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.

Two new Culture24 training events by Seb Chan

Following the sold-out success of last years event, Culture24 are pleased to welcome Seb Chan back to the UK for two dynamic sessions:

- “Strategic social media for the cultural sector”

- “Web analytics and measuring online success in a rapidly changing online landscape”

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Strategic social media for the cultural sector
Tuesday, November 03, 2009 from 9:30 AM – 6:00 PM
At: CILIP, 7 Ridgmount Street, London
Cost: £150 (inc lunch)

How does your museum engage with its audiences? Do you use social media to reach and engage with new audiences?
Understanding social media marketing is essential for museums in the 21st century. This workshop will show you how you can listen to and engage with audiences online, and consider some of the challenges involved in running effective campaigns.

What will you get from the day?
• Practical ideas about ways to make your digital collections more accessible
• An understanding of the changing nature of online publishing
• Evidence to argue for investment in online services within your organisation
• Ideas and strategies for building sustainable online audiences

For full details and how to book click here:
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Web analytics and measuring online success in a rapidly changing online landscape
Wednesday, November 04, 2009 from 1:30 PM – 6:00 PM
At: Royal Observatory, Greenwich
Cost: £75

Explore the emerging landscape of metrics and measurement in the world of the social Web. The workshop will begin with an examination of the traditional measurement tools available on the Web, explaining their pros and cons, before looking specifically at the new suite of tools needed to discover ‘actionable insights’ for your social media projects.

What will you get from the day?
· Insights into current issues around online measurement
· Practical understanding of how to use and not to use existing measurement tools
· Ideas and strategies for developing more complex and effective results

For full details and how to book click here:

About the presenter:
Sebastian Chan leads the Digital, Social and Emerging Technologies department at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. His teams include the museum’s web unit, audio visual and photography, rights & permission and the photo library, the research library and Thinkspace, the Powerhouse’s digital media teaching laboratories. He is a researcher in several Australian Research Council Linkage projects researching social media, museums, and technology; and speaks internationally about the use of cutting edge technology in the cultural sector. He is on the international programme committees of Museums and the Web (USA), Digital Strategies for Heritage (Eu), the Horizon.Au New Media Consortium, and is an International Steering Committee member of Culturemondo, an international group of representatives of cultural portal strategists. Seb is also a member of the Australian Government’s Government 2.0 Taskforce examining ways of improving citizen engagement with government and opening access to public sector information

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???

How *not* to use Twitter!

There is a really nice piece in SocialMediaToday.com here about how Habitat have used #tags in twitter to promote it new furniture range. They come into much criticism for what is seen by many as just plain spamming and by others as a more serious king of twitter abuse.

Comments added add further to the debate and together off a pretty good critique of Twitter, the opportunities and pitfalls.

Take-homes from btween09 digital media forum, Liverpool

Just spent a great two days in Liverpool with a very interesting mix of creative types (entrepreneurs, developers, thinkers, social media start-ups, agencies and broadcasters) as part of the btween09 digital media forum. Well done to Katz Kiely and her team at just-b.

I was one of only a handful of people from the public cultural sector and probably one of the only people who doesn’t have the successful monetising of their offer at the heart of what drives their service. Not that I am saying that the task of justifying the spending of public money is not something that should be quantified and considered as ROI but that the mindset of being driven by a remit to promote learning and engagement for its own sake puts you in a different box to commercial companies.

For me there are a number of key take-homes and formation of early ideas.

1. I was struck by how clever commercial agencies are getting in their manipulation of social media. Ogilvy talked about Brands not just using social media, but being social. But the methods within this new marketing 2.0 seems sometimes counter intuitive in some ways to traditional marketing methods. For example, you don’t talk about yourself within networks, you talk about other people or you support networking and ideas shaping events such as this one in order to make sure you are on the right wave. I guess no one would be surprised to hear that I am deeply cynical about agencies in general and about this kind of clever intrusion into the heart of social networking but, as the revenue streams generated support the sector that I hold dear, I have to bite my tongue. Also, hats off to the people at Ogilvy who are seriously smart (love the brainZ internal problem solving solution, read a post from the people that built it here). I would love to see this kind of intelligence applied to arts, heritage and education!

2. Charles Leadbeater’s analysis of the switch between traditional media and what he calls ‘mutual media’ is excellent. It’s a very clear visual image of the shift between mutual media as the moon orbiting around the huge sun of traditional media (the model of the past), and the future trajectory that he predicts will see the positions switch. He talked around many of the ideas present in his books, such as the breakdown of people activities into three categories – Enjoy, Talk, Do. You can get his essay with a lot of other good stuff in the recently published “After the Crunch” book by CCSkills and British Council here).

3. The three speakers from my session (Will Gompertz, Peter Buckingham and me) were presenting and discussing the issues faced by different aspects of cultural sector as funded by three different government funded agencies – Film Council, MLA and Arts Council – three different organisations but all clearly arriving at the same place at the same point in time with regard to the potential of digital services to transform user engagement. All looking for the holy grail of what this should mean in terms of policy development. But the really cool bit was that Leadbeaters introduction couldn’t have provided a better platform or introduction to the issues we were discussing. It was not planned, it was just all true. True and very reassuring that our observations and thoughts about what is possible and the value of real collaboration put us on the right track, Very comforting when weighing up the price of all the blood, sweat and tears or trying to get people to see the links between all these things.

4. It was really inspiring to see FACT thriving as a venue and as an organisation. Looking really good with projects like FACT TV and Abandon Normal Devices. They were contemporaries to the organisation I used to run before Culture24 called Lighthouse, who roots came out of the independent film and video workshop initiatives in the 80’s and who have both blossomed through the careful and clear advocacy of the role of creative activities and industries in economic development and reform at a local level. The original key player in FACT, Eddie Burg, is now at the Southbank and soon to join the Culture24 board. Very nice and looking forward to working with him.

5. I have learned that five and a half hours on a bus that was sold to you as a techbus, but actually lacked much actual ‘tech’, not really enough beer and a huge traffic jam, can actually be really fun if you are travelling with a group of truly free minds (thanks to Alfie Dennen and Adam Gee for the stories). Charlie Leadbeater called the people who are pushing to find the meaning of the new digital spaces (socially and culturally) “pirates and renegades”. I say ‘yes’ to that.

Check out the little blue buy who blows bubbles when you tweet!

Edinburgh City Libraries – ‘Tales of one city’. How to sort your web2.0 stuff and run a simple joined up social media campaign

Nice story from Phil Bradley’s weblog describing how Edinburgh City Libraries have got thier web2.0 stuff well together under one simple branding ‘Tales of one City’.

Consists of:
Blog , Flickr pictures, Twitter feed, delicious tags, wiki, YouTube channel .

Matt Locke & Andy Budd at the MA conference 2008: From Measurement to judgement in the digital world

I chaired a session at the Museums association conference in Liverpool yesterday called ‘From measurement to judgement in the digital world.

My two speakers were Matt Locke and Andy Budd. Matt is a commissioning editor at Channel 4 and their Head of Learning working principally on materials aimed at teenagers and younger audiences. He was previously Head of Innovation at the BBC and before that worked in the cultural sector as a curator. Andy is User Experience Director at Clearleft. His expertise lies in understanding user experience both in terms of building sites but also as consultants.

I asked both of them to talk about what digtial innovation is and to show us examples of things they thought were innovative.

The context for the session was the recent DCMS report by Brain McMasters. The report champions a move away from measurement to judgement. The idea is that arts funders and policy has become overly concerned with quantitative, bean counting type measures. McMasters suggests that it is time to refocus on strategies that embrace innovation, risk-taking and peer review.

However the McMasters report does not explicitly address the digital world and it is to address this gap in his report that my session sought to explore and ask questions.

Matt started by talking about his belief that if you are working creating online stuff now then the real issue is about attention. Where is your audience’s attention? How do you grab that attention and how do you keep it?

“It has never been so easy to be ignored” he said. A mindset away from the ‘build it and they will come’ mentality that often happens in the cultural sector.

His work at Channel 4 is focussed largely on a teenage audience, which means their attention is largely ‘within’ social networks. As a result a lot of Matt’s work is about delivery through these channels. What was interesting about how he described this work was not just what we can all learn about how museums might use social media. He also unpacked the processes he used through the build of a project and explored what lessons can be taken from that which are generic and can be applied to any audience.

His point was the need, before you begin, to define the user experience you are trying to engender and crucially, who you want to have this experience. When you have done this, you can then work backwards to find out how to lead people to this experience (marketing) and how to find out if they liked it (feedback).

A question from the audience unwittingly helped to clarity this approach by wondering if all of Matt’s examples, as they were for teenagers, were not relevant to an appreciation of fine art. The questioner wondered if all this online work was all just too fast and too teenager led and nothing to do with the people that he wanted to reach. He wanted to get people to study a painting, to reflect, dive into an intimacy and depth of consideration about a painting.

What struck me was that this was such a clear vision for an experience for a user and it would be a great place from which to define and build an online experience. How might you do this online? If you could do this, well maybe that would be an example of innovation or excellence? I have never seen an online project that succeeded in doing this (yet) but it is would be a great challenge to try.

Andy suggested that true innovation is a terrible strategy and rarely works outside a handful of companies. He looked the development of the iPod and the Diamond Rio. The Diamond Rio was the first consumer mp3 player in the western world and was hugely innovative. The iPod didn’t come out until 3 years later and it was already a saturated market. It had less storage capacity, less battery life and less features than the majority of its competition. So in reality there is nothing innovative about the iPod. What makes it great is the design, the simplicity and the over all user experience “Best to market almost always trumps first to market.”

Andy’s view is that innovation is a costly exercise and you will fail a lot more times than you’ll succeed, especially if you don’t have a culture of innovation, which few people actually do. So his advice to the museum sector is rather than being innovative, it’s much better (and more cost effective) to learn from others mistakes and aim to create the best experience possible.

Matt’s advice was to be decide to do one of two things: either try and tell a story – or – build a bit of the web. His example of telling a story was Yeardot – teenage narratives and shared experience. His example of trying to create a piece of the web was School of Everything – an architecture that is about connections and a service.

His advise to those without a lot of money was to understand your objects, try and tell a story using your date and make it easy to join and participate.

The epiphany moment for me came when I realised that when thinking about the cultural sector and digital stuff I mix up innovation and good practice and that they are really not the same. Innovation is not just doing something well. I think my confusion comes from the fact that so much of what I see being done digitally is ‘not good’ that when I find something that works well, it feels like innovation.

Time to redefine.

dconstruct ‘Designing The Social Web’ 5th September, Brighton

Designing The Social Web, that was the title of this year’s dconstruct conference in Brighton on 5th September organised by Clearleft. The event was packed and due to the fact the date coincided with the Culturemondo steering committee meeting, I was able to go en-mass with Seb Chan, Ilya Eric Lee and Aleksandra Uzelac who were all over visiting the UK.

I think we were pretty much the only people there from any cultural sector organisation (who are non profit) and obviously bring with us quite different expectations. I think when you sit and listen to the broader changing web issues without the cultural context they often lack a touchpoint for me as ultimately they pursue that successful business model (that is commercial) and prioritises that over the meaning of the stuff/content. Great if you want to make money (something I have never been good at!)

The opening session delved into social history and looked at the Cholera epidemic in London and the tools that were used to made a breakthrough into discovering that the cause was in the water not in the air. The solution was found through a combination of cartography (new ways of mapping), local knowledge (social networks) and free official data (open source). The old feeds into the new its shape and patterns. Social phenomenon repeat and duplicate.

The talk was by Steven Johnson and was based on his book The Ghost Map. Loved the idea of a social network of dead people.

The two presentations by the developers and brains behind Doppler (Matt Biddulph and Matt Jones – a geeks version of the Two Ronnies) and Daniel Burka from DIGG/Pownce were both worth hearing. I always favour stories that use practical experience to communicate ideas and they were open about their successes and failures in a way that was engaging. Both talked about the need to offer more to users. The two Matt’s referred to the need to work in what they called ‘the coral reef’ of the web rather that a walled garden. Daniel looked at how to encourage sign up with real benefits that go beyond just altruism.

The day ended with a really ambitious and poetic presentation by Jeremy Keith whose dry witty style I like very much. He took us on a whirlwind tour of the thinking behind how everything in the universe is connected to everything else and the laws of nature/physics (whatever you prefer to call them) apply to everything, even the web. So long tail is no accident it is a reflection of a scale free network of the power head and tail. Cool stuff, lots of it from other sources (Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point to name one) but well executed and bold. Bold in its lack of geekiness and its nod to the force of nature above commerce. I liked it.

dconstruct is organised by Clearleft where Jeremy Keith is based. Andy Budd who is there Director of user experience is taking part in my session at the MA conference on October 6th 2008 in Liverpool with Matt Locke.

Culture24 Seb Chan Workshop – September 8th, London

I often refer to the fantastic work that Seb Chan has been leading at the Powerhouse Museum in Australia and am pleased to say that Seb is coming to the UK this September to work with Culture24 on our international project Culturemondo.

While he is here, I have arranged for him to run a one day workshop looking at how to make your collection work for you online (or in other words “strategic social media for the cultural sector”).

The workshop is at the DANA centre in London on Monday 8th September and is being coordinated in association with Collections Trust and NMSI. You can find out more and book a place here.

This is a unique opportunity to find out about Powerhouse’s pioneering work first hand, the issues it has raised and how they have dealt with those issues (with great results). After the workshop there will be a chance to network over a few beers

Public Sector Broadcasting? Arts Council consult for Ofcom

When you hear the words public sector broadcasting you tend to think of the BBC and when you read the current consultation document prepared by Ofcom to generate debate and collect advice about where to go next with their regulations, you would be hard pressed the think of a lot else.

The document still expresses the debate within the terms of reference of the traditional broadcaster. It is all about inspiring and stimulating, there is little talk about actual participation, interactivity or collaboration – the kind of stuff that defines the way people actually use online technologies today.

I was not the only one at the meeting (which was filled mostly with other publicly funded media agencies, publishers and content holders) who felt that the old school broadcast language and tone of the document was symptomatic of the fact that they are basically missing the point of the online revolution and changing user behaviour.

If I were at art school now I would be writing my dissertation on the death of TV. Even the BBC has broken their own mould with the launch of the iplayer. I wonder who still only watches programmes within the TV schedule that just simply can’t get their head around their remote control (my mum basically)? Broadband is not the issue it was ten years ago and the wide scale take up has changed the UK media consultation habits forever.

The key question now is what are the new models for public sector publishers (I think publishing is a more appropriate work then broadcasting) that can encompass this change? They may broadcast but they will also need to aggregate, broker, listen, add value, provide context, host, distribute and mediate.

The possible answer to this question seems to have preoccupied me as Culture24 tries to find a way to describe itself within these new terms of reference. Surely public sector broadcasting is about access to publicly funded stuff? So me, this means not just the interpretative arts documentaries of BBC4, or the contemporary arts shows on Channel4, but the Tate on YouTube, the V&A podcasts, digital artists sites, commuinity gaming, the British library online catalogue etc..

Surely museums, galleries, archives, artist workshops, libraries, science centres, heritage sites should all be part of what public sector broadcasting/publishing should encompass?

Lets hope that the Arts Council are able to feedback these thoughts to Ofcom and that they are willing to hear them.

These notes relate to the Public Service Broadcasting Review Seminar, run by the Arts Council Visual Art Department and held at the Bluecoat Arts Centre in Liverpool on the 2 June 2008. John Wyver chaired the meeting.