The momentum for follow a museum day on February 1st continues to build, and I have checked the hashtag (#followamuseum) as the week has progressed.
Today I noticed a tweet which read:
This was followed a few hours later by:
I thought it was worth highlighting these messages, as Dea has pointed out two area’s of best practice on Twitter which many museums do ignore.
Firstly, Twitter is a person to person network and it is important to say who is tweeting on behalf of your museum. For example the Brooklyn Museum Twitter homepage profile reads:
We’re the Brooklyn Museum and happen to be one of the oldest and largest museums in the country. Who tweets on this page? Shelley B. is on deck.
The other criticism which Dea made was that many museums don’t follow the people who take the time to follow them. Again it is best practice to do this and it can look like a museum is not interested in it’s audiences if you fail to do this.
Do you agree that museums should show the real person behind their tweets? Do you think that museums should follow those who follow them?
I’m part of Tuscany’s social media team – we speak for a region, but our twitters (like mine, @tuscanyarts) have a name and a personality behind them. We discussed this issue at work and made this choice because we ARE humans operating twitter (and blogs, and facebook pages), and we WANT interaction with people. That’s what makes it SOCIAL media, and not just media.
I tweet for Leicestershire Museums in the UK.
I’ve been wondering about following people who follow us. I’ve been advised that ‘most people wouldn’t want organisations following them back, it’s like stalking’ by certain people. I’d love to follow everyone but need some more advice first, do people really dislike being followed back by institutions?
You have to ask – would there actually be a point? As a big Museum fan I really want to see Museum’s engaging with their followers on Twitter but does having a “and so and so is typing today” make any difference? After all the chances of me actually meeting them is remote so why should I give a stuff if they’re called Bob, Zoe….? For me engaging with the organisation on about the content of the tweets than the name of the person writing it.
As for the other part of the question. Well I guess it comes down to how that organisation uses Twitter. If it’s to rack up as many followers as possible then that’s fine, but realistically how useful is it? I struggle to keep up with the 150 or so people I follow have so god knows how a Museum could genuinely keep up with the thousands of feeds they must have. I suspect it makes most sense for a Museum to follow a) those followers who actively engage b) other organisations that are linked to their work (thinking archaeological feeds for the BM, or environmental feeds for the NHM) as it could be a good way to spread relevant information about their work….. or just like Bill Gates and follow virtually nobody.
Have you asked the Museums?
I completely agree with Bea, Alexandra and you, Jim. Ever since our museum started with Twitter, we’ve been showing our faces (like Shelley does) and tried to engage our audience.
I think it’s good practice to ask the new followers once in a while why they’ve decided to follow us. What is it they want to hear? Doing this, we’ve build some close ties with our followers. Furthermore I’m always on the lookout for themes and discussions that will trigger conversation rather than sending information.
However, quite some of our followers have indicated that they want us to also tweet about news related to our museum. We give this information, we send this, according to their wishes. Most of our retweets come from our traditional broadcasting tweets, most of our replies from questions we ask.
agree. we did this for @museumtoulouse . maybe soon museums will have multiple staff accounts around the “official” more neutral one, so that the professionnal “community” will engage at a personnal level with the online visitors community…i think that would “solve” those questions.
Nice to see this interesting debate taking shape!
These are great questions. On the one hand, there’s an argument against turning social media endeavors into a cult of personality–TOO associated with one person, so that if that one person leaves than the whole thing falls apart. On the other, giving a sense of the people that make up a “faceless” institution is a good thing. My preferred solution (not yet implemented, but what I’d like to see) would be for many people in the institution to be involved in social media. Make it a part of the culture of the place
The other thing that I’m still struggling with as far as Twitter goes is that unless our followers follow each other, it’s not really a “networked” conversation. It’s really a hub-and-spoke conversation, with us tweeting, individual followers responding, and few of them talking to each other. What’s the best way to tackle that challenge?
Here is my story, why the real person behind the tweets make a difference to me:
I am a german archaeologist and very much interested in working in an archaeological museum. But to me they appear to be “years” (?) behind the international best practice use of social media. Only a couple of them use twitter so far. One of my friends is working in one of them. I told her “wow, you are using twitter now! Who is tweeting – an intern? – a volunteer?” And she answered “no, our director”. This museum immediately increased my respect and climbed up my inner ranking list, so to say. But even if it was the intern: it would show respect towards the person in charge of tweeting, if he or she would be allowed to post his/her name. It would be a sign of appreciating this job. That’s my actual feeling. What do you think?
edmj, we’ve had better luck with creating networked conversations on Facebook than Twitter. Our fans have started to interact with each other, sometimes with little direction from the Museum. You can “see” the conversations more easily on Facebook, which may encourage people to respond to one another.
we have made a practice of following almost everyone on Twitter who follows us. That being said, we are still guilty of mostly talking “at” them rather than “with” them.
My institution has gotten around this problem by creating a persona (museum ghost) that tweets for the museum. This way our followers get to interact with a ‘person’ who has a distinct voice. It has worked pretty well so far and gives us a chance to cover a lot of different stuff with our tweets (behind the scenes, event/exhibit info, etc). Plus, it is fun and (I think) helps the museum get away from the perception of being boring, isolated, etc.
It is very important museums follow people back. If you don’t follow people back it is like saying, “I want you to listen to me but I have no interest in listening to you”. Many people (myself included for my personal Twitter account) will unfollow others if they do not follow them back. We have gathered a large number of our followers by finding people (usually anyone on Twitter from our local area) and following them – I think of it as introducing ourselves to people and letting them decide if they are interested enough in our institution to follow us back. We don’t follow everyone back (there are an awful lot of spammers out there) but make a point to follow anyone in our area as well as other museum/cultural institutions. It is impossible to keep up with all the tweets from our followers but we do the best we can and, of course, always try to reply to those who tweet directly with us.
Hi there. I tweet for @QueensMuseum, and yes, we also mention who tweets for the museum (it says my name on our twitter background). We try to always respond and interact with our followers. When we first joined twitter, we followed everyone who followed us, which is not our rule of thumb anymore. However, if you are someone who actively retweets us or tweets at us (engages in conversation), we follow you. We have some really wonderful followers who are great supporters not just of us, but of all museums and the arts.
We in Museum Boerhaave use twitter to reach out en get in touch with our audience. We really want to talk to them and everybody who follows us will be followed back. Once and a while we’ll check for twitbots and unfollow those accounts. We tweet with two or three colleagues and we tweet like persons. This might cost a follower or two sometimes because some people do not expect/like this low key or non-authorian approach. But we think this is the best approach to break down the barriers between people and institutions.
We believe that we’re still not have reached the participation levels we would want from our audiences. Therefore we try to persuade them with twittercandy almost every day. On tuesday we invite people to send us science related pop tunes and broadcast then via Blip.fm
On wednesday we tweet about an interesting historical fact with a connection to this weeks news, our (sorry for the Dutch) #woensdagweetje. And on friday’s we’re still experimenting with a twittertour though our and other museum’s collections. Inviting our audiences to ask questions or even better to ask to take a detailed picture of an object…
We’re no experts, but most of all we have a lot of fun an that’s noticed by our followers. More and more they become involved with the museum and start to interact, even in real life some times.
Kate, that’s very much been our experience with Facebook as well–it lends itself quite nicely to discussions. Great point!
Great food for thought re: following our followers. We haven’t been as conscientious with that as we ought to be.
Great point from jathrail :
If you don’t follow people back it is like saying, “I want you to listen to me but I have no interest in listening to you”.
Hi, Jim – Three staff people tweet at our museum – the Weyerhaeuser Museum in Little Falls, MN. We initial our tweets and have a key as to who’s who in our bio.
Slightly off-topic, but I posted about Follow a Museum Day on Facebook and another museum professional responded that a day other than a Monday would have worked better. Many Minnesota museums are closed on Mondays. This may be the case for American museums in general. Not sure how it works in the U.K. or rest of the world.
If you host Follow a Museum Day next year, are you planning to keep it on February 1st? If so, this should rotate the day off of a Monday.
Thanks for a great viral idea!
Completely agree with jathrail – Institutional tweeters should have a person associated with them – love the museum personality idea, though with a bit more info dissemination than NHM’s Blue Whale.
As to following back – a nature photographer was recently celebrating his 1000 follower but didn’t take kindly to me pointing out he only followed 4 people. IMHO museums, personalities etc should at the very least follow back a good chunk of their followers to give the impression communication is not entirely one way and also (a tip for Steve Davis and no doubt a few others new to the medium) reply to replies occasionally!
I totally agree with Dea’s first tweet and while I like the spirit of her second, I’m not sure that twitter is actually the best format to sustain a two way conversation.
I’m not sure it’s physically possible to be one identified person tweeting AND keep track of everyone who follows you. Or if you can, you probably aren’t doing anything else in the museum.
My favourite tweeters are the ones that say interesting things about their museums rather than just duplicating marketing emails. I’d much rather they were busy doing stuff they can tweet about than following my every move.
Speaking of things, I blogged a bit on my current opinion of the question of whether museums ought to follow their followers (based in part on discussion here and on Twitter): http://bit.ly/alU3A3
Hi,
primero que nada pedir disculpas por escribir en español, por el momento cuento con poco tiempo y es más fácil para mi, dado que este post me causa gran interés.
Creo que es indiferente colocar si una persona maneja la cuenta de twitter de un museo o no, dado que a pesar de ser una institución esta como tal, cuenta con un “alma”, por así llamar al espíritu de valores, posicionamiento y otras características que forman parte de las instituciones y marcas. Pues al hablar desde ese espíritu con las personas no habría necesidad de recordar que no cuentan con características humanas.
Comparto totalmente que el estar en Twitter no es sólo una herramienta de difusión, es una red donde al ingresar y aceptas participar, con sus reglas, podemos adaptarnos a ellas y hacer sentir al visitante, un “cibervisitante”, capaz de encontrar el contenido que calme sus inquietudes con respecto a la temática del museo y el uso de internet. Dado que los museos nacen desde la comunidad y deben formar parte de la comunidad, la cual ahora está en estado virtual.
La manera en que se genero la lista, no la comparto se podría haber creado un mejor debate sobre este tema.
Como siempre Jim, es un gran blog!