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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My twenty-ten in museums and culture – 642 words, flywheels and making change happen

Photo by RightBrainPhotography on Flickr (CC SA-NC-ND)

I think you’re great! Let me explain why.

There’s about a 50% change you’ve visited this blog before, so I think it’s safe to assume this is not the first post you read. That means you’re one of the people who helped to make this blog go from a couple of hundreds of visits a month to – recently – over 2,500. Cool! Over 7,000 unique visitors from more than 100 countries came to this blog in twenty-ten. Among you are quite some of the people whose work on innovation in the cultural sector I greatly admire. Thanks for joining.

The discussion about the future of culture and museums is happening on many blogs, forums and conferences. Mine is just a small one. The past year has given us many moments where the international community for cultural innovators came together. I think about the ash cloud unconference sessions after Museum and the Web, the comment section of Nina Simon’s ever great blog and events such as #followamuseum and #askacurator (thanks Jim!).

Jim Collins wrote one of the books that have shaped my vision on life and work, Good to Great. If you haven’t done so before, pick up a copy and memorize it. It’s gold. One of his points is ‘first who, then what’, another the flywheel.

What Mr. Collins proves is that if you get the right people together, and you make sure you work on something you really like, can be the best of the world in and earn a sustainable living while doing so, a flywheel will start turning. When you are persistent in doing that thing, the flywheel will get momentum. This momentum makes the impossible possible and will turn whatever you do from merely good, to great. Read the rest of this entry »

The INNL network – what it is and how it works

Last week we launched our new website. As I wrote last week it’s a connected website. With our website, we launched the INNL network. The INNL network is a semantic network of history and heritage websites.

Connecting online collections and communities

When we started the new website project, we realised that over the last couple of years many museums, archives and other institutions have digitised their collections. At the same time many created communities around projects and expositions. The result of all these efforts is a rich, but dispersed online presence of culture, history and heritage. If you know where to look, you can find almost anything online. Most people, however, don’t look further than Wikipedia and the top-3 results in Google (often the same).

We wanted to make it easier for people to discover history and heritage online by connecting different collections and communities. Sort of like Europeana builds an enormous database of European collections, but then focused at the normal Internet user, who doesn’t even know Europeana exists. This idea, the INNL network, allows people to enter anywhere in the network and experience the rich online collections, rather than having to search for them.

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