ArtMobs remixes MoMA
ArtMobs is a few years old, but I think it was a little before it’s time. It asked members of the public to create audio guides to artworks in MoMA and share these through their website. Though not created by professional curators, these amateur guides give a different perspective.

The project which ran in 2004 – 2005 seems to have produced just 10 guides, so perhaps other didn’t share my enthusiasm for the idea of creating alternative audio guides, but I guess while it is easy for me to say I like the idea, would I really record a guide myself?

I know that N8 in The Netherlands tried a similar project and found that creating audio commentaries was a lot to ask of visitors.

Overated?
Slate Magazine produced it’s own audio guide under the headline ‘The commentary museums don’t want you to hear’ in which it’s art critic guided visitors around MoMA and the Metropolitan museum of Art.

This unofficial audio tour looked at the most overrated and underrated pictures on display, giving another alternative (and an intriguing) view of the collections of these great art museums.

Going Mobile
With the growth in mobile technology, perhaps now is the time for a platform which allows visitors to share audio commentaries through the web rather then podcasts, so a visitor could instantly access a choice of audio guides on the go.

I’d be interested to hear about any other Audio Tour projects which you are aware of, and whether you think the public could be bothered to create something worthwhile.

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?

In my guide to getting started with Facebook last month, I mentioned creating an html landing page to make your fan page more appealing to visitors, and to push events and exhibitions more effectively.

I also mentioned the landing page which my company had created for Seven Stories, the Centre for Children’s Books. One month on I wanted to report back on how the fan page has worked for the venue.

One month ago Seven Stories had about 370 fans, and today the number of fans has increased to 454 fans, that is an increase of over 20%.

We (and our fan page) can’t take all the credit for this success, Seven Stories have been actively adding lots of great content to their fan page over the past month. We are really pleased with the result.

Last week I wrote about the need to step beyond engaging with the public on social media platforms and to move towards putting the public at the heart of the development of the museum as a whole.

As someone who works on the marketing side of museums, I have been thinking about how my comments about the ‘BETA Museum’ could apply to the way in which we develop the way in which we promote an exhibition, an event or the institution as a whole. Could we involve the public in the way in which we develop our marketing?

I know many of you will be thinking, ‘we have done that for years’, but I am guessing that while you may have conducted research with your audiences, perhaps even asking for opinions on past marketing, you are not involving the public as partners through out the development of new marketing, branding or advertising.

To create the most effective marketing campaign for a museum, do we not need the bring together the marketing manager and a designer, but also the people who the campaign is targeting?

Including the public in this development process would help us to understand their feelings, habits, motivations, insecurities, desires and prejudices so that we can better picture of how they might respond to different marketing messages.

While audience research might help us to develop our message, asking the public to feed in to every stage of the development process could help to bring the voice of those who visit you museum in to your marketing in a far more powerful way.

Though I am advocating the involvement of the public in the development of museum marketing, I am not in any way suggesting that they have the final say, but rather that along with the marketing manager and the designer they are allowed participate in the conversation, and their views are considered.

This approach may sound horrific to you, and I accept that both the designer and marketing manager would need to be confident enough not to be threatened by a third voice at the table.

You would be excused for saying that I should put my money where my mouth is and put this in to practice, and that is exactly what I intend to do. I am going to use this approach in the coming months and report back on this blog, if anyone is interested in working with us to try this, then please drop me a line.

Have you involved the public in the development of your marketing, not in evaluation, but in creation? Please post a comment.

Increasingly companies like Google are operating in a permanent state of Beta, as they use the constant feedback, which they receive from their users to constantly improve their service.

Social media is shifting other sectors towards operating in a constant state of BETA, as they open themselves up to a world of real time reviews, where the public share their experiences, good and bad of everything from the restaurant they ate in last night to their visit to your gallery today.

Museums have embraced social media as a tool to engage with their audiences, and I suspect that many have done this without realising that part of taking part in a conversation, is listening to what the other person has to say (or at the least management of most venues are unaware of this).

How can a museum really build a community around it’s brand if the feedback which is given isn’t used to continuously make the institution better.

I feel that to do this, we need to embrace BETA, and be brave enough to open ourselves up to a never ending cycle of development, one in which we partner with the public to create the museum of the future.

With the current climate of cut backs, it may seem like a crazy idea to promise continuous development to the public, after all it would be worse to promise something that you simply can’t deliver then to do nothing at all.

However, I think that it is fair to be honest with the public about what is possible within your existing budget, and as partners, to work together to fundraise if there is a demand for something that is beyond the museum financially.

The fact is that the public are making statements about where they think you need to improve anyway, both publically on social networks and privately to friends and you can either ignore or act on this.

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.

I was reminded by a piece in FastCompany magazine about museum tags of the lovely IK Tag which I received when I spoke at the MediaMatic Kom je Ook? conference last year.

The IK Tag contains an RFID chip, this links me through a number on the chip with my profile on the Mediamatic social network and allows me to connect a real world event like a conference with the digital world.

So I could connect with people at the conference and by scanning our IK Tags next to a sensor, we were linked as friends on the social network when I next logged in.

Seeing this piece in FastCompany about these museum tags, I thought wouldn’t it be cool if a museum tag could also link the real world and the digital world in some way, perhaps it lets you vote for different things as you walk around the museum, or it somehow lets you collect items.

What do you think? Has anyone seen something like this?

The idea behind the mobile friendly website is that a regular website doesn’t work particularly well on a mobile phone and with 3% of web traffic in the UK coming from mobile phones (2.5% in the US) museums can benefit from having an alternative website which mobile users are redirected to automatically.

This first test shows first the user trying to find the address of the museum on it’s regular website using a mobile phone, this takes them about 30 seconds to locate, then the user tries to do the same on our mobile friendly website and this takes no more then three seconds.

Next we tried the same on an iPhone, this was faster then the Nokia phone, but still far quicker on the mobile friendly website then the regular site, especially when we start looking at exhibition or what’s on information.

The mobile friendly website is run off a specially built content management system, making it easy to keep up to date. If you are interested in getting a mobile friendly website for your museum then drop me a line at jim (at) sumodesign.co.uk

Foursquare is a location-based game which describes itself as being ‘All about helping you find new ways to explore the city, discovering new places, doing new things and meeting new people.’

Foursquare basically lets you leave tips for friends and strangers in your favorite places, when someone else comes to that place, they can read the tips that you have left through Foursquare on their mobile phone.

Foursquare is growing in popularity and many museums and galleries are listed on the application. A lot of these institutions are taking steps to engage with those who use Foursquare and  having spent a little more time using this application I want to share a couple of tips.

The image above is taken from the Foursquare account of The Pollak Library in the United States. The library has used the ‘TO-DO’ function on Foursquare to tell people more about what they offer, for example ‘ebooks’.

This is a really nice idea which I think could work brilliantly to create treasure hunts through museums, where the visitor has to tick off a list of twenty items in the collection which they have to track down in your collection.

The other route which I have found many institutions taking to encourage people to check in with them is to offer prizes to anyone who becomes a major (this happens when you check in the most in any one location). With Pratt Library, I believe they offered a tote bag as a prize.

Foursquare is being hyped as the next big thing, so it is worth checking out and thinking how you can engage with it’s users.

Have you used Foursquare for your museum, what tips do you have?