Planning the Future of Museum Mobile Experiences @ Tate

Many of you may know that the IMA has been really active in building mobile content for our main website, our special exhibitions, and 100 Acres.  One of the things I love about working at the IMA is that we always try to give a little love back to our museum buddies when we undertake new projects.  That’s why we’ve made all the software for these mobile experiences available for free to anyone who’d like to play around with them.

While I’m happy that many museums can pick these tools up and use them for their own content, it won’t be the right solution for everyone.  In fact, it only solves just part of the problem.

One of the things we talked a lot about this year at the conference was the need for a common standard for the mobile tours that so many museums are creating.  The danger with such a quickly changing technical playing field is that the choices we make today will certainly be different this time next year.  We risk losing the investment in content we are making today if we don’t anticipate and plan for the changes that we know are coming.

That’s why a group of us (museums, vendors, and other experts) met together after the conference was over to begin to plan and document a potential standard for the mobile content we’re creating.  We had some great conversation and have a good start on some common language that will be really useful as we move forward together.

To keep the fire burning a bit and to hopefully engage all of you – dear reader – in some useful conversation, I’ve put together what I think are:

5 Ingredients Required for a Successful Mobile Standard

1. Simplicity – Let’s face it, there are a lot of standards proposed in the world that are rarely used to solve real problems.  I’m a firm believer in fact that a standard is only “standard” in as much as people use it.  Keeping it simple is important to ensure that the standard can be easily understood in one sitting, can be easily implemented by museums and vendors, and can easily integrate with museums’ existing tools.
2. 80% Rule – Not that we’re underachievers, but shooting for a comprehensive standard is the quickest way to ensure failure.  With technology changing so quickly, seeking to cover only 80% of the most common types of content and tours might allow us to actually finish and put this standard to use (see rule #1)
3. Extensibility – If we are not going to shoot for 100% coverage in our standard, then it will be important that users have some easy way to add their own “secret sauce” to the mix without breaking the rules.  All the successful standards efforts I know of include some way to grow and adapt to changes. Think about the ways we’ve seen the HTML and CSS standards grow and change over time. As we get smarter and smarter about the ways we want to create mobile content, we’ll certainly need to adapt our initial version of a standard to be smarter too.
4. Smart People – Speaking of smart… team work and contributions from  really smart people will certainly be the make-or-break ingredient that determines whether we can succeed in creating this standard.  Would you please consider being involved with us? Don’t feel that you have to be a standards expert in order to contribute something valuable to the mix.  In fact, very few of us are standards experts, and we could really use your best ideas to make this thing work!  I’ll share some specific ways you can help at the end of this article.
5. Determination – Success in this area will require some real commitment on the part of museums and vendors to make it all work.  The standard will require some early adopters to take the plunge and use this standard in practice to sort out all the kinks.  The IMA is willing to do this, and I hope that a lot of you will be too. It may take us a little while to see the fruits of our labor, but it would seem silly to keep investing the amount of money and effort we are already pouring in without at least giving it our best attempt.

How can you get involved?

If you’re interested in learning more, you can track our progress on the Museum Mobile Wiki here: http://wiki.museummobile.info/standards.  You can also read the notes from our first meeting in London.  We’ll be updating and refining those notes as we go, so stay tuned for more information.  Please add comments or thoughts to those pages with any questions or ideas you might have.  You can also track the current version of the TourML XML Standard here: http://wiki.museummobile.info/museums-to-go/products-services/tourml.  Those schema documents will be changing soon to reflect the initial conversations from the London meeting.

Most of All

Come to the next edition of the Museum Mobile Summit to be held on October 27, 2010 in Austin, TX.  This meeting is free and we hope you will attend.  Please let me know if you plan to be there so we can have enough chairs!  The US version of this meeting will continue where the UK summit left off and will align nicely with the MCN Annual Conference that week as well!

Thanks! -Rob

In case you haven’t heard yet, we’re searching for a blogger. (See instructions for submission.) So far, we’ve received nearly 20 submissions and each is pretty darn good. It’s going to be a difficult process of narrowing down the field. However, I believe that the IMA’s Social Media Committee of Excellence is up for the task, and we hope that our blog readers will in turn be up for the challenge of voting for their favorite in the coming weeks.

Blogging isn’t easy. At least not for me. I’ve been doing it for nearly 3 years (see my first blog) – since the beginning of the IMA blog (read the first post ever) – and honestly, every post is a challenge. Finding a topic and a point of view  is time consuming and hard.

If you’re thinking about blogging for yourself or for the IMA, here are some great tips that I’ve found online:

• Write a Blog You’d Want to Read
• Ten Tips for Writing a Blog Post
• Ten Secrets for Writing Good Blog Posts

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ArtBabble Video: The Mummification Process

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Winter by L. Clarence Ball

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MuseumNext: Robert Stein from Indianapolis Museum of Art will be joining us for MuseumNext to talk about Artbabble – http://www.museumnext.org

Saying that transparency is a “good idea” is not enough to address concerns that many museums have about sharing  information in this way.  Today, we’ll spend some more time examining a few reasons why museum administrators should seriously consider an open approach to transparency as a strategic choice in running the museum.

Again, please chime in with thoughts / questions / analogies / etc…  Your thoughts really add to and enrich the conversation.  Do you think this would work in your museum?  What would be the biggest concerns that would arise?

Reasons for Transparency: The Internet Will Out You

Since a common counter argument to efforts for Transparency is the impact of information sharing on the museum’s brand and reputation, it is useful to explore this in the context of today’s realities. Seen initially in the rise of the blogosphere and more recently in the emergence of micro-blogging and real-time search, the pace of information creation and the ease of access to this information has changed the ways in which a museum’s brand and reputation are perceived in the media and online. The advent of the real-time web means that the invested public frequently has as much input into a museum’s online reputation as media professionals do.  An increasingly information-savvy audience is becoming more and more sophisticated in their ability to decipher fact versus spin as they surf this info-sphere. Author Clive Thompson highlights the impact of these facts on Transparency in his article for WIRED Magazine,

“But here’s the interesting paradox: The reputation economy creates an incentive to be more open, not less. Since Internet commentary is inescapable, the only way to influence it is to be part of it. Being transparent, opening up, posting interesting material frequently and often is the only way to amass positive links to yourself and thus to directly influence your Googleable reputation.”  - Clive Thompson, “The See-Through CEO”, WIRED Magazine – Issue 15.04, March, 2007.

This reality is not restricted only to government and for-profit corporations to deal with, but in fact, has already reached deeply into the way that museums and non-profit institutions operate in modern culture. “There is no outside world anymore, just a world–one that is blogged, Facebooked, Twittered, and utterly porous. The extent to which we can control our image is directly proportionate to our honesty about ups and downs in a context that we can to some degree define” points out Maxwell Anderson, The Melvin & Bren Simon Director and CEO of the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

A common reaction and perhaps our gut response is to see Transparency as just another public relations tool which can be employed to enhance an institution’s brand and reputation in the public’s eye.  While efforts in Transparency can have a positive impact on a museum’s reputation, that’s not the point says Anderson, “To view a dashboard primarily as a PR tool is to miss entirely the point of Transparency, which is to influence contemporary organizations to act with greater responsibility.“ Likewise, author Thompson points out that, “Putting out more evasion or PR puffery won’t work, because people will either ignore it and not link to it – or worse, pick the spin apart and enshrine those criticisms high on your Google list of life.”

Reasons for Transparency: Impact on Mission and Performance

“I don’t think it’s entirely a coincidence that, at a time when new media technologies are changing the rules of journalism, companies are placing a new emphasis on Transparency. Access to, and distribution of, information is being rapidly democratized and smart companies know to get out ahead of this trend. However, as with many corporate buzzwords (e.g., “quality” and “innovation”), the concept is suffering from inflation as too many companies claim “Transparency” as part of their identity without really walking the talk.” -Mark Hannah, “Transparency as a Principle not a Tactic”, PBS.org, January 7, 2009

It is a natural tendency to promote what is good about our institutions and hide what is not. As professionals, we’ve been conditioned over many years to treat the internet as just another communications medium, but in fact it’s not.  What does it take for a museum to begin the adoption of transparent methods and attitudes without falling into thinking of Transparency as just another PR tool, and what are the advantages of this strategy that might compel institutions to make the leap?

Museums are mission-driven organizations. For a museum, success cannot be measured in financial terms alone.  Sometimes – in service to our mission – museums make decisions which would play very poorly on Wall Street. However, these very decisions are those that set us apart most clearly from the for-profit world and offer us a chance to communicate with our constituents about our mission and about the unique and important place museums hold in our communities.

It is safe to say that museums spend large amounts of time and money every year on strategic planning – and for good reason.  A healthy and vibrant strategic plan is an invaluable tool to use in divining which activities we should pursue and which we should not.  The choices we make about which activities to forgo often say more about our strategic purpose than those we choose to pursue.  A common thread among many museums seems to be an addiction to an over-abundant array of worthwhile programs and activities. Solid strategic planning helps us focus activities on those which will achieve a measurable impact for the mission of the institution and result in long-term progress towards those stated goals.

Museums face difficult challenges when trying to measure whether or not they are being successful.  Success cannot be measured solely by the size of their endowments, attendance figures, or recent coverage in the press. Unlike their for-profit counterparts – where profit/loss statements can ultimately separate the winners and losers – a museum’s success has much more to do with achieving its mission and its degree of impact within the community.  Defining what success looks like and the establishment of benchmarks for comparison is absolutely vital to achieving a continuous improvement to goals and success over the long term. In his 2004 paper entitled “Metrics of Success in Art Museums”, Maxwell Anderson points out that “The root of the problem is that there is no longer an agreed-upon method of measuring achievement” and proposes several sets of measurements by which museums might gauge their success over time. Of course, the task of defining and agreeing on common metrics to be used across institutions seems to be a daunting task, however Anderson highlights the fact that, “While many challenges beset art museum leaders today, finding a way to measure performance is accordingly among the field’s most urgent.” and, “Without generally accepted metrics, arts organizations will have more and more trouble making a case for themselves.”

Choosing such a set of primary metrics for your institution can help to clarify and codify the relationship between your organization’s mission and its strategic plan.  These conversations are perhaps the most important discussions that could possibly be had among senior management executives and board members. As Andrew Taylor points out in his blog the Artful Manager,

“Of course, such systems [dashboards] raise a rather vexing challenge: what, exactly, are the few key indicators you would need to watch to monitor your success? It’s this question that actually proves to be more effective than the dashboard tool itself. To know what you should monitor, you need to know what you’re trying to do, and you also have to define what success looks like (more people? happier people? more art? better reviews? prolific artists?).” - Andrew Taylor, “Keeping an Eye on Dashboards”, The Artful Manager Blog, October 20.

It is important to note that this is a point at which the notion of Transparency and Metrics of Success in your museum are very closely related.  Anderson’s paper makes a convincing argument regarding the measurement of those efforts which are the most important to meeting our mission objectives.  Furthermore an establishment of appropriate metrics and benchmarks can have tangible benefits for museum operation.  Author Jason Saul illustrates this point in his book on benchmarking for non-profits,

“Thus, benchmarking has many direct and indirect benefits: increasing the impact of mission-related activities, raising internal standards, improving performance, attracting more funding, uncovering (and fixing) hidden weaknesses, and overall, improving the public face of the organization.” – Jason Saul, Benchmarking for nonprofits: how to measure, manage, and improve performance (Fieldstone Alliance, 2004) pg 12.

If these benchmarks or metrics are indeed the key drivers of our success, is it not also the case that these are the same facts and figures we should be making available to our constituents? By so doing, we begin to build an ongoing trust based on measurable fact and open a door to rational and informed conversations about why continued support of our museum is so vital.

Unfortunately, choosing the statistics and deciding to share them is not enough. Our museums are composed of an amalgam of individuals from many different social, educational, and professional backgrounds. Many of whom are extremely intelligent and passionate about their service to our institutions. Their daily choices, attitudes and activities are required to actually put these strategies and metrics into action and achieve the institution’s mission.  We cannot succeed in achieving our mission without the buy-in and understanding of these key staff members.

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ArtBabble Video: Creation of a Tibetan Mural

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