Most of the workshops I run I conclude with a simple and effective game I call Bag It or Bin It*. Simply put I ask participants to summarise the main ideas of the workshop and put them into two categories: the ideas they will follow up (these go in the bag) and the ideas they never want to hear about again (these go in the bin). The result is a nicely coloured co-created do’s and dont’s list for the participants.
Minke Havelaar, with whom I run a series of workshops for Mediamatic’s Kom Je Ook?, has made a summary of a couple of Bag It or Bin It games we played about social media marketing strategy with cultural institutions. The result reads like a trend list for social media development in the cultural and non-profit sector. Especially interesting is what people put in their bags regarding the strategic use of social media.
So, what do our colleagues focus on when it comes to social media? Here’s 100s of ideas summarised in six clear trends:
Quantity versus quality of content
Do’s include writing Tweets and Facebook updates according to best practices (short, images, etc.), the 9-1 rule for writing more about others than about yourself and thinking more strategically about each piece of content.
Almost overnight my RSS timeline changed from “Facebook blah Facebook blahblah” to “Pinterest blah Pinterest blahblah”. There’s so much buzz around this new social network that I’m not even going to explain what it is and why it is the future. Others have done so and have done so better, especially Neil Patel’s marketing guide to Pinterest. A must read, which lists SFMOMA as a brand doing well on the platform. Chapeau.
Pinterest is the perfect platform for culture, if you ask me. It’s the platform most suited to give meaning to our mission statements and values. Among the many, many things you can do on Pinterest (thanks Jenni), here are five I find especially valuable:
Make your blog more compelling, and easier to fill
Regardless of your topic, an image and strong tagline almost always tell a more convincing story online than an image and a 2,000-word essay. I’m sure a good board can replace many a regular culture blog, reach a wider audience and be more engaging. Plus, it’s easier to get a 5-word quote about a painting from a curator than have her write a 500-word blogpost.
Create a mindblowing gallery of influencers and influenced
So the Guernica inspired hundreds of artists (and rightfully so)? Make a board that shows a “timeline” of all the art influenced by this piece, and where Picasso took his inspiration from. This makes a great exposition, and – thus – a great board on Pinterest. You could also crowdsource such a project by opening up the board to contributions by your followers. Read the rest of this entry »
Regardless of Google’s don’t be evil ethos, they are successfully slaughtering serendipity. For a while now, on most searches I do the only surprising results are ads. Most others in the top-x are recommended or shared or +1d by people in my social circles. The announcement of Search plus Your World hints the web will only be getting smaller as time goes on.
It made me think of a forgotten social network I probably spent more time with than Google+ and Facebook combined: StumbleUpon.
StumbleUpon is the cabinet of curiosities of the web. StumbleUpon is the unGoogle, a curated collection of stuff you didn’t even know you were looking for. I stumbled around in the arts section and sawmoregreatstuff than in a week on Twitter.
With a population of 20 million StumbleUpon doesn’t have the body of most other social networks. However, unlike most other social networks, the users of StumbleUpon are open to chance encounters, welcome serendipity, and value quality regardless of its origin.
StumbleUpon is around since 2001, but I think its potential for museums is severely overlooked when we talk about social media. Ranked 126th worldwide on Alexa, the website is directing huge amounts of visitors to great content on the web. Plus, according to Wikipedia they added millions of users in the past year, which strengthens my believe that there’s a growing interest in content from beyond once’s social circles. Read the rest of this entry »
Last year – best wishes for 2012! – I got my hands on a copy of The Happy Museum: A tale of how it could turn out all right. It’s a happy little publication (PDF) I hadn’t heard of before about the role museums play in our changing world, and should play to remain relevant and add to a more sustainable future. And, hidden between the lines, there’s a twist in the story that takes is from society straight to social media…
In 2010, when asked to imagine museums in 2020, I wrote about how I believe a museum has and should have a responsible position in culture, art and heritage and also in society in general. The Happy Museum takes this further and focuses on the role museums can play to limit consumption, make people happier and generally contribute to the well-being of people.
The Happy Museum has two USPs when it comes to playing an active part in these areas, and I’ve added a third which I believe is equally important:
Apart from the gift shop, museum don’t try to sell anything but understanding and enjoyment. Therefore they are a sanctuary from the advertising and commercialisation of the public space.
As public (social) spaces, museums offer a counterpart to the ever more privatised public realm, where hardly anything is freely accessible anymore (especially when they are truly “free”, as in “gratis”).
In the world of StarBucks and Apple stores, museums provide an opportunity to experience something ‘unique’ in the original meaning of the word: one of a kind (not unique as in: venti triple half-caf organic caramel macchiato).
A persistent misconception is tormenting the cultural sector and it’s a misconception about value. I’ve heard people say the craziest things about value, including from experts put on stage to educate us. One of them, just to pick an example: Social media allows us to have a large impact with a low investment. Bollocks!
Another one: The cultural sector has significant social and cultural value, but not necessarily economic value.
Talking about economical value and social value and their relationship makes the value discussion way too complex, especially since “The Economy” has been branded as something difficult (read Tim Harford to understand it’s not) and value is understood as profit and loss (read Seth Godin to understand it’s not).
To make everything easier, here’re the two things you need to understand about value:
Value and money are two completely different things. Value more closely resembles karma. It’s a universal currency and the banking of it is outsourced to everybody.
In a way, value is a constant. Over the long run, the value you receive will always equal the value you have created for others. However, this relationship can be diffuse.
If you understand this, you’ll understand there’s no such thing as a big impact for a low investment, in social media or elsewhere. Everybody who tells you so AD 2011 is a fraudster. A tweet that receives hundreds of retweets might be free to send, but to build the engaged following that will retweet it takes at least 6 to 12 months of professional high-quality tweeting. That’s a huge investment for, at best, a large impact. It’s why corporates pay for their videos to go viral. Read the rest of this entry »
