Yesterday I wrote the first draft of the chapter on YouTube for my Museum Social Media Handbook. I thought that a nice piece to include at the end of this would be five ways for Museums to use YouTube:
1. Meet the artist, curator, historian etc
The TATE YouTube channel contains beautifully produced films including ‘Meet the Artist: Mat Collishaw’ shown below. Posting films of artists talking about their work to coincide with exhibition openings is both a great marketing tool and a brilliant way to extend the gallery experience on to the web in a way that adds to it’s audiences enjoyment of art.
Of course an artist isn’t the only person a Museum can interview, for example the National Media Museum in the UK has an interview with Director John Carpenter to coincide with the showing of his film The Thing.
2. Ask people what they think!
The Smithsonian Institute wanted the public to give them their opinion on what a museum in the digital age should look like. They posted a video on YouTube asking people what they thought and received both text and video responses, including the one below:
Other good examples of asking for public opinion are iConfess which asked visitors to the Matress Factory in the United States what they think of the Museum and The Black list Project at the Brooklyn Museum.
3. Have a crowd-sourcing competition
During the Brooklyn Museum’s Target First Saturday on October 6, 2007 visitors were invited to film a one minute video and upload it to YouTube. The entries in this competition were very impressive, my favortie is “Art Thief” shown below:
4. Extend the Museum
As a physical space a Museum has certain limitations, for example you don’t get many live animals within a typical Museum and few include a rain forest! The Manchester Museum YouTube channel extends what the venue can do with natural history (among may other subjects) with a series of films about Amphibians shot in Costa Rica.
The Manchester Museum have 340 films on their channel, making them one of the most active institutions on this social media platform. the variety and quality of what they have produced, makes them stand out as an organisation we can all learn something from on YouTube.
5. Be viral
One of the great tools on YouTube is the ability to embed the films within blogs and websites. This lets people who like what you are doing, spread the word about your organisation (or television programme as shown below).
Many of the Museums which I’ve looked at on YouTube don’t allow their content to be shared in this way, and in doing so, they are losing out on this potential viral marketing.
What do you think? Are there ways that your organisation is using YouTube that you have found effective? Please share your thoughts in the comments on this post.
Thanks for the great info, Jim. Love your blog. Another use of You Tube I like is extending collections beyond current exhibit space. Check out this video of the Chicago Museum of Science (it’s actually a segment done by the Tribune but museums can do this themselves). Curator takes viewers into store room to see items not currently on display. Cool! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijQKlwbsi2Q
Great essay! I’m adding a link from the Planeta wiki
http://planeta.wikispaces.com/museums
One of the topics that I’m exploring is how to present museum directors in Mexico (and Oaxaca in particular) with Web 2.0 tools, so this essay is a big help. The key questions that I have is how to creative incentives for buy-in from museum staff themselves. A few years ago I created a rough guide to Flickr en español – http://oaxaca.wikispaces.com/museos123 – but there was no follow-up. Until museum staff want to use the Web, they tend to ignore it completely.
The video from Chicago’s museum is certainly a step in the right direction.
One idea I’ve had (but not yet done anything about!) is using YouTube to help people navigate round the local road system to get to a specific museum, or to its nearest parking facilities. One YouTube user near me loves driving round our city with a video camera on his dashboard. So I reckon that with a little encouragement I might be able to get hm to do some really useful video for us – and maybe for free.
[...] you’ll need to fill it with great content. Here is an article I recently wrote about 5 ways for your Museum to use YouTube. This should give you a starting point for your YouTube [...]