This is the first in a serious of posts on my favourite presentations from Webstock 2010.
Fostering personal connection to a place
Thursday, 18th February 2010
Shelley is the Chief of Technology at the Brooklyn Museum where she works to further the Museum’s community-oriented mission through projects including free public wireless access, podcasts, cell phone audio tours, projects for mobile devices and putting the Brooklyn Museum collection online. She is the initiator and current administrator of the Museum’s web initiatives on MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and Twitter.
Shelley’s presentation was passionate, enthusiastic and inspirational – without doubt one of my top three of the entire conference.
Embracing social networking tools and techniques as a core component of your online strategy
The core message (for me at least) of Shelley’s presentation centred around how they improved upon the patrons experience at the museum using freely and commonly used social media technologies – that patrons were already familiar with.
The museum has a unique demographic, it is the youngest and most diverse out of all the museums in the U.S. However, they have fostered this by opening up – encouraging photography within the museum and amongst the artworks, encouraging video footage to be filmed within the museum. Automatically eliciting feedback from patrons and projecting that externally – creating an open and active online community, building interest, brand awareness and increasing patronage.
People entering museums are generally looking to access, understand and draw context from it. The Brooklyn Museum has achieved this by encouraging blogging and social media interaction.
With regards to Twitter, the Brooklyn Museum’s goal was to build context and community through it’s use of Twitter. They achieved this by connecting people, by being transparent, being honest and by posting interesting content. As an example they tweeted when they sent four mummies to a local hospital for CT scans recently – as a result, people felt like they were being included, or let in on a secret.
They encouraged patrons to become a central part of the art works and the broader museum community, by integrating them into exhibitions. They created a YouTube channel and allowed visitors to interact with the exhibitions, automatically filming, uploading and then eliciting their responses.
The museum even went so far as sending out staff with GPS enabled devices (iPhone’s etc) to talk about the places they frequent at lunchtime and other breaks. They then aggregated this geo-located data on Foursquare, and brought that back to the museum website, building a deep, rich information source extending beyond that of the art gallery itself. They even allowed patrons to gain a Foursquare badge by just visiting the museum.
Crowd-sourcing as a form of community involvement
They created meta data around art works by encouraging their community to create tags. Over time they then build up a rich record of selected works with much more context for visitors – as it was created by them. Gallery visitors using the Museum’s iPhone app can feed data back into the museum building an even deeper context around those artworks.
In closing
Working the social media landscape takes time, and it needs authority. It’s not an intern role, it needs management buy-in and a whole lot of time and attention, with the associated commitment to have the patience to wait for the return on investment.
Trust the user – listen to the conversation and act on it: i.e. take on board that expertise is now distributed and that user communities have long term value. Even better, use the community – let it take the responsibility to find and locate your next step.
Brooklyn Museum is not about using social media as just another marketing and visitor experience tool-set. Rather, Brooklyn Museum itself is now a social network – that is its job – to be a centre for the community to have a conversation.
Further Reading
The Brooklyn Museum API – Q&A with Shelley Bernstein and Paul Beaudoin »
Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum »
The Participatory Museum »
Sources and Resources
Shelley Bernstein talks about the Brooklyn Museum at the NLNZ »
Shelley Bernstein Fostering Personal Connection to Place »
Not me.
Neither do you if you already have an iPhone and a MacBook.
@jhkoning Elliot took the words out of my mouth (with regards to the #iPad) http://bit.ly/aYxiNk saves me having to write a post!
But the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that a glaring omission has to be a camera – a front facing one. I mean – seriously, where is it?
Even the iPhone has a camera.
That feature would probably have sold it for me. I can imagine using a device such as the iPad – for Skype – that would be impressive. It would have been a point of difference and could have given those of us with an iPhone/MacBook combo a reason to grab one.
But then again, I don’t think we are Apple’s target market with this.
Don’t get me wrong, it looks beautiful, will no doubt be very polished and work flawlessly.
It’ll sell truckloads.
I just wish Apple had pushed the envelope a little more.
Maybe the next gen model might have some killer feature that will convince me otherwise.
Until then, I’ll be waiting for iPhone 4.
My 3G is getting a little rough around the edges, and despite my desire to own every Apple product on the market, my common sense and bank balance forbid it…
A quick update and another view.
@rob_sheridan I was reading the umpteenth article complaining about iPad, and left my thoughts on why I think it will succeed: http://bit.ly/cvFEO5
Great post by Jay Hollywood, here’s a snippet.
In my experience I would suggest that the idea of hiring a freelancer for your next project is not given much thought, if any at all. After all, you want the experience, and quality that only an established company can provide, right?
Wrong! Well, in the most part.
I’m sure you’re looking for all these qualities and more, but the idea that only a company can provide them is a large misconception. Freelancers often provide above and beyond the traditional business model, because they don’t have the limitations that most companies are bound by.
You should hire a freelancer for your next project, and I’ll explain why.
Recently, as another added security measure I decided to change the table prefix of my Wordpress database in MySQL. Easy enough done, log in to phpMyAdmin and change all the wp_ to, well – whateveryoulike_
For example: wp_options becomes yournewprefix_options
The only catch here is Wordpress actually saves some options using the wp_ prefix – within those aforementioned tables.
So, try logging in to wp-admin and you’ll get a ‘You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page’.
A little annoying, considering you can still use the front end of your site without issue.
The fix is to change the offending prefixes in _options, and _usermeta
What you’re looking for is _user_roles (in the _options).
_capabilities, _user_level and possibly _autosave_draft_ids (in the _usermeta).
Once you have updated your prefixes here, you’ll be able to log back in without a problem.
Quick micro-blog here, but useful and important information.
Upload an .htaccess file to the wp-admin folder within your Wordpress installation, then restrict access based on IP address, like so;
AuthType Basic
order deny,allow
deny from all
# whitelist home IP address
allow from 00.000.000.00
# whitelist work IP address
allow from 00.000.000.000
Replacing 00.000.000.000 with your IP address (obviously).
To find your IP on Windows, run CMD and type ipconfig
To find your IP on Mac, run Terminal and type ifconfig