Rebecca Krause-Hardie

MoMA's take on Social Media - An Interview with Burnette & Samra

Allegra Burnette (Creative Director, Digital Media) and Victor Samra (Digital Media Marketing Manager) from MoMA talk about their web and social media strategies....


Allegra, when we talked about a year and a half ago, you were doing some cutting edge stuff with iTunes U, as well as a YouTube channel, Blog posts, and an interesting project with teens and podcasts.
 
Can you or Victor give us an update on some of these activities? (For example, as I recall you had over 20,000 people a month downloading your iTunesU podcasts.)

Allegra: Our iTunes U and YouTube presence continue to be very strong, but since we last spoke, we also launched a complete redesign of our website, MoMA.org, which features (among other things) an enhanced, centralized multimedia section with media widgets that can be placed throughout our site or embedded in other sites.  

[Wow! I'll say you did.  The redesign is amazing! Everyone should look and learn!]

This, and the subsequent increase in Web traffic we have been experiencing, means that more people are accessing MoMA’s media content through our own site as well as other channels like iTunes U and YouTube. In addition, we are also participating partners in ArtBabble, the art video site created by the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Our goal throughout is to create and showcase compelling resources on MoMA.org and distribute them to various other channels as appropriate. We also have an exciting series of exhibitions on view currently, a couple of which have accompanying in-depth subsites (moma.org/timburton, moma.org/bauhaus, and moma.org/gabrielorozco).

 And when we last spoke, we were talking about the architects’ blog on the Home Delivery exhibition site. Since that time, we’ve also launched Inside/Out, a MoMA/P.S.1 blog that has contributors across the museum. We’ve all been very pleased with the reaction it’s been getting, both externally and internally within MoMA. 

Those are just a couple of highlights, but there’s certainly much more!

 
I'm really interested to hear about what you've learned along the way, and how you have refined or changed your activities as a result.

Allegra: Well, the things we have learned along the way are probably too numerous to cover here—I think we learn something new each day—but I would say that the value of a great team and cross-department collaboration constantly gets reinforced. No matter the size of the institution or the resources available, there are never enough resources to do all the things that you dream of doing, but good people thinking creatively and working effectively can do great things together.
 

 

Okay, we are all completely blown away with your facebook stats. 190,000 fans!  Can you put that into context for us?  How did you get there? (in 140 characters or less :>)   [It's over 200,000 now]

Victor: The main reason, I think, is peoples’ interest in and regard for MoMA’s collection, its history, and in a sense, its “brand.” I think people want to engage with the content in MoMA’s collection and be associated with it in some way. MoMA’s collection covers disciplines that people are very passionate about: painting, drawing, prints, sculpture, design, photography, film, architecture, media and performance art. People may look to MoMA as an authority in these areas and want to take part in its communities.
 
It also helped that we merged our page with another Facebook page that a high-school student had started a month before we started ours. I got in touch with the student a little more than a year ago to offer him the content that I was posting on our page. He was then a freshman in college and more than happy for me to be admin on his page (and he subsequently came and did an internship with me this summer!). I was able to have Facebook merge the two pages last spring.
 
As well, we did run a modest cost-per-click ad campaign on Facebook for about a week a few months after we created our page, which did help get the word out about our page. Facebook ads allow you to target people by their interests, so it is an efficient way to target those who might be interested in your institution.  
 
[Here's a super interview with Victor over at Artsjournal about Twitter and FB)

 
What is your approach to facebook?  Do you have some specific goals and metrics you are trying to achieve?

Victor: Our main goal has really just been to create a space where we can interact with our audience and foster two-way conversations, and to hopefully get our content in front of people who may not be aware of MoMA’s exhibitions or collection but would be interested in them. It’s allowed us to reach out directly to where a lot of people are already, and to open a direct line of communication between them and the museum.
 
As well, Facebook and Twitter are great tools for listening to what people are saying about MoMA, whether positive or negative. These are conversations that are going to take place if we’re there or not. It’s helped us garner feedback and learn more about our audience, both online and in the museum.
 
 
Can you follow the conversations of 190,000 people, or does the '90,9,1'rule apply where only 1 percent actually participate in any meaningful way?  I guess what I'm wondering about is the 'depth' of engagement of fans, whether that be on facebook, or youtube, or twitter, or the next big thing.  (ps  what is the next big thing?)

Victor:  Since most of my day is spent on other projects, I do what time allows. For Twitter, an application like TweetDeck has been essential in helping to organize the information overload that is Twitter. I have columns in the app’s interface that list tweets mentioning “Museum of Modern Art”, “MoMA”, and, of course, “@MuseumModernArt.” It really helps in finding out what people are saying about MoMA.
 
I absolutely agree, though, that what is important here is not quantity, but the quality of engagement. That is where the ‘value’ is for an institution and its audience. That is what will create closer relationships between the two and help to create a passionate community.
 
Are there correlations between fans and visits to the museum, or is that even the right question? I've been saying that people should find ways to integrate online and offline activities.  Would you agree?

Victor:  I can’t say we really have any hard numbers to show, but we have received a fair amount of anecdotal evidence about people visiting the museum or attending events and educational programs from hearing about them through these channels.
 
At the same time, about 42% of our Facebook community is outside the United States (and that’s about the same percentage of international visitors to our website). The top cities after New York in terms of fans are Milan and Rome! At one time, Milan was ahead of New York. It has been very interesting to learn about where are community is from. Italy is very well-represented in terms of visitors to the museum as well.
 
I would definitely agree that it is valuable to integrate online and offline activities. It is something we are working to do more and more.
 
 
One of the big questions that is coming up for a lot of people is the issue of scale and reach.  'MoMA is a world renown organization, well of course people will fan them just because.....'   How can a little organization with a very small staff adapt what you are doing, or should they?  Do you have the sense that a different strategy is required for smaller orgs?

Allegra: I think part of it has to be about keeping it active and engaging with your audience. And thinking about how to promote the presence to that audience also helps. As Victor mentioned, we had spikes in our fan numbers when we did Facebook ads and other initiatives, so part of it is just thinking about how to get the word out there. And as for resources, Victor does this as part of all of the other things he does in a day, so it is possible with a small staff. They just have to make it a priority. But I’ll let Victor speak for himself here...
 
Victor:  I think there are a few things that are important for any size institution to keep in mind. This is not about blanketing people with marketing messages. People can sniff out blatant marketing in social media and it might as well be spam. This is about sharing content that your community is interested in and allowing them to share it with others. This can include giving access to the works in your museum, or sharing news about art outside your museum. I try to post things that have nothing to do with MoMA, and I think people appreciate it. It’s also about engaging people in conversation. So, it’s important to find your “voice,” one that shows personality and gives a human-face to the institution.
 
I’d say it’s important also to get a certain amount of buy-in from key people in your organization and to educate internally about social media. It really helps to have ‘ears on the ground’ to find content within your organization that you may work with directly, but your community would appreciate.
 
 
Any other burning insights you can share?

Allegra: Try and avoid creating a silo for your content—think across as many avenues and channels as possible without swamping yourself and your team with repetitive manual labor. We still have work to do ourselves in this area, but we’re making progress!
 
 
Thanks so much Allegra and Victor!!!

Cool Art Career Resources Page

Here's an interesting link for those looking for resources  related to art from artcareer.net.  Its a list of online resources covering every aspect of art.  Seems amazingly comprehensive.  Here are the subject areas:

• Introductory Courses   (e.g. from MIT and Open University)
• Images and Online Exhibits   (e.g. Smithsonian, Getty, British Museum)
• Studio Arts   (e.g. again MIT mostly)
• Lectures and Semiars  (Harvard, Princeton,   but not ITunesU!)
• Theory & Advanced Study
• Technology Training
• Photography & Film
• Graphic Design & New Media
• Art History

So its interesting because it raises 2 questions in my mind. 
First one is:  How did they build this list.  How do we build a list?  Is it SEO rankings in Google?  Is it word of mouth?  Our experience, someone telling us about it.  Noodling around?   Why is your museum listed here, or NOT listed here?   (Okay that's more than one question.)

Second question is:  WHere is ITunes U?   Seems like it would be a natural collecting spot for people to find things.  Just my 2 cents. 

hat tip @Kanter for the link...

Leveraging Social Media

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.

Leveraging Social Media

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

A Conversation with Allegra Burnette @ MoMA

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.

A must see for me for next visit to Big Apple.