The Museum of the Future | Culture in times of social and technological change

23 Jul, 2009 • Thoughts about museums • 5600

Conversation is King, but how can he reach his people?

I love social media. And I think part of the future of museums is in social media. The future of museums is their community, how they can truly connect with their audience. In that, I am not alone.

This morning I received a link to a rather interesting article called “Museum’s new mantra: Connect with community”. A short Twitter discussion ensued between Jim Richardson, Jon Pratty and me. A conclusion for museums: “Conversation is king”. Later today Ryan Donahue added that if conversation is king, content should be its queen: “One by itself is uninteresting.”

Now I don’t know about the monarchy in your country, but ours has quite some difficulties connecting with the regular people. And I think that analogy applies to museums as well. And I don’t think social media can easily take that away.

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6 Jul, 2009 • Thoughts about museums • 7756

How much co-creation is OK for a museum?

Historically, museums are built by individuals around a private collection. Later, in the 18th and 19th century, museums became institutions. Although they were governed by a group of people, the audience still had little say in what was put on display (and how, and where).

In the last century, museums became interactive and especially in the last decades were focused more on the audience and less on the need to exhibit. Only recently, however, museums discovered you can let the audience have a say in the contents of a museum. (I love this example on Flickr.)

You can’t build the world’s most innovative museum alone. In fact, co-creation is one of our main focuses. We want to have a structure that enables our audience to participate in everything the museum does. We want to engage them, not only in our exhibitions and projects but also in our organization itself. Continue Reading
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15 Jun, 2009 • Technology • 14963

Practical advice on developing your presence on social media websites

One of my first jobs as a Community Manager for the Museum of National History was to build a presence on existing social media websites. There’s quite some literature available on social media strategy. That helps. I think I developed a strategy that could be the envy of all museums worldwide. (I’ll brag about that when it starts to pay off.)

However, what I noticed is that strategy is only one. There’s also the practical side of becoming active on social media websites. I didn’t read a word about that. I simply used my experience as a user and the small things I did in the past and thought this would work for a large ambitious museum as well.

That proved a learning experience. Looking back on the first month, I can already identify things that I could and should have done better. Therefore I’d like to share my practical experiences with developing a social media presence with you. Please share your experiences as well to avoid others to make our mistakes. Continue Reading
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7 Jun, 2009 • Technology • 6644

Mobile augmented reality to turn our country into a museum

Last Friday I met Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald from SPRXMobile. He gave me a demonstration of a new application they built, named Layar. Layar is, according to their website, a free application for your mobile phone which shows what is around you by displaying real time digital information on top of reality though the camera of the mobile phone.

Currently it’s only available on Android phones. In the near future, however, it might become available for the iPhone as well.

Layar is a browser. On top of the image of the camera in a mobile phone, this browser displays an information layer. For instance, the location of all ATMs around you. A small dot shows you the direction and the distance of an ATM. Once you select one ATM, you can get additional information about this ATM. Also, you can call a map to see how to get to this ATM from your current position. Continue Reading
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31 May, 2009 • Technology • 8651

How to use Twitter as a museum?

Internationally, there are a lot of museums active on Twitter. Unfortunately, most of them use Twitter only as a modern announcement board. There is very little interaction with their followers.

The Brooklyn Museum is one notable exception. In the museum they encourage visitors to send their feedback to their Twitter. Also, they reply, retweet and encourage visitors to engage in conversation. Not surprisingly, they have over 23,000 followers, which is the highest I’ve seen of all museums.

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