OK, not so much a fight, as a discussion. And when I say ‘in public’ I mean on my Facebook wall.

It all started when I retweeted @anarchivist (see below) and then it ended up on my Facebook page too. Anyway, the ‘discussion’ played out like this:

ME: I agree. RT @anarchivist hates the phrase “social media.” all online media is inherently social even if you dont want it to be.

Ben: to be social is to have an understanding or acknowledgment between two or more people. so then simply watching a movie on line would not be considered social but definitely media.
Wed at 2:33pm

ME: but what if you can comment and/or share that video with your friends using FB, Twitter, etc?
Wed at 2:41pm

Ben: that is social. but watching the movie and commenting on it are two separate things. right?
Wed at 2:56pm

ME: but the fact that it exists online DOES mean that. The fact that it has potential to be shared makes it social.
Wed at 3:50pm

The argument ended there. But did I win it?

Let’s take a look at what good old Wikipedia has to say:

Social media is online content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. Social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content; it’s a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologues (one to many) into dialogues (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers.

I agree with Ben that the simple act of watching a video online is not social. But because of the way the web had evolved,  now any media that exists online can be social media, whether it was intended to be used that way or not. An article, picture, or video is posted and you can share it numerous ways (email it, Facebook it, Twitter it, Digg it, etc.)

Or is my friend right? Are they two completely different things? Maybe the real question here is why are we so eager to label everything? The IMA is always on the look out for cutting edge ways to interact with with the public. Call them trends, call them buzzwords, call them The Next Big Thing… we’ve employed just about every ’social media’ tactic that makes sense (and it’s working!)  So maybe it doesn’t matter and if it works, it works.

I’m not sure why anarchivist’s statement and the resulting debate got me so riled up, but maybe the ‘anythings possible’ sentiment of ‘all online media is social media’ simply gives me the warm-fuzzies.

Please comment below and help me prove my friend wrong, er… help us sort things out so we can look each other in the eye again.

Even though the show has only been over for a few days now, I thought it would be interesting and a little fun to recap some of the online stuff that happened around European Design.

As for interesting, turns out the European Design exhibition website was relatively successful in terms of traffic and Google PageRank. According to Google Analytics, through the run of the show, the site welcomed nearly 30k unique vistors and beat out our last two special exhibitions, Power and Glory and To Live Forever over similar time periods. For a young site with a short span of marketing relevance, European Design was able to muster a PR of 5 before the show ended. This is a little hard to believe but we also managed to keep the site’s bounce rate below 20%. That’s awesome. Good work.

As for fun, who remembers the European Design Facebook caption contest? I know I completely forgot about it until my trusted Facebook associate, Emily, reminded me about all the good ideas she’s had and how that was one of them. Below is a notable example.

It looks like that flower is "sponge worthy"... - Jake on Facebook

As for more fun, we also started up a Flickr group that fed into the EuroDesign exhibition site. Not only did group members get to see their designs streaming through our site but we also gave away a few tickets and some cool prizes like exhibition catalogs and Design Center gift certificates. Check out the Flickr group.

While I’m a little sad to see European Design leave, I’m super excited about what new interesting and fun online stuff is going to show up for Sacred Spain. While I’m not going to make any promises, expect some Facebook activity. And since it’s all the rage, my guess is that Twitter may make an appearance. As always, if you’ve got any ideas or suggestions, let me get ‘em in the comments.

In the recent days, I have watched and listened as social media innovates political process in Iran. Twitter has been a powerful forum for a newsfeed out of the country, allowing people to photograph, video and blog about events in real time, even as more traditional journalists are being asked to leave.

Listening to a segment about it on the radio, I couldn’t help but think about the massive change to how news is found and the way crowdsourcing of information has so drastically changed the source of the news we get, and for museums, how closely this is tied to the changing face of visitor interactions through the web. Nina Simon, in this article at Museum2.0, writes,

For people who are deeply immersed in social media, social networks are already a much heavier influence on personal choices–where to visit, what concert to attend–than traditional advertising. Which means that your organization’s website–a brochure out in the wilderness of the Web–is only going to remain relevant and useful as a marketing piece if it is being referenced in the social context of your users’ lives.

Different people and institutions have found vastly different approaches to garnering information from their audiences.

Some museums have decided to use crowdsourcing, which can be appealing to visitors, in a way that is helpful to what the museum wants to accomplish. The Brooklyn Museum’s Shelley Bernstein wrote about a new project called Freeze Tag! where Brooklyn decided to utilize their loyal taggers to help control errant or incorrect information. Putting control back in the hands of the visitor can be risky, but, like Wikipedia, ultimately a project where passionate people and the wisdom of crowds wins out in the end. Brooklyn is a leader in integrating the visitor into the museums practice in innovative ways. With or without social media, how can other museums use this model to further their own goals?

Certainly, insta-media has increased the demand for transparency. Last week, Tyler Green and Christopher Knight tweeted and blogged about the dubious ethics in a private sale of works of art at the Orange County Museum of Art. These exchanges led to a heated discussion of the readers of the respected entries, including people representing both sides of the argument, and lots of scrutiny at the museum. Did the museum miss a chance to lead these discussions in the first place?

The problems start when the institution places itself on these social media sites, but don’t seem ready to hear what their devoted fan have to say. Douglas McLennan, of  Diacritical says,

…traditional PR notices are not only ineffective in this new era of many-to-many communication, but can make things worse. And what might have been a real opportunity to meaningfully engage this community has been lost.

Can a museum be listening all the time? In the world of public relations and standards, the casual conversation style of the Facebook world must seem completely alien.

The voice of the audience has never been as available to museums as it is now. Museums small and large have been all over Facebook and Twitter, my social media outlets of choice, trying to add fans and establish a voice that is cohesive with the museum’s image. Let’s imagine there is a museum out there doing it all perfectly. They generate lots of discussion and suggestions from their core audience of loyal visitors and donors…. What now? This next step is crucial and the point of getting involved in social media in the first place, and it is up to each museum.  How and when is that museum going to listen?

It’s my hope that we will continue to see the flowering of visitors being welcomed into the museum conversation, worldwide, with social media just being an example of ways to welcome them into the rest of the practices in the institution. If we want the community to value our institutions, we can strengthen the relationship by showing how much we value them.

facebook.com/imamuseum – I’m a real trooper. On Friday night, nay, Saturday morning at 12:01 am, Facebook started allowing vanity URLs. As the IMA’s main Facebook logger-in person, you know I was poised at the keyboard right before the witching hour, ready to blast-type in the nine characters that would once and for all slap the collective Facebook faces of our main IMA rivals, the museums for Internet Memes and Artifices and the Iconoclast Museum of Art. Oh yeah, I also snagged facebook.com/artbabble. For you web folk, here’s some geeky Facebook URLs for ya.

EnvironmentalGraffiti.com – Came across this page as I was doing my normal morning search for shadow art made from garbage/junk. Don’t question my queries. Anyway, I’m into clever uses of materials and space so you know my eyes were like “let’s pop out this skull” when I saw a post on their homepage about green roofs. As I’m aware, the IMA has a green roof above its parking garage. Good looking out, EnviroGraff.

BadArtists.jpg – Speaking of graffiti, as reported by CNN, “artist Banksy, famed for infiltrating museum collections without their knowledge and spray-painting public buildings around the world, is holding his first major exhibition in years.” Neat! Here’s a link to some pictures. @dincandela – Check out this show if you have the chance. It’s at the Bristol museum.

Monday Music – “Last Dance” (Demo) by The Raveonetttes.Download audio file (The%20Raveonettes%20-%20Last%20Dance%20(Demo).mp3)

Trying to keep up-to-date with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. is not a new problem.  There are entire desktop applications dedicated to aggregating this content for your consumption. Still I find myself drowned by the noise. It would be optimistic to say that a quarter of this social stream directly interests me. Additionally this content is decoupled from other forms of communication (i.e. SMS / e-mail).  These are some of the reasons why I am excited about the prospects of Google Wave.

Last week Google announced what can best be described as a communications platform.  It mixes traditional e-mail with a slew of modern features.  Real-time collaborative editing, event planning, and a game of chess are just a few of the tasks you can carry out from within the platform. — Anyone used SubEthaEdit? — The engineers developed Wave by asking themselves what e-mail would look like if it were invented today. The result is e-mail on steroids.

Where Facebook presents a view of the conversations from your hundreds of contacts, Wave focuses on conversations that you are directly involved with. You will even be able to branch new (private) conversations with whomever you wish. Conversations can be played back so late-comers can see how they evolved. How many times have you received a forward with broken fragments of conversation and you are supposed to understand all the context around it? No more my friends!

Concurrent rich-text editing in Wave

Much of Wave will be embeddable as well.  An example was shown of blog authoring from Wave.  Edits are published in real-time.  Comments on the blog are also pushed back to the wave interface in real-time. A blog author could immediately start up a conversation with a complete stranger who posts a comment on their article if they both happen to be online at the same time.

You are not bound to Google's Wave.

Another interesting note is that Google Wave is indeed a platform. An entire protocol is being developed so anyone can host their own Wave Server. Entire conversation can be held without leaving your intranet. Information only leaves your Wave host when outsiders are brought into the conversation. Still, parts of the wave that occur internally will stay internal. This platform also means we won’t be forced to consume ads down the road and we truly own the content.

If you have 80 minutes and a tolerance for poor presentation style, feel free to watch the announcement from Google I/O.

Battleship Island -  A former coal mining facilty owned Mitsubishi Motors that was at one time the most densely populated place on earth (13,000 people per square kilometer). Viceland, the web outlet of the Vice media conglomerate, takes us on a quick tour and offers up some really cool pictures of this “rotting metropolis.” For those of you that are into industrial lookin’ living spaces, check this out for sure.

Goofing Off Boasts Productivity – Another interesting study about how taking a break from work to check out the Internet is good for getting things done. I’d be curious to see the results of a study on those of us who “goof off” for a living and take breaks from goofing off by filing papers and organizing their inboxes.

$23/month iPhone plan – That would rule!

100 Awesome Facebook Apps – Because I know you love/hate a good/bad Facebook app as much as I do. Notable apps include Picasa (photo manipulation), Goodread (personal book tracking) and “What language should you learn” (self explanatory). There are 97 more for your enjoy/disdain ment.

Monday Music – “My Maudlin Career” by Camera Obscura. Title track off their new album.Download audio file (Camera_Obscura_my_maudlin_career.mp3)

Web 2.0 logos from Flickr user stabilo boss

Lucky for me, social media has become an integral part of the way museums create an interactive experience for the museum visitor, especially here at the IMA.

That said, we at the IMA would like to invite all our blog readers and fellow bloggers to peel your eyes from the computer screens for one night, and put a face to the local blogs you love to read. (Don’t worry, we’ll have wi-fi so you can live-blog and tweet to your heart’s content!)

Come one, come all...

And now, just for fun, The top signs you have a Blogging Problem: {Comment below with your own (probably more) witty ‘top signs…’}

• After 5 minutes of meeting someone you ask, “So… do you blog?”
• You make plans and decision based on whether they are ‘blog-worthy’
• You get more “approve this comment” e-mail messages than spam
• You only stay at hotels with broadband or with a Starbucks within 3 blocks
• People worry about you when you do not post for a day
• You’ve started to resemble this guy:

RSS feed tattoo from Flickr user shizhao

For more absurd blogger tattoos, click here. Obsessed with Facebook? In need of a Twittervention? You’re invited too… See you on Friday!

But it’s not only individuals using these sites. Here at the IMA, as most of you know, we embrace social media as a useful tool in reaching our audiences and fulfilling our mission. And we’re not the only ones – LACMA, SFMoMa, and Walker Art Center are just a couple of our peers actively engaging online audiences. Even the Art Institution of Chicago recently announced here, that they’ll soon be launching a Twitter account.

But as museums and museum employees continue to grow their online activity – both personal and institutional – we’re faced with the challenge of exploring policies and guidelines online activity. Should there be employee policies in place for personal use of such sites? Should museums implement a clearly detailed policy for institutional use of such sites? And if so, what would either one of these policies look like and what purposes would they serve?

In researching the topic, I can tell you for sure that there are several people asking these questions, and I can also tell you that nobody really seems to know the answers.

So what are some of the issues to think about? Well, there are a lot of them. Museum 3.0 suggests the following issues are all important in considering your strategy to online networking: technical concerns, how to archive online museum activity, implementation planning, policy development, training, and a how/why to guide for media sites.

Museum 2.0 blogger Nina Simon discusses what might be included in a social media handbook. Her list includes things like rules on what should or should not be shared, how get a new initiative approved by your manager, what is considered appropriate for internal and external distribution, and a reference guide to social sites that would include recommendations, stylesheets, etc.

While I think these are all important items to consider, I can’t help but wonder if some topics should just be covered in ongoing discussions instead of binding them into a manual. Why? Well, by the time a policy or manual was organized, there’s a pretty good chance that the certain components (like a ‘how to guide’) would already be obsolete. In other words, the web changes so much that consistent updating might become a daunting task.

Three seemingly stagnant issues that I see as most important in policy making or strategic planning for social media include: information release, content quality & content control.

Information Release – A problem might arise here when someone inadvertently releases sensitive information about the museum. An example of this might be tweeting in excitement that a new acquisition has just arrived to the dock (which might jeopardize the safety of the work), or announcing an event on your facebook page before it’s been announced by your museum. This issue is one that might arise more frequently when an organization’s employee is using a personal account that wouldn’t be filtered by a colleague. The question to be asked here is: should museums tell their employees what they can and can’t discuss on their personal sites?

The release of certain information can also be a problem even on an institutionally controlled site. For example: Let’s say Daniel, our New Media Director, comes back from Spain next week and blogs about something regarding an artist in an upcoming exhibition that he interviewed. Let’s also say that the curatorial department was waiting to release that information for whatever reason – we might have ourselves one unhappy curator, or even worse, maybe an unhappy artist. (With effective communication amongst departments, this issue should not be as difficult to manage as the issue of personal Facebook, blog or Twitter accounts).

Content Control – With so many departments/individuals managing various sites and social network accounts for the institution, who’s the gatekeeper of information? For example, if multiple writers are contributing to a blog (as is the case here at the IMA) how do you filter or should you filter content? Is there someone that gets final say on what goes up where?

Content Quality – Because it’s so easy to post things on the internet and incredibly cost efficient how does an institution refrain from overloading their audiences? Even worse, how do we keep from putting up information (that might not be very good or insightful) just because we can? Here is a short post by Matt Yglesias that suggests that while non profits are increasingly enjoying the captivity of online audiences, the quality of information on the web is a growing problem.

Like most everyone I have come across, I do not have answers to all of these questions nor do I have a suggested policy or manual. But I will leave you with some additional links that I have found useful in the discussion of social media and museums.

IMA’s Blog Guidelines – which is posted directly on our blog.

Powerhouse Museum’s 2007 Blog Policy

BBC’s social media policy – this is a good example of a fairly extensive policy.

Brooklyn Museum’s Shelley Bernstein discussed various ways to use social media sites in Where Do We Go From Here? at the 2008 Museums & the Web conference. I would be shocked if the topic of social media policies were not discussed at M&W 2009, which is here in Indy, next week.

And finally – On the lighter side, this article entitled The 14 Types of Twitter Personalities might help you pinpoint some possible problems or areas of concern for your workplace.

BrainRules.net – A companion website to a book with the same name (minus the .net). On this site, Dr. John Medina lays out “12 principles for surviving and thriving at work, home, and school.” The site is video heavy and each gets progressively more interesting. The “Stress” and “Vision” sections are standouts.

Umbrella Art – Given the weather today outside the museum, I was pleased to stumble upon a collection of umbrella art put together by crookedbrains.net. As much as I like umbrellas and how they make me think of Mary Poppins/Julie Andrews, this freezing rain nonsense is harshing the good Spring cycling vibe.

IndyCultureMatters.org – The IMA is one of the cultural institutions behind this organization and is urging its employees to take off work to attend the rally that is happening April 20 on Monument Circle.  Show your support for Indy culture and attend the rally. There is also a Facebook group.

Twitter for Plants and ArtBabble.org – Just came accross two cool examples of Twitter integration. The first was Botanicalls.com and how they are using the micro-blogging service to get status updates from plants. The second was the new ArtBabble.org page that now includes a feed of everyone on the Twitter-sphere tweeting about ArtBabble. I can’t believe I just used the word “Twitter-sphere.”

Monday Music – “The Ark” by Dr. Dog. 38 more days and we’ll have something…Download audio file (Dr.%20Dog%20-%20The%20Ark.mp3)

A snapshot from Pepsi's real-time keyword swarm from SXSW

Take half of Twitter’s activity base, bring them together and you have SXSW.  This group of people are just some of the many that are driving what we will all know as the real-time web.  To the left you can see a screen shot I took this morning from a real-time keyword swarm driven by Twitter and SXSW attendees (compliments of Phil’s Pharmacy).

Twitter has been the source of many of these popups.  You can find a real-time evolving tag cloud of what’s popular right now, or if you are a finance junkie like me, get bleeding edge news and opinion on every stock in your portfolio.  Real-time updates on the real-time web anyone?  Finally, bring them all together on your desktop with TweetDeck.

Bringing it all together with TweetDeck

Facebook has jumped on the boat as well with the recent updates to user’s profile pages.  The emphasis has moved solely to the latest updates from your friends. Video sharing site UStream.tv has pushed the envelope by offering free streaming of live video to anyone.

Facebook's recent changes to promote real-time activity

Internet users are being groomed to have an expectation of receiving information as it is generated.  In an age where e-mail is the new snail mail, could a start-up with a decent semantics engine make Reuters tremble?