Museum Marketing

I read an interesting piece in The Guardian at the weekend about the rise of Apple, which the article linked with the companies move from being a manufacturer of computers, to focusing on mobile communications. The article questioned if the company will continue to make it’s range of desktop computers, when they now account for such a small part of their income.

This made me think about the future of the desktop computer and the way in which people will view and interact with websites in the future.

The desktop computer isn’t dead, but is the iPad the start of a shift which will see people using a different type of computer at home to those they use in the office. It seems that laptops had already started to be the computer of choice for personal use, after all, who wants to have to go and sit at a desk when they get home from work.

This shift towards having mobile devices as the primary way that the public view the web in their personal time could see a big change in the way that we design museum websites, which at present are focused on a format that best suits desktop computers.

As budget cuts and spending freezes hit cultural institutions around the world, I worry that their websites will be stuck in this desktop world as the rest of the net moves increasingly towards mobile.

This week my company launched a series of mobile friendly websites for York Museums Trust (view here), visitors to their website on mobile devices will be automatically forwarded to this website, which is easier to navigate on a smaller screen.

The future of the web is mobile and museums need to be careful not to be left behind.

I have been talking a lot recently about the growth in the mobile internet and the opportunities that this offers cultural institutions. This week I came across two more facts to back up the rise of the smartphone as a platform which we need to give serious thought to.

Outnumbered?

An article on Bloomberg this week highlighted a report from Gartner Inc. which forecasts that smartphone sales will triple from 139.3 million worldwide in 2008 to 491.9 million by 2012, over the same period the PC market will expand from 290 million unites to 443.1 million.

The will mean that more people will have access to the internet via a smart phone then a desktop PC, and I think this will be especially significant for cultural venues who will be able to deliver information on the move to their audiences.

Social Mobile
New research released at the start of March shows that more then 30% of smart phone users (11.1 percent of all mobile phone) in North America accessed Facebook or Twitter on their mobiles.

While 30% of 11.1% might not seem like a significant number, the rise in usage over the past 12 months is impressive with access to Facebook growing 112% and access to Twitter jumping 347%.

A Facebook and Twitter presence obviously offer museums and galleries one route to smart phone users.

iPhone applications seem to have a tremendous buzz around them at the minute, and in the first two months of 2010 my company has had a lot of requests from cultural organisations to create Apps for museums, festivals and heritage sites.

I think it has come as a surprise to many of these organisations when I have told them that they should think again. While there are an estimated 2.5 million iPhones in the UK, this is only accounts for about 10% of the smart phone market and it is better value for a cultural organisation to look at creating mobile friendly web content, then a more expensive application which only a minority of their audiences can access.

I think this is especially true of museums and galleries, where organisations have a real responsibility to make their content accessible to as many people as possible.

In the UK 53% of the mobile phones have built in internet access and this now accounts for over 3% of web traffic. Museums and galleries who I spoke to have experienced a large rise in the amount of traffic coming from mobile phones with some receiving over thousands of web visitors every month from mobile devices.

To me, it seems like better value to put resources in to creating website which will work for all smart phones, rather then an App which will only work on an iPhone.

A recent blog post from Ted Forbes at Dallas Museum of Art highlighted this, his museum chose to create a ‘smARTphone Tour’ which would guide visitors around their collection rather then develop an iPhone App.

Ted writes ‘I was completely blown away when I got to the museum to see people on all kinds of phones not only curiously checking out the web app, but also in the exhibit taking it all in!’

To make the ‘smARTphone Tour’ even more accessible, Dallas Museum of Art also had iPod touches available for visitors to use in the gallery, these can access the internet via a wifi network, making the web based tour accessible to these users as well.

With 16 months being the average time that a person keeps a mobile phone, we can expect the number of smartphones to keep rising over the next year.

As we start to roll out mobile friendly websites for museums and galleries, I am really interested to see high the number of visitors browsing these websites from smart phones rises.

Will we have over 10% of website visitors coming from mobile phones by the end of 2010, or will more accessible websites push this even higher?

I noticed earlier this week that Google has added a few new tools to it’s analytic which make it easy to track how many people are visiting your website from mobile phones.

I checked a couple of museums who my company work with and found that a little over 1% of the traffic that their websites received came from mobile phones, the bulk of these from iPhones.

I wondered if anyone else would like to share how much traffic they are receiving from mobile phones, to get a better idea of the kind of benchmark we can expect.

Last month I wrote about the increase in people using mobile phones to browse the internet, 3% of web traffic in the UK is now from mobile phones, and half of that comes from iPhones.

These users are more likely to be looking for information on the go, and that includes searching for venue information such as what is on and how to find you.

With this in mind, my agency Sumo have been working on an off the shelf mobile friendly website for a museum, this doesn’t go in to pages of collection information, but does have the basics which people are looking for on the go.

Above is a picture of the same website, the first is how an iPhone would see this on it’s smaller screen, you need to hunt around to find the information you need to make a visit.

The version on the right is the mobile friendly test site based on the first website, the content management system on this allows museum staff to add as many exhibitions and events, as well as about us and visitor information.

This mobile friendly website is meant to be a low cost off the shelf solution for the rise in mobile phones for museums, and those accessing the museum via a smart phone would be automatically redirected to the mobile friendly website.

You can try the test website out here on an iPhone or smart phone and compare finding information on this to browsing the full museum website on your smaller screen.

I’d be really interested in anything you think we need to add in to make this work as well as possible, without overloading it with features.

I mentioned mobile friendly websites as a trend for museums to watch in 2010 last week. This was inspired by a piece Mike Ellis had written on his blog about the mobile web and by statistic I read over Christmas which said that 57% of people now have access to the internet from their mobile phones, and because of the relatively short time that most people keep handsets (18 months on average) this number is rising fast.

A report by AdMobile Metrics released in late 2009, put the amount of web traffic coming from mobile phones at about 3% in the UK and 2.5% in the United States (half of which is from iPhones). Though I would expect that most museums would find that they are getting more than this because as ‘visitor attractions’ their audiences are more likely to be looking for information about them on the go.

With an increasing number of users Museums need to start to think about creating a mobile friendly version of their website.

Do I really need to think about mobile?
Your stats package should be able to tell you how many visitors your website is currently getting from mobile phones, this is a good place to start when thinking about creating a mobile friendly website for your museum.

How many people are currently looking at your website from a mobile phone? (you might be surprised) you may also want to use Google Analytics to track what they are looking at.

Keep it simple!
Common sense tells us that people are unlikely to want to browse your full collection, they are more likely to be looking for practical information, that will help them at that time and location like opening hours, what’s on and how to find you.

So you don’t need to redevelop your whole website for mobile, just give your audiences the information they need as quickly and simply as possible.

Having said that, the Brooklyn Museum have recently launched a gallery guide which runs on mobile phones and you can see the museum guide and phone converging as more and more institutions launch their own iPhone apps.

Mobile friendly?
Because the medium of a mobile phone is so different from a computer screen and because people access information differently on this medium you need to think about a mobile friendly website.

Unlike computer screen based websites where you have a range of common browsers and screen sizes, on mobile each type of phone typically has it’s own browser and screen resolution can range from high-end devices like the iPhone to low-end handsets with limited screen size and memory.

My advice would be to start by keeping it simple. Here are a few examples (obviously these are best viewed on a mobile device):

Science Museum of Minnesota
Wexner Center for the Arts

Your web designer should be able to set your website up to detect when somebody lands on it from their mobile phone, and redirect them to your mobile friendly website (As we have done with this website).

Is it really worth it?
I believe that from a marketing perspective it is essential that museums set up a mobile friendly presence. The number of people accessing your website from a mobile phone may be in the minority, but these people are more likely to be converted in to real visitors, because the likelihood is that they are looking at your website to answer questions on the go, to enable them to make a visit (what time will the gallery be open until tonight? Etc).

Even if just 3% of your visitors are coming from mobiles, that will still add up to thousands of people over a couple of months.

What to learn more?
As I said at the start of this article Mike Ellis got me thinking about ‘mobile and the museum’ and I am pleased that he will be joining me at MuseumNext in London in April to share his thoughts on the subject.

Does your institution have a mobile friendly website? If you do, please post a link to it in the comments.