Need some tips for embracing social media? Check out Jeff Guin's blog

Last Friday night I attended the Pro Football Hall of Fame Enshrinee's Dinner in Canton, Ohio, and as it turned out, one of the guests at our table was a woman who serves as the volunteer director of a nonprofit that teaches traffic safety to children. We talked at length about her organization, entirely run by volunteers, and their desire to embrace the wave of new media to better promote ongoing programming and reach an ever-changing audience of parents and their young children. She had already reached out to a local college for an intern to help them handle day-to-day posting beginning this fall. We discussed the merits of this initial set-up, along with some pitfalls to avoid, and by the end of our conversation she seemed encouraged by the potential of developing a well-conceived social media plan, and ready to embark on that task.

Launching a social media initiative can be as nerve-wracking as any other new and unfamiliar program undertaken by a lean organization of well-meaning, but unconfident staff. This particular nonprofit leader had done her homework and needed only a few pointers to reassure her that she and her organization were on the right track. Regardless of whether your staff are full-time professionals, or part-time volunteers, the proper amount of preliminary planning will make a huge difference in the roll-out of your social media campaign. So, where to begin?

Several months ago Jeff Guin tackled this very issue in his blog for Voices of the Past Heritage Media, specifically addressing the needs of heritage organizations. Jeff's post from March 31, 2010, Social Media Planning for Heritage Organizations: Differentiating Goals, Objectives & Tactics, is an excellent primer for those who are considering swimming in the social media pool. If your organization has yet to undertake the seemingly daunting task of developing a social media plan, or you have tried social media, but are frustrated by the difficult task of measuring your success, check out Jeff's article for a common sense approach to planning the application of 21st century media in your PR portfolio.

Wordle word cloud celebrates 100th post

In honor of my 100th MuseoBlogger post, I created this word cloud using my blog feed and the Wordle program. To make your own word cloud, visit www.wordle.net

Thank you so much for following my musings on museums and the cultural landscape. I promise to keep improving the quality of the content you find here as I head toward my next 100 posts.

Coming soon to MuseoBlogger, an examination of the increasingly important role of hospitals as collectors and exhibitors of fine art, as well as a series of guest posts from the students in my exhibit development and design class at Walsh University. My students will also be posting to their own museum-related blogs throughout the upcoming semester, and I will post links to those sites when we have them up and running.

Thanks again for your interest!

USS Midway Museum's family audio guide sticks with visitors

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of spending two days aboard the USS Midway Museum in San Diego. As part of my preparation for an exhibit evaluation project, I spent almost four hours taking the audio guided tour of the entire ship in order to gain the valuable perspective of an uninitiated first-time visitor. Upon receiving my headset I was told about the brand new family audio tour, which debuted at the Museum just a few weeks prior to my visit. I expressed a particular interest in this tour, which was developed specifically to engage kids and adults simultaneously, and the docent explained that I was welcome to sample the new guide along my journey whenever I encountered a green numbered audio stop.

I began my tour as many adult visitors would, typing in the appropriate yellow numbers and receiving the carefully crafted and duly informative messages aimed at a mature museum audience. However, after listening to only three of the stops on the family tour, I found myself typing in the green numbers first at combined stops, postponing the adult tour, and listening to it as I made way along the passageway to the next stop. What was the significant difference, and why were the family stops so much more compelling to me?

In essence the strength of the new family audio tour lies in several key principles I believe are critical for any successful museum narrative:

1. Keep it short: most of the family tour recordings seemed to last less than a minute and a half.
2. Make it personal: a friendly sailor character personified the experience, developing a familiar rapport between the visitor and the guide, while also allowing an insider's look at life onboard the Midway.
3. Make it authentic: appropriate sound effects, attention to subtleties, and little details described in intimate spaces piqued the visitor's interest and instilled a desire for more.
4. Don't get too technical: the emphasis was on how men lived and worked aboard the Midway, and the importance of that work, not on the specifics of how the work was accomplished.
5. Less is usually more: with markedly fewer stops along the tour, the visitor did not grow as overwhelmed by infinite details, instead the pace was steady, but manageable.

The USS Midway's new family tour works because visitors are treated to a first-hand accounting of the history of the ship, but are not expected to disembark as experts. The pressure to retain great amounts of information is replaced by a casual initiation into the ranks of those who served. Looking back on my experience, I find that I can easily recall numerous memorable stops on the family tour and convey the significant take-away message from each, but I have only a few such take-aways remaining from the adult tour. It was too much information, delivered in rapid-fire succession and unfortunately not as much of it stuck.

In relating my experience with the tour audio guides onboard the Midway, I am reminded of the keynote address delivered this past May by Susie Wilkening of Reach Advisors at the Ohio Museums Association's annual conference. Susie reported initial findings from Reach Advisors' survey of over 40,000 museum-going households across the country. In talking about the most memorable and profound museum experiences described by survey respondents, Susie used the term "sticky." The longest-lasting museum encounters were sticky moments when memories were being formed in the minds of young visitors.

Naturally, most museums want to create opportunities for children and their families to have these sticky experiences together within the context of their own particular content. In my opinion, the USS Midway's new family audio tour creates exactly this kind of sticky opportunity. There is a remarkable space to explore, a personable character guide, and a wealth of history and objects to share. I certainly fall well outside of the seven year-old average age for sticky memory creation, but the Midway Museum's family tour will stick with me for years to come. It will be interesting to see if evaluation of this new educational program identifies the same kind of information retention in other visitors, both kids and adults, but that's a study for another day. Stay tuned.

Indianapolis Children's Museum to offer preschool, more museum schools to come?

The Children's Museum of Indianapolis has launched an exciting new preschool venture beginning this fall. As the mother of a not quite four year-old, I can say for certain that my daughter would love the idea of attending preschool inside the Children's Museum galleries. Currently my daughter attends a preschool in University Circle, an area of Cleveland rich in museums and cultural organizations. As part of her school's curriculum program she and her classmates take regular outings to the surrounding museums, the Botanical Garden, and even the world famous Cleveland Orchestra. However, the Indianapolis Children's Museum, staffed by experts in early childhood education, is taking this idea from an every-now-and-again experience to a new height of immersive learning, moving the preschool onsite and integrating the museum into every class day.

About ten years ago the idea of the "museum school" was showing potential as an exciting way for museums to take a greater role in educating students about the world around them, but although some very fine museum schools exist today, the trend never caught on as an initiative embraced by most museums across the country. I think preschool is a wonderful thing to teach in a museum setting. Typically, the preschool day is short, children only attend a few days each week, and very little of the instruction requires textbooks, white boards, or number 2 pencils. The children lucky enough to enroll in this new preschool will have a wealth of engaging learning environments all around them. I must admit to being a little jealous that the Montessori preschool I attended as a child, although wonderfully enriching in its own right, didn't have an indoor carousel or a Chihuly on the ceiling.

Here in Cleveland we have a new Montessori High School, also located in University Circle, which makes partnerships with the surrounding institutions an integral part of their specialized college preparatory program. Could we see the museum school reemerge as a viable alternative to traditional private schools, or even charter schools, in the future? With so many quality programs on diverse subjects already in place at museums, the next step towards some form of "museum school" might not be as a great a leap as once imagined. Perhaps tuition from onsite schools, or revenue sharing from cooperative programs could help pay the expensive educational bills? Consider the exciting possibilities of having students support public outreach efforts and the response from families whose children participate in building their communities from the museum out.

Certainly, opening a school within your museum is not an endeavor one enters into lightly, or with the expressed goal of making money, but as budgets grow increasingly tighter, education departments are forced to find new and sustainable revenue streams and just maybe the museum school comes off the shelf again. Best wishes to The Children's Museum of Indianapolis and this first class of students beginning their lifetime of learning in the new preschool this fall. I am looking forward to hearing about how this program comes into its own and supports the mission of the museum at-large.

Indianapolis Children's Museum to offer preschool - chicagotribune.com

Photo: My daughter Nora, age 1 1/2, in the dinosaur dig exhibit at The Children's Museum of Indianapolis.

The Pinky Show takes a look at the how and why of museums- very funny!

For any of you out there who have not yet seen the Pinky Show's take on museum administration, here is a hilarious and perhaps frighteningly accurate portrayal of the traditional role and function of museums in society, according to Kim the cat in her video essay The Creation of Value: Meditations on the logic of museums and other coercive institutions.