1. Birla Museum Pilani Rajasthan 333031
First & Foremost Science & Technology Museum of India
http://www.birlamuseum.in/
12th All India Conference of Heads of Science Museums / Centers
December 7 - 9, 2012
Theme of the Conference: Networking Strategies for Success
Talk on Social Media & Museum Networking
by
Prof BR Natarajan, President – Vice Chancellor
Sangam University Bhilwara Rajasthan 311001
http://www.sangamuniversity.ac.in

2. There are roughly 2 million paid staff and 1.9
million volunteers making things happen in the
arts and cultural space. That’s almost 4 million
people! They serve over 850 million visitors
that generate $166.2 billion dollars in business
every year. In order to sustain this type of
impact, tech savvy art museums, zoos,
historical sites, botanical gardens and many
other types of arts and cultural nonprofits
understand that technology is indeed the key
to sustaining their growth.

3. •A website is a destination - so visiting a museum’s
website is analogous to visiting its building—it has
an address on the internet just as it has an address
on the street (assuming it isn’t a virtual museum!)
•The same term, “visitor,” is used to identify when
one views the museum’s homepage and when one
walk through its doors.
•In email, sending an inquiry to the main museum
email address isn’t much different from calling the
museum’s main telephone number.

4. What is the main aim of a museum
website? Browsing the internet, one
quickly concludes that this is to
promote the institution to potential
visitors.
This is of course a worthwhile aim,
museums would not exist without an
audience, but in present day context
museum websites can be much more.

5. The starting point for all digital activities within a
museum should be it’s mission, this is likely to be to
educate, to inspire, to preserve and to share (or
similar).
Visitor figures have a role in a museum, but these
should be a way to measure how many people the
museum is reaching, not the reason that the
institution exists.
The solution that emerges is for museum websites
to become hubs for ideas, publishing platforms
which allow institutions to pursue their missions by
sharing knowledge and inspiration with the public.

6. Walker Art Center had done this by becoming
a digital hub for not just contemporary art
which is hanging in their institution, but for
contemporary art as a whole. The result was a
40% increase in traffic to their website and a
digital experience which seems to ties in more
closely with their mission.
For the Walker Art Center website to grow
beyond being primarily a marketing tool they had
to invest in the team who produce their website,
adding members of staff to manage and produce
the huge quantity content needed to keep this
ideas hub constantly changing.

7. If Walker Art Centre which has an annual
turnover of around $17 million, can do it,
one must believe that even much smaller
institutions could do the same, but there
seems an unwillingness to divert funds
from the physical museum to pay for
digital activities, perhaps because many
institutions see websites as primarily a
marketing tool and things which happen
in the physical museum as delivering on
mission.

8. What about “social media,” “social networking” or, “the
social web?” The last several years have seen the
incredible rise of social networking sites like Facebook
and Twitter.
The internet churns out “revolutions” at an alarming
rate, but this development is certainly worthy of the
term. Most of these social sites and services are less
than five years old but they already amount for almost
25% of the the time people spend online.
Thousands of museums around the world already use
these tools to connect with their audiences—
real, potential, or virtual—but they are moving quite a
ways away from the institutional models towards the
personal, away from being a virtual space to being an
actor in a virtual space.

9. As part of understanding the need for
technology, the more than 17 thousand
museums in the U.S. are beginning to adopt
social media. By using social media museums
like the San Diego Zoo are able to help people
around the world enjoy their incredible
exhibits. How the San Diego Zoo uses social
media to bring their exhibits to life.
http://www.facebook.com/SanDiegoZoo

10. Here are 5 things San Diego Zoo does on their Facebook Page
•Sharing interesting content
•Engaging their visitors both at the park and online
•Creating interesting contest
•Connect with their loyal fans
•Tell people about the awesome work they do

11. Museums in Social Media
3,635 Museums & Galleries
11,863,882 "Likes" on Facebook
12,909,649 Twitter Followers
Source: http://litot.es/museums-in-social-media/

12. Name of Museum FB Likes Rank
MoMA The Museum of 897,345 #1
Modern Art
The Metropolitan Museum of 569,237 #2
Art, New York
Musée du Louvre 409,368 #3
Tate 318,504 #4
Solomon R. Guggenheim 301,395 #5
Museum

13. Name of Museum Twitter Rank
Followers
MoMA The Museum of 923,086 #1
Modern Art
Smithsonian Institution 627,146 #2
Tate 581,042 #3
Solomon R. Guggenheim 561,352 #4
Museum
Design Museum 514,055 #5

14. Name of Museum Klout Influence Rank
Tate 70.41 #1
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New 69.27 #2
York
MoMA The Museum of Modern Art 68.16 #3
National Museum of American History 67.86 #4
Smithsonian Institution 67.65 #5

15. Birla Museum Pilani Rajasthan 333031 India
https://www.facebook.com/BirlaMuseumPilani
Birla Museum Pilani
Non Profit Organization
Page: 324 like this
Joined Facebook
20 hours ago

16. First, that to stand out in the social web the
quality of your closest friends is more important
than the quantity of your followers.
Second, the museums enter the social web with a
privileged position. They will have to take on as
part of their mission a new responsibility: to use
that position to craft their social interactions in
ways that add meaning, and not to simply provide
content to fill the gadgets that people need to
justify buying

17. The landscape of social media or social networking is made
up of an ever-changing number of online services and sites.
Some specialize in particular media, such as pictures
(Flickr) or video (YouTube, Vimeo).
Some revolve around bookmarks (Delicious, Diigo), what
you’re reading (TwitThis) or where you are (Foursquare),
Klout which measures your degree of influence
Facebook and Twitter are generalists (Facebook voraciously
so) and anything online that considers itself social works
together with these two, almost by definitions, to share the
fact that you’re sharing your pictures, videos, or location.
Tumblr, a relatively new and popular blogging platform,
owes it’s success in part to their decision to make it very
easy to share from and to many of these other services.

18. What makes these, or any services, “social”?
What makes the social web different from the
web as we were using it before Facebook? In
a word: followers.
The social web is not made up of websites.
Different services use different words—
“fans”, “friends”, “contacts”—but, whatever
the term, the social web is made of
relationships implied by these terms,
mediated by these services.

19. •Whatever the interface or device one uses, being on the social web
entails more than setting up accounts on any of these services. One has to
develop a network, one has to attract followers, one has to make friends.
•When one posts something, it is one’s followers who will see it. If it is
interesting enough to them they may repost it. Now one’s followers’
followers see it. They may repost it further and, through the mutual
connection, one’s followers’ followers may become one’s followers.
•A website functions like a broadcast and the great change that the Web
brought was the creation of a universal wavelength where all
programming was available at once. Information spreads on the Social
Web more like a rumor or an idea, from person to person. People will turn
their ears towards those with best rumors or ideas to share, and there is
something in human nature that gives us delight in passing these on to the
next person.

20. To look at one possible model, Museum of Modern Art
MoMA’s Department of Advertising and Graphic Design has
their own portfolio website (http://momadesignstudio.org)
and Twitter account (@momastudio) which MoMA has
promoted on their main blog.
Their design team does amazing work and, by featuring it in
this way, MoMA not only gives the public a glimpse behind
the scenes, but also gives the designers a space to present
their work as their work, the way they would present it to
their peers and clients if they were working for themselves.
Something they would want to share, and their followers to
re-share. MoMA is a better member of the social web, and a
better place to work perhaps, by letting their insiders operate
something like outsiders.

21. Canada-based George Jacob Email: george jacob <designfunc@yahoo.com> has been the
founding Director of 3 Museums in his 25 year career and his project track record exceeds
$400 million to-date with museum work in 11 countries. His books Museum Design: The
FUTURE , Exhibit Design: The FUTURE and Museum Practice: The FUTURE address
numerous on-going trends in the museum field from around the world.
Private philanthropy in India is an untapped sector for museums and science centers.
Unlike the Google Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Paul Allen Foundation,
the Rockefeller Foundation and others where on-line Grants await proposals from
Educational institutions and Museums, India is yet to channelize its massive industry-based
taxation model to re-invest in its future- creative applied education- which continues to be
the bane of our school and university rote-based education system.
What museums/ Science centers do as institutions are the following:
A. Enter into strategic cooperation, alliances, joint-initiatives and public-private
partnerships for: 1. Projects 2. Events 3. Services
B. Offer Education Outreach- where museum programs are extended beyond the physical
confines of the museum premise either through classroom projects, traveling exhibits,
science camps, field trips or an extended web-enabled, mobile technology-driven
continued experience through Facebook, Linked-in, Tumblr, Twitter, QR Codes, Augmented
Reality, etc. Often on-line projects are linked to NASA, National Science Foundation and
others where seamless classroom or home-based interactivity allows for layered
engagement in real-time with on-going missions, experiments, inventive prototyping and
innovations.

22. How social media thinking could help museums to turn out all
right Posted: January 2nd, 2012 | Author: @Jasper Visser
The Happy Museum focuses on the role museums can play to
limit consumption, make people happier and generally
contribute to the well-being of people.
Museums are seen as trusted and valued organisations by most
members of the public, and it becomes clear museums have
quite some potential. “By encouraging happiness and well-being
museums can play a part in helping people live a good life
without costing the earth.
The Happy Museum proposes to achieve this using the Five Ways
to Well-being, namely: Connect, be active, take notice, keep
learning and give.

23. An open letter to Museum Directors by Jim Richardson @SumoJim
Museum leaders need to rethink digital, and look at it from a
more strategic perspective, one which can really deliver on the
mission of the institution and the needs of the public.
Museum leaders need to recognize that a powerful website
can deliver just as much as a powerful exhibition and fund the
roles within the institution to produce something credible
online.
If museums see updating their websites as something which
their marketing people can do in a couple of hours per week,
then they are missing a huge opportunity to step beyond the
walls of their institutions and settling for little more than
digital leaflets.
I believe that our website have a real role to play in delivering
on the mission of museums, but to do that, we need to
be prepared to invest in

24. BR Natarajan, Your Tweet got a reply!
BR Natarajan @deannattu 07 Dec
@SumoJim can I quote you to say that If
museums today want to carry out their
mission with passion then they must engage
Social Media
Jim Richardson @SumoJim @deannattu
of course 04:02 PM - 07 Dec 12

25. Social Media Statistics of Prof BR Natarajan
2312 Connections link to 12,784,244+ professionals
Twitter Followers 1026
5113 Friends 1057 Subscribers
43
Has 167 in Circles & 127 Have in Circles