The Museums Journal asked me to answer a few questions for an upcoming article they are doing about Museum Blogs, here are my answers in their raw format:
Should museums include blogging in their web strategies?
Blogging is a way of engaging audiences with up-to-date and behind-the-scenes information from a venue. It is less formal then a traditional museum website, giving the curators and staff a chance to push the museum’s ‘personality’. The casual format means that any information can be added, from a fresh look at objects in the collection, to event reviews, to snippets and thoughts from curators; this variety will keep readers interested, and the flexibility means it should be easy to find content to keep it going.
How does blogging compare with other marketing techniques in terms of reach and effectiveness?
A blog is a type of permission marketing capable of communicating with audiences more effectively than conventional communications such as leaflets and advertising, because if the blog is well written and informative people don’t feel like they are being sold to. It is also delivered in short, varied bursts and invites feedback – keeping up a dialogue. With RSS features a blog can send daily updates direct to the desktop of your subscribers in a frequency and ease which no other form of marketing can match.
Like any marketing campaign, you have to keep your target market in mind. Blogs are perfect for contacting the ‘Long Tail’ museum visitors: a large number of keen, long-term, disparate individuals. When aiming at larger, transient or more mainstream audiences, such as families or tourists, traditional routes like advertising and website listings may be more appropriate.
A museum will get as much out of a blog as it puts in – write lots of interesting posts and people will take the time to engage with you. In our experience, staff enjoy the opportunity to get involved and from a visitor perspective we would expect a well maintained blog to add 10% more visitors to a museum website.
We encourage venues to open their blogs to people from across their organisations, curators often bring the most to a blog because they can tell rich stories about objects in the collection or the latest theory about a certain event. The public seem to respond very well to things you might not think to include on a blog, like the work involved in getting a stuffed animal delivered.
What is the relationsip between blogging and SEO?
A blog can quickly build into a large collection of content, and this obviously helps to build search engine ranking in terms relevant to a venue.
What advice would you give to those worried about negative comments on their blog? Would you advocate moderating/censoring the content?
Monitoring comments on blogs is essential, but I think that a venue needs to be open to negative feedback, this can spark debate and encourage on-going improvement.
Are there any examples that you would hold up as good/bad practice?
Brooklyn Museum have a very prolific blog, updated almost everyday with interesting content which is often linked to their equally impressive collection of imagery on Flickr.
