Museum Marketing

YouTube Play is a collaboration between YouTube and the Guggenheim Museum which they hope will ‘unearth and showcase the very best creative video from around the world’.

To have your work considered, simply post it on YouTube, and then submit it at youtube.com/play. A jury of experts will decide which works presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York on October 21, 2010 with simultaneous presentations at the Guggenheim museums in Berlin, Bilbao, and Venice.

The videos will be on view to the public from October 22 through 24 in New York and on the YouTube Play channel.

Where to start with YouTube
YouTube is a video sharing website which lets anyone sign up for a free account and post a video online.

These videos appear on the website YouTube.com, and are also made available for people to share through an HTML link which lets anyone embed the video in a web page or blog.

YouTube enables anyone to broadcast to the world, and many museums can be found on the website.

Setting up your account
Anyone can watch a video on YouTube, but to upload videos you will need to set up an account. You can find the ‘create account’ button in the top left of the YouTube.com homepage.

Firstly you will be asked to select a username, this name will be visible on your YouTube page, every video that you upload and in your YouTube channels website address so I’d suggest that you use the name of your Museum.

Click ‘create account and finish’ and this will send a verification email to the address that you entered into your registration, this contains a link which you must click to confirm your email address is valid.

Getting started with YouTube
Now that you are a member of YouTube, you can start to upload and share video, but I would suggest that you take some time to customize your YouTube profile first.

Click on your username in the top right hand corner and select ‘account’ from the drop down menu, this will reveal an overview of your account. Here you will be able to add an user icon and add details of your Museum and your website address to your profile setup

Customizing your YouTube Theme
As well as adding information in to your profile, you might want the look of your channel to be more in line with your Museums branding. You can do this by through the ‘Themes and Colours’ page in your ‘Channel Design’ options.

The ‘Themes and Colours’ page allows you to pick from a series of different coloured themes or create your own by selecting ‘show advanced options’.

These advanced options let you create your own colour palette for your page, and upload a background image.

Uploading Video
Click the ‘Upload’ button in the top right of your browser and this will bring you to the video upload section of your account.

You’ll notice that under the “upload video” section there are some options for connecting your YouTube account to you social networks, this may be something you want to consider when you have got to grips with YouTube.

Click the ‘upload video’ button and select the video which you would like to upload from your hardrive. YouTube accepts videos in most formats, though the file size is limited to 2 gigabites and the film length to 10 minutes.

When you select the video, it automatically starts to upload and as you are waiting for this to happen, you are asked to provide a title, description and descriptive tags which will help people to find and understand what your film is about.

You will also be asked if you would like to keep your film private, or share it. I’d suggest that you keep the video private until you have checked that your happy with the way it looks.

Sharing your video
One of the great features of YouTube, is that once you have uploaded a video to the website, it is very easy to share this by copying and pasting a piece of HTML code.

To the right of your video you will notice that underneath your username and the video description that there are two boxes one marked URL and the other marked EMBEDDED.

The URL link is simply the address of the video on YouTube, making it easy to tell people where they can find the film. The EMBEDDED link is actually a piece of HTML which can be pasted into your website, blog of Facebook page and which will embed your video on that site without the user having to visit YouTube.

As well as embedding your video in blogs, facebook and websites most museums also allow the public to share their content in this way, however you don’t have to do this if you feel uncomfortable letting go of copyrighted material.

Comments and Ratings
Each video on YouTube is given a rating out of five by those who watch your film, as well as rating each film, You Tube also encourages users to leave comments which can be written or even filmed on a webcam.

What to do with YouTube
Now you have set up your account, 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 content.

Do you have any YouTube tips that you’d like to share? Leave a comment.

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.