Social Technographics

As it seems that some of TEC CHers are interested in exploring the use of social media in the field of cultural heritage, I found useful to share some ideas I found interesting in article from Charline Li for Forrester research about ladder of participation - Forrester’s new Social Technographics report. In the report, the author categorizes social computing behaviours into a ladder of six levels of participation and analyses the population according their participation to these levels. Presented as “Social Technographics” the result is an useful set of data that helps understanding how people use social technology. In the result they “group consumers into six different categories of participation – and participation at one level may or may not overlap with participation at other levels. We use the metaphor of a ladder to show this, with the rungs at the higher end of the ladder indicating a higher level of participation.”

This distribution, according to the level of participation, is interesting since it allows companies to understand how audiences are likely to get involved with social media, hence helping developing a relevant strategy. For example, a teenager and a senior will both interact with social media but will participate in very different ways. Young people will be more actively involved with these tools while adults will be more “passives”.
Understanding the audience is at the core of any social media strategy. It is very important to define who the target is before choosing the tools that are more likely to match their audience expectations and social media usage.

Open Source Education

Recently we started work on creating an online community for the TEC-CH programme, one that involves professionals and students to interact outside of the classroom, to share information and resources, and to have constructive discussions that help professionals on their work and students on their understanding of the field.

Current tools we plan to use: Twitter, facebook, ning, a wiki that serves as an online bibliography, a new TEC-CH blog, and a channel on YouTube EDU. Are we using too many? too little? What are some other tools that would be useful?

Currently we’re thinking of involving a broad range of professionals, academics, artists, historians and students (last but not least) in the museum and cultural technology field, and we would love to hear your thoughts.

Would this be something that you would like to have a voice? If YOU receive an invitation to participate in the TEC-CH online community, what would be some properties of the community that would motivate you to participate? And what can we do or provide in order to make it interesting for you?

Linda’s defense, social media and the impact on museum image

Linda’s dissertation has been the third at TEC-CH to explore the use of social media in cultural heritage communication. Before Linda, Joao Paulo analyzed the impact of social networking on the growth of cultural knowledge, taking music as example of a cultural product and the specific case of Brazilian music on the web. Olga looked upon the potential of web 2.0 for communicating Italian cultural heritage and leaned on a case for adopting web 2.0 by a small museum in Italy.

Linda’s approach was an analytical one, focused on the way social media impacts on museum image and on the perceived benefits and disadvantages of its use in museum communication, from the perspective of museum decision-makers. Her hypothesis is that social media have changed the museum communication landscape and will consequently induce museums to change their communication strategy. Starting from the observation that there is an unequal integration of social media services in museum communication in the city of Geneva, Linda has tried to understand the reasons behind this, focusing on four museums in Geneva: The Musée d’art moderne et contemporain (MAMCO) and the Centre d’art contemporain (CAC); Musées d’art et d’histoire (MAHs) and the Musée d’ethnographie de Genève (MEG). The results point to the fact that museums look at social media as a means to attract an audience that would not have been otherwise touched by typical museum communication. Though the results point at the openness and interest towards using web 2.0, they also highlight the limited amount of information that decision-makers have on the variety of tools and services now available (the decision-makers interviewed knew Facebook, and while two of them also used Facebook, none of the interviewees knew about Twitter). Regarding the content production strategy, it appears that the museums in her study which used social media tend to re-use existing content rather than creating it for scratch for publishing on a specific platform. The overall conclusion of her study is that the museums studied are aware of the benefits of using social media and of the positive impact they might have on their image, but are either reluctant to use them, or would use them in a very limited part of their potential, due to lack of human and financial resources, and especially due to lack of personnel specialized in communication through social media.