Museum Marketing

This is a short summary of the talk I am giving tomorrow at Communicating the Museum in Malaga:

Social media websites are some of the most popular places on the web and for museums they make it possible to connect and build relationships with your audiences, converting those with a passing interest into passionate advocates for your museum.

For those responsible for museum brands, the opportunities that social media provide come with new challenges: how can you control your brand is a space that offers little or no control.

The bad news is that whether you like it or not, nobody needs to ask your permission to talk about your museum on a blog or tell a friend about an exhibition on Facebook – positively or negatively – so your brand is already in this social media space.

You can’t control the conversation but you can participate in it. Take a minute to think about what your brand really is. Is it your logo? Is it your advertising campaign? Your collection? Your building? No, it is none of these things: your brand is the perception that people have of your organisation. You have never had total control over it, you have only ever been able to use all these touchpoints to help to shape this perception, and in the social media space that is no different.

Your first step in taking your museum and your brand into Social Media is learn about these websites and, most importantly, how your audiences are using them. Each website has a different set unwritten rules and spending time looking and listening helps you get into them. You start to realise that now any- and everybody gets to create content, distribute content and control their own user experiences and you can then consider how a museum can fit in to this.

Jumping into websites like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr without understanding how these spaces work can be damaging to a museum’s brand, because it projects the image of an institution who can’t be bothered to learn how a space which is important to its audiences works.

Social media is here to stay, it isn’t a fad, and while Facebook or Twitter may fade, people expecting to be part of the conversation rather then just talked at with not go away, and we need to adapt our brands to exist in this world.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 at 5:15 pm and is filed under Branding, Conference, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.