Category: Web 2.0

Applying a new social media framework from Forrester to the cultural sector

Post author By Seb Chan
Post date March 11, 2008

Josh Bernoff at Forrester has put together another good chart of how corporations might use social media to support five key functions – research, marketing, sales, support and development. He neatly ties together function, objective, the appropriate choice of social media application, and then a success metric for each.

Whilst the cultural sector may not have the same ‘sales’ and ‘support’ needs, there are clear parallels if we begin to look at the objectives column.

(source: Groundswell at Forrester)

Let’s break it down.

Listening

Audience evaluation practices in light of visitor generated social media are clearly undergoing change and there are enormous new opportunities for insights. As Josh indicates, good metrics of success for ‘listening’ are the value and depth of insights, and the comparable cost of focus groups and surveys. In light of Lynda Kelly’s work in this area I’d say that social media offers many exciting new ways to not only undertake audience research but also to present it. Her work with ‘visitor stories’ is particularly exciting.

Talking

Most museum marketing teams, sometimes assisted by the web team, are now ‘talking’ to audiences in new ways and starting conversations. Officially sanctioned museum blogs are now far more common and many museums both small and large are talking to audiences on Flickr and YouTube as well as Facebook and MySpace. Where the cultural sector lags is in having well developed measures of ‘buzz’ and awareness – and few are tracking through the door visits that are a result of these activities. Offering downloadable tracked discount passes through these media are an easy way of starting to track ‘conversions’ and ‘sales’.

Energising

Museum membership departments are starting to look at social media as a way of creating and strengthening the member community but these are still early days. The real ‘energising’ in the sector lies in the deep engagement in social media of niche communities of visitors – Flickr pools, YouTube groups, MySpace friends. Probably the best examples of ‘energising’ in the cultural sector lie around the well developed MySpace presence of MOCA and the Flickr pools and groups run by the Brooklyn Museum. Here there are some very ‘engaged’ visitors who act as brand ambassadors for the organisation.

Supporting

This is perhaps the most difficult objective for museums to engage with. It relies on building a strong community around your content – most probably your collection – and then letting go. In workshops and presentations the inevitable question comes up here around ‘authority’ and ‘reputation’. What if the community knows ‘more’ about part of your collection than your museum does? In the corporate/commercial world some of the most significant successes from social media have been in reducing customer support – and having the customers answer each other. Look at any support forum for any product and you will see, if it is working well, that most of the responses and suggestions are from other users. Now, could a museum provide a platform for community members to answer the questions of others about objects in the collection?

Here at the Powerhouse we are struggling with the increased volume of public enquiries since we launched our social media-infused collection database. Requests for information have tripled and now the sort of questions we are asked are more detailed and require significantly more curatorial research time than previously. At the same time we are receiving valuable new information and corrections to our collection documentation at a rate of nearly 2 a day.

Would it be possible to provide a platform for, say, the numismatics experts to answer the questions of other collectors directly, through our site, and reduce the ‘support calls’ needing to be answered by curatorial research staff?

Embracing

Already many are starting to harness the insights they are gaining from their visitors. At the Brooklyn they are going as far as having a ‘crowd-curated’ exhibition soon called Click!. and back here at the Powerhouse we have been using a lot of the insights of the users of the collection database to inform our classification and documentation practices. I also know that over at the Australia Museum Lynda Kelly’s innovative collaborative evaluation work with visitors, especially teens, is transforming the content of future exhibitions.

Social networking Web 2.0

Listening, engaging, acknowledging museums fans

Post author By Seb Chan
Post date March 10, 2008

Even if your museum isn’t engaged in making forays into social media itself then your audiences certainly are. In the workshops that I’ve been running with Angelina Russo and Jerry Watkins I am yet to find a museum that isn’t being actively discussed, critiqued, blogged, photographed, and videoed online.

The real question for museums is whether they listen, engage with, and acknowledge these museum ‘fans’. Not only will you learn a lot about your organisation and how it perceived by audiences (not just the audiences who have agreed to fill out a post-visit survey or participate in an evaluation exercise), it is great opportunity to strengthen your audience relationships.

Strengthening the relationship between visitors and museums opens up the opportunity for visitors to transform into participants and co-creators. Doing this authentically is critical.

Here’s a recent example at the Powerhouse.

(taken from Powerline Magazine, Autumn 2008)

We became aware of Lee and his son Jarvis via their ‘house dad’ blog. It popped up in an RSS feed that we’ve set up to keep an ear out for any mentions of ‘powerhouse museum’ in blog posts – much like a media monitoring service. Lee started blogging his son’s visits to the Museum about a year ago and over this period they built up a strong relationship with the staff in the Museum’s Members Lounge. Not only has the Museum benefitted greatly from the passionate fandom of Lee and Jarvis – their word-of-mouth recommendations to their friends will have brought many more through our door; we’ve also learnt a lot about what Jarvis likes and dislikes at the Museum. In an act of acknowledgement the Members Department decided to feature Lee and Jarvis in their Members Profile section in our quarterly Powerline Members magazine this quarter.

Another example exists over in Flickr where a photographer (and cupcake maker) whose photograph of a cup cake was used by our Marketing team in an advertisement.

Digitisation Metadata Web 2.0

Flickr Commons – mass exposure of historical images

Post author By Seb Chan
Post date January 17, 2008
4 Comments on Flickr Commons – mass exposure of historical images

As a lot of museums (and libraries) have been using Flickr in lightweight ways for various purposes from image storage to building community engagement for quite a while, it is exciting to see a new formal collaborative project between Flickr and a major institution launch.

Flickr Commons is a project between Flickr and the US Library of Congress. It provides a secondary point of access to some of the out-of-Copyright historical photo collections of the LoC. Whilst these photos have all existed on the LoC’s own website, they have been, like most image collections, only known to those audiences who are familiar with the work of the LoC already and are undertaking (‘serious’) research.

The project is beginning somewhat modestly, but we hope to learn a lot from it. Out of some 14 million prints, photographs and other visual materials at the Library of Congress, more than 3,000 photos from two of our most popular collections are being made available on our new Flickr page, to include only images for which no copyright restrictions are known to exist.

Placing these images on Flickr allows the images to reach a much broader audience and be connected with images of similar people, places and things in contemporary photography. Importantly, this audience’s labour can be engaged to assist in tagging and geolocating the images – work that the LoC is unable to do so efficiently or presumably as quickly.

As George Oates from Flickr writes

There are about 20 million unique tags on Flickr today. 20 million! They are the bread and butter of what makes our search work so beautifully. Simply by association, tags create emergent collections of words that reinforce meaning. You can see this in our clusters around words like tiger, sea, jump, or even turkey.

What if we could lend this wonderful power to some of the huge reference collections around the world? What if you could contribute your own description of a certain photo in, say, the Library of Congress’ vast photographic archive, knowing that it might make the photo you’ve touched a little easier to find for the next person?

This isn’t the first formal engagement between a library and Flickr. The National Library of Australia’s Picture Australia project set up a relationship to allow the community to upload contemporary images to Flickr and have them catalogued inside the NLA’s resource as well.

What is interesting about the Commons project is that it reverses this and releases back to the community a wealth of historical imagery that previously was hard to find. Flickr is a good match for the collections of images already available under this project – the pro-am photographic community is well represented in Flickr which bodes well for higher quality tagging and user generated content, Flickr already has a lot of ‘similar’ contemporary content with which these historical images can be linked, and of course Flickr’s API opens up some interesting possibilities for recombinatory projects.

No doubt many other organisations will be watching this closely to see what impact this has on the LoC’s reputation and image sales revenue. Also, for those who hold similar collections, how their own image sales revenue is affected. Likewise, others will ask whether these public domain resources should now also be replicated out to other image services as well, and when more public domain collections will be uploaded in a similar fashion.

More over at the Flickr blog and the LoC’s own blog.

Collection databases Web 2.0

OPAC2.0 – new context features – collections, ‘parts’, and narratives

Post author By Seb Chan
Post date January 7, 2008
6 Comments on OPAC2.0 – new context features – collections, ‘parts’, and narratives

As promised some of the new features of our collection database have started to go live.

We have been spending a lot of time working through a range of legacy issues to do with how collection data is structured in our collection management system and how this affects the options for its more flexible use on the web. Part of the problem lies in the way in which museum professionals classify, and another part in how these classification practices become hard-coded into collection management software.

A very big problem for us has been ‘parts’ and ‘collections’ and how they have been historically catalogued. An example is our Hedda Morrison collection of photographs. In our collection management system this set of 349 photographs has an object number (92/1414) with associated structured data. Then, each of the 349 photographs has their own object number (92/1414-1 through to 92/1414/349) related to that of the parent with a lesser set of structured data – because it is assumed that it inherits some data from its parent.

Now this works perfectly if the user views (and reads) the parent object (trunk) first and then digs down to the part objects (branch) and their associated data (leaves). But in the new world of search it is far more likely that a user will start at a leaf not only because they are more plentifully represented in the search results which flattens the tree structure, but also because it is actually what they are looking for (a photo of an “Itinerant barber” for example).

So finally we have started to reveal these parent/child relationships on object pages. Now looking at the collection record for the aforementioned “Itinerant barber” we reveal that it belongs to a parent object.

You will also notice that for some objects (the barber photo is one) we also reveal that it belong to a ‘collection’. These are even broader groupings of objects that cross into the forest of other object trees. The barber photograph belongs to the ‘Hedda Morrison Collection’ which also contains her camera, passport, papercuts, Chinese belt toggles and much more. Again by revealing this relationship we open up new pathways for users to traverse the collection.

Here’s the Jenny Kee Collection – a collection and archive of the work of a famous Australian designer.

All this work is a prelude to a much larger feature that will go live very soon – narratives. (Although I think we will call them ‘themes’ on the site). Narratives will operate in a similar manner but allow for much more free association between objects. Narratives will also contain their own text and images so that they operate a little like object groupings. We might have one on 20th Century Australian Design written by a curator, or one on Flying Machines written by one of education staff. There will probably come a time when users will be able to submit their own object clusters.

One of the computing curators, Stephen Jones, came up with the notion of ‘heterarchical narratives’ (possibly after a quick lunchtime re-reading of Deleuze). This is a good way of describing the way in which they will act as fluid nodes for contextual collection information. Not only are they much more fluid in terms of navigation, they are also much looser in terms of internal structures of control in terms of knowledge production. Anyone with access to the collection management system can create a new node and associate collection objects with their node – this opens up plenty of opportunity for cross-disciplinary narratives, and cross-organisational collaboration.

Collection databases Web 2.0

New York Times on their own use of collective search intelligence

Post author By Seb Chan
Post date January 4, 2008
1 Comment on New York Times on their own use of collective search intelligence

Here’s a short piece from the NYT Tech Blog on how the New York Times is using realtime analysis of site search to improve results.

Regular readers will know that we’ve been doing this over at the Powerhouse on our OPAC for a long time. The principles are the same and the use of actual users search relationships can greatly assist the navigation of other users.

Web 2.0 Wikis

Googlepedia/Knol and Wikipedia

Post author By Seb Chan
Post date December 19, 2007
3 Comments on Googlepedia/Knol and Wikipedia

Open Culture provides a withering examination of Google’s Knol project and in so doing draws out some of the strengths of the Wikipedia approach in terms of collaborative production.

In the discussion of the Knol project, Dan Colman speaks of some the fundamental shortcomings in the Knol approach, shortcomings that Wikipedia’s approach has been able to get around. Whilst museums have been hesitant to engage with Wikipedia, the high volume ‘open’ approach to content creation holds a lot of opportunity for museums versus the traditional very low volume ‘closed’ top down approach.

Although the screenshot provided by Google nicely featured a Stanford University scholar writing on “Insomnia,” the reality is that few experts of this stature will take the time to contribute. Take my word for it. I’ve spent the past five years trying to get scholars from elite universities, including Stanford, to bring their ideas to the outside world, and it’s often not their first priority. They just have too many other things competing for their time. More often than not, Google’s knols will be written by authors with lesser, if not dubious, credentials. The mediocre entries will be many; the great ones, few. And this will leave Google’s content in a weaker position relative to Wikipedia.

To be clear, Wikipedia’s overall talent pool may not be much better. But Wikipedia’s model has an important built-in advantage. A community of writers focusing on the same text will correct one another and improve the overall product over time. The final text becomes greater than the sum of its authors. Meanwhile, Google’s model, which will produce a proliferation of lackluster entries on the same subject, doesn’t include any kind of strong self-correcting mechanism that will improve the entries.

(hat tip to Chronicle of Higher Education)

Conferences and event reports Web 2.0

NLA Social Media & Cultural Communication conference – Sydney, Feb 28/29, 2008

Post author By Seb Chan
Post date November 29, 2007

Registrations have opened for the Social Media and Cultural Communication conference to be held in Sydney in February 2008. This conference is one of the outcomes of the Australian Research Council research project New Literacy, New Audiences which concludes shortly.

The conference brings together a range of great museum industry speakers from around Australia as well as Kevin von Appen from the Ontario Science Centre, Carolyn Royston from the Victoria & Albert Museum, and Mei Mah and Caroline Payson from the Copper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

It promises to be a provocative day and is aimed at the needs of those institutions small and large who are yet to start fully exploring the opportunities.

The conference is a single day event on February 29 and is preceded by a day of two masterclasses on the February 28.

Registrations range from $134-$149 and the masterclasses are $9 per person. Book through Museums & Galleries NSW.

Developer tools Web 2.0

OpenSocial, social networking and museums

Post author By Seb Chan
Post date November 3, 2007

Google’s OpenSocial has finally gone live.

What it provides for the museum sector is a much easier way to seed content to social networks, where apparently our younger online audiences, like to spend a lot of their time. OpenSocial, as opposed to a Facebook application, promises to work across multiple social networking services – meaning the development effort expended results in an application that can theoretically be deployed on MySpace, Ning, Bebo, Linked In and all the other OpenSocial partners. It remains to be seen just how portable these applications are.

The benefit for developers, especially those in the museum world, is that the risk of ‘choosing the right’ social networking service is greatly reduced. Museums have been experimenting a lot with seeding content to social networks – mainly as a marketing and promotional tool; and to a lesser extent building professional communities either within existing social networks (the multitude of Facebook groups especially) or discrete services like Exhibit Files.

Where applications from museums sit in the mix is more complicated, especially when development needs to be outsourced or requires significant investment. Our sector is often slow to respond and by the time we do, the audiences we were targetting have sometimes moved on.

Looking at the professional networks for museum staff on Facebook, they currently are thriving because currently many museum staff have private accounts – and usage from work is generally not blocked. However once non-museum personal friends move on to the next site, I do wonder how long those professional networks on Facebook will be sustainable.

As Fred Stutzman points out,

Ego-centric social network sites all suffer from the “what’s next” problem. You log in, you find your friends, you connect, and then…what? Social networks solve this problem by being situationally relevant. On a college campus, where student real-world social networks are in unprecedented flux, Facebook is a social utility; the sheer amount of social information a student needs to manage as they mature their social networks makes Facebook invaluable. For the consultant or job seeker, LinkedIn maintains situational relevance by allowing one to activate weak ties in periods of need.

What happens when a social network is no longer situationally relevant? Use drops off. Social networks can combat this problem on a number of levels. Myspace dumped tons of exclusive media content into the site, so users would keep coming back once they negotiated their social networks. For non-SR users, Facebook developed the application platfom, betting that third party developers could make tools that would answer the varied needs of their userbase. Unfortunately, the gimmicky nature of the platform tools has undercut this approach somewhat, but this could very well change over time.

Try as they might, once ego-centric social networks lose situational relevance, its pretty much impossible for them to retain their status. Myspace users have exhausted the Myspace experience; they’ve done all they can do, they’ve found all the people they can find, so now its time to find a new context. We naturally migrate – we don’t hang out in the same bar or restaurant forever, so why would we assume behavior would be any different online?

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