Comments on: In response to #followamuseum

By: Andrea

Andrea — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 11:06:12 +0000

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!

By: edmj

edmj — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:25:17 +0000

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

By: P

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 19:26:54 +0000

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.

By: markwilkinson1

markwilkinson1 — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 18:56:03 +0000

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!

By: Mary

Mary — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 21:57:05 +0000

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!

By: Jim

Jim — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 22:15:06 +0000

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”.

By: edmj

edmj — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:19:00 +0000

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.

By: Bart

Bart — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 21:40:58 +0000

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.

By: Nora G

Nora G — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 20:34:38 +0000

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.

By: jathrail

jathrail — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 17:32:20 +0000

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.