This is a great thread, and one that is of current relevance to many of us,
I think.
At the moment I'm soliciting case studies, informal experiences and wishes
and desires from anyone in the sector who wants to use more informal
socially-inspired ways to interest with audiences online; it's part of
ongoing research commissioned by Renaissance West Midlands.
I'm looking into museum and gallery use of Facebook and other SN tools; my
early doors instincts are that smaller regional museums seem to be turning
to sites like Facebook, and to blog applications such as Blogger and
Wordpress, because they just can't get hands upon simple online CMS-driven
websites at a low cost. It's something we all need, and the morphing of blog
software like Wordpress into more conventional web publication systems
evidences some of these suppositions, I think.
What's interesting from this thread is how we seem to be perceiving the blog
space as being 'friendlier' than a conventional museum website. Why does
this have to be so? Surely if the same people that make the museum website
make the museum blog, it'll be infused with the same voice, and have a
similar user-appeal? Can the 'normal' museum webpage not be set aside from,
say, the collection pages and given a more user-centric aspect? Maybe.
There's another interesting aspect to off-the-peg blog suites, which is
shared with Facebook; and that is that it's a much more connected, tagged,
tracked back publishing space. It must be a good thing if people in the
sector start to make pages and posts that then get tagged and discovered in
a much more connected digital place. We'll be learning about curating the
meaning of our content more in this kind of digital landscape.
Enough from rainy Brighton; for my Renaissance research, I'd love to hear
more from any MCG members who are thinking about Facebook use, or who have
user experiences from the front line of FB-land.
Jon
-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Rick
Lawrence
Sent: 16 January 2009 15:16
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Do any council run museums have blogs?
Hi Perry
At RAMM we have decided to use a blog to present a more informal face of the
museum, and try to communicate with our public in a conversational tone
rather than the more formal tone of our official print and web products. We
also wanted the flexibility to respond to what people are interested in
knowing about.
We wanted to blog, post photos and videos, have people tell us about their
experience of events and the museum, and try to reach new audiences. Given
our limited resources in terms of staff time we decided to use a Facebook
page, using the notes feature for blogs, as it would let us do all of this
on one site instead of checking several.
We have a group of staff working on this to spread the work out, involve our
enthusiastic staff, and avoid it becoming part of one person's job. We also
want a variety of voices on the site. We used a Google site to coordinate
our work as we are spread across several locations.
Following approval by our management team in September last year we then
needed approval from three parts of our council: Audit, IT, and
Communications. Audit agreed promptly and I have a meeting arranged with IT
this month to agree security requirements and what IT resources we need. I
am awaiting a communication from our communications colleagues.
Whilst waiting to meet with IT and for communications we have used the time
to create initial content.
Feel free to contact me if I can help further.
Regards
Rick Lawrence
Digital Media Officer
Royal Albert Memorial Museum
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