The Museum's Social Media Strategy

  • Author(s)
    Lynda Kelly
  • Category
    Museullaneous
  • Published
    19 November 2009
  • Read time
    2 minutes

Our task is to have a more strategic approach to working with social media across the Museum. To kick-off the conversation we had a workshop today (18 November) with around 25 staff to progress this.

The aims of the workshop were to:

  • get on track with what we’ve been doing with social media over the past 6 months under the auspices of the Engaging with Social Media ARC grant
  • think about the aims of our social media strategy by reflecting on these
  • plan some further integrated projects for 2010

We got well down the path with some terrific discussions around the aims, with notes from each working group found here, which we based on questions posed in Russ's presentation (also available on the right hand side of this page).

After most people left, a small group of us developed the key aim for the Museum in social spaces as:

  • To inspire the exploration of nature and cultures through sharing; engaging; building relationships and influencing, while adapting our organisational culture.

Through using social media we aspire to:

  • increase our reach, influence and relevance
  • create ambassadors to support and promote what we do
  • personalise interactions
  • encourage and grow communities through a critical mass of active cultural and scientific participants
  • maximise revenue
  • change our work models from one-to-one communication to many-to-many communication
  • move from providing information to creating shared meaning with audiences

Our operating principals are that we:

  • recognise engagement is part of our jobs - it's just that the tools we use have changed
  • need to drive visitation across all platforms, with recognition that visitors to the physical site is a key goal
  • will work towards finding out where each of us "fit"within the world of social media - it may be that some people interact intermittently and some very frequently
  • listen, respect and respond to our audiences wherever they are and however they want to interact with us
  • write once, publish many times across a range of platforms
  • think and work 20% differently, not 20% more

So, how does this sound? Did I get the gist of the conversation? Where do we go now? Thoughts please?