It’s taken a few days, but I think I’ve finally processed some of what I heard at MuseumNext. This post sums up a  few key themes and take aways.

National Museum of Scotland

1. Museums need to get over themselves!

Museums are vain, they act like politicians, and they love to have meetings. stop having so many meetings! These were the wise words of Geer Oskam from the Dutch organisation N8, the people who run the world famous Museum Night. Run by young people aged 26 and under, N8 ensures that it remains both relevant and innovative by changing its entire staff body every 3 years. N8’s human resource policy is in stark contrast to the wider museum sector which often attracts professionals who stay at 1 or 2 museums for their entire career.

Rich Mintz from Blue State Digital (the people that ran Obama’s digital campaign) stated the obvious, but often overlooked point ‘no body cares about museums as much as you do!’. Museum people think about museums all day every day, about new technology, about content and engagement…but so often we forget that our visitors don’t. Our visitors have real lives, they have real problems, they have jobs and children; their time is precious and we should remember this in everything we do.

Shelly Bernstein  reminded us all that ‘its not about ego’, she talked about Brooklyn museums work to add to or create Wikipedia files. Everything museums do is branded, so it’s a difficult ideological shift for museums to start carrying out development work on platforms that are totally distinct from the official museum platform. Taking this holistic approach can bring rewards back to a museum. The Brooklyn museum now have i-pads with access to Wikipedia in their galleries- the result visitors spend on average 7 minutes looking at these,  compared with 30-40 seconds spent looking at traditional interpretation panels.

Image: Wikipop iPads and Visitor Metrics Brooklyn Museum

2. Museums need to realise they only have 5 seconds to engage their visitors….

Visitors want to know: Why are you reaching out to them? What do you want me to do right now? What Will happen next?

In the context of meta data games, Mia Ridge talked about ways to lower barriers to facilitate visitor engagement. Her message was simple ‘make it easy for people to get involved’. Mia suggested getting people interested by providing a narrative that they can relate to, i.e.  ‘help, it’s this curators 1st day on the job but shes accidentally deleted all the collections data. Can you help her replace it?’

Nora Semel and Francesca Merlino from the Guggenheim talked about using established platforms as a means to lower institutional barriers to engagement. They discussed their project with Youtube, Youtube Play a biennial of creative video. When they started Youtube play they expected to receive around 6,000 entries, in actual fact they received over 23,000 submissions.

3. Museums need to value their followers

Know your followers, don’t rely solely on social media monitoring tools was the message from Jim Richardson. Your own eyes can be an excellent, reliable and cost effective way to analyse your online network. Klout will tell you about your followers who are influential online, but what about your followers who seldom use Twitter but are influential journalists, artists, politicians or teachers.

Find out who your followers are, engage with them and get them to talk about you. Go as far as helping them talk about you, make it easy for them by programming exciting events, have behind the scenes tweet ups,  integrate social media sharing buttons into your webpage. If you value them, they will value you.

For more ways to engage with your followers check out my article for Arts Professional on turning digital friends, fans and followers into real world visitors ‘From virtual to reality’

I’m sure I’ll blog again about MuseumNext but for now lets conclude with the wise words of Shelley Bernstein

‘Take risks, learn from them because without risks there is no reward’

If you want to read more about MuseumNext, or to check out other blogs head over to www.museumnext.com