Thank you all for some excellent pointers to good references. As suspected
it's an ephemeral art trying to analyse the whole range of motivations for
people's interactions with museums, whether just online or online and in
person, and more importantly how/whether they relate. And it is perhaps
early days, even for fb.
However, there seems to be a consensus from what I have read so far that the
sheer potential of numbers makes having a fb fan page a worthwhile endeavour
(more than starting a group from anecdotal evidence). The benchmark report
recommended by Jennifer was quite interesting as it does split out some of
the 'conversion' of interest generated through facebook, and of course other
social media channels/outlets, into funding for example (not visits or
attendance at exhibitions/events, though). The individual case studies
demonstrate also that much of what you get out of it is what you put into it
which raises a lot more questions. I'm sure some more evaluation work is
still to be done on all social media outlets, but fb in particular, so will
await any more findings with interest.
While I am here I thought it apposite to this subject that Jon Pratty's
recent guest blog post on the MCG site is well worth reading. Do we need to
look outside the trad museum skills set or just identify the best writers
and creators a museum already has and deploy more of them time in web
content creation?
Thank you once again,
Tehmina
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