The Museum is Nominated for 3 Webby Awards!

The Webby Award nominations are in (drumroll, please) and the American Museum of Natural History is nominated in three categories. The Museum’s YouTube Channel is nominated for best Science & Education channel. Take a look at the AMNH Channel Trailer:

Over 50,000 subscribers can’t be wrong! Check out more of the Museum’s video offerings and VOTE over at the Webby Awards Page. 

Additionally, the Museum’s Instagram account is nominated in the Education & Discovery social category, and the #InsideAMNH campaign is nominated for Best Photography & Graphics social category. 

Vote for the American Museum of Natural History in these three Webby Categories! 

Congratulations AMNH!

They’ve done wonderful things with their Instagram recently - definitely worth checking out!

6 ways museums can boost social media engagement

It’s nice to have a large social media following. It looks good on paper and can impress your boss. But stacking huge numbers is only half the battle. The whole point of social media is to communicate with the public and build your brand credentials. If your posts aren’t getting likes, shares, or clicks then you have a problem. Simply put - those followers you’ve acquired either aren’t seeing your content, or they aren’t much interested in it.

So how can museums and art organisations get around this and increase the level of interaction with their audience? Glad you asked. Here are six simple pointers to boost your social media engagement.

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Great little Tumblr I just ran across. Worth a scroll down if you're in any kind of non-profit social media.

What’s wrong with this picture?

I’ll tell you what’s wrong with this picture: assumption.

This picture has gone viral as thousands of people deliver searing indictments of both smartphones and teens.

I’ve met a couple of teens. I’ve had a couple smartphones. Could these teens be playing Angry Birds or texting stupid jokes to each other? Yeah, they could.

But they could also be googling provenance for that painting or taking a second to text a friend about how amazing the museum is or completing an assignment given off-screen by someone standing just beside the photographer. They could be taking notes about the palette choice so that later they turn into a generation of artists that take your breath away.

What’s wrong with this picture? Nothing, until proven otherwise. Welcome to 2014.

Yup - I spent yesterday in London. In 4 various museums we used our phones and iPads to:

I would have added updates online while in the BL Terror and Wonder exhibition, but respected their policy about photography. I would have looked up more details about Seti I’s sarcophagus (the room attendant was busy with a group, in a spirited chat about Soane’s intentions) at Soane’s House, but again, respected their no phones at all policy. 

We increasingly rely on our blocks of technology. For the generation who has grown up with them, smart phones etc are a part of life, and rather than just being a source of diversion, are also the key way to gather data, share experiences, record reactions and impressions, and interact with the world around them in an enhanced way.

That said: French students, camera phones, selfies, museums. No. Just no. Localised EMPs, that’s what’s needed. 

While I could not disagree more with the final (bolded) sentence of this post, what's above it is worth noting.

Visitors to #TurnerPrize @Tate have used paper and pencil to recreate the internet on the comments board

This is my favourite thing today.

25 January 2012

If you enjoy following museums on social media, then mark your diaries for a week today, Friday 1st February, as it’s Follow-a-Museum day on Twitter. First initiated in 2010 by Sumo design agency in the UK, museums in Germany have since claimed the idea for the community and...

“You might have seen one of our objects, even if you have never visited us - our loans are all over the country” - @HornimanMuseum on twitter

The Horniman Museum has tracked all their object loans on a google map to show how their collections travel. Click to visit the map and see which objects are in which museums. 

I tweet for work and it ends up on Tumblr, where I reblog it on my personal account.

The lines. They are blurring.

Quite proud that my submission made the cut! :)

I think this is my favourite so far.

laughingsquid:

Do I love this so much because it criticises Facebook? Partly.

Choosing unique web handles/account names is the bane of my online life. It will always pain me that my personal Twitter account has to have an underscore in it.