Shared aims

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

Sites and services such as YouTube, Flickr, iTunes and Wordpress can provide useful platforms for sharing your work and events

THIRD-PARTY SITES

One of the most significant aspects of the move to web 2.0 technologies and social media is just how much online content is now delivered to the reader not directly from the source, but through third-party websites or software.

Photos are viewed on Flickr, videos on YouTube, blogs on hosting sites such as Wordpress and Blogger. Designed to get people using their systems, these services are simple, largely free and robustly developed.

As well as hosting content, these services are specifically designed so users can share and comment on this material. In many ways, they are an ideal option for museums, few of which can afford to build complex and media-rich websites to host and manage their own content.

When used cleverly, such services can support museum activities extremely effectively. Used poorly, they could become a dumping ground for largely irrelevant media. There are other issues to consider too: media on a third-party site sits within that site’s branding, not your own. And if the site becomes unpopular - or worse, goes bust - it may be difficult to migrate your content to a different system.

These are two main reasons why, given sufficient resources, it may be worth developing a proprietary content management and publishing system for multimedia content to use alongside third party sites.

Of course, the appeal of third-party systems is that all this expensive and time-consuming back-end development is already taken care of; all you really need is good content and a reason to publish it - the rest is easy.

POST HASTE

Posting images to Flickr should take less than an hour if you are already generating photographic content.

“You can post images from museum events on Flickr or upload event videos to YouTube easily,” says Nina Simon, a web 2.0 consultant.

“The time required is highly correlated to whether you are currently generating this kind of content. But if you are already snapping shots, putting them up on the web - with a handy link back to the museum website - is a cinch, and it’s totally acceptable to do it sporadically.”

It is debatable just how interesting pictures of people mingling at an event are to the wider public, but it is an easy way to kick off an online presence. National Museums Liverpool is using this snapshot approach through Flickr to chronicle construction of the new Museum of Liverpool on the city’s waterfront, for example.

The Tate, London Transport Museum and National Maritime Museum (NMM) have all used Flickr to run competitions, with user-contributed photos feeding into content for accompanying exhibitions and books.

In July 2008 the London Transport Museum’s Flickr Scavenger Hunt sent five teams of visitors on a trail of “cryptic clues” to locate and photograph nearby transport-related features in the Covent Garden area, in central London. All the photos were uploaded to Flickr - and ultimately to social networking site Webjam - where the winners were chosen by public vote.

“You need to be well organised to run a Flickr scavenger hunt and think creatively to come up with clues, but events are fairly low-cost and the more you do the easier it becomes,” says Jane Findlay, a community curator at the London Transport Museum.

“Running a public vote is also a great way of prolonging the life of the event. As well as the competition on the day we had a week-long vote for the best photograph.

“It’s been a good way of developing a new web 2.0 community audience and building a media relationship with bloggers. It’s also changed museum interpretation practices by inspiring the use of user-generated content in all future exhibitions.”

The Tate joined forces with Flickr and book-publishing site Blurb as part of its Street & Studio photography exhibition, to add a public element to the show, which was held in 2008. Participants could add two of their own street- or studio-based photographic portraits to a Flickr site, for example (see link below).

“We use Flickr to run audience-participation projects,” says John Stack, the head of Tate Online. “Our approach has always been to ask people to contribute but then to offer something back: displays in the gallery, or a book of selected photographs [for example].”

USING YOUTUBE AND ITUNES

Flickr is the easiest and most used of the third-party media-hosting sites, but some museums are also making use of YouTube and iTunes. If you are already producing video and audio material in-house, these services are especially useful for broadcasting that content.

Tate publishes its video podcast series TateShots on YouTube, and iTunes and is now producing a small amount of content specifically for YouTube. Audio and film recordings of Tate public events are available through iTunes, as are some exhibition audio and multimedia tours, which can be downloaded to iPhones or iPods prior to a visit to the gallery.

Even if you are already producing multimedia material in-house, deploying it to third-party sites will take some additional resources, especially when you plan to update it at least once a month, as the Tate does.

“Mostly we are reusing content from elsewhere or redeploying it,” says Jane Burton, the head of content and creative director of Tate Media.

“Generally it needs to be recontextualised for the medium, and that’s time-consuming. There is a change in what people do as part of their jobs and inevitably working with social media is additional, rather than replacing existing channels, such as email communications, press releases and Tate Online. There is some staff time involved in uploading and maintaining play lists and responding to comments, for example.”

Given the extra time needed to “populate” third-party sites with content, it is reasonable to assess what the benefits might be. According to Burton, Tate measures the number of referrals from these sites back to the main Tate Online website and has found the results encouraging enough to adopt this approach in all of the gallery’s activities.

“In general, we have found that reaching out to communities on other sites is very successful and we are working on a cross-departmental strategy to embed this within the organisation including Tate Online, marketing, press and communications, visitor services, director’s office, membership, and beyond,” she says.

This article was written for the Working Knowledge section of Museum Practice, Autumn 2009.

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