MW2008: Planning Social Media workshop

Led by Seb Chan & Angelina Russo

The key phrase uttered in this workshop was social media is hard – the technology is not.

The session focused on how museums (etc) can use social media (blogging, wikis, vodcasting, you name it) to communicate with their audiences, the issues that may arise, and the ways you can plan for these issues. As many of the notes and slides are available online (links at the end of this post) I’ll focus on some key points that got me thinking.

Listening to your users …

The web offers us a myriad of ways to discover how our users/audiences feel about us:

-- Blog posts are the new comment cards
-- Flickr will show what people find visually interesting about your building and exhibitions
-- Wikipedia page edits will reveal differences of opinion amongst people who know and use you.

How do you keep track of all this conversation? I’ve posted before about using Google Alerts, and I have RSS feeds from Technorati for certain words and phrases. Checking referrals in your site stats is invaluable. But you also need to just be out there sifting around on the web with your eyes open – and yes, that will take time.

… and talking back

If you’re not listening to people talk, how do you talk back? Of course, talking back raises its own issues. For example: can you just drop a comment on a blog, or do you need to talk to your comms team first? Can I use my blog voice, or is it time for the institutional voice (and is that even appropriate)?

Seb made a really interesting point here. The people who are blogging and flickring about you are not necessarily doing this in an intentionally public way. In fact, they're likely to feel they’re doing this for friends and family. Pay attention, but don’t violate people’s privacy.

Being online might change your (working) life forever

This topic got kicked around a little in the comments on my last post. Interacting with users/audiences online is going to necessitate different ways of working. It’s not just about sorting out who can respond to a critical post on someone’s blog, or which collection items you can put up on Flickr. It’s about being there with your users – accepting friend requests, answering questions, fixing broken links in their timeframe, not yours.

The thing that really drove this home from me was when Seb commented that it had been really convenient having him in a different time zone when the Powerhouse images went up on Flickr Commons. It meant he and his team members could maintain more or less round-the-clock engagement. Are we ready to be 24/7?

Seb also gave the example of how the Powerhouse is currently testing a helpdesk-like system for curatorial enquiries – an instance of organisational change being driven by online activity. A challenging part of this the potential for online activities to replace offline activities. If a social media tool or activity ends up replacing an employee’s work tasks or role, what do you do?

All this points to the need for a workplace where resource (and most often that means people) can be directed where it’s most urgently needed, whether that’s digitisation on demand, curators responding to questions in online forums, or all-hours support for a new product.

It’s not just about your web team

I think there’s a bit of an attitude where “the web” is something that the web team (or whatever you call this part of your organisation) does. But it’s more far-reaching than that.

It’s obvious that a lot of this online activity crosses over into the traditional roles of comms and marketing departments, and that was talked about quite a lot during the session. But again, it goes further than that. You might be getting feedback on your customer service or the state of your toilets on blogs. People might be posting photos of particularly inexplicable bits of your signage on Flickr. Or what say you let some content go free, and allow people to mash it up – how do you (should you?) collect and preserve that for posterity?

Two posts by Seb on these kinds of issues are well worth a read:

Four intersecting circles of social media and web strategy for the cultural sector

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

More from the workshop

Workshop abstract

Slides from the workshop (note – PDF file)

Jes Koepfler’s notes on the workshop

Seb’s post about a similar session @ Social Media & Cultural Communication 2008 conference

If you're interested in joining/continuing the conversation, check out the ‘Engaging with Social Media in Museums' network on Ning.