Today is #followamuseum Day on Twitter. Museums and museum lovers have been busily sharing their favorite tweeting museums. At http://www.followamuseum.org you can find some (but not all) of the museums who are waiting to be followed.
The idea originated with Jim Richardson at Museum Marketing who was disappointed to see that Bill Gate had attracted so many followers in such a short time.
But this raises a question. Should museums follow you back? If you think you know, Mia Ridge has posted a quick survey. (I’ll try to report back here if results are shared).
It’s a timely question as I’m participating in a panel at this week’s iSchools conference about social media. Also timely was Clive Thompson’s latest column in Wired “In Praise of Online Obscurity.” While I’m not nearly as famous as the tweeters mentioned in the article, my raft of followers is approaching 1,000. I’m feeling a little hemmed in and often wonder what all those people find interesting about my tweets. But more than anything it’s made me very conscious that I’m not just tweeting to a few friends: it’s an audience.
So what does this mean for museums? If social doesn’t scale what happens to your twitter feed? Does it fracture? What if I’ve done a nice job cultivating a great community around my museums tweets? What happens to the social space when @BillGates and his 400,000 followers crash the party? How could #followamuseum day change the way your museum tweets?
Thompson suggests that “there is value in obscurity.” But there is also value in exclusivity. I wonder how long before museums start special “members only” twitter accounts that only allow paying members to follow.
Update: Mia has posted the results of her “Friendly or Weird” survey.
February 2nd, 2010 07:03
Thanks for mentioning the survey – I’ll share the results over the weekend.
About museums having “members only” twitter accounts – have you seen http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/join/1stfans/ – I’m not a member but I think that’s one of their offerings.
February 2nd, 2010 07:54
Ah yes, I’d taken a look at 1stfans before, but hadn’t looked at it recently. And I’m not saying that such things would be bad – in fact that kind of “obscurity’ might be good for the smaller number of people who might participate.
But it would seem to entail more than one strategy for using twitter. A open, public account that might be less social and another more limited space for selected groups within the museum.
By the way, I think you are one of those people who have a similar arrangement for your personal twitter accounts – right? I’ve not been so much contemplating a “Musebarian_out” account, as much as “Musebrarian_local”