By James Yasko
This article was published in Museum News, July/August issue of 2007.
In a 1979 interview with the Washington Post, Andy Warhol, reevaluating his most enduring quote, said, “I’m bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is, ‘In 15 minutes, everybody will be famous.’” And that’s what has happened with Web 2.0.
Wait, Web 2.0? There’s another version of the Internet? Well, kind of. It’s not a different Internet, but a different way of using the Internet. With Web 2.0 applications, users take control by encouraging collaboration and sharing information. At the first Web
2.0 conference in October 2004, media moguls Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle summarized some of the key aspects of Web 2.0 by introducing the Web as a platform with information as the driving force and, perhaps most important, ease of use among new users.
Museums use Web 2.0 technology to excite audiences about museum content and gather a roster of “views” and “friends”; users stay connected with a cultural institution in a medium with which they’re familiar. While museums might not target a specific demographic, defining the audiences most likely to take advantage of Web 2.0 applications and marketing specifically to them help drive traffic and the all-important word of mouth.
Does it hurt that it’s mostly a younger generation who pick up Web 2.0? Not at all. James Chung, president of market research firm Reach Advisors, makes it his job to notice how people use technology. “Those who are 65 and over aren’t as dependent on the Internet. Those who are in their late 20s and older depend on the Internet as a tool, while those who are younger live, eat and breathe connectivity. For any museum that wishes to cultivate this younger audience, technology will be a necessary part of their outreach strategy.” The audiences to which museums reach out today will be President’s Circle donors tomorrow. Staying relevant to that growing audience while staying to true to the museum’s mission is integral to a long-term plan.
Nina Simon runs the blog Museum 2.0 (www.museumtwo.com) and writes about everything from why museums should use Flickr to rethinking wayfinding. In a March 2007 post, she nails the point of all this: social interaction. Without it, Web 2.0 won’t work. “A successful [experience] uses social interaction to enhance the individual experience; it gets better the more people use it,” she says. “The social component is a natural extension of the individual actions.”
Unfortunately, Simon says, the primary message getting out to “non-techies” is what you hear in the news: “[It’s] ‘Look at what those crazy kids are doing.’ The value of these applications is often lost under the perception of constant change, privacy concerns and high barriers to entry. You don’t have to be a teenager to ‘get it.’”
One of the best examples of Web 2.0 is the website Wikipedia, an encyclopedia written entirely by volunteers whose 1,670,000-plus articles (and that’s only in English) can be edited by anyone. One of the main problems with Wikipedia—and by extension, most Web 2.0 applications—is allowing what could be perceived as too much control by the public. In Wikipedia’s case, “Favoring consensus over credentials in its editorial process makes it unauthoritative,” wrote Stacy Schiff in the July 2006 issue of the New Yorker. “It is also no more immune to human nature than any other utopian project. Pettiness, idiocy, and vulgarity are regular features of the site.” In March 2007 one of Wikipedia’s most prolific experts on theology, who edited upwards of 20,000 entries, was discovered to actually be a 20-something college dropout from Kentucky despite claiming to be a tenured professor of religion. In a response, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales listed the “twin pillars” of Wikipedia as “trust and tolerance.” Utopian, indeed, but we all know how utopian societies work out.
Despite this, a Wikipedia entry on your museum can mean a significantly higher search engine ranking, according to Jonathan Bowen of London South Bank University in the United Kingdom and Jim Angus of the National Institutes of Health, who gave a paper on museums and Wikipedia at the 2006 Museums and the Web conference. “Wikipedia is highly rated by search engines such as Google, so the Wikipedia entry is liable to appear high in search engine listings, especially if a user searches for a museum by name,” they say. “Anything that improves search rankings for museums is worthwhile, particularly when it can be achieved at minimal cost and effort, as with Wikipedia.”
Flickr, a photo management and sharing application, is another way for museums to increase their reach. The site allows users to arrange photos in albums and post them online with everyone else’s album. For example, the pictures you took last month of your trip to Bhutan can be put in the Bhutan album with other pictures given the Bhutan tag, with comments and ratings from anyone browsing the site. The Brooklyn Museum has been using this to its advantage with a feed that has more than 1,600 photos.
Preparing the Brooklyn Museum's Rob Mueck exhibition- available to everyone on Flickr. | “These are not just party photos, but features connected directly to our exhibitions, such as a photo set taking visitors behind the scenes of our Ron Mueck exhibition,” Shelley Bernstein, manager of information systems, wrote in a letter to Museum News. |
Recurring themes of Web 2.0 applications are those two pillars Wikipedia’s Wales espoused: trust and tolerance. You trust users to not upload inappropriate content; if they do, you trust other users to report it and Wikipedia to remove the content. Why don’t the founders and webmasters take it down themselves? Those Web 2.0 applications are so popular it’s difficult to monitor every piece of information passed back and forth. Can it be a problem for museums? Sure, but is having too many people access museum content a problem you might be willing to take on? I certainly hope so. And while many museums are just now developing audio for their site, some museums are increasingly turning to video, thanks to the ease and popularity of YouTube.
The video-sharing site YouTube allows users to watch—for free—Chicago band OK Go’s music video with its highly coordinated treadmill dance or video that accompanied Esquire’s March 2007 piece on the 2004 Beslan school hostage tragedy. Don’t care about either of those things? (Really, you should watch that OK Go video.) You can make your own music video with an audio clip from the Residents sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) or watch one of 13 videos uploaded by the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA).
YouTube has made headlines for a $1.65 billion sale to Google and Time magazine’s recently naming it the Invention of the Year. Founded by three former employees of PayPal, the e-commerce site you probably have used to pay for that Beatles LP or Irish teapot from eBay, YouTube now employs more than 67 people and allows more than 70 million videos from around the world to be viewed . . . per day. According to Chung, YouTube now has a larger audience than the New York Times’ website.
Daniel Incandela is the manager of educational new media projects at IMA and works closely with the museum’s YouTube channel. IMA began creating videos in fall 2005 with no thought of YouTube or any other Web 2.0 application. “We had videos lying around,” explained Incandela in a phone interview, “and we wanted a place to use them.” But IMA’s website could not handle the bandwidth necessary to offer video. In summer 2006, IMA started posting video to YouTube that appeared in exhibits and as forms of documentation, but the basic account has limitations on file size and video length. All videos uploaded to YouTube—regardless of the type of account—are restricted to 100 megabytes and 10 minutes in length. IMA circumvented the length limit by applying for a director account, a free option that allows for larger files.
In January 2007 approximately 30 million people streamed videos from YouTube. IMA is trying to get the word out to those users. “Surveys of Web visitors show that the same people who visit our website also visited YouTube and read blogs and download podcasts,” said Incandela. Museums reaching out to the online community are targeting all Web users, who are just as likely to download a podcast as they are to visit a museum’s YouTube channel. But for IMA there is no target audience per se. “We have a desire to be a transparent place to the outsider,” said Incandela. “It’s about telling compelling stories about art, and video is a great medium for doing that. By providing accessible stories, literally millions of users discover art, from formal pieces to informal behind-the-scenes videos.”
But how do those millions find museum content as opposed to a video of a toilet paper folder and dispenser prototype made of Legos and scrap metal? One of the problems that museums, and all content providers on the Web, face is how to get the word out. By harnessing the popularity of YouTube, IMA is certainly fulfilling its mission of “reaching out to—and actively participating in—our diverse community.” That community has been expanded by the experimentation with YouTube. “We have more visitors to our YouTube channel—by millions—than our website, and there has been very little publicity originating from the museum,” said Incandela.
Peter Foley, MoMA’s director of marketing, agrees. “How do people find you in the chaos? Now you’re a tiny fish in a big pond, and you have to find ways to promote it.” MoMA featured a 2006 retrospective of the avant-garde music and visual arts group the Residents. In conjunction with the exhibit, visitors could download from the Residents’ website and MoMA.org a 90-second audio clip from the group’s album River of Crime and create a video based on it. Curator Barbara London and members of the Residents selected videos to post on YouTube for public voting; the top vote-getters were featured in the retrospective. The public was now integral to the exhibition. “It created a lot of buzz, was a lot of fun and was a great use of the medium,” said Allegra Burnette, MoMA’s creative director of digital media.
A collaboration between MoMA and filmmaker Doug Aitken resulted in the outdoor exhibit “Sleepwalkers.” Aitken created eight sequential film scenes projected onto MoMA’s exterior after dark early this year. Actors included Donald Sutherland, The O.C.’s Ryan Donowho and musical artist Cat Power, and fans helped drive the buzz. One fan took Aitken’s film, re-edited it so that you only saw Donowho and reposted it to YouTube with a new score. “That form of interaction and engaging the visitor allows them to have fun with it,” says Peter Foley, MoMA’s marketing director. “We want people to have fun with MoMA.”
Ahhh, but how much fun? YouTube has a basic security screening process, relying on users to write in and decide whether a video is inappropriate. With an application available to everyone come concerns about allowing any member of the public to comment and vote on the appropriateness of content. This is a fundamental characteristic of Web 2.0 applications: giving the public unbridled access to content. Museums must be careful and exercise caution over what is distributed to YouTube. Obviously you would not want to offer a behind-the-scenes video of your guards making rounds and punching in security codes. Make sure that permissions and copyrights are in order, and, if you are repurposing a video from a gallery setting to a Web-based setting, ensure the copyright holder approves of the transition. “We just have to make sure that the videos we post and the people represented are made aware and they’re okay with it. Once you put the video out there,” Burnette advises, “you lose a certain amount of control.”
Museums must be cautious of how much control they are willing to lose. IMA currently allows all user comments, but they are checked regularly for appropriateness and have come across no issues to this point. MoMA let “Sleepwalkers” go without monitoring comments. “That’s what YouTube is about—we don’t just want to put up the positive [comments],” Burnette says.
Because of the successes in 2006, IMA’s YouTube program has expanded—and become more defined—in 2007. IMA’s results have been surprising. “Our highly produced videos have less views than our short and informal videos,” Burnette says. MoMA mines the museum for content that makes sense for YouTube. “I don’t think people are coming to YouTube for dry or scholarly information,” Burnette explains. “They’re looking for easily digestible things that illuminate art and make it interesting for them.”
