Quick note: Two more months, nostalgia and the speed of culture

Photo by Stephen Shrubsole on Flickr.

Time is flying and the end of the year – and with it the end of the Museum of National History – is quickly approaching. Only two more months and the adventure is over.

This week we found a new home for the National Vending Machine, one of our signature projects. It’s time for her to move out, and I wish her well with her new owner, the Zuiderzee Museum in Enkhuizen. Two other projects – the innl-network and xwashier – are still looking for a place to call home after December.

Also, this week another co-worker left, further reducing our numbers. In our quiet office I moved to the room with our curatorial staff and researchers, where there’s still some action.

The close-knit team we’ve become reminds me of my first days in May 2009, when a similarly small team worked around the clock to make our museum happen. And when I still knew nothing. Nostalgia.

I often think of these first months as the best time I have known in the museum. Not in the sense of colleagues (who weren’t there), projects (which were still only plans) or audience engagement (the hundreds of thousands we were to reach were still an ambition). No, most of all because of the speed at which we worked, and the opportunities we created. 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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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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