It’s not too late to register for the Engage Your Community unconference, being held in central Wellington this Saturday, 21 August.

The unconference is a free day-long learning and skill sharing event for people working or volunteering as webmasters in community groups, volunteer organisations and not-for-profits. Industry professionals are invited to come along as well, to share their knowledge and experience.

I attended last year’s EYC conference in Wellington, and had an absolute ball running a social media workshop. I love the informality and sparky atmosphere you get at barcamps, so I’m really looking forward to going along this weekend.

The details

Who’s it for?

• volunteer webmasters
• people communicating with member groups using the web, email or social networks
• comms professionals or webmasters in not-for-profits
• people responsible for almost everything in an office, including communications
• industry professional wanting to give back to the community by sharing knowledge and skills.

Why should I go?

• meet others with similar interests
• share and learn alongside your peers
• find ways improve your website, and explore other web tools.

Where and when is it?

9.30am-4.30pm Saturday, 21 August 2010
Rutherford House, Victoria University Wellington

What does it cost?

The EYC unconference is a free event

What’s an unconference?

An unconference is like a conference, in that it’s a gathering of people interested in a particular topic, who come together to share and learn. An unconference is unlike a conference, in that it doesn’t have a preset schedule of talks that you sit through: instead, the agenda is built on the day by the people who attend. Anyone can run a session, whether it’s to share something they’ve done, ask for help with something they’re trying to do, or just to kick some ideas around. The EYC unconference site has a list of topics people are interested in talking about on the day.

So what are you waiting for? Register now! And if you come along on Saturday, make sure you come say hi – I’m running the schedule board on the day, so I should be easy to find.

At the end of last week I was in Westport, running a workshop on using social media tools for National Services Te Paerangi. The weather was lovely, the people were welcoming, and the lamingtons were fabulous. And I learned something interesting.

At the beginning of these workshops I ask everyone to introduce themselves, talk about where they work or volunteer, and describe the social media/online tools they use both for work and for themselves. I’ve noticed a trend in these sessions. With a small number of exceptions people are using two tools, personally and professionally: email, and Facebook. Blogs aren’t mentioned. Few people have even heard of Flickr. Twitter has more awareness, but is usually dismissed as silly or pointless at the start of the day (after more discussion, people often warm to it). But everyone has an email address, and almost everyone has a Facebook account, and has set one up (or is considering doing so) for their organisation. In particular, older participants in the workshops say that they’ve joined Facebook to stay in touch with children who have left town (or New Zealand) and to see pictures of their grandchildren.

A few years ago – say 2006/2007 – everyone in the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) sector was getting hot under the collar about this Web 2.0 thing. The two keynotes at the 2006 National Digital Forum conference for example were Jim Spadiccini from Ideum and Toby Travis from the Victoria and Albert Museum, both talking about ways museums could harness this explosion of new, free communication and collaboration tools to reach out to online audiences. Blogs, wikis, social bookmarking sites, Flickr … we were all over it.

So I’ve been interested to see that people working in small museums who are just starting out on this social media thing are now leaping over all these options in favour of Facebook. Facebook is, of course, in some ways the new Google – for many people, it is where the internet begins. Because people often use the same tools for their organisations that they use at home, Facebook is becoming the default starting point when setting up social media presences.

Facebook is an all-purpose tool: a way to blog, share photos, schedule events, send email and post brief updates all in one place. With the spread of the ‘Like’ button, it’s all over the web. It’s great for publishing content, and for building connections with physical and online visitors. But what else might it be used for?

Earlier this year Seb Chan at the Powerhouse Museum blogged about mining Facebook data to understand what your fans are also fans of. As Seb notes:

If you can identify similarities between the fan membership of your own institution and those of others you can start to think of new partnerships and collaborative opportunities.

Seb pointed to Pete Warden’s Fan Page Analytics as an example of a lightweight tool to look for cross-fan linkages. You just drop a Facebook URL into site, and hey presto …

Auckland Museum fans analysed by Fan Page Analytics

Auckland Art Gallery fans analysed by Fan Page Analytics

Of course, you can use Facebook’s own analytics package to delve into the age, gender, location and activities of your fans. In this sense, it’s a lot like the physical visitor surveys many museums and galleries run. Or you can just ask them questions, as Brooklyn Museum did recently when they started thinking about updating their collections handbook.

To my mind, the main point of analytics is to understand how people are finding your online presence (be it your blog, website or Facebook page) and how they respond to your content. In this vein,  Beth Kanter’s (co-author of The Networked Nonprofit) blog post about ‘spreadsheet aerobics’ makes good reading. Beth uses metrics drawn out of Facebook to analyse the responses to different kinds of content she’s posting to Facebook, and tweak what she’s doing:

My Facebook page is focused on a listening and engagement objective – starting and maintaining a conversation. I view it as a focus group that offers content ideas for blog posts as well as to provide another conversation channel to share insights about social media. The target audience is people who work for nonprofits.

Here’s my description:

This is a focus group and sand box to learn more about how nonprofits can use social media effectively, especially Facebook. You are all the experts here! That statement guides how I engage and what content I share. That in turns drives my measurement strategy.

Here’s a brief list of New Zealand museums and galleries who are on Facebook – feel free to add your own in the comments!

Te Tuhi

Auckland Art Gallery

Auckland Museum

Rotorua Museum

Puke Ariki

National Army Museum

Te Papa

The New Dowse

City Gallery Wellington

Shanty Town

Air Force Museum

“Return on investment for social media activities”. It’s not a sexy phrase, but it’s one I’ve been pondering hard as I prepare for a National Services Te Paerangi workshop I’m running  later this month in Westport (here are some notes on the first running workshop, held here in Wellington).

The workshops are targeted at the GLAMs sector (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) and the people attending often come from quite small or even volunteer organisations. One of the interesting discussions we had in the first workshop was around measuring ROI (return on investment) for the social media activities.

ROI is the ratio of money made or lost on an investment, relative to the amount of money invested. It’s expressed as ROI = (X – Y) / Y, where Y is the investment, and X the final value. A good ROI might look like initially investing $100 and having a final value of $150: that’s a 50% ROI (a 50% profit). A bad one might might look like this: a $100 initial investment and a $0 final value; that’s a ROI of -100% (a 100% loss). This presentation by Oliver Blanchard gives a good overview of how this formula can be applied in a meaningful way to businesses’ social media activities, especially in terms of measuring whether there’s a link between activity and increased sales revenue.

I often struggle with the applying this idea of ROI to GLAMs activities. Firstly, for these organisations it’s rarely about investing hard money. Galleries and museums and the like are not diverting cash in their marketing budget away from one form of advertising and into social media. Instead, they’re reallocating their staffs’ or volunteers’ time and energy. Secondly, benchmarks are rarely in place to make comparisons between social media activities and other promotional activities,  such as print advertising.

This is not a reason not to think about the return on effort, rather than pure cash, expended. In fact, one of the best reasons to think about measuring ROI at the start of a social media project is that it helps you clarify what you’re doing and why. I think the time of people rushing, lemming-like, towards the latest tool has passed: now when I talk to people in cultural organisations who are starting or running social media channels, they’re more reflective about who they’re trying to reach, what content they’re wanting to share, and what outcomes they’re trying to achieve. Figuring out ‘what success looks like’ is an important part of the planning process.

There are all sorts of tools out there that can help you measure some kind of ROI, beyond the simplistic follower counts and page views. This Altimeter report gives a good overview of social marketing analytics, and this Mashable post gives a good overview of tools (most better suited to large organisations, to be fair).

Of course, there are all sorts of outcomes other than making money, and different ways to measure whether what you’re doing online is benefiting your organisation. For example, looking at your Facebook stats can help you learn more about the people who are interested in you, as Seb Chan shows.  Posting collection items to Flickr might drive interest, enquiries and sales back to your website, as Paula Bray’s paper suggests. Simple tools like bit.ly help reveal how and where your content is spreading. Studying analytics can help you improve what your content and communication, as Beth Kanter blogs about her own Facebook activity. Setting up funnels in Google analytics could show if efforts to publicise exhibitions and events, or fundraising drives, are paying off.

However, after covering tools and ideas like these in my workshops, I usually end with a plea.  And that’s for people to think about a human measure – one that captures the benefit for the people who are undertaking the work, who are usually doing this social media stuff on top of already full workloads, and who aren’t being repositioned as well-paid social media managers in order to do so.

When I was at the National Library of New Zealand I worked with the Services to Schools team to set up the Create Readers blog. When we surveyed the staff who were contributing to the blog, one of the things we found was they almost unanimously felt good about was having learned a new communication skill (only one or two contributors had blogged before) and  mastered a previously foreign technology. This is still one of my favourite examples of return on investment.

There’s also a sense of pride and community that I don’t think should be undervalued. Most people don’t work in the GLAMs sector for the generous salaries and the stock options. They work in them because they believe in the social value of what they do, and often because they love the stuff they’re working with, be it books, paintings, or bird specimens. Having an opportunity to share the things you care about with other people who’re interested too? To quote Mastercard – that’s priceless. A tweet that gets re-tweeted by half a dozen people, a blog post that garners a bumper crop of comments, a photo on Flickr smothered in notes – that’s the kind of thing that makes your heart glow. As we look for new ways to motivate the people we work with – and ourselves – I think these kinds of measures have a very valid place within discussions of return on investment.

It feels pretty appropriate that one of my first tasks at Boost is preparing for a social media workshop that we’re running for National Services Te Paerangi (NSTP) on Friday 18 June here in Wellington.

I’ve just joined Boost after four and half years at the National Library, where among other things I helped set up and/or run the Library’s social media outreach, including the LibraryTechNZ and Poet Laureate blogs, the Library’s membership of The Commons on Flickr, and (pretty awesome, if I do say so myself) @nlnz twitter account. I definitely found being out there online and talking to people about the Library’s collections one of the most exciting and satisfying aspects of my job.

The workshop for National Services is on the theme of Using and evaluating cost effective online tools. It builds on a workshop that Sarah from Boost ran for National Services in four locations last year, How to promote your museum using online tools (see Sarah’s notes on the five themes that stood out from last year’s workshops).

We’ll be covering the following topics in this year’s workshop:

• the pros and cons of different kinds of online tools
• how to identify your exact needs
• how to pick the best tool for your needs
• the time required for different kinds of activities
• how to set your project up for success
• how to evaluate and report on your performance.

I’ve run sessions like this before, and have certain favourite examples that I always trot out (Christchurch City Libraries’ blog – especially their reporting from Writers and Readers Week; the TeAra, Te Papa Collections and NZHistory Online twitter accounts; the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s Wikipedia Saves Public Art project; the Brooklyn Museum’s 1st Fans). But it’s been fun having a look at things that have happened recently.

Top of the list of shiny new things is Brooklyn Museum’s partnership with the online fashion community site Polyvore. Following their belief that they need to get their content out where the people are, rather than waiting for people to find them, Brooklyn Museum have added fashion items from their collections to the store of material on the Polyvore site that members can use to create and share collages like this one by pinkopaque22

Vintage by pinkopaque22 featuring Yves Saint Laurent shoes

Underneath my arts and culture veneer, I’m a science geek at heart (this is one of my favourite blogs). In 2009 I got all excited about the Royal Observatory Greenwich’s astrotagging project. This year I got all excited about their Solar Stormwatch project, where people can help spot explosions on the sun & track them across space to Earth. Like the astrotagging project, this is meaningful community engagement, with the bonus of real scientific benefit.

One of the areas workshop attendees have flagged their interest in is understanding how much time social media outreach can take up, and how to manage this. There are various tactics you can take to make sure that scarce staff time doesn’t get totally diverted into managing your social media presence, starting with being smart about which channels you choose to use.

Another tactic is to run short-term projects, which is the approach of My Life As An Object. A recent project commissioned by Renaissance East Midlands and delivered by Rattle, MLAAO saw items from Nottingham City Museums and Galleries telling their stories on different social media sites – Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Ebay – for a week at a time. These short, intense bursts of storytelling are quite different from the long-term presences we normally think about creating.

I’ll be posting notes from the workshop, so check back in to see how it went. NSTP also runs a range of workshops at different levels for museums, galleries and iwi: check out their online calendar to see what’s coming up.

It’s been a really interesting month working with museums around New Zealand on their social media activities and strategies for building audiences.

We’ve run a series of workshops for National Services Te Paerangi (Te Papa), meeting passionate museums, archives, gallery and library professionals who want to find out more about what social media can do for them.

Here are the five themes that have stood out for us:

• A professional presence on Facebook enables organisations to intersect with the social lives of potential audiences. Research indicates that social interaction can be a pretext for participation, and also that people are increasingly influenced by recommendations from family, friends and even strangers over traditional forms of promotion. Facebook and services like it encourage fans to market your service for you. Museums reported some successful forays into audience building via Facebook.
• Virtual visits are something that museums can value as a legitimate cultural experience. Virtual visits can generate physical visits – web camera footage of the dissection of the colossal squid had people turning up to Te Papa to see it in the flesh. Curating online makes your collection or service accessible to audiences who are remote and may never be able to walk through the doors.
• Use of social media is increasingly nuanced and discriminating. Te Papa has two twitter feeds: one focuses on promoting events, happenings, exhibitions and giveaways, and the other profiles interesting items from their collection. Ideas for blogs generated by workshop participants ranged from working with the community to identify unknown objects in a collection to presenting a characterful, behind-the-scenes museum personality.
• For resource-strapped organisations, a blog or Facebook page may give them a low-cost web presence or greater flexibility if they are part of a larger website run by a parent organisation. A website is important but not enough. A website centralises information about your organisation; social media distributes information. Audiences may visit your website rarely but receive your twitter updates regularly.
• ‘Under the radar’ activities are giving way to building social media into communications and marketing plans. Linking your activities to your marketing objectives will help you choose the right tools for the right reasons, prioritise what you can manage, as well as think through the implications for organisational social media policy, branding and so on (see this post on the workshop blog about social media strategy).

We’ve heard from a few workshop participants who’ve set up blogs and twitter accounts, including these two new blogs: Runanga Falls and Presbytarian Research. Check out the workshop blog to read about what participants thought and to get links to great examples of museums’ use of social media and articles and tips on using social media effectively.

We’re really stoked that National Services Te Paerangi, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, has asked Boost to facilitate four workshops around the county to introduce museums to the benefits and practical realities of using social media to promote themselves and grow their networks online.

The workshops are called How to Promote Your Museum Using Online Tools. They will cover:

• an overview of social media tools
• what they offer and who they target
• how to use them to build audiences and professional networks.

Participants will get the chance to:

• get hints and tips on using social media effectively and avoiding pitfalls
• see examples of how museums – big and small – are using social media
• discuss approaches you might use for your organisation
• build confidence to use and contribute to the growing body of practice around social media.

The one-day workshops are taking place at these locations and times:

• 6 October 2009 – Whanganui Regional Museum, Whanganui – register here
• 15 October – Whakatane REAP Centre, Whakatane – register here
• 22 October – Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dunedin – register here
• 30 October – Westport – details and registration to be confirmed

Watch the fun unfold on a blog specially prepared for the workshops. It contains relevant links, tools and examples and – hopefully – participants’ thoughts and ideas on what social media can do for them and their organisations.

I’ve just stumbled across this blog – Technology for Communities. It’s the combined project of Etienne Wenger, John D Smith and Nancy While – all  influential in the online communities of practice space.

It looks like the blog is working towards the publication of a book called Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities.

I’ve come across this idea of the ‘stewardship’ of communities before in Wenger’s article Knowledge management as a doughnut: Shaping your knowledge strategy through communities of practice. A highly memorable article title and a piece of writing that I’ve returned to time and time again as a touchstone for understanding communities and knowledge management. Don’t leave home without it.

Back to the blog though, and I’m really struck by this post on the Community Orientation Spidergram Activity. Wenger and pals have categorised nine patterns of activity in a community and wrapped them into an activity. The activity can help you to analyse your community’s behaviour so you can focus your stewardship activities, identify which tools and processes you might need to support your community, or plan for the future of your community or reflect on the past.

They’ve also released a chapter of the upcoming book. It’s a very comprehensive ‘action notebook’. With checklists, tables and questions, it takes you through the steps of stewarding technology and outlines what to keep in mind at each step. Could be handy if you’re really starting from the beginning – keen to use social media but not sure why or what.