Museums and social networking

Social Media
Social Media Magic, a social media marketing firm, held a free webinar today on establishing and managing a social media presence. It was a fascinating 90 minutes that ably demonstrated the need for organizations to develop strategies for managing and leveraging their on-line presences. Moderator John Souza, co-founder of Social Media Magic, made several good points about creating an on-line presence that, if properly adapted, could easily be applied to a non-profit or museum setting. He noted that a social media strategy was different from an overall media/PR strategy and managing a web site. Social media is a new form of digital connectedness and the old rules do not apply. Souza repeatedly emphasized the importance of managing you and your organization's social media presence and discussed the strategic challenges involved in the same.

On-line Strategies
The webinar laid out a five step process for building and maintaining a social media presence.

1. Develop a social media strategy based on selective targeting of your prospective audience. Social media outreach is not designed to help connect you to the world, rather it should identify specific audiences with highly focused messages. 
2. Establish a presence on the main social media sites: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Biznik, FastPitch, Plaxo, MerchantCircle, and QAlias. Each site serves a specific purpose and reaches a different segment of your audience. Tailor your message to the unique needs of the sites' users, and be careful to follow the rules of engagement each site lays out.
3. Continually work to expand your reach to find and connect with target audiences. Establishing a profile is not enough. Use the sites' capabilities to make new connections.
4. Nurture relationships. Reach out to the community and be helpful. Enter the conversation in a way that adds value.
5. Maintain an active presence. Communicate consistently every day, and develop a strategy to maintain your consistency. The more successful you are at building a social media presence, the more time that it will take to maintain it. Create a plan for how you will adapt to the exponentially increasing amount of time it will take to maintain and grow your presence. 

Application to Museums
Museums, unlike for-profit businesses, exist to serve mission while encouraging physical visits. As with all museum programming, the social media strategy needs to be measurable. Either the strategy will result in increased on-site visitation or it will support the mission in a meaningful way. Because museums' main focus is not the sale of products or services, it is difficult to interpret social media outreach success via a balance sheet. You are asking that target audience to take action in a way that validates your mission, and the action has to be more meaningful than visiting your web site. The critical components that museums must include in their strategies are micro-targeting audiences and actively soliciting feedback.

Museums identify large problems and develop methods to solve them. They inspire, educate, and call to action. In developing social media audiences, they keep their mission at the forefront. Mission is critical to identifying the micro audiences they want to reach.

Example
A nature center may set a goal to eradicate "nature deficit disorder" (as defined by Richard Louv). Step one would be to identify those with the same concerns. These could be science teachers, other nature centers, parents, hikers, campers, or even sporting goods companies. The more they expand their search, the more people they will find with the same concerns. Step two is to initiate a call to action. Once the affinity group has formed, the nature center has to deliver a measurable challenge. The nature center could ask people to take local actions, such as: visit nature with a child; organize local clean ups; do bird counts; or take part in school programs. The important component is that each person reports back to the nature center his/her actions and their results. The nature center must be able to demonstrate that its actions initiated a positive change in order to prove to its Board and funders that its strategy is successful. Driving web traffic or boasting a large group of "friends" is not enough.

Conclusion
In the overwhelming world of social media, museums face a special challenge to identify audiences and build affinity. However, once social circles are established, they are fortunate that they are not selling products, rather missions. In a social setting people respond to mission as the idea that is greater than themselves. Museums have the ability to inspire. A strong and well-thought-out social media strategy has the potential to advance an institution's mission more widely than would have been possible with only a brick and mortar location and mind set.