Social Media | Boost Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Social media’

August 17th, 2010

Reminder: EYC unconference this weekend in Wellington

Posted by courtney on August 17th, 2010

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.

Tags: engage your communityl, Social media, unconference, wellington, wellington web events

Posted in: Random thoughts, Social media

No Comments

July 27th, 2010

Facebook is now the first step

Posted by courtney on July 27th, 2010

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!

City Gallery Wellington

Shanty Town

Air Force Museum

Tags: analytics, facebook, museums, Social media, social networking, workshop

Posted in: Social media

No Comments

June 15th, 2010

Social media workshops for museums & galleries

Posted by courtney on June 15th, 2010

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.

Tags: Social media

Posted in: Social media

No Comments

November 12th, 2009

5 social media themes from 4 workshops with 31 organisations

Posted by sarah on November 12th, 2009

It’s been a really interesting month working with museums around New Zealand on their social media activities and strategies for building audiences. I’ve run four workshops for Te Papa National Services Te Paerangi – in the process, meeting fabulous, passionate museums, archives, gallery and library professionals who are curious about social media. Here are some themes that have stood out for me (to find out what the museums thought, read our workshop blog):

* Use of social media is much more nuanced than it used to be. For example – whether serendipitous or intentional – Te Papa has two twitter feeds, each for a different purpose. One focuses on promoting events, happenings, exhibitions and giveaways, and the other profiles interesting items from their collection. MORE MORE

* Whether we personally like it or not, 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 your ‘fans’ to market your service for you.

* A website is important but not enough. A website centralises information about your organisation – social media distributes information. Some people will follow you on twitter or fan you on Facebook so that they don’t have to go to your website – your information gets fed to them in their own personal compilation or version of the web.

* Virtual visits are something that museums need to value as a legitimate cultural experience. They can generate physical visits – web cam footage of Te Papa’s colossal squid had people turning up 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.

* For resource-strapped organisations, a blog or Facebook page may give them a low-cost web presence and also greater flexibility if they are part of a larger website run by a parent organisation. It’s also an opportunity to present a less formal, characterful and behind-the-scenes personaltiy. Of course, these activities don’t promote themselves – audiences won’t automatically appear – they need feeding. THere’s also plenty of opportunities out there to leverae other people’s efforts – sites like nzmuseums, nzlive and tourism ventures.

* ‘Under the radar’ activities are giving way to an interest in building social media into communications and marketing planning. Linking your activities to your vision and marketing objectives will help ensure your choosing the right tools for the right reasons, prioritising what your resourcing can manage, as well as thinking through the implications of organisational social media policy, branding and so on.

Joining the great examples of what NZ museums are already doing with social media, these organisations have established new social media activities since the workshop:

Great examples of museums’ use of social media, the tools and other links – see the workshop blog.

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.

Tags: museums, Social media, Te Paerangi National Services, Te Papa

Posted in: Social media

No Comments

October 4th, 2009

Boost Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Social media’

Categories

Archives

Boost Loves Design

Boost Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Social media’

Reminder: EYC unconference this weekend in Wellington

Facebook is now the first step

Social media workshops for museums & galleries

5 social media themes from 4 workshops with 31 organisations

Boost facilitates social media workshops for museums

Categories

Archives

Boost Loves Design