Marketing & Public Relations

Using Pinterest to See the Future

By Elizabeth Merritt

What is the fastest growing social media startup-of-the-moment? Pinterest, a site devoted to “visual scrapbooking.” Pinterest’s first investor, Brian Cohen, attributes the site’s burgeoning popularity to “people’s natural desire to curate …
Social Butterfly

By Cecelia Walls

This article originally appeared in the March/April 2012 issue of Museum magazine, a benefit of AAM membership. Today there are more than 800 million active individual users of Facebook and 30,000 Facebook pages for nonprofits, with these …
Open Authority & the Future of Museum Ethics

By Elizabeth Merritt

Lori Byrd Phillips is the U.S. Cultural Partnerships Coordinator for the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikipedian in Residence at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. As a museum studies graduate student at Indiana University-Purdue …
The Curation of Collaboration: Experiments in Mobilizing Museum Archives

By Elizabeth Merritt

This guest post is by Gaurav Vaidya, Andrea Thomer, Rob Guralnick and David Bloom. Gaurav, a graduate student at CU Boulder, has been editing Wikipedia since 2002. Rob is a biodiversity informatician, museum curator and collaborative …
Steampunk, Crowdfunding and the Power of Social Media

By Elizabeth Merritt

Or, How One Exhibit Company Pulled A Brass Elephant Out Of A Hat This week’s guest post is by Peter Overstreet. Pete and his wife, Cat Taylor, founded the exhibit and event design company Aeronaut Productions LLC. Pete was a full-time …
Tailor your Twitterverse to the Future

By Elizabeth Merritt

Thanksgiving 2011 marked a CFM milestone—we topped 10,000 followers on Twitter. I was thankful about that—I like to think it means we are sharing information people find useful and informative. And maybe a little fun. I know some folks …
Building a Better Fishing Pole: how technology-focused organizations can help their museum community

By Elizabeth Merritt

Many museums are struggling to navigate the expanding universes of social media and digital content with the slim resources available to them in constrained budgets. Fortunately, some entrepreneurial museums are breaking trail—pooling …
Technology: A Tool for Storytelling

By Elizabeth Merritt

Michael Balderrama, programs coordinator at AAM, shares news about next week’s Technology, Interpretation and Education online conference—an opportunity for readers to glimpse of how an organic approach to technology can transform the …
It’s Not About the Cat Cams

By Elizabeth Merritt

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Blogger, Tumblr—the world is awash in social media platforms and museums are, like the rest of the world, experimenting with when to use them, to what ends and how to measure success. Guest blogger …
The Future of Development: Crowdsourced Funding

By Elizabeth Merritt

When AAM conducted its 2009 Museum Financial Information survey, a quarter of respondents had a capital campaign in progress. We don’t even have stats on how many museums regularly run annual giving campaigns, but it sometimes it …