Nope the comments marked Jim throughout the blog are me (MuseumMarketing.co.uk) i try and check for comments daily and respond where appropriate.

Jim

Matty
(Center of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona)

Debora
Museum der Weltkulturen
(Museum of Worldcultures)
Frankfurt, Germany

You could try an internal intranet, an internal wiki or create a private network for your museum on Yammer.com.

Jim

First of all, I think the first step of any social media strategy should be to hire an experienced Community Manager to manage and control the process. Community Managers are a rare breed of marketing/communication specialists who know all the ins and outs of social media, are able to manage huge amounts of information and keep track of all activities. There’s a lot written on Community Management, for instance by Jeremiah Owyang (http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/). A truly skilled CM will also more or less follow the steps Jim described in everything he/she does.

My museum originally hired me as a Community Manager. Due to our rather special (and fortunate) position – we’re building a completely new museum – I have the opportunity to draw all our communication from scratch. Unfortunately, as we’re only just starting out, my job descriptions has increased dramatically and turned me into something between the CTO, campaign manager and communication assistant. (I’ve heard this tends to happen to all CMs.) That harms my grassroot community and social media work, so I guess I’ll be hiring one or two CMs soon. That’s how important (I think) they are for your social media strategy to succeed.

Another addition is that we use a different “ladder of participation”. The system is the same, but there are only 4 steps: Advocate, Co-creater, Participant and Lurker. As a rule of the thumb (based on the limited data available on communities) we say that every step down the ladder reduces your reach by 90%. So for every advocate, you’ll need 1,000 lurkers. We still have to prove this model for museums, though, and my guess is that it’s “worse” (more lurkers per advocate).

I think this model is more appropriate, because it reduces the complexity of the system. Think about what your aim is with your social media strategy and you know how many people you’ll need to reach. For example: we will start a campaign soon in which we want people to add a portrait to our database. For every successful conversion, based on our calculations we’ll need to reach 100 people in a positive and constructive way. (Adding a portrait is Co-creation.) To reach 100 people, we need to use different marketing strategies, especially as it means that for 2,000 portraits in 3 months, we’ll need to “personally” address 200,000 people.

One last addition, I think, is that you shouldn’t underestimate the importance of a reaction strategy. Monitoring alone is not enough. You’ll have to draw a line beforehand which makes a clear distinction between what you’ll do and accept, and what you won’t. For instance: which comments do you approve and which ones not? Where do you draw the line between open conversation and the serious quality that your museum should have in every message.

It’s a curious process and it’s a pity only some museums understand the added value of social media, communities and open conversation. I’ll be keeping an eye on the discussion (as a true CM) and give additional thoughts whenever my experiences teach me one. Thanks again!

One other aspect I’m really interested in is how these tools might be used to improve communications within the organisation and with ‘connected’ folk, such as our volunteers, and partner organisations. Any thoughts?