My sister, who also happened to be the director for the National Eagle Center, commented that you can’t buy that kind of public relations and an employee like that is the best PR and organization can have. She herself had a similar situation when in the early days of the National Eagle Center when she gave an impromptu tour to someone that showed up just as she was locking up for the day. This person was so impressed that they became not only a great volunteer for the center but also a very generous donor as well.

This brings up an issue that I have noticed with several museums. Yes, the front desk people whose jobs may be dependent on being polite and helpful are cheery but what about the rest of the staff? What about your director, your curator, your exhibit designer, your web designer and yes your maintenance staff? Chances are if it is not their job, they are not. While they may not be rude and dismissive (sadly some are) are they proactively looking to help visitors or going out of their way to be polite? Are non-customer service staff

Museums have small marketing budgets (at least most). One of the greatest marketing tools they rely on and one of the most effective is word of mouth.  One of the cheapest PR tools out there and the most effective, is good employee interactions with customers. Some of the extra good deeds I have spied at the Minnesota History Center during my time here have been an employee on their way home offering to return a borrowed wheelchair to the front desk from the parking lot; walking a visitor in the rain out to their car with an umbrella; helping carry a visitor’s tray from the cafeteria to their table; talking time to help visitors get to where they need to go; numerous people opening doors for visitors; etc…

I worked in a hospital which placed great emphasis on employee etiquette and courteousness. Good etiquette and courteousness didn’t happen there by chance, the hospital did quite a bit of employee training on the subject, if nothing else employee got it that this was considered both important by the organization and meant to be practiced by all.

So what does all this have to do with online marketing and PR? Well, in my next post I will talk about the overlooked PR potential of employee helpfulness, etiquette and courteousness in the online environment.

Not only that, but the work claiming, correctly placing and deleting duplicate or irrelivant listings in Google Maps has begun to pay off. When searching for the Minnesota History Center or the Minnesota Historical Society you are not set around the Metro area on a wild goose chase. However, as the graphic will a testify to, while owned by the Minensota Historical Society, the Forest History Center is no where near the Minnesota History Center.  Work still needs to be done on claiming and getting the listings correct for MHS’ other historic sites and museums.

Another time was when I was chatting with a friend of mine recently about his own technology paridime shift when he was looking at his friend’s four year old daugther watch “Dora the Explorer” on TV when suddenly she got up in the middle of the program and begin to rummage around the back of he TV set in the snake pit of wires. His first thought and reaction was how cute, she is pretending to be Dora and was exploring. As the four year old became increasingly fustrated it was clear that she was not exploring at all. He asked her what she as doing and she replied she was looking for “the mouse”. Interactivity with media was so commonplace with this four year old that she felt it her right that she should be able to control the show on TV.

For example…

For over two years we planned and designed a roadside sign that would advertise our presence to the community and drivers by. It took that long because of city approval of changes and of course having to raise funds to help pay for the sign. It also took long due to ongoing changes in the design, partly reflective of unsureness of what to have on the sign which reflected the marketing of the organization and the brand itself.

What to put on the sign went right to the core of how we identified as organization. People were fine with the 50’s style logo and branding however, there was a lengthy debate on whether it should be the” Richfield Historical Society” or the “Richfield History Center” or simply “Museum” which is as clear as ice to the passing motorist as to what we are. Also debated was what else should be on the sign. There was an agreement that having hours on the sign would be nice, but like most small museums our hours were both infrequent and chaotic and would make the sign too busy to read quickly.

While people may plan their visits to larger museums, visits to smaller museums appear to be more driven by impulse. It was important to have a sign that identified quickly who we were and and when they could come.

However, during the two years while we planned and planned our new sign we had almost nothing identifying our site. We were losing customers as the time passed.

Enter Norm

Norm's simple but effective signs

Norm was another board member. He was not a good designer, nor did he have any thoughts (or care) as to what branding was about. But he did have the common sense to understand that without signage not many folks will know who or where you are.

While the committee met and raised funds for a new sign and decided what to put on it, Norm quietly put up his own signage identifying the building as well as a simple sign letting the world (at least those driving by) know when we were open By hanging an open sign, we significantly increased our daily traffic with folks walking in often saying “I always drove by and wondered what you guys were, I am so glad you are open”.

A highly visible open sign. So simple and yet often over-looked at small museums.

With that knowledge I went to task to redesign (yet again) our organizations roadside sign. This time eliminating any mention of hours or other information and instead listing our web site where people can look up the hours (whatever they happened to be at the time) along with other information but however we including space for a large “OPEN” sign to capture the impulse intellectual. The resulting sign built by Mathey Sign was a success.

Main Sign showing URL

Main Sign showing Open sign

There is a smaller sign listing the Richfield Historical Society’s web site which unfolds to become the OPEN sign. Once in place this improvement has greatly increased the traffic and exposure of the Richfield Historical Society. The final changes to the sign included the use of the name of the building “Richfield History Center” rather than the “Richfield Historical Society” in an effort to promote the place not the organization running it. It also (after some debate) included “& Museum” which was short hand for the other building on the site the Bartholomew House. Museum was added to help the site get instant recognition and understanding from drivers passing quickly by that “History Center” may not have. In the same way that “Spa” or “Health Club” may mean many things to different people but when you say “Spa & Brothel” the term is, well, rather crystal clear. (yes, yes… I know its risqué but its the only example I could think of at the time of writing this post).

Norm sadly passed away not much longer after putting up his simple hand made signs which were very effective in helping the organization. In spite of their crudeness and lack of brand savvy I find it hard to remove them and probably will keep them around for a while, …one of the privileges of volunteering at a small museum.

Debra Askanase of the blog, Community Organizer 2.0 wrote an article on the innovative ways three arts organizations are using Flickr creatively, engaging and empowering stakeholders and doing a good job of pulling Flickr users to their organizations.

1. The Houston Ballet uses Flickr to give users a look behind the scenes in their warehouse and the creation of props. Behind the scene tours are appealing to just about anyone but they are particularly appealing to museums hardest sell, teens which are interested in knowing how things work under-the-hood.

2. The Mass Museum of Contemporary Art (MassMOCA) and The Luce Foundation Center for American Art both used crowdsourcing to engage and pull in viewers. The Mass Museum of Contemporary Art asks viewers to upload photos specific to an assigned topic. The topics usually relate to one of the exhibits happening at the time.

3. The Luce Foundation Center for American Art pulls off both crowdsourcing and is able to introduce users to it’s collection by engaging them as citizen curators to find appropriate works of art of size to fill-in-the-gaps in their display units  while matching the other artworks in theme.

MHS on Flickr

Where I work, the Minnesota Historical Society does a lot of content “push” on Flickr, adding items from its collection, event photos, historic site photos nothing (as of yet) as clever or engaging on Flickr as the previous three mentioned. It’s pull is limited to the basic making sure photos are marked up properly with titles, captions and tags.
One thing discovered while adding photos on Flickr of the historic sites we manage  was just how few good contemporary photos we actually had of the sites but not only that our customers seemed to be taking much better and more numerous photos than we could or were. Flickr seemed the perfect place to do a little simple crowdsourcing-light of our own by asking others on Flickr to add their photos they have taken of our sites to the site’s equivalent group on Flickr. With that we were able to pull in the photos to our site using a widget to give viewers a better idea of what the site looks like.

While this is a good step it is inspiring and nice to see other museums using Flickr to engage and pull viewers back to their collections and museums in creative ways.

“Growing Community at the Brooklyn Museum”

“Focusing on the Brooklyn Museum’s community-oriented and visitor-centered mission, Shelley Bernstein and Will Cary will discuss ways in which the museum has reached out to foster community online and grow supporters at their institution. Recognizing that honesty and transparency are key and that, above all, communities are made of people – they will discuss why social media has nothing to do with marketing and everything to do with making personal connections.”

Nothing? True, social media has more to do with public relations and branding than marketing or advertising – but nothing?!

It might have been well said if it stated, “they will discuss why social media has nothing to do with marketing” because social media is really about branding and PR, and good public relations creates a healthy environment for which marketing can work in, but then it goes on to state that social media has “everything to do with making personal connections.

Today marketing has everything to do with making personal connections. I discussed opt-in marketing in an earlier post and the need to make your content so engaging that consumers voluntary go online and subscribe to  it. Consumers increasingly can choose what advertising they wish to see and how they wish to be marketed to. Marketing has be very attune with making personal connections.

Marketing is interested in the market — consumers and demand. What is social networking but one-to-one marketing. Translate that into museum lingo: A consumer-centered museum factors in consumer’s interests in planning museum exhibitions, programs, services and use the market rather than the museum organization as the starting point for planning.

In social media, the dialogue is two-way communication, which avoids the promotional hype and the authoritive dialog of the one-way communication which were hallmarks of print, TV, radio marketing. Marketing has become more holistic and the lines more blurred between as consumers choose how they wish to be marketed/communicated to.

The Coming DOT-MUSEUM Crash

One interesting trend are museums and organizations pushing large amounts of their content on-line in spaces like Flickr, YouTube, iTunes University and Wikipedia with little thought of how to use it to pull customers into their facilities.

All this has lead me to wonder if the rush for museums to put their collections on social media sites with little regard to the bottom-line isn’t a little like the dot-com craze several years ago.

A dot-com company’s business model relied on the network effect to justify giving way the product away and/or losing money in hopes to gain market share or the commodity of mind share in the “new economy”. The money they raised through capital venturists or public offerings on the stock exchange was burned through as most could not create viable economic models. The rest is history.

I think museums are in a similar (but not as dramatic) bind. Foundations similar to venture capitalists love funding new things but seldom fund operating expenses. What happens when the grants dry up that helped put the content on the web? What happens to museums who knew how to push the content out on the web but had no plans to pull customers back to their brick and mortar facilities.

Museums better had learn how to monetize their content (if not directly then indirectly) and develop real on-line and social media marketing stratigies if they plan not only to remain relevant but also to remain solvent in the years to come.

However, overlooked in that discussion is harnessing the power of the currently more than 100 million blogs on the Internet. Hopefully at least a few of those writing the 100 million blogs are going to be ever-so-keen about your museum and its offerings and will be interested in writing about it.

The Minnesota Historical Society recently invited bloggers to a preview of the new “Minnesota’s Greatest Generation” Exhibit at the Minnesota History Center. This was a first for the Minnesota Historical Society. In the past it has done this for the traditional media outlets of radio, TV and newspapers but this time they would be offering two exhibit preview events, one for traditional media another for bloggers.

Bloggers presented a challenge, first blogs are both numerous and ephemeral. Traditional media outlets are limited in number making them much easier to target and send out a “Media Alert” notices for the exhibit,  Also, while the Minnesota Historical Society has a track record of working with traditional media it has had little experience working with the blogging community.

Secondly, while we were excited to offer a media event to bloggers to view our exhibit, we were concerned about appearing to ghettoize bloggers by separating them from traditional news media or the possibility some bloggers may feel offended not being offered the chance to attend the event for “traditional” media. Also at question was the issue that many traditional media outlets such as the Saint Paul Pioneer Press newspaper and KARE 11 TV have their own staff bloggers for their online web sites.

We decided to open both time slots up for bloggers to attend but the first time slot would be offered to general media and the second time slot would be a blogger exclusive event. We ran this idea by some prominent bloggers in the Minneapolis/St. Paul community and the feedback was positive.

However…
With all of our planning we overlooked one small thing (but with large consequences), the time of the event was terrible. We scheduled the media events to take place on a Thursday between 10am to 1pm. We heard back from several of the bloggers that they were interested but unable to get away from their day jobs for the event. Douh! This led to a very small turn out indeed. Two bloggers (of 32 invited) turned out to the first media event and one blogger turned up to the second. In spite of the low turn out MHS considers it a success for a first time attempt and will continue with the practice, but will in the future offer better time slots for bloggers.

Compile a list of bloggers relevant to your organization or cause

Museums should start paying attention to bloggers and compiling a list of relevent bloggers. This is difficult. As mentioned before blogs can be many and ephemeral. While it can be helpful to look at blogs with large number of followers and lots of activity, to be truly successful you need to go for blogs that are relevant as well.

Sometimes numbers matter but nothing beats a good understanding of the blogging communities or blogs that are most relevant to your organization and/or what you are promoting. Some bloggers can carry a lot of influence even if they may not have the “numbers”. In addition to these, nothing beats a blog that is an enthusiast for your organization or cause.

Ultimately it comes down to research.  Start reading blogs, do searches on topics relevant to your organization or search for mentions by blogs of your organization on sites like technorati.com or blogsearch.google.com (if you are not already doing this you should!).

Build Relationships

Ok, you now have your list; now work to build a relationship with the bloggers on that list.  Send them relevant and timely information about your organization and events. If possible provide tickets to show openings or pre-show screenings with behind the scenes tours for the media. Send follow-up “thank you” notes to the blogger for communicating the message to the public. Also similarly like the press, museums should not expect bloggers to cover them for inviting them to the event. What is being built is a relationship. This is the first step in to their world.

Consider any giveaways carefully; the giveaway should be appropriate to the blogger and audience. Some bloggers may feel that even free admission is unethical, others may not feel that it is an ethical issue; others still may not mind at all and also enjoy the free wine and cheese at the event. Use good judgment.

Track Results

In the end it is important to have tangible results so track any postings about your museum with keywords through sites like blogsearch.google.com or technorati.com.

If after all your efforts you are receiving little to no coverage or inaccurate coverage go back to the bloggers an find out why and what information you need to provide for coverage. Again, museums should not expect bloggers to cover them for sending them a press release or inviting them to an event but if you find yourself not getting any coverage you may wish to relook at what blogs you are trying to get your message out to.

Museums are in a great position to harness the power of bloggers to help get their message out than commerical companies. I am going out on a limb but I imagine it is easier to get bloggers in their community interested in a media release on an exhibit opening than say, a new facial cream. The key is museums need to start compling lists of blogs and forming relationships that they feel are a good fit with their mission and institution.

Where I work, the Minnesota Historical Society (MHS), Wikipedia is the top referrer after search engines and internal referrals and is ranked 11th overall over the past year on MHS’ main web site. The same holds true with referrals from images used on Wikipedia from our collections. Wikipedia.org is ranked 9th overall over the past year as a referrer to our visual resources database.

It is important to note that by policy, Wikipedia does not publish original research, material on Wikipedia needs be cited from somewhere else. This is good for the Minnesota Historical Society and other museums and cultural institutions on two levels, first, people are directed from Wikipedia articles to their site from either footnotes or “External links” relating to the article. Secondly, the museum or institution also becomes an authoritative source of that material and thus more relevant. The Minnesota Historical Society’s massive web site has an amazing amount of data on topics relating to Minnesota History, much of it buried, and even if it is accessible mnhs.org may not be the first site folks think of when they want to look up Minnesota topics and people such as  F. Melius Christiansen. After Google search Wikipedia has become the place people go to to look up information. Wikipedia may be the first place to go to for information on F. Melius Christiansen but Minnesota Historical Society can be the authoritative word on F. Melius Christiansen. So cool….

The Minnesota Historical Society has gone from watching people add information on Wikipedia to actively adding information, links and images ourselves. It has been baby steps, adding or correcting links from relevant topics to pages on our site like our Finding Aids and also adding, first public domain images of the Governors of Minnesota  then later adding non-free (copyright protected) images of Minnesota Governors to Wikipedia under an educational license. We also have been adding original images of objects from our collection to illustrate relevant articles. The M8 Greyhound, The William Crooks, Globe, and oddly enough Vending Machine, are among some of the pages in which we contributed original images.

Wikipedia Loves Art/Museums Love Wikipedia

MHS is not alone in enjoying and understanding “The Wikipedia Benefit”, 15 museums have participated in Wikipedia Loves Art event. Coordinated by the museuo-digerati  Brooklyn Museum,  Wikipedia Loves Art is a scavenger hunt and free content photography contest among museums and cultural institutions worldwide, and aimed at illustrating Wikipedia articles.

While these institutions are interested making their collections more accessible and getting it where the people are, it doesn’t hurt that it will be items from their collection that will be illustrating articles on Wikipedia. Seeing something online does not necessarily make you want to see it less, it might actually have the opposite effect. It may wind up giving it a somewhat minor celebrity status. Image two people visiting the Brooklyn Museum and saying to each other… “Hey! Isn’t that the painting that illustrates the Oedipus Complex on Wikipedia?”  MHS was unable to jump on the Wikipedia Loves Art band wagon at the time but I would love to start an event among historical societies called Wikipedia is History.

The “M” Word

What is happening here (at least in part) is marketing. Again, many museums working on the web are loath to use the word, however when Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales  himself talks about people taking pictures of art for the Wikipedia Loves Art scavenger hunt  and says, “…which of course helps the museum…” he is indirectly talking about the museum marketing itself and its collections through Wikipedia. As mentioned before, one of the problems is not about getting museums to push their content out on the web but rather how to pull people back to both their web site and ultimately the museum itself. Unfortunately if done incorrectly museum work on Wikipedia can ultimately lead to just another cool siloized project that does little to connect users back to the museum.

However, it is important to emphasis a few points here when working on Wikipedia.

1. Be Transparent and Honest
Do not try to hide your intentions. Your IP can be traced. You more likely to get help and understanding if you commit a Wikipedia faux pas if you are up front about your intentions. Trying to hide who you are or mask your intentions will only get you ill will if you are found out and risk bad PR for your organization. BTW: A good rule of thumb is to void editing your own museum’s entry on Wikipedia and then only editing it to correct inaccuracies (ie: hours and location).

2. Be Relevant
Think before you post. As a museum approach Wikipedia as a long term relationship when posting. The entries and information you add is not about a quick release of information. You may have spent a lot of time and money on your shiny new exhibit or program but is it really relevant enough to add on Wikipedia? Probably not. Trying to clumsily and brutishly ram through material that resembles a press kit will only result in a backlash. Also when adding links to the “External links” section only link to your site not if it’s about the topic, but if it adds information to the page.

3. Be Prepared to Lose Control
That is, be prepared give up control. Wikipedia is not your site. You may not be happy if one of your images winds up illustrating an article that your organization is less than thrilled about. Many organizations have decided (or discovered) that the cost of not participating is greater than or offsets the loss of control. Besides most have found out that with the advent of social web they do not have the control over their brand that they once did anyways.

4. Lurk a bit
Do your research upfront. Spend time monitoring pages and edits to those pages. Read the discussion pages of topics and other discussions that go on in Wikipedia. And even with all the lurking be prepared to get flagged and have something deleted. Wikipedia is a complex environment with it’s own rules and regulations. Understand, that while they do want submissions they have guidelines in place for quality control. I have found that if your intentions are well meaning, other users and Wikipedia administrators can be very helpful. If they cannot point you in the right direction to correct an error, will explain why your submission was deleted.

While adding Minnesota Governor images to Wikipedia we had four of them marked for deletion. I found out that I had filled the image template out incorrectly and also while it was possible to use a non-free image it could only be used when no free equivalent was available.  It seems since those four ex-governors  where still living there was the potential to take a free image of them. So the images were deleted and Wikipedia will have to wait for a free image or until they die. The living governors images were deleted however, I was given guidance on how to fill out the  non-free use template correctly so the other images would not get deleted by technicality.

Content is King

To combat this, advertising agencies are now switching to a more marketing-focused model that depends upon viral content. Rebecca Lieb, former Editor-in-Chief for ClickZ talks about three criteria for creating content that should:

• Educate and inform the audience
• Amuse, engage, entertain
• Create a story that consumers can spread (viral marketing)

The key is how do you make your content so engaging that consumers voluntary go online and subscribe, or go even farther and become advocates and invite or send your content to their friends. Many think of video when they think “Goin’ Viral” but the same applies to e-newsletters and blog posts as well, which are increasing the marketing tools of choice for these cash strapped times. Lieb says that brands are now dedicating their budget not to media buying, but to creative and spokespeople to find ways to engage consumers.

I would like to point out that Lieb said that they are not cutting their budget, but rather rededicating it. Engaging consumers comes at a price. Anyone who still thinks that web is just cheap content is fooling themselves.

Lieb also states, advertisers are becoming “storytellers”.  If you want to sell a product, you need a story. Cranking out talking head videos, sending out emails or doing Twitter or Facebook posts that come across as institutional press releases is not content that is going to get someone to want to “opt-in”.

As museums, most of us are adept at telling stories AND we have content, lots of content. It seems amazing that most opt-in web marketing by museums appears to be only as a by product rather than an intentional campaign.  If only museums could do as good a job of story telling in their marketing departments as in their education departments. If we want them to engage in the conversation then we need to offer consumers something of substance in return.

Push and then Pull

We tell the story, but pushing your content out on the web is still not marketing or at least marketing it effectively, it is certainly useful to your brand but pushing your content out without a plan to pull your fans back in with some call to action whether it be to purchase a picture or a membership, attend an event, give to the annual fund drive is a miss. Your $10,000 interactive flash site may be lovely, your Facebook page exquisite, you can put every one of your institution’s photos on Flickr but if you have no plan to pull users back to your institution you have missed a valuable marketing opportunity. Don’t get me wrong, projects like iTunes University, The Commons on Flickr, Wikimedia Commons are wonderful and I believe that museums have a higher goal than just commercialism, however at least in the U.S. we must acknowledge that museums for the most part need to pay the bills and more often than not government funding is not always an option.

So while many museums sit on content it remains to be seen the ways that museums can effectively push that contect in leveraging an on-line marketing stratagy to, first, get customers to opt-in and allow themselves to be marketed to and then secondly pull those customers through their doors as patrons.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Minnesota History Center identified as Miller Hospital on Google Maps

This is a fairly current image of the Minnesota History Center. Curious thing is that the History Center is identified as the Miller Hospital. The site was occupied by the Miller Hospital but the hospital was razed OVER 20 YEARS AGO!

Wait! It gets worse…

Minnesota History Center default location on Google Maps is way wrong!

Not only is the site identified wrong, but a search for “Minnesota History Center” in Google Maps puts the marker not even near the building let alone the location of entrance to the Minnesota History Center. In fact, the marker points to an isolated stairway leading to no where that is often used more as a public urinal. How quaint!

To be fair, the site being identified as “Miller Hospital” is less Google Maps fault than Tele Atlas which is responsible for producing the digital map. However, the location of the marker is another matter. That layer is entirely Googlemaps. It is more than likely based on where 345 W. Kellogg Blvd. would normally be. However, to quote our esteemed former Governor Jesse Ventura, Saint Paul’s streets were designed by a “bunch of drunken Irishmen” (my Grandfather being one of them). Our address, 345 W. Kellogg Blvd. doesn’t even come close to our entrance.

But wait! Web 2.0!

Googlemaps User interface showing Minnesota History Center adjustments

Fortunately you can claim your business listing (assuming it is listed in Google Maps). The Minnesota History Center did just that. In doing so not only are you able to move the marker to a more appropriate spot for your museum but you are also able add photos and videos of your organization as well as it’s hours. On top of that you can also categorize your listing and get access to stats on how often that listing is viewed. One problem is that claim is only for the search “Minnesota History Center”, do a search for “Minnesota Historical Society” and you still get sent to the stairway. However, changing just an address, example: “345 Kellogg Blvd W, St Paul, MN” is rather painless, Google Maps now does allow you to move a marker of a street address.

By claiming a business listing, you actually validate your listing by either A. having a an automated Google bot call the number on the listing and give you a pin number or B. have them mail a postcard to the address on the listing with a pin number. In both cases you then enter the pin number to claim your listing.

Still there is the small issue of being identified as “Miller Hospital”, that is a more of a problem. Unlike Google Maps, Tele Altas has no admin tool for the user which would allow us to change or remove the incorrect information. Tele Atlas can only be contacted via form and hope that they will look favorablely upon a request (they have not to this date for the Miller Hospital change) and will make the correction. Sigh…