Another Web 2.0 application with a similar cultural trajectory is MySpace. Alexa Internet, a Web information service, places MySpace as the sixth most popular site in the world, behind No. 4 YouTube, as of June 7. MySpace is a social-networking website that offers photos, music, videos and blogs submitted by users around the world. There are more than 150 million MySpace accounts, and that number is growing, by last account in August 2006 at the rate of about 300,000 per day, according to CNN.
Increasingly, museums are joining the millions already registered with MySpace. Glenn Wonsettler, manager of visitor services at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, says, “MySpace seems like something Andy would absolutely love. He would probably think that the museum’s MySpace page was a little boring, but that would be okay.”
There are a number of ways MySpace can be employed to reach out to the public. After all, being listed as a MySpacer increases potential visibility by at least 150 million people. Signing up for a profile takes about 15 minutes, and MySpacers request to be added to others’ lists of friends. Your profile can be viewed by anyone, and people request that you add them to your list of friends. A lot of attention is paid to how many friends you have—much like high school. (My wife has out-friended me by nearly three times, but her brother Jared has almost 400 friends—he’s like the Regis Philbin of MySpace.)
Typical with Web 2.0 applications, users can post comments on your MySpace page for the whole world to see. Most of the comments, for museums anyway, have little to do with fulfilling the mission of the museum. On the Brooklyn Museum’s MySpace page, there was a January comment from a photographer professing: “I love being in an industry where the best thing you can do for your career is to die.” Likewise the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre posted a comment on the Warhol’s My-Space with a very odd (yet funny) version of Romeo and Juliet within the comment linking back to . . . yep, YouTube. This miscellany “is just part of MySpace,” explains Shelley Bernstein, manager of information systems at the Brooklyn Museum. “It’s part of owning MySpace instead of fighting it.”
Realizing that users can try to take advantage of the site can also increase its effectiveness. Many museums receive comments from other artists posting notices about gallery openings, online artwork or live performances. Do museums want to be associated with that kind of shameless self-promotion? “Warhol was a self-promoter,” says Wonsettler. “MySpace is an enormous promotional tool. We certainly do not mind a little self-promotion.” This practice only increases the awareness around the MySpace community of the museum’s presence.
Ever listen to Howard Stern before he fled the FCC (for satellite broadcaster Sirius Radio) like New Yorkers from winter? Segments are funny, bits are clean, until all of a sudden you’re sitting in your car beet-red and embarrassed. Like Howard Stern, your MySpace friends can get a little risqué with their content. The Warhol reviews all comments and posts; anything “too intentionally explicit” is deleted as soon as possible. A message from “wildbleedingheart” on March 2 told the Warhol that he had had a colostomy. Is that inappropriate? There’s a fine line between TMI (teen for “too much information”) and explicit. That is a risk that comes with the medium, Bernstein says. “If you’re going to be in the community, you have to own being in the community. We can’t control who walks in our doors, so we don’t control who our friends are.” Only recently the Brooklyn Museum decided to moderate its comments; with the proliferation of MySpace spam, it has been necessary to at least check for questionable content. This is not as easy for the Warhol. “We are also part of Andy Warhol’s legacy,” Wonsettler says, “so the judgment often comes down to ‘What would Andy have wanted?’”
Simon takes a different spin. “There are no traps that come with a MySpace account. There are possibilities, both good and bad. Too often museums are more naive than the teenagers whose innocence we so ardently want to protect. Know the rules and culture of new and strange environments.”
All of this commenting serves as a kind of currency on MySpace. Users can write messages that are sent to all of their friends, which in the cases of the Warhol and the Brooklyn Museum number in the thousands. If one of your friends likes your bulletin and copies the bulletin into a bulletin of her own and sends it out to her own friends, that’s called a re-bulletin. How often these bulletins are re-posted as others’ own is a way of judging effectiveness. “That tells me if the message is successful—you see the word-of-mouth happen,” says Bernstein. The Brooklyn Museum’s notice for the November 2006 panel discussion of the “Graffiti Women” exhibit was re-bulletined time and again and resulted in much higher attendance than expected.
Wonsettler says that MySpace is used as a promotional tool to keep those who are interested in the loop. The Brooklyn Museum takes a slightly different approach, focusing on the website’s community-building effects. “We try to be very conscious of our audience,” says Bernstein. “When we’re [on MySpace], we’re serving two purposes: to provide something dynamic that doesn’t take much time and at the same time build the community.”
Success in cyberspace’s second coming is a little harder to define than program attendance. Do not be afraid to call it quits if it’s not working; it is better not to have a MySpace page than to have one that you can’t keep updated. Simon’s suggestions are similar:
1. Set your high-concept goals and find a Web 2.0 technique/application to fit those goals. “It’s not acceptable to say, ‘We want to do it all.’ Set a strategy best serving the mission of the institution.”
2. Start conservatively and build from there.
3. Get all departments on board.
4. Get the statistics. “Keep everyone apprised of the impact the project is having on the institution in general,” advises Simon.
5. Be flexible and open to error.
6. Don’t wuss out. “We’ve known for a long time that visitors define their own museum experiences,” Simon says. “Web 2.0 sites take the radical stance that it is desirable to have users define not just their own experience but everyone’s experience. Can you grin and bear it?
“Incorporating support for innovation into museum corporate culture isn’t just about people sitting in rooms dreaming of the next Bodyworlds,” Simon writes in Museum 2.0. “It should be about encouraging people to do—to try a program for seniors, to host a MySpace page, to build a cart activity and get it out on the floor. That way, staff is learning, stretching, and feeling supported in taking risks.”
By encouraging staff to pursue new audiences, museums will open their virtual doors to the world and meet visitors on familiar ground. As Simon wrote in an e-mail interview, “Concerns about resources have to be addressed. It’s hard to commit resources when you don’t know why you’re doing it; once institutional leaders buy off on the value, resources become available. Involvement in Web 2.0 can be cheap or pricey, but it takes time to maintain a presence and establish relationships—which is what successful 2.0 products do.”
Now the trick is to keep them there longer than 15 minutes. One prominent ad campaign for communications technology company Cisco Systems early this year expanded Andy Warhol’s sentiment with the slogan “Welcome to a network where anyone can be famous!” Somehow I think Andy would approve.
James Yasko is manager of visitor education at the National Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, N.Y. He is the administrator of the Baseball in the Classroom blog, found at http://hofedu.mlblogs.com.
