversation online about wild ideas. For me the beauty of the Signtific Game lies in the way people are guided by a select number of possible responses to a wild idea. This structures dialogue and makes it more productive.

We translated this online game to an offline activity around everyday objects. I believe it worked brilliantly. Over the course of the weekend a small team (three people each day) engaged in conversation with hundreds of people, individually or in groups and encouraged them to contribute to our community of objects with personal stories and new objects.

Read the rest of this entry »

Users and use of the National Vending Machine – 7 lessons about participation

Two months ago the Museum of National History, my employer, launched the National Vending Machine. The interactive installation, currently on display in the Amsterdam Historical Museum, encourages people to discover history through objects. It’s a pilot project and we will use our experiences of the three-month try-out to improve future instalments of the National Vending Machine.

The National Vending Machine is a participatory project. To discover who uses the machine and how these users interact with it, I’ve spent quite some hours observing visitors and I’ve used the website (and especially the visitor part) to get an overall idea about participation and interaction. Read the rest of this entry »