From social media to social organisations

social space at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Last week I attended Museum Next 3 – the latest in an excellent series of international conferences looking at how museums are being transformed by technology. It was attended by over 200 people from Europe and N America. Many of those attending had roles that included social media in museums and you could feel a surge of shared frustration (not least via conference twitter hashtag which came alive with endorsements and RTs) when one speaker voiced the frustration of many: having a facebook page isn’t engagement. In the rush to embrace the latest trends in social media, some museums, it would seem are missing the point are using social media to broadcast what they do, rather than to engage audiences in conversations.

Museum Next is about technology as a means not an end in itself – and what we’re excited about is how technology can transform and enable relationships with our audiences. To put it another way, the real transformative potential of technology is not the tools or gadgets – but the approaches which have emerged through digital culture. Another speaker put this in terms of how we move from using social media to how we develop social organisations – by which I think they meant institutions which enable people to come together to create meaning and value around their collections. Last year I speculated about what this might mean for art museums and galleries in an article partly inspired by attending the first Museum Next conference in 2009.

One of the issues I highlighted in this article, which also emerged in the conference last week, is how institutions enable their workforce (staff and volunteers) to make full use of their skills and expertise, rather than pigeon-holing people into tightly defined roles. Why crowd-source content or ideas from the outside world (which to do well takes skills and resources) until you’ve first made use of the talents within your own walls? One of the biggest complaints I hear from those running organisations is that there are not enough staff, and yet I often encounter staff with plenty to offer who are under-utilised (and volunteers). In a period when most arts and cultural organisations are having to look again at staff structures to reduce their fixed-costs to a minimum it’s ludicrous not to make full use of our people. What might this mean? Enabling staff to act as advocates for the museum via social media or in person is one way some museums do this.

Speaking at Museum Next, Rich Mintz of Blue State Digital shared the principles behind the ‘people-powered’ campaigns they had created for Barak Obama’s presidential election. His lessons had clear implications, not just for social media campaigns but also for anyone who wants to increase their impact: you can’t possibly think you can achieve a wide reach on your own, you need advocates, supporters who will influence on your behalf. This means giving them tools, lowering the barriers to joining in, allowing people to take ownership of your campaign: which means letting go a bit.

For museums and arts organisations ‘engagement’ might mean letting your visitors take photos they can share to tell people about their visit, enabling them to use your facilities for their own purposes, offering ways to contribute and support the museum that are open to all (and not just those who can afford patron-level support). Perhaps if we focussed a little more on how we can engage our visitors, we’d be able to worry less about advocacy – because we’d have other voices making the case with us, if only we can find ways to maker space for them.