Aging Museum Websites

This week, I ran across an article (login required) by Andrew Marton in the Dallas Star-Telegram and winced. In the piece, Mr. Marton writes "a more robust online presence is an attempt to entice a potentially huge number of younger patrons." This perspective is more than a little simplistic in its understanding of the demographics of web users and websites.

Taking a step back, the polarity presented here between grey-heads and cyber-babies is just blatantly false. According to comScore, Internet usage increased by over 24 percent last year. Of particular note here is the list of fastest growing properties for web user over 55. This list of sites includes MySpace, Wikipedia, Washington Mututal and Craigslist. A rhetorical question: what then is the older audience doing online? Well, the same thing as younger audiences. They are finding ways to communicate, research, educate, transact and connect themselves through the online channel.

Though the reality is interesting, it is the misconception of whom the web serves that is essential to understand and dicuss. From my own experience, it is exactly this mode of thinking that drives many Museums to keep websites and online services on the back burner in terms of priorities and strategic thinking – especially when it comes to discussions of funding projects and returns on investment.

The results are easy to see - most museums that I have reviewed are recycling the basic HTML containers they have used for the last five years. This is a pity because, as the comScore survey makes clear, audiences are maturing, growing and moving on. While museum-goers often cherish a more traditional experience of Museums and exhibitions, website visitors do not cling to a similar sensibility. As technology raises the bar of possibility on the web, Internet users raise the bar of expectation.

No Director would permit an exhibition hall to inspire a ho-hum reaction, yet this is frequently the net impact of museum websites.

This is an incredible resource to let go to seed. For perspective, according to the annual report of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, their website enjoyed almost 20 million visitors in the 2006 fiscal year. That is almost five times as many "visitors" than the actual Museum hosted. It is impossible to imagine that all 20 million of these visitors are “younger patrons”. Clearly, how that Museum represents itself on the web impacts a substantial portion of its in-person visitorship across demographic segments.

Lesson: We (technology practitioners and managers) need to be very careful of how we frame discussions on website technologies and whom they serve.

Google Drive: Cure for Social Network Fatigue

In recent years, it seems social networking sites arise and fall in ever-shortening intervals. Perhaps for the newest crop of teens and tweens, this frenetic pace of technology migration makes sense - MySpace has become old news, passé or too mainstream. These users are able to flitter (with their offline social networks) to whichever service or platform is a la mode.

But then there are the rest of us. Jon Udell wrote a great piece yesterday on social network fatigue. It is clear that advertisers and technology venture capitalists may bend over backwards to find the next big thing, the next killer social platform, for the majority of technology users and practitioners it is increasingly difficult to navigate and discern what these sites can offer in terms of either connection or investment (whether personal or institutional). In the non-profit and cultural sectors, more times than not, this quandary has translated into a certain level of paralysis when considering social networks. Yet, the sheer size of these networks make them impossible to ignore (as does the general trajectory of Web 2.0 adoption in the last two years).

What is missing, as Mr. Udell points out, is the convergence across networks. Each user can only manage a finite number of profiles, bookmarks, sites and blogs. And, given the distribution and varying layers of log-in and personally identifiable information that exist for each site, the onus for managing the varying social networks falls on the user. Not a particularly user-friendly scene. There is no unified credential or login management resource to make using the various platforms easier. And while some writers have called for greater interoperability between sites - all signs point to a more to monolithic rather than distributed solution.

The rumors of the Google Drive reflect a possible form and structure for what the next (perhaps final?) step may be in integrating social networks. More information Google already has Blogger and YouTube under its belt - the leveraged acquisition of Facebook, Friendster or LinkedIn (or some other social content site - Del.icio.us? Digg?) when paired with a personal storage drive, would represent a wholly trinity of Web 2.0 resources. Not to mention the economic enginge already represented by Google's search services.

Currently, users, technology nor law seem quite prepared for a Google drive. There are still too many privacy and copyright/licensing considerations that need to be defined before this endeavor could be successful. If and when this does happen though, I believe it ultimately will help purveyors of cultural content to better exist and serve in the digital world. Finally, there would be a single place and standard to apply in making culture available to as many individuals as possible. Resource deployment, platform interoperability and content management would have a single umbrella standard for which to aim, and thereby hit the mark with a greater number of users.

Information users (and managers) of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your social network fatigue!

Resolutions and Solutions

2007 - OK, so everyone has their pile of resolutions for the new year. Mine, it seems, did not include being on time. Twenty-two days into 2007, it is time to get back on the ball - or the blog. My news years resolution, slightly tardy, is to ramp up my efforts of blogging on technologies in the cultural sector.

In 2006, I focused primarlily on technology assisting the administrative functions of Museums and libraries; marketing, PR and fundraising. There is certainly more space to explore those topcs here - and I will continue to do so in 2007. But, I've been ignoring the elephant in the room; of greater interest is the growth of web 2.0 technologies in the diffusement of content and community. Can web 2.0 be a solution to improve the dispersement and dialogue surrounding cultural capital in the public sector?

Let's explore, we're already running late...

Tech Trends For 2007

1. Skype - Can you imagine reference services on demand? Distance-learning and lecturing to underserved populations? A curator on-call for students in Hong Kong, Johannesburg, New Orleans... I'm just waiting for a development department to request funding for this type of service. Bricks and mortar are great for capital campaigns but at some point, the right donor is going to ask why funding projects for dynamic web services aren't being explored.



2. Flickr - Community image-tagging and posting (the Brooklyn Museum is already getting their feet wet - Link).



3. YouTube - What? Treadmills and trampolines? How could this help the ballett or modern dance? Its the platform stupid. Eyes to see great coreography. Gallery tours made easy. Google can't keep this platform streaming forever. Sooner or later it will be available to download individual videos - watch out!



4. Digg - Community-driven news. Museums and performing arts groups draw millions of visitors a year with blockbuster exhibitions but community dialogue and review have not kept pace. Look for institutions relying on word of mouth to harness new avenues for getting noticed.



5. MySpace - The music and social networking site has gotten a bad press of late with its lack of community policing and soft privacy and security protections. What still stands out though is the rising of "alternates to email". Email is dead. We are witnessing the rise of RSS and hosted messaging services where only the invited can play. MySpace for all its faults, is a widely used platform for invitation-only messages and data-mined advertisements.



6. Blogs - Old news you say. True. But I can count on two hands the number of major institutions in the United States that have implemented blogs as part of their PR/outreach and education programming. Link Budgets might be tight, but I think this is still the unexplored frontier.



7. CoRegistration - Pay Attention. New ways to connect to mavens and links. Any annual fundraisers that tells you Direct Mail is going to be where it is now in a decade is not paying attention. The Chronicle of Philanthropy (subscription required) and the eBenchmarks survey both boast of the rapid growth and reliance of online donations and community building in the non-profit sector. It isn't 2.0 but it is an emerging trend to monitor for non-profits of all shapes and sizes.

Party like it's 1999...

I wonder to what extent ePhilanthropy companies (Convio and Kintera) have yet to understand people's actual interests and natural interactions on the web. It seems like most of the community-building models are trying to standardize a very limited and specific model of how constituents approach cultural institutions and the Internet as a whole (circa 1999). LinkedIn, like alot of next-generation web services (like MySpace, Friendster, Del.icio.us, Flickr) are finding new ways to systematize and frame user contact points with institutions. We all should take a page from their playbooks and actually think outside the box.

Outside the box; this is more than just partnering with these services. Though groups like MOCA in Los Angeles are leveraging MySpace for technology infrastructure and PR and they are missing this company's real impact; its innovation. MySpace executed a totally unfounded vision for how people could use the Internet. I have harped on innovation before, but this is the realm of opportunity for cultural institutions, using their mission as discreet advantage in developing web services and contact points to engage constituents. Beyond an ePhilanthropy paradigm (which has resulted in a formulaic, one size fits all, approach to online community and fundraising), it is time for organizations to get in on the game and create an innovation paradigm.

To begin, understand why people come to you and what makes you special in their eyes. This is a "good to great" epiphany. Then, go for it - develop requirements that baloon into a system of strategies and practices and technologies; a top down approach. Don't start the other way around.