Adoption of Social Media - It’s the Connections!

[Lynda Kelly]

Reading a great post on the Fast Forward blog (via Peta Hopkins, a Facebook colleague) - Adoption of Social Media - It’s the Connections!. Has the best quote about social media I've seen so far:
"Adopting Social Media has nothing to do with the tools. After all the tools are cheap and easy to use. It is all about rewiring the habits and the mindset of people."

This is what we've been trying to do at the Museum for the past two years. Now our new website is live, I see we're just at the beginning of "rewiring our people". It's going to be challenging but we feel we've made a good start.

How are other museums rewiring their people to meet the challenges social media brings?

[Seb Chan]

Just a small quibble . . . I'm not sure that "rewiring the people to meet the challenges social media brings" accurately explains the reason for the "rewiring" - in fact it under sells it. Social media is not necessarily the biggest change facing museums and there are plenty of other reasons for "rewiring".

The "rewiring" has to be mission-aligned and the mission of a museum needs to change as a parallel or complimentary process too.

[Lynda Kelly]

Hmm, I'm not sure. Sometimes we need to be radical in moving people on and social media provides the vehicle for change, well at least gives the change some urgency. Social media/Web 2.0 have changed the power paradigm. Visitors/users no longer need to look to museums for information about their content as they can get this elsewhere so where does that leave us? I have written before that people who engage with museums will increasingly expect to have a two-way relationship with them and we ignore this at our peril.

Agree rewiring needs to be mission aligned and that missions need to change - but who has done this?? Also, apart from having to have a commercial focus, be sustainable and responsive, I'd be interested in other reasons for rewiring??

[Seb Chan]

I think social media has changes a power paradigm in some museums - I'd argue that it hasn't done this equally.

Small, locally run community museums well connected to their local community are paradoxically less affected. Large, federal or state institutions with little direct connection to their local community are most affected - but that's not just because of social media - it is also because of their growing irrelevance to the 'everyday life'. Again, more a symptom of their continued disengagement over many decades preceding the web.

Does Web 2.0 potentially hasten their demise/irrelevance? Possibly, but again unevenly - and it depends a lot on the core visitor demographics and the motivational reasons as to why a society might 'value' museums. There's a whole host of reasons why museums become untenable in certain locations and close down - and we're yet to find one that closed down 'because they didn't "do" Web 2.0'!

>Visitors/users no longer need to look to museums for information about their content as >they can get this elsewhere so where does that leave us?

Actually that creates a great new opportunity and freedom to focus on experiences and storytelling. Letting visitors get their information content on the web means that museums can spend more time creating immersive, engaging, mind-altering/blowing experiences.

The social web certainly creates new opportunities for museums and it definitely creates new ways of working internally (which in turn creates new external opportunities), but there will still be plenty of museums for whom the realisation of these new opportunities is a bridge too far (and quite possibly irrelevant to their communities).

(A side point that some non-web/tech readers might miss - it is critical to remember that Web 2.0 is NOT 'incremental' to 1.0. They operate in parallel.)

[Mia]

Is the the reason we're not seeing a lot of 'rewiring the museum' that web 2.0 (and conversation with audiences in general) is still seen as peripheral to a museum's main mission?

Many museums are still struggling with the notion of user-centred development; the resources and organisational transparency required might just be too much, particularly when museums are battening down the hatches to deal with the 'global financial crisis'.