Birla Museum Pilani Rajasthan 333031First & Foremost Science & Technology Museum of India

http://www.birlamuseum.in/12th All India Conference of Heads of Science Museums / Centers

December 7 - 9, 2012Theme of the Conference: Networking Strategies for Success

Talk on Social Media & Museum Networkingby

Prof BR Natarajan, President – Vice ChancellorSangam University Bhilwara Rajasthan 311001

http://www.sangamuniversity.ac.in

There are roughly 2 million paid staff and 1.9 million volunteers making things happen in the arts and cultural space. That’s almost 4 million people! They serve over 850 million visitors that generate $166.2 billion dollars in business every year. In order to sustain this type of impact, tech savvy art museums, zoos, historical sites, botanical gardens and many other types of arts and cultural nonprofits understand that technology is indeed the key to sustaining their growth.

•A website is a destination - so visiting a museum’s website is analogous to visiting its building—it has an address on the internet just as it has an address on the street (assuming it isn’t a virtual museum!)

•The same term, “visitor,” is used to identify when one views the museum’s homepage and when one walk through its doors.

•In email, sending an inquiry to the main museum email address isn’t much different from calling the museum’s main telephone number.

What is the main aim of a museum website? Browsing the internet, one quickly concludes that this is to promote the institution to potential visitors.

This is of course a worthwhile aim, museums would not exist without an audience, but in present day context museum websites can be much more.

The starting point for all digital activities within a museum should be it’s mission, this is likely to be to educate, to inspire, to preserve and to share (or similar).

Visitor figures have a role in a museum, but these should be a way to measure how many people the museum is reaching, not the reason that the institution exists.

The solution that emerges is for museum websites to become hubs for ideas, publishing platforms which allow institutions to pursue their missions by sharing knowledge and inspiration with the public.

Walker Art Center had done this by becoming a digital hub for not just contemporary art which is hanging in their institution, but for contemporary art as a whole. The result was a 40% increase in traffic to their website and a digital experience which seems to ties in more closely with their mission.

For the Walker Art Center website to grow beyond being primarily a marketing tool they had to invest in the team who produce their website, adding members of staff to manage and produce the huge quantity content needed to keep this ideas hub constantly changing.

If Walker Art Centre which has an annual turnover of around $17 million, can do it, one must believe that even much smaller institutions could do the same, but there seems an unwillingness to divert funds from the physical museum to pay for digital activities, perhaps because many institutions see websites as primarily a marketing tool and things which happen in the physical museum as delivering on mission.

What about “social media,” “social networking” or, “the social web?” The last several years have seen the incredible rise of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

The internet churns out “revolutions” at an alarming rate, but this development is certainly worthy of the term. Most of these social sites and services are less than five years old but they already amount for almost 25% of the the time people spend online.

Thousands of museums around the world already use these tools to connect with their audiences—real, potential, or virtual—but they are moving quite a ways away from the institutional models towards the personal, away from being a virtual space to being an actor in a virtual space.

As part of understanding the need for technology, the more than 17 thousand museums in the U.S. are beginning to adopt social media. By using social media museums like the San Diego Zoo are able to help people around the world enjoy their incredible exhibits. How the San Diego Zoo uses social media to bring their exhibits to life. http://www.facebook.com/SanDiegoZoo

Here are 5 things San Diego Zoo does on their Facebook Page•Sharing interesting content•Engaging their visitors both at the park and online•Creating interesting contest•Connect with their loyal fans•Tell people about the awesome work they do

Museums in Social Media

3,635 Museums & Galleries

11,863,882 "Likes" on Facebook

12,909,649 Twitter Followers

Source: http://litot.es/museums-in-social-media/

Name of Museum FB Likes Rank

MoMA The Museum of Modern Art

897,345 #1

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

569,237 #2

Musée du Louvre 409,368 #3

Tate 318,504 #4

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

301,395 #5

Name of Museum Twitter Followers

Rank

MoMA The Museum of Modern Art

923,086 #1

Smithsonian Institution 627,146 #2

Tate 581,042 #3

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

561,352 #4

Design Museum 514,055 #5

Name of Museum Klout Influence Rank

Tate 70.41 #1

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

69.27 #2

MoMA The Museum of Modern Art 68.16 #3

National Museum of American History 67.86 #4

Smithsonian Institution 67.65 #5

Birla Museum Pilani Rajasthan 333031 India https://www.facebook.com/BirlaMuseumPilani

Birla Museum Pilani Non Profit Organization

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First, that to stand out in the social web the quality of your closest friends is more important than the quantity of your followers.

Second, the museums enter the social web with a privileged position. They will have to take on as part of their mission a new responsibility: to use that position to craft their social interactions in ways that add meaning, and not to simply provide content to fill the gadgets that people need to justify buying

The landscape of social media or social networking is made up of an ever-changing number of online services and sites. Some specialize in particular media, such as pictures (Flickr) or video (YouTube, Vimeo).

Some revolve around bookmarks (Delicious, Diigo), what you’re reading (TwitThis) or where you are (Foursquare), Klout which measures your degree of influence

Facebook and Twitter are generalists (Facebook voraciously so) and anything online that considers itself social works together with these two, almost by definitions, to share the fact that you’re sharing your pictures, videos, or location. Tumblr, a relatively new and popular blogging platform, owes it’s success in part to their decision to make it very easy to share from and to many of these other services.

What makes these, or any services, “social”? What makes the social web different from the web as we were using it before Facebook? In a word: followers.

The social web is not made up of websites. Different services use different words—“fans”, “friends”, “contacts”—but, whatever the term, the social web is made of relationships implied by these terms, mediated by these services.

•Whatever the interface or device one uses, being on the social web entails more than setting up accounts on any of these services. One has to develop a network, one has to attract followers, one has to make friends.

•When one posts something, it is one’s followers who will see it. If it is interesting enough to them they may repost it. Now one’s followers’ followers see it. They may repost it further and, through the mutual connection, one’s followers’ followers may become one’s followers.

•A website functions like a broadcast and the great change that the Web brought was the creation of a universal wavelength where all programming was available at once. Information spreads on the Social Web more like a rumor or an idea, from person to person. People will turn their ears towards those with best rumors or ideas to share, and there is something in human nature that gives us delight in passing these on to the next person.

To look at one possible model, Museum of Modern Art MoMA’s Department of Advertising and Graphic Design has their own portfolio website (http://momadesignstudio.org) and Twitter account (@momastudio) which MoMA has promoted on their main blog.

Their design team does amazing work and, by featuring it in this way, MoMA not only gives the public a glimpse behind the scenes, but also gives the designers a space to present their work as their work, the way they would present it to their peers and clients if they were working for themselves.

Something they would want to share, and their followers to re-share. MoMA is a better member of the social web, and a better place to work perhaps, by letting their insiders operate something like outsiders.

Canada-based George Jacob Email: george jacob <designfunc@yahoo.com> has been the founding Director of 3 Museums in his 25 year career and his project track record exceeds $400 million to-date with museum work in 11 countries. His books Museum Design: The FUTURE , Exhibit Design: The FUTURE and Museum Practice: The FUTURE address numerous on-going trends in the museum field from around the world.

Private philanthropy in India is an untapped sector for museums and science centers. Unlike the Google Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Paul Allen Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and others where on-line Grants await proposals from Educational institutions and Museums, India is yet to channelize its massive industry-based taxation model to re-invest in its future- creative applied education- which continues to be the bane of our school and university rote-based education system.

What museums/ Science centers do as institutions are the following:A. Enter into strategic cooperation, alliances, joint-initiatives and public-private partnerships for: 1. Projects 2. Events 3. Services

B. Offer Education Outreach- where museum programs are extended beyond the physical confines of the museum premise either through classroom projects, traveling exhibits, science camps, field trips or an extended web-enabled, mobile technology-driven continued experience through Facebook, Linked-in, Tumblr, Twitter, QR Codes, Augmented Reality, etc. Often on-line projects are linked to NASA, National Science Foundation and others where seamless classroom or home-based interactivity allows for layered engagement in real-time with on-going missions, experiments, inventive prototyping and innovations.

How social media thinking could help museums to turn out all right Posted: January 2nd, 2012 | Author: @Jasper Visser The Happy Museum focuses on the role museums can play to limit consumption, make people happier and generally contribute to the well-being of people.

Museums are seen as trusted and valued organisations by most members of the public, and it becomes clear museums have quite some potential. “By encouraging happiness and well-being museums can play a part in helping people live a good life without costing the earth.

The Happy Museum proposes to achieve this using the Five Ways to Well-being, namely: Connect, be active, take notice, keep learning and give.

An open letter to Museum Directors by Jim Richardson @SumoJim

Museum leaders need to rethink digital, and look at it from a more strategic perspective, one which can really deliver on the mission of the institution and the needs of the public. Museum leaders need to recognize that a powerful website can deliver just as much as a powerful exhibition and fund the roles within the institution to produce something credible online.

If museums see updating their websites as something which their marketing people can do in a couple of hours per week, then they are missing a huge opportunity to step beyond the walls of their institutions and settling for little more than digital leaflets.

I believe that our website have a real role to play in delivering on the mission of museums, but to do that, we need to be prepared to invest in

BR Natarajan, Your Tweet got a reply! BR Natarajan @deannattu 07 Dec

@SumoJim can I quote you to say that If museums today want to carry out their mission with passion then they must engage Social Media Jim Richardson @SumoJim @deannattu of course 04:02 PM - 07 Dec 12

Social Media Statistics of Prof BR Natarajan

2312 Connections link to 12,784,244+ professionals

Twitter Followers 1026

5113 Friends 1057 Subscribers 43 Has 167 in Circles & 127 Have in Circles