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Futurist Friday: Visitor Analytics

Category: Center for the Future of Museums Blog

Your Futurist Friday assignment is this very brief (1.58 min) video from Cisco about using Connected Mobile Experiences (CMX) analytics to locate and track every wireless device in a venue. 

While the commentary in this piece is about shoppers, think about the implications for collecting data about museum visitors–the traffic patterns through the museum,  dwell time in particular exhibits throughout the day and at different times of the week or year. Would mobile tracking such as this give you useful information you do not already have? How could data such as this would help you make operational decisions?

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Even as museums begin to move into the world of mobile location analytics, they need to respect the privacy concerns of visitors. This week the Future of Privacy Forum and the Wireless Registry announced the creation of a new platform and a voluntary “Mobile Location Analytics Code of Conduct” that enable consumers to opt-out of such tracking. In the future, data privacy may be commonly addressed in  museum codes of ethics, as well as in museums’ operational policies.

And if your museum is already using mobile tracking analytics of one sort or another, and/or addressing data privacy in your policies, I would love to hear about it! Drop me a line or post in the comments, below.

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