Integrated media strategies for museums

Photo by Kristian Vinkenes on Flickr.com

One of the recurring themes at the recent MuseumNext conference in Edinburgh was what I call the “holistic” or “integrated media strategy”. Social media or technology is not an isolated department within the whole of the strategy of an institution, but a core function such as communication, education or finance.

This means it’s no longer about having a great Facebook strategy within your team. It’s about having an overall strategy for all media (new and traditional), connected with the activities you do and the expositions you host. A strategy that is interconnected and continuously attracts new visitors, retains the old ones and engages them with what you do.

The museum as a media producer

If you think of media as communication channels (and is there any other way to think about them?), museums are media producers. We’re very much like the BBC, HBO and even Walt Disney, apart from that we’re not into it for the money, but for “the arts”. For-profit museums understand this point very well, presumably.

In my opinion, there’s three levels at which a museum does things: 1) new and traditional media, 2) activities and events with the audience and 3) the physical expositions that you put up in a building. Most of our campaigns are focused at getting people to visit us (3). Not everybody, however, will always be able to visit us. For instance, because the buildings not big enough. New and traditional media (1) as well as activities (2) allow us to reach more people. I use the model below to remind me of this.

This model is all about people moving from one level to another (up and down). It’s in these movements the advantage of an integrated media strategy becomes clearest. Read the rest of this entry »

Small-scale marketing (for yourself, your art, activities and expositions)

Photo by Trey Ratcliff on Flicr.com (CC BY-NC-SA)

Last Friday already (time flies) Isabelle Conner and I hosted a series of round table sessions to help young artists with their marketing, personal branding and the successful use of distribution channels. Isabelle is a genius. The questions she asked the young artists are well worth thinking about once every while. It’s like, marketing 101, suitable to put anything ‘small’ in the market, such as yourself, a project or exposition or even a small museum.

1. Introduce yourself, please

Who are you? What do you stand for? What makes you unique? Whatever you are and do, there’re a lot of others doing the same. Take the average conference, what makes people come to you, apart from that they know you? What have they heard about you beforehand?

You should be able to tell others in one sentence who you are, or what the activity is you’re working on. This doesn’t mean it should be brief: be specific. There’re a million photographers in the world, so when you say you are one, you might as well let people know why you stand out between the others.

Be surprising, dare to stand out. One of the artists present made art using her voice to create sounds. So I asked her if she could make a special sound and she made the sound of breasts. I will never forget that and just told you about it. That’s marketing.

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Using Foursquare to make historical contents locally available (and reach new audiences)

Ever since I first used Foursquare I’ve been looking for ways to use this platform for our museum. After some unsuccessful attempts, I believe we found a way to use Foursquare that might have potential and some conditions to use the platform well.

Our new website, and especially its integration of Google Maps, made it easy to add stories from our website to relevant places in Foursquare. About a month ago I’ve added 15 stories as tips to Foursquare. And it seems to work! Some of the tips have been done relatively often and between 0.05 and 0.1 % of our website traffic (wow!) now comes from Foursquare.

Here’s what I did (and/or should have done, looking back):

1. I looked for things on our website (stories, etc.) directly related to a location.
2. Then I looked for a venue on Foursquare at this location with a lot of check-ins (train stations seem to work best) and preferably not too much tips.
3. I added a tip with the main body of the information of the story (the length of a tip is limited, so even when you add the core of your message it works like a teaser).
4. To the tip, I added a URL. The last couple of them I’ve given the extra attribute ?source=4sq to be able to measure them in Google Analytics. (There’s no other way to measure the traffic from Foursquare as far as I know).
5. I measure success using a special Advanced Segment for Foursquare (using the ?source=4sq).

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“Dear webmaster” – Uncommon emails sent to museum web teams

Image by Andrea Joseph on Flickr (CC-BY-NC-ND).

Amidst the Twitter updates, questions about opening hours and praise for the website, sometimes there’s an email in our webmaster@ addresses that makes us frown, forward the message to colleagues and wonder what to respond. Good-natured visitors send us well-intentioned emails with the strangest comments or requests. We, webmasters of 2010, know we’re the face of our organisation ever more often. Yet, that doesn’t always make it easier to respond to these emails.

After having talked about this with some colleagues from other museums, I decided to get together some examples. Not to laugh about them, but to create awareness of these important messages and the importance to respond to them correctly. Below are some examples received from different museums. Anonymous, so nobody might feel offended or laughed at.

A son not worthy of working at a Nobel Prize-winning desk?

A lucky man finds himself to have inherited the desk of a Nobel Prize laureate, maybe. His uncle has saved it over 50 years ago from the landfill and given it to the writer. Not sure what to do with the desk, and whether it’s the real thing and thus might be valuable to a museum, he asks a science museum for advice. Especially, because his own son doesn’t seem to be enough of a student to deserve such a special desk for his studies. Maybe it’s better off in a museum?

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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 »