The best of the Museum of the Future of 2011

Photo by Paulo Alegria on Flickr.

Quite some blogs are offering “best of” lists at the moment (notably, Expert Enough, Know Your Own Bone and Time’s Best Blogs of 2011), and I find these surprisingly pleasant. Also, even on blogs I follow closely I miss some posts, which then turn out to be the best. That’s my luck; to help yours, here’s the best of the museum of the future of 2011:

1. 6 useful Google Analytics Custom Reports and Advanced Segments for museum websites
2. How the Google Art Project might revolutionize the physical museum experience
3. DOK Delft, inspirational library concepts
4. Integrated media strategies for museums
5. 30 do’s for designing successful participatory and crowdsourcing projects
6. Using Foursquare to make historical contents locally available (and reach new audiences)
7. What is good museum architecture?
8. Bumpy rides and dead-end streets
9. How to measure engagement and participation? An experiment with Google Analytics
10. Videos and blogs about museums, technology and media

It’s great to see the strategic and result-oriented posts get quite some attention this year. Also, without Google I would have been nowhere (in terms of topics and traffic). 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?

Read the rest of this entry »

Growth of mobile visitors and the phones they use on innl.nl

Photo by JD Hancock on Flickr.com

Today I began working on the quarterly report of my museum’s new media activities for Q2. People who follow this blog will know I usually find something useful in the huge pile of data we gather and process. This time, a somewhat higher percentage of mobile visitors to our website motivated me to take a closer look at their stats.

The first graph shows the percentage of mobile visitors to our website. Although there’s little difference on a per-month basis, and even a small decline in the early months of this year, the trend (orange line) shows a continuous growth.

Graph 1: Percentage of mobile visitors to innl.nl

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The new visitor

Photo by Jon Martin on Flickr.com (CC BY-NC-SA)

One of the recurring questions at Museums and the Web 2011 was about the new visitors technology and new media supposedly get to our institutions. Who are they? Where do they come from? And: how do we get them to be new visitors? And do they even exist?

Most talk about the new visitor goes as if there is a remote and undiscovered country full of people with nothing to do. We only have to give them the right media and technology and they’ll come running to our museums and archives and heritage sites.

Of course, there’s no such country. Rather than talking about attracting new visitors we should talk about increasing the quality of visits of people who are already visitors, and the people who can be drawn away from competition such as television, other museums and bars.

According to an MW presentation, the mobile app ARTeMuse managed to increase the time visitors spent per artwork from 30 seconds to 3 minutes. To me this means the technology created entirely new visitors, because the quality of their visit has increased dramatically.

Another example I found while finishing last quarter’s new media report today. On an average, about 0.6% of all visits to our website result in a contribution of some sort (comment, favourite, etc.). Earlier this year, we ran an architecture project with a very specific focus on people interested in culture and architecture (not “new” visitors from the supposed country). In this project, 4.9% of all visits resulted in interaction and participation. Again, not new visitors per se, yet they feel very new. Read the rest of this entry »

Inspiration from Foursquare 3.0 to reward your visitors

Photo by What What on Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA)

Foursquare has proven pretty successful at making people do stuff they don’t really need to do. Checking in on Foursquare is like visiting a local museum or gallery: it will not save your life but it’s fun to do so once in a while. One reason, I think, Foursquare is popular is because of its reward system. In the recent 3.0 release a lot of new options have been added to earn points and be really cool.

I know a lot of places offer rewards to returning visitors, etc. Foursquare 3.0 takes this to the next level. Maybe among the many things they reward there’s one or two we could apply to the physical visitors of our museums.

• First visit to a venue
  First times are always tricky: they determine if there will be a second or not. A good first impression rocks. Foursquare gives quite some points. A museum might give a special tour, flyer, or even a discount (as people do not yet know if it will be worth their money). “First time visitors enter for free. See if you will come again!”
• Returning visitors
  Foursquare used to reward loyalty with turning you into a mayor and offering badges. Now they’re also handing out points for returning visits. My hairdresser does as well, with a nice discount if I come back within 4, 5 or 6 weeks. At museum, for instance a sign at the exit: “Don’t throw away your ticket, it’s worth a coffee next time you’re around.”
• Welcome back
  One of the best new rewards in Foursquare 3.0 are the points awarded for returning after a long time (to playing the game, to a venue). It feels like Foursquare has personally waited for my return and that feels good. So, how about inviting people with old catalogues, flyers or tickets who are not friends or members to a special opening of a new exhibition? Read the rest of this entry »