To give you an overview of what someone who works in museum marketing does , I thought that I’d outline my typical day. In order to do that, I recorded my activities throughout the past Monday. While some of you were relaxing (or partying) on your Columbus Day off, I was hard at work with my fellow colleagues at the IMA.

Image taken from ugotbling.com

COLUMBUS DAY, OCTOBER 12, 2009*

8:27 Arrive at office. Plug in laptop.

8:35 Sip coffee and respond to emails sent over the weekend.

8:50 Research the 100 Acres: Virginia B. Fairbanks Art and Nature Park for IMA  Magazine article.

9:15 Write interview questions for article to send to Ed Blake, the  landscape architect for 100 Acres.

9:32 Email interview to Ed Blake.

9:37 Discuss signage in Efroymson Family Entrance Pavilion with Marketing Manager.

9:42 Register for Next Audiences Summit.

9:52 Review marketing budgets from last 2 years.

10:22 Read NYT’s article about the Louvre’s attempt to ‘Loosen Up.’

10:34 Get distracted by Jamie Oliver article in NYT’s Mag.

10:39 Review Web site content. Put together work plan to present in the afternoon’s Web team meeting.

11:22 Read Geoff Von Burg’s blog entry.

11:31 Email this week’s TV schedule for Sacred Spain commercials to Max, curator Ronda Kasl, and Nugget Factory.

11:38 Check attendance numbers from the weekend.

11:39 Organize opening weekend debrief meeting for Sacred Spain.

11:45 Polish up communication pieces for potential Winter Nights and Summer Nights media sponsorships.

12:18 LUNCH (Lean Cuisine and Fage Yogurt).

12:38 Watch Gentleman Broncos movie trailer.

12:41 Send movie trailer to Dan Dark.

12:44 Change Twitter name from @IndyArtGirl to @MegLiffick.

12:50 COFFEE.

1:00 Catch up on emails from the morning.

1:30 Web Team!

2:50 Review and edit Group Tours corporate mailer for Sacred Spain.

3:15 Respond to email from Contemporary Curator Lisa Freiman about the prestigious national award that her husband received. Congrats, Ed!!!

3:17 Create an initial inventory of marketing materials that can include media/corporate sponsor recognition during 2010.

4:02 Continue to draft 2010 marketing plan for Public Programs.

4:48 Brainstorm about communication ideas for TAP.

5:21 Respond to remaining emails.

5:42 Leave office. Head to gym.

6:13 Check email while running on treadmill at gym. DANGEROUS!

6:16 Attempt to respond to an email while on treadmill at gym. EVEN MORE DANGEROUS!

8:15 Read IBM’s social media guidelines while watching Will Ferrell on Man Vs. Wild.

8:30 Close laptop. No more work for the day.

*Please note that I have left out some details such as phone conversations, specific email correspondences, bathroom breaks, and Facebook and Twitter checks.

Next up (Oct. 28), I’ll tackle the ginormous topic of branding a museum. Stay tuned.

The Pharmacy prescribes the following links to combat Monday online anemia.

www.lifeadvicefromoldpeople.com

Blog: Life Advice from Old People

If this doesn’t get you to crack a sentimental smile on a Monday, then nothing will. You won’t find any potty-mouth one-liners here, but you will find sweet, insightful and real interviews and videos from the wisest among us.

ArtBabble Video: Smarthistory presents:Leonardo da Vinci: The Last Supper

IMA Work of Art:

Soup tureen, cover, and liner from the Branicki Service by Jean-Baptiste-Claude Odiot

Tweet:
linrose Went to sleep in Indy, woke up in W-Indy. Yikes! Blowing so hard it woke me up in the middle of the night.

I have the distinct pleasure of being in Daniel’s class this fall, Museums and Technology.  While it is surprising for my classmates that I would take a class about something I do already, I am excited for the opportunity to explore more thoroughly the meaning of technology for the museum experience and how the visitor is affected by these changes. I see continual parallels between issues encountered with visitors in physical space and issues we are encountering all over again in our digital spaces. I’ve talked about Twitter before and I have been thinking about how it is harnessed by museums and where we are going wrong.

We were talking about Twitter again in a recent class, more specifically what we consider to be a successful museum tweet, and why. It’s very hard to nail down, and even harder to do. The main reason is because it’s so hard to avoid becoming a marketing ploy, something which happens without rapt attention. A museums use of twitter now stands as an analogy for the way the actual museum interacts with its visitors and the traditional barrier between the inner workings of an institution and the public at large. So many museums need to release their stranglehold on twitter feeds to actually let interesting information get out.

I was at the Indianapolis Greek Festival this past weekend, and I couldn’t help to think that they were doing something right.

There were throngs of people, tons of Greek food, everyone jostling and yelling and having a great time, but here’s the part that baffled me- you had to pay to get in, and the food was delicious, but quite pricey. What is the Holy Trinity parish doing that connects so much with their audience that museums cannot seem to do? I think we can be the Agora marketplace discussed by Dr. Steven Zucker (@drszucker) and Dr. Nancy Proctor (@nancyproctor) a vibrant place for community and discussion, in the same way that the Greek festival is. I think the problem is balance- how do we sell ourselves as experts in our field while maintaining that we want everyone else’s opinion, too?

Some people are getting it right, figuring out how to sift through all the noise and clutter to connect with their audience while maintaining their voice. One such person is the British musician Imogen Heap, who felt a divide between herself and her fans before she started to utilize blogs and Twitter, not dissimilar to the separation between and institution and it’s community. In a recent interview with Melissa Block on NPR, she describes the divide quite succinctly. She then discusses what it’s like to have that direct connection throughout the process of making her music.

It’s been so amazing. I’ve always struggled with this barrier that I felt like I’d had up until blogging came along. Just one comment from somebody really sparks something in me. It doesn’t need to be this huge wall between me and the listeners anymore. I really thrive on that.”

@ImogenHeap gets it- the audience has become part of the process, and there’s no going back.

The Pharmacy prescribes the following links to combat Monday online anemia.

Katheats.com

Blog: Kath Eats Real Food

Who doesn’t love some good food porn? Kath posts gorgeous photos of everything (literally everything) she eats to her blog to illustrate that eating healthy can be delicious.

ArtBabble Video: YBCA Inside Out: A good idea? The Pilot

YBCA (new comers to ArtBabble) has a video series that documents the behind-the-scenes of their workplace. Think ‘The Hills’ for the museum world.

IMA Work of Art: UP7 (II Piede)

UP7 (II Piede), 1969

Tweet:

mooshinindy Yes. While #gencon is awesome…#blogINDIANA is where it’s at. (Besides we’re all going to Gen Con tonight. WHEE!!)

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.

The Pharmacy prescribes the following links to combat Monday online anemia.

CoolHunting.com

Blog: CoolHunting.com

Matt is a connoisseur of all things cool, so I wasn’t surprised when he recommended this blog to me. ‘Cool Hunting is a daily update on ideas and products in the intersection of art, design, culture and technology…‘  I really dig the gift guide.

ArtBabble Video: Robots: Evolution of a Cultural Icon

If you haven’t heard the news, ArtBabble just launched 10 new museums with lots and lots of new videos. One of our favorites from the newest batch is from The San Jose Museum of Art. And it’s about robots. Check it out below.

IMA Work of Art: The Two Sisters

The Two Sisters or The Serruys Sisters by Georges Lemmen

Tweet:

“Introducing the Hello Kitty Taser. I am both immediately horrified and filled with want.”
@bwyman

If you haven’t heard of Bloggers Anonymous, it’s an informal get together the IMA blog team puts together every couple of months to meet people from the local blogosphere, and put a face to a name with the local arts scene. Who gets to come? We  reached out to the official museum blog’s blogroll, which keeps us up to date on local happenings and includes greats like On the Cusp and MW Capacity. Also, our team is collectively connected to a wide array of people around Indianapolis and beyond, and we each follow blogs and people on twitter depending on our own personal interests. We decided to cast the net wide and get them all here to talk about social media and how they are using it in their daily lives, including blogs, facebook, and twitter.

The exciting twist for this event is we are throwing it right before the IMA screens two movies. You’ve probably been to Summer Nights, the IMA’s outdoor summer movie series. Yesterday marked the start of another event happening this year at the IMA, the Indianapolis International Film Festival. Tomorrow’s double header includes one of the IIFF offerings, a documentary called Best Worst Movie shown in the Toby, followed closely by Troll 2 (the subject of the first movie) in the outdoor theatre. Sometimes I want a documentary, sometimes I want Italian B Horror. Tomorrow night, they’re both on the menu!

Rumor has it we have tickets to give away for the Summer Nights/IIFF double feature, so join us at 6pm outside the museum store, on the ground floor at the IMA to talk shop and then we will head to the movies. We can all relax and watch a campy horror flick, I hear there’s nothing like it for a little bonding time!

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.

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.

but does it float – Another curated blog for your enjoyment. Today’s exhibition is a set of photographs from Ed Ruscha. I like ‘em. Oh, and on a nerdy technical level, the built in autoload feature when you get to the end of the page is super slick.

Twitter Tools for Business – For the time being, Twitter is important to the people on the Internet. If you tweet and are interested in augmenting your tweeting capabilities, check out this top ten list. It’s no surprise to me that Tweetdeck and Tweetie for iPhone are on the list. However, OutTwit is a new one for me and may have my IT guy hook me up.

New Media Round Up – If you like turntables and the possibility of getting hit with virtual spittle from a beatboxing dog, check out Beatbox (thanks Kate). And if you’re into Facebook and political humor, the Atlantic’s own political cartoonist Sage Stossel has combined the two into a brilliant series of potential LOLs.

Monday Music – “Peloto” by Hyperpotamus. More beatboxing. This time from a human.Download audio file (Hyperpotamus-Peloto.mp3)