Take homes from two Culture24 workshops – Social Media, Web Metrics, Evaluation by Seb Chan

Just finished a full-on week with Seb Chan from Powerhouse, delivering this years ever popular and inspiring workshops – the first on Social Media and the second on Web Metrics and evaluation.

Under Seb’s guidance, Powerhouse Museum has been consistency leading internationally on how museums can use digital tools to further engage and reach audiences. This fact, combined with Seb’s own passion for the subject and his ability to dissect, confront and interpret his own digital, made this years workshops better that ever.

Take homes for me from both were:

Tuesday 3rd November – Social Media

1. Start with what are you trying to achieve and who is it for. Sounds obvious but its harder than you think.
2. You have to know who your audience are to reach them (the more segmentation the better).
3. Your content is your marketing. If your messages are not your actual stuff, your stories, your views, the stuff that makes you who you are, then its just noise.
4. Your social media channels need curating just like your exhibitions (all the time).
5. You need to monitor what is happening in our social media channels – what are people saying about you – and you need to respond to them.
6. Digital strategy needs to really be the responsibility of the whole museum team.
7. One museums misuse is another person’s valid interpretation.
8. Websites are not social spaces so don’t try and make your one. Take your stuff out into the existing social spaces where your target audience already are.

The day was held at CILIP in central London, great venue for courses and good catering with real hot food (very important). The mixture of people was really interesting, some museums, heritage, photography, arts – and individuals with responsibilities for marketing, curation, publishing, technical.

Living proof of the huge range of ways that organisations are dealing with digital strategy. There was a marked different from last years workshop and people seemed to be further developed in their thinking and understanding of the key issues. You can see this clearly in the fact that this year at least third of those attending were in the process of writing a digital strategy for their organisation, whereas last year, about the same number left the workshop having realised this was something that needed to do.

Wednesday 5th November – Web Metrics

This subject is a particular hobbyhorse of mine as I am so often amazed by how many digital projects have not even considered the basic questions of what are they trying to achieve and who is it for – without this how do you know what to evaluate to tell if it worked?

The big issue here I think is the fact that some projects are clearly commissioned because people think they have to ‘do’ something about digital – have a website, have a facebook page, put their collections online – whatever it might be.

Seb has done a great blog post on what he calls the “five rules of museum content” Worth a read and definitely worth interrogating your own work to see if you can answer the questions well or not.

Next meeting up Seb at the New Zealand National Digital Forum where we will do the Web Metrics workshop again as part of the 5th Culturemondo roundtable. Looking forward to seeing how the NZ museums/galleries/archives are coping with all this.

Collaboration can be transformative – Take homes from the CILIP executive briefing ‘Beyond Silos of the LAM’s

“Collaboration can be transformative”. This was the opening statement made by Gunter Waibel at the ‘Beyond Silos of the LAM’s’ event at CILIP on 15th September.

He used an analogy for collaboration being like a trapeze artist, swinging from one swing to another. In other words, something that requires an act of faith and a trust in yourself, your fellow flyers and the technology you are using.

Trust and risk were themes of the day. Who was willing to do both? It was clear that in most cases it was getting a mandate for collaboration from senior management that was necessary.

Case studies from V&A, Smithsonian and York Library and Archives all shared the presence of a clear vision, a belief and clarity about purpose and value that drives your ambitions. With this, securing the mandate for collaboration seems easier – as Stuart Dempster so nicely put it“ success breeds success”.

One thing that struck me was the question – What are the incentives to collaborate beyond personal success that so often (if we are honest) can be defined as trumping your partner? Guenter spoke accurately I felt, about the inherent tension in the fact that we are often measured “against each other – not really a natural state for collaboration”!

Maybe a way to deflect this dichotomy might be as Nick Poole suggested in his talk the need to collaborate “beyond our mates”. and consider wider collaboration with perhaps the creative industries, tourism, arts or commercial partners.

This mirrors my personal feelings that by far the biggest threat facing LAM’s is the risk of not collaborating beyond their mates – not to face outwards from the sector to the wider environment and the many places where cultural content could be of value (schools, broadcasters, publishers, bloggers and more).

Nick encapsulated this very well when he said “ we have a collective opportunity, we are all emerging from an ere of mass digitisation into something more nuanced and sophisticated.”

Left to right: Brian Kelly, Fiona Williams, Roy Clare, Nick Poole and Guenter Waibel

I was struck by the fact that within the Smithsonian, they face internally all the same issues that an individual museum, library or archive face in collaborating with others. With their 19 museums, 20 library branches, research facilities, archives and a zoo, they probably have as many objects as a small country! They are singlehandedly their own silo, but with a brand (a bit like the Tate), that needs no introduction.

My own presentation considered the issue of users, their needs and behaviour online. In particular what methodologies and tools are available to us now that could deliver more focussed user friendly services that have a collaborative model at their core.

You can view the presentation of slideshare here.

My essential premise took a specific profile of a 10 year old child sitting down to a computer in a library. It asked “why can’t the library’s online offer, engage the child to the same degree as the physical library?

It’s a very good question and one that is long overdue in asking. For me, the answers are all there for the taking – diverse content feeds, open data sharing, aggregation platforms and interface personalisation.

I would love to see my idea tried out in a library and then track the usage.

Any takers???

‘VoiceThread’ tool for group conversation

Voicethread is a useful, fun and simple tool for playing around with images, text and audio in ways to add and share meaning(s) with others.

They describe it as follows:

:A VoiceThread is an online media album that can hold essentially any type of media (images, documents and videos) and allows people to make comments in 5 different ways – using voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (with a webcam) – and share them with anyone they wish. A VoiceThread allows group conversations to be collected and shared in one place, from anywhere in the world.

At the moment it is free and you can see it would be very useful for any of the educational style, participatory community/local history projects that museums do so well. Also, for teachers, museum educationalists or kids just playing around.

Live and online museum information in a cool dashboard

Nick Poole (The Collections Trust/MDA) and I are working on plans for a more active and strategic partnership between our two organisations. At our last meeting he showed me a very cool thing from the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Launched last year it is a live Dashboard of regularly updated data about the museum and its activities – things like visitors through the door, fans on Facebook, energy consumption etc. It basically makes public all the usual statistical information that is normally lost in an institutions annual reports.

The visual layout of the data is really nice, simple and easy to see and there is something very compelling about the (almost) live updating. You can also explore any of the top line statistics further making it a fantastic advocacy tool for the museum.

You can read more in an interview with Rob Stein the Museum’s Chief Information Officer and Seb Chan.

Presentation to the NMDC (National Museums Directors Conference) March 08

Below is the text and slides from a presentation I was invited to make to the National Museums Directors Conference meeting about what I see as the current digital issues and opportunity that national museums need to know about.

There have been huge changes in recent years online such as the hype about Web 2.0, the blogging boom, delicious, Flickr, etc. Including some high profile projects from museums like the Launchball game from the Science museum whose popularity on the social bookmarking site DIGG took out their server.

Too much to talk about in ten minutes, so going to concentrate on three examples of interesting work that is happening at the moment that encompasses some of the key issues.

1. Powerhouse Museum, Sydney

Put online over 70,000 of objects from storage.
Built a system that invited and allowed users to tag objects with words that meant something to them.
The tags not only add meanings that sat alongside the curators tags but also created better links between data and search engines.

Within first three months every single object had been viewed.
Since launch in June 2006 over 25 million collection records viewed.
300% increase in overall traffic.
Proportion of website traffic engaging with collection up from 8% to 65% (collection is now integral part of why people visit the museum website)

They have developed a very nice way of treating the viewing of objects online (above).

Result is that they have in effect turned their museum inside out.
Opened up access and improved visibility to search engines.

Through their interaction with people, have brought knowledge back into the organisation about their collection.

At Powerhouse the success is driving organisational change- puts the collection back at the centre of the organisation (why they exist, why they are different to other ‘leisure attractions‘). Most popular three objects have never been on public display, up-turning internal perceptions about collections.

Culture24 is working with the lead developer at Powerhouse who is doing this work – Sebastian Chan – because we are working with him on our international project Culturemondo Seb writes an excellent blog called Fresh + New about their work that is well worth following.

Through my conversations with him, I know that it is not about big budget, but clever use of technology.

Their *particular* system is also giving them new ways of understanding their audiences.
Software their team has built to present the collection (recommendations engine, social tagging, smart ranking) is generating an enormous amount of business intelligence around their collection and how people use it.

The intelligence allows the Powerhouse to rethink its real world exhibitions, classification and documentation processes, and will lead to more effective communication to their audiences. It isn’t just that the collection is online … it is that it is usable, user-centric, self-learning, and dynamic.

Another project, just gone live that also uses tagging of collection but in this case they have put their collections into an existing online community.

1. Flickr ‘Commons’ project

The Library of Congress Pilot Project
Show the hidden treasures in the huge Library of Congress collection.
Show how with audience input, a tag or two can make the collection even richer.

Within the first *month*:
- Over 5 million page views for LoC Flickr account
- 60,000 tags, 10,000 unique (So, a tag “woman” added to 5 photos)
- About 400 people added one tag, all the way up to one person adding 5,000!
- Roughly 5,000 comments

This is where the gold is in terms of useful data. The LoC has already made about 12 updates to their catalogue based on corrections they’ve received via Flickr!

Also created so far about 10,000 new contacts to the Library’s account in Flickr, so new photos they publish will fall into the “photos from your friends” page, and into RSS feeds and such.

This project interconnects the historical and contemporary, creating relationships between the two, effectively making Flickr a huge record of living social history photography.

Third and final example if much closer to home.

3. Integrated Architecture project – Partnership with MDA and MLA.
- Vision for a unified ‘infrastructure’ for creating; managing and sharing information across the sector
- Way to bring together different systems to share data openly easily
- Delivering locally-based services from a national platform
- Uses what exists, cost-effective framework, greater impact and reach

This builds on work Culture24 have done championing data sharing across sectors. Things like our RSS feeds and our agreement with Visit Britain to provide them with all our event data for inclusion in their own site.

It is also informing our current work with LOCOG to provide them with UK wide event information about Cultural Olympiad for inclusion in all their online projects.

As well as our work that has just received support form DCSF and BECTA to get stuff in front of teachers, kids and families.

For me, the Integrated Architecture project is about collaboration and an understanding that the future of the online world resides in the ways that information comes together into services and structures that meet the needs of different users in different ways.

So could museums in UK do what Powerhouse has done?
Yes of course, but why not go further?
How about browsing across collections and institutions.
Searching across different organisations. Bringing together meanings?
I see this as the big opportunity and the recent changes at MLA I think offer a chance to be bold.

To work across sectors with ACE, Tourism, Creative Industries and address the fact that there is still a lack of any digital strategy in the UK cultural sector.

I think a good starting point is with the National Museums Online Project, which I am sure you all know about – as you have helped to support the consultancy work that is just beginning. As you know it initially brings together a few of the nationals – Science Museum, National Maritime Museum and V&A, with Culture24. Bridget Mackenzie from FLOW has been appointed to explore the possibilities for online collaboration between different nationals and their digital collections.

There are very exciting opportunities here to bring on board an even wider set of partners, people like, MLA, PCF, Art Fund, Arts Council and DCSF, and set a national agenda that is focussed on needs of users.

Getting culture into social networking sites

Getting museum and galleries to share content openly is problematic for a lot people in the sector. It challenges the boundaries of their institution, their curatorial control and their sense of the authority of their data. It forces then to be open to the idea that knowledge comes from different places and to accept that people may want to use their cultural content online in many different ways that have value to them specifically.

There are some institutions that already understood this challenge and are are beginning to be proactive and actively push their content into social networking sites. An article about how the Brooklyn Museum in the US illustrates this point.

The Museum are letting stuff flow out into social networking sites like Twitter, Flickr and it is having an impact on the level of active user engagement through the posting of videos, pictures, comments etc. What is particularly good is that the museum has put back onto their own site the many pictures their visitors have taken of their institution and posted onto Flickr.

They are embracing the community and being very open about its interpretations of their stuff, they are also improving their own search engine optimisation (SEO) which is always a big challenge for any website.

Crystal ball gazing – Free Our Data

As part of the final session on Tuesday I was one of three speakers (the other two being David Anderson and Dan Snow) that each presented a short vision on the future of museums in 2020.

The audience then discussed the three options and voted. Here is the text of my presentation …

Imagine a world without access to culture. Who would want to live there?

Imagine an online world without access to cultural stuff? This is the future that we need to avoid.
This must not happen.

None of us want to see an online world that is totally dominated by online shopping, porn and gossip.
But that is what could happen if we are not careful. What can we do to make sure that this doesn’t happen? Well, the good news is, it is not about vast quantities of money. It’s about how we behave.
And its about something that we all learned how to do a long time ago at school – sharing

In the future, we are going to need to get better at sharing our stuff with other people. When I say stuff I mean your digital collections and objects – the images, the text, the resources, your podcasts, your videos, your archives, everything that can take a digital form.

It is your responsibility to make sure this stuff is present in that virtual world of the future where people can find it, engage with it, learn from it and use it in ways that have meaning to them.
The online world is changing all the time, there is no way that all museums are going to be able to keep up with that – and I don’t think you should all have to. Other people are busy doing that, who are better qualified and resourced. But what you do need to do, is make sure that your stuff is available digitally to plug in and mingle.

Mingle with the communities and people that are online. No matter where they are, or who they are, or what they are doing. But crucially, it also need to be available to the machines, the robots and spiders, the aggregators and search engines. If you like, these are the librarians, the shop keepers, the delivery vans, the gate keepers, lollipop ladies – you can think of them in lots of different ways – they are the guides to the enormous quantities of digital stuff online that is growing all the time.

And in the future, it will be even more important that your content knows how to talk to these machines.

Now, I want to share a couple of things with you.

Fact one – I love Museums.
I really do, I love the actual physical real places and I want you to be clear, that what I am talking about is NOT some sort of real vs virtual debate.

I’m not saying that we are going to mind meld with out computers and live in a 3D virtual reality version of our universe. I am talking about the opportunities that the online world offer that coexist alongside those of the physical.

Fact two – People are living in search engines.
Over 80% of users start their online activity in a search engine. The most popular sites, around the world right now, are either search related or communities. And I don’t think that is going to change in the future. But, what is going to change is how people search and how they use what they find in their online communities or in their own life.

Who could have imaged five years ago that there would be 10 million people publishing their own blogs? Or 40 million shared photographs on Flickr. Who could have imaged how things like You Tube have changed our viewing habits or the way that the ipod and itunes has changed the way the music industry makes its money?

And search is getting clever. By 2020 it will be really clever.
People talk about web 2.0, web 3.0 or the semantic web and no one really know exactly how it will all work. But they do know that it is vital how digital information is packaged and offered to machines.

It will need standards.
It will need to be structured
And it will need to be tagged with its meaning or meanings depending on who you are.

And for museums, it needs to be known to have the authority that it deserves – that it can be trusted.
In a way what you are going to have to do is get your data ready and then set it free. By doing that, you will be making sure that it is available to the machine of the future to meet and greet. To mash up, to interoperate with, reuse in other places and contexts.

Because if those clever search engines can find it and they know what it is, and where it is from, then they will be able to deliver it via whatever new services we will all be using in the future. The services that will form the new experience economy Will Hutton talked about. The services that will customise and personalise stuff for us.

And if the machines can find it then the users will be able to find it as well.

In a way, search engines are the digital equivalent of the original collectors of the past. People like Henry Welcome, John Soanes or Pitt Rivers. But the machines and robots or the future will be collecting digital meaning not physical objects.

So, we need to make sure that our cultural stuff is set free online and that it can be separated from the institutions own online presence.

This will require a culture change. A new way of thinking about a piece of digital data.

I’m not saying museums can’t and shouldn’t publish their own curated online experiences, or develop their own services. Of course they should. What I am talking about is making sure stuff gets seen, is picked up and used in the online world of the future.

The new services that will be online in 2020 we cannot imagine. In fact, I bet, our understanding of what online means will not even be the same. But whatever it is, we need to make sure that culture is part of it, and that will mean setting our data free.

MA2007 ‘The Real Thing?

This is a great question for the museum sector and aside from the long list of stuff listed in wikipedia (songs, plays, bands, slogans) it is more than just the debate about the real object vs the digital one.

Of course, both of these are real to the person looking at them – whether on a computer or in the gallery, but I would suggest that the real ‘real thing’ for a cultural object (painting, relic, document, book or installation) is in fact the layers of different meanings, interpretations or significance that different users bring.

At the moment it seems that this layer is mostly a sandwich of curators. Sometimes it has an added layer of user focus, or specialist input but imagine how much deeper the layers would be if anyone could contribute?

I don’t just mean UGC, I mean the layers of meaning that come from different ways of working and looking at the world, that different people have. For example, if you are a small artist group, a national museum, a local authority library or an online archive, the way that you build meaning around your object varies greatly.

The impact of the new world of cross-sectoral partnerships that is being advocated (by some) at this year’s MA conference, is going to be a whole new thing for museums to deal with and are each the ‘real thing’ for someone.

A good topic for a future MA conference session I think?

Future Gazing 3: The Machine is Us/ing Us

The third of the future gazing videos that I have come across on the web that are quite media savvy and polished in their crystal ball gazing.

What I really like about this is the way is looks at how the online world changes both content and context.

See also:

Epic 2015 and Prometeus – the media revolution

Future Gazing 2: Prometeus – the media revolution

The second of the future gazing videos that I have come across. They are quite media savvy and polished in their crystal ball gazing.

Prometeus – The Media Revolution

See also:
Epic 2015 and The Machine is Us/ing us