On Saturday, I had the great pleasure of doing a presentation with Erin West at the Technology and Arts Conference in Pittsburgh on leveraging Social Media. We'd never worked together before and weren't quite sure how we were going to merge together all our ideas and content into one presentation. Amazingly everything seemed to dovetail together with great ease. Maybe because Erin did that part and her gift for organizing, and getting to the core ideas is fantastic.
I also just wanted to say that Conference organizer, David Dombrosky had the great wisdom to move the conference out of the CMU campus and down to the Hilton hotel. That move transformed a really bad thing into a really good thing. Lots of room and space and time for networking, and learning. As David says, lots of things he'll do differently next year, but he's really on the right track!
So here is our presentation. Feel to use with attribution.
I had the great pleasure of talking with Allegra Burnette, Creative Director of Digital Media at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Allegra and her department oversee all the ‘public facing’ media at the Museum which includes the design and production for the Museum's Web site, MoMA.org, as well as interpretive kiosks and displays. Their focus has been on developing the experience for the online visit, as well as the visit to the museum.
Audio Tours and iTunes U Using iTunes U to extend network and reach - 20,000 downloads a month
As a result of a Bloomberg Grant, MoMA has been able to make its audio programs available for free, including online for download without being in conflict with any revenue stream. Most museums have to create new content for the web because they have to charge a fee for their audio tours.
Says Burnette,
“The grant from Bloomberg not only enabled us to offer the audio program for free within the Museum, but it provided the opportunity to repurpose our audio tours for use online. What this means in part is that you can download the programs to your ipod and bring it with you during your visit or listen at home. We recently extended this initiative by working with Apple and becoming part of their educational program, iTunesU, which was recently expanded when it became part of the iTunes application.
Initially iTunes U was a way for colleges and universities to make lectures and material available through the iTunes interface. In October Apple extended the format to include cultural institutions, and MoMA was in the first group of non-universities to be featured. What that allows us to do is to create an ongoing archive of different content, from our past and present audio programs, to featured lectures and other public programs, and includes both video and audio. It also allows us to link back to additional resources available on MoMA.org.”
FINDING iTUNES U
You can find iTunes U, by opening up the iTunes application and opening iTunes Store if it’s not already open. iTunes U is at the bottom of the iTunes Store menu. MoMA can be found in the “Beyond Campus” Category on the lower right portion of the screen. Sometimes it’s also featured in the graphics in the center section.
“Its been great”, continues Allegra, “We’ve had a lot of people get the audio from MoMA.org, but it also really expands the audience for that material and gets it to an audience we are really trying to reach – educators and students.
The audio tours as well as other material is in the iTunes U. You can listen online or download it.
That’s been one of our big focuses - making sure we are reaching beyond our website and reaching our audience where they happen to be. In the case of students, and educators and scholars, they’re starting to use iTunes U for courses and as a research tool.
What’s nice about this is that we can specify the links here, so for example the guides for teachers or things that we’ve added can link back to materials we have. There’s other supporting links. So its a way to broaden where the content goes but also to say, ‘Hey, if you want more information its available here on MoMA.org.’”
Update 3-13-08
Since they launched in October 2007, they've had about 20,000 downloads a month, which includes anything from full video to short audio clips.
Red Studio & Student Created Podcasts
Participatory Culture - Engaging Students
Red Studio is a project where groups of teens are working with educators at the museum and creating their own podcasts. So far there have been 3 groups of teens working specifically on creating audio podcasts- groups of high school students that work for a 6-8 week period on a project. The first group was experimental to see how the project could work. Students come in and work with educators and someone from Acoustiguide, the audio company MoMA works with. They teach the students about creating audio programs, and the kinds of things they need to think about. Students pick works they are interested in, research them, do the audio, learn how to edit it, and do all the nuts and bolts of the process. Burnette is enthusiastic about the project:
“It’s great. They bring their own take to it, but they have also been engaged and learn about how a professional process works. The result is a looser feeling project then what we get with some of the other audio programs but it still has a basis in teaching at the museum.”
There is a whole Red Studio site for teens, with other activities. So some of the students have been working on the podcasts and some are doing other projects like interviews with artists that are turned into videos.
You Tube Channel
From Video Contest to Time Lapse Photography
MoMA also recently started a YouTube Channel. For a recent popular video for their Richard Serra exhibition, they used time-lapse photography to capture the entire installation process.
Currently there are about 37 videos up now, as well as some film trailers promoting MoMA’s film program.
“It started with an online contest with the ‘Residents’. They had a song that we (MoMA and the Residents) both posted, and then people could make their own video to go with the song. The judges were the ‘Residents’ Band and the curator for the film retrospective at the Museum. The finalists were posted on YouTube and screened as part of the retrospective of the ‘Residents’ Films at MoMA. That was our first exploration into using YouTube, which has since grown to our own channel with close to 40 videos currently.”
'Home Delivery' - and MoMA’s version of BLOGGING
A fun project coming up is ‘Home Delivery’ – about prefab architecture. Five prefab houses are going to be installed in the empty lot next to the museum as part of its exhibition.
Architects are working on their projects at their various factories and then will bring them in to be installed. Each architect will capture the whole process in blog ‘journals’. The postings will include images, video or text.
Says Allegra, “We’re not doing blogs in the tradition sense of an ongoing conversation from a single point of view, but using it in a different way to show the multiple streams of production on the project happening simultaneously. It’s going to be a big experiment as there are many unknowns in the whole process of setting up this exhibition.”
The Right Tool For The Right Project - Second Life - Build or Visit?
Allegra talks about the approach to web interactions....
“A lot of it is thinking about where people are going and how we meet them in that space, not for the sake of technology but which format makes the right sense. YouTube made sense for the ‘Residents” and a type of blog format is what’s going to work for ‘Home Delivery’. But it’s important to us to match the content, the goals, and the technology in a way that they all are able to play off of and support each other.”
Paola Antonelli, curator in the Architecture and Design Dept, hosted an event in 2nd Life not long ago. But rather then try to reproduce the Museum in 2nd life, MoMA felt that hosting an event made more sense. As Burnette notes,
“Somebody like the San Francisco Exploratorium is doing a lot in Second Life. For them it makes so much sense to have a space there, because so much of what they are doing is very hands on and fits, like their 3D activities or flying around planets. For now, event-based initiatives is what we have been focusing on in this space, but who knows where this could lead?”
‘Design and the Elastic Mind’ and Twittervision:
I initially contacted Allegra because of an email blast I’d gotten from Biz Stone. I almost never read them, but for some reason I opened this one last week...
Twitter at the MoMA
Twittervision, a popular Twitter API project, is included in a show at the New York Museum of Modern Art titled "Design and the Elastic Mind." The show explores the relationship between science and design and is open from February 24 to May 12, 2008.
Twittervision, created by Dave Troy is this cool little app that’s a mashup between google maps and Twitter, where you can see twitter posts in real time mashed up onto where in the world they are coming from.
Troy has also created another version called Flickrvision that mashes google maps with photos that have been uploaded to the Flickr photo-sharing site.
These are part of the ‘Design and The Elastic Mind’ exhibit also curated by Paola Antonelli, It is a fascinating look at the intersection of design, technology and science, how they come together and how they play off of each other. The exhibit contains an online piece that captures images and videos from some of the exhibits at the MoMA.
The exhibit includes all sorts of intriguing items, from the video project called ‘Lightweeds’ - of plants that grow and respond based on the weather outside, to the ‘Shadow Monsters’ – which takes your image and then adds ‘monsters’ to it.
Allegra says... “So many of these objects – some of them may not be so eye catching initially, but each as a story about why they are there...” and they look way cool.
Shelly Bernstein, Manager of Information Systems at the Brooklyn Museum shared some of her insights and approaches to the social network world with me recently. (Thank you to Elena Park at the Met for pointing me here!!)
Some of the key ideas that surfaced are:
Web communities are about communities (not necessarily marketing opportunities)
Be creative and flexible and …
Find the right activity for the right community
Street ‘credibility’ - walking the talk
Work and develop your social web presence organically
Finish what you start – (or don’t start)
Align your activities with your mission
Here’s how they’ve been doing this.
Web Communities are Communities In 2006 the museum began to look around the web trying to understand what ‘community’ meant in that medium. Because the Museum’s institutional mission is centered around ‘the visitor experience and community,’ this was a key issue. They found that these communities on the web were ‘real’ communities like MySpace , Friendster, and Flickr. Says Bernstein,
“We thought that just like how we extend ourselves in our own backyard, we should do that online as well. We started to participate in the communities and the first thing that became clear is that these are real communities, and not necessarily marketing opportunities. For example, when we’re on Flickr, we answer questions, make sure comments get to the right people, and try to upload interesting content that people care about and really want to see.”
Be creative and flexible and … Just Do It Since there was a freeze on the current site spending at the time, they looked at what could be done elsewhere that would be dynamic and interesting. They looked at each community and tried to understand what that community was about and what would be the right thing to do for that community.
FLICKR - Find the right activity for the right community
In summer of 2006 the Brooklyn Museum did a show on Graffiti. “We had a canvas show of graffiti canvasses from our collection.” Continues Bernstein, “When it was installed, a blank wall was put up in the middle of the gallery where people could tag the wall. The changing nature of it was the very nature of graffiti - it would get covered over and covered over because there was so much traffic. Weekly we took pictures of this ever-changing wall and posted it to Flickr.
At the same time, we did an ‘interactive’ where people could take photos of graffiti in Brooklyn and post them on our Flickr profile. People were seeing the real theme that was happening in the street, and at the same time seeing the theme that was happening in the gallery, in addition to the works of art that were in the show.”
Another neat tool was an online drawing application to make virtual graffiti.
That is such a great example of what web 2.0 really means: participatory culture!
Later when they did a Ron Mueck exhibit this last fall, they took behind the scenes photos of Mueck loading in the art. It was hughly popular on Flickr. It goes back to the concept of posting content that people find interesting and engaging, rather then strict marketing.
“Similarly when we started our blog,” says Shelley, “the initial blogs were just a way to put up our postcards. When we really started to blog we turned around and said that wasn’t really interesting. We began to open up the internal process of the museum and provide content that people care about.”
Electronic Comment Book in the Gallery - Street ‘credibility’ - walking the talk
The idea of community has its roots in their gallery. For a long time they have had “Community Voice Labels.” They would get quotes from visitors from the community, and these would be put on the wall, next to the official label. It has a physical presence. Now they have an electronic comment book both in the gallery and online at the same time.
“‘Street cred’ … it’s not marketing, it’s community. It’s making that commitment, and if you make that commitment your audience, I hope will see it. And then you get credibility and they care. We see it in our testimonials.”
Statistics for sites like Flikr and YouTube show that fewer then 1% actually participates in adding content. The rest are just looking. The participation is building. Bernstein says that, “We’re half way into the show and already have 300 comments. We’re building an audience. If you look at some of our older shows, we had fewer comments. This looks good to us.”
Finish what you start – (or don’t start)
“It’s a sizable commitment. If people are going to do this it’s a real commitment, and once you’ve jumped in, you have to keep on going. You have to have the time and commitment to do this right, otherwise, don’t do it at all.”
Bernstein notes, “Someone contacts us and says ‘We want to do a Myspace page just for this show.’ I ask them ‘Why? You spend this effort to build an audience and then just leave them.’ It makes no sense.”
It’s a community effort within the museum to build and maintain their social and web activities. Much of the Flickr content is provided by the education department, interns, and other staff, though all is updated by the IT department. The blog is different because there are many authors and its a direct publish - it doesn’t go through the Editorial, or Public Information Departments, but trust that the authors will follow the policies that have been set up. For projects that are directly related to exhibitions, the curators, the interpretive materials manager, and education are all involved.
ArtShare on FaceBook-Work and develop your social web presence organically
The Brooklyn Museum just developed a new application for FaceBook called ArtShare. This seemed like the right thing to do to engage with their community on this social site. ArtShare allows people to take the art they like and put it on their profile. The application is open and other Museums are using it to add art from their collections. In fact artists are encouraged to upload their own work too.
“The ideas often come up organically, we look at the exhibition schedule and talk about what might be appropriate. We have a conversation (internally), and then maybe come back to it a week or two later. The FaceBook idea came up really quickly, and we decided to do it. Almost all these things happen pretty fast and pretty organically. And I hope that that also comes across because it’s something that we try to do really hard here.”
VIDEO COMPETITON on YouTube - Align your activities with your mission “…Dedicated to the primacy of the visitor experience…”
As with the other social networking sites, the team asked “What was the right kind of thing for YouTube?” “You have to define what the community is interested in and do that as opposed to constantly pushing your own stuff,” says Shelley. While they do have their own content there, they feel it’s really also about what other people produce. “Its funny,” says Shelley, “when you look at the videos that were part of the competition, they have way more hits than anything we put on YouTube.”
Bernstein is doing a great job on the transparency side too. Here are some pointers on the lessons learned from their video competition.
And let me know if you are doing something interesting and I'll write about it here!
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