Watch out, it’s catching
As one of the most trustworthy methods of communication, viral marketing is booming. Hugh Ernest believes that museums need to wise up to a medium that places users in the driving seat
For many people, museums are perceived as balanced places of education and knowledge, embodying some sort of benign didacticism. Embracing this apparent objectivity, several institutions have been keen to set up as organisers and mediators of public debate on topical issues.
In doing this, they take on not only the interpretation of their own collections, but also attempt to connect more directly with what is going on in the world around them. Some have carved out dedicated debating spaces for this, while others attempt to design dynamic and responsive elements into exhibitions dealing with contemporary issues.
But how successfully can a museum chair this kind of dialogue and are they even the right places to do this? The Science Museum and Natural History Museum (NHM) in London have looked carefully at how they can build debate into the fabric of their operations. The Science Museum's Dana Centre was launched in 2003 as a venue dedicated to the adult debate of contemporary science.
The decision to create the facility followed "huge focus groups" asking people what would get them into the museum, says its event programmes manager Kat Nilsson.
"It is about creating a space for dialogue for adults, as the main museum is often thought to be for kids and families," she says.
"So we try to reintroduce adults to the Science Museum. Suppose you come across a cool podcast on the Metropolitan Museum's website - perhaps the American painting curator enthusing about Emanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware. In a couple of clicks, you send the reference on to a colleague who shares your interest in Leutze."
Having found gold, you're now more likely to go back to the Met site and, importantly, your colleague is, too. When you do, the museum offers you a personal space on its website. This allows you to conveniently cluster links to the information that interests you, such as images of Leutze's works in the collection, and share your space with other enthusiasts.
At your request, they will email you - and your colleague - with news related to your specific interests. By now, you have bought into the Met's world, and are most likely telling your friends and colleagues about it.
Welcome to community marketing - carefully targeted communication aiming to influence individuals linked into a network formed around a common interest, in order to use that network's inbuilt capacity for relaying information. Think of it as the Web 2.0 equivalent of the grapevine.
Sometimes called viral marketing or word-of-mouth marketing, community marketing is booming thanks to the convergence revolution in information technology: podcasts, videocasts, iPhone and the rapid development of social websites, such as MySpace and YouTube, with their tens of millions of posters and bloggers.
We use these technologies to seek out information that was previously fed to us by advertising or the media. We comment on it, compare it and share it with like-minded people. In other words, we harness it for our own purposes, and to have fun.
A useful way to imagine the future is to look at the business world, where innovation and competition create a dynamic highly responsive to social change.
Kristine de Valck, a professor in community marketing at the HEC School of Management in Paris, says that as people plug into different networks according to the subjects that interest them, they become more confident and effective in exercising choice.
She adds that consumers increasingly expect involvement, and even a degree of influence and control. The balance of power between individuals operating through informal networks and the traditional "bricks and mortar" institutions of society is shifting.
For a taste of how it works, de Valck suggests checking out some commercial websites (see box). Look at how Harley Davidson promotes itself by providing events and services for bikers all over the world, or how "influential moms" can share survival tips with others on Procter & Gamble's Vocalpoint.com
Other sites, such as BuzzParadise, link consumers simply to "buzz" (share word-of-mouth comment) about their experience of international brands. Brand owners everywhere are giving more status and power to their users - not from choice, but because technology is diluting the information monopoly of formal organisations.
Trust is behind much of the growth in viral marketing. Internet research agency Forrester says the means of communication in which people of all ages and groups place the highest level of trust is word-of-mouth. The next most trusted media is the branded website, while the least trusted is ads received on mobile phones.
We are as sceptical of institutional spin as we are sensitive to uninvited spam, and prefer to rely on those we know and trust, who share our interests, to test messages for credibility and services for quality. This is the key to the scoring system of sellers' trustworthiness on eBay, for example.
The crucial difference between successful viral marketing and spamming or junk-mailing, according to de Valck, is permission. Both may be well targeted, but to be effective, the communication must be invited by the target or at least welcomed as a relevant message from a trusted source. Only then will the receiver be likely to act on it and to pass it on to their network.
To create a virtual community is not simple and takes careful thought. The key is finding an issue that captures people's attention. People must care about the issue, have opinions about it and be enthusiastic enough to share their views, says de Valck.
To attract the online public, and particularly the growing tribe of digital natives (basically everyone under 30), museums need to "get it" in terms of opening the door to real interactivity.
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York is one museum that gets it. Like the National Gallery, Tate and other leaders in the field, it posts podcasts authored by curators or department heads. As part of the Red Studio project on contemporary art, MoMA invites members of the public to contribute an audio file of their own thoughts on artists or their works, then posts them as podcasts to create a rich and varied texture of interactivity on its site.
This strategy of exploiting user-generated content exemplifies the shift to user focus. Nancy Proctor, the head of new product development at Antenna Audio in the US, says that visitors asked to give their opinion on one of Niki de Saint-Phalle's Tirage series (before and after they were told that the pictures were produced by firing a hunting rifle into paintballs concealed within the canvas) turned out to value the unprecedented experience of being invited by a museum to express their views even more than the information itself and its related insights.
Aim at the right target group
Tapping into the power of this shift to a user-centred perspective can help a museum transform its communications - and even its role in society.
As Will Gompertz, the director of Tate Media, said at Agenda's Communicating the Museum conference in July: "If you have a Mondrian or a Picasso, there are people around the world who are interested in that. You have to work out how you are going to respond to them. If you don't respond or reach out to them, when they decide to go and look at some Mondrians, they will go and see someone else's."
Tate now sends out 14 different interest-specific bulletins, after starting with just one in 2001.
Vicent Argudo, the director of Spanish radio station ScannerFM, says community marketing techniques can be likened to guerrilla warfare.
Speaking at the Agenda conference, he emphasised the need for very careful targeting. You can't afford to waste ammunition by sending the same email to people with completely different needs and perspectives (teachers and gallery owners, for example).
Make sure your website is full of hyperlinks and uses the terms that will be typed into search engines rather than museum vocabulary. He said museums should start with the people to whom they are already best connected - their current visitors.
Once you have their email addresses, and their permission to use them, they give you indirect access to the members of all their networks. Each positive contact is potentially multiplied many times.
Be nice to bloggers
This multiplier effect is clearly seen in blogs. You need to be active in searching out bloggers among your visitor communities. Once you have found them, check out what they have to say about you, or about your latest exhibition. (This takes time and commitment, but so does any research.)
And don't just be passive, says Argudo. Don't hesitate to respond online to what you find, whether good or bad. This can cement a relationship that turns a simple visitor into a committed advocate and ambassador for your museum.
The Cité des Sciences in Paris is another museum that recognises the importance of creating advocacy by leveraging visitor interest. Its Visite + programme, which uses new software developed by project leader Roland Topalian, keeps a record of your itinerary and involvement with different exhibits, has it waiting for you on your return home (if you choose to register for the service), offers you a personalised log of visits over time, and lets you create links with others sharing your interests if you wish.
Another useful strategy is to leverage your campaign through effective partnerships. Tate seeks out communication partners likely to be acting as hubs to community networks overlapping its target.
Its head of marketing Claire Eva cites agreements with photo-sharing site Flickr, and a publicity operation with MySpace, which featured Tate gratis on its homepage for a week at a cash value of £150,000, as successful examples of trading on the museum's assets.
The formula is simple and seductive: if you can find a partner whose users are as interested in your brand as yours are in theirs, you can achieve a lot without resorting to massive marketing budgets.
Not so different from what we were doing before, you're thinking, just in digital format instead of print? Wrong! The internet is not just another medium. It transforms the way we do business because it reverses the relationship between user and institution, putting the visitor in the driving seat.
Hugh Ernest is based in Paris and writes on innovation and organisational change in museums
Related site and page references
Community spaces
www.flickr.com/explore/
http://uk.youtube.com/
http://uk.myspace.com/
Business sites
www.harley-davidson.com
www.petco.com/petco_Page_PC_communityhome_Nav_371.aspx
www.buzzparadise.com/
Museum sites
www.metmuseum.org/podcast/episodes.asp
www.metmuseum.org/mymetmuseum/
www.tate.org.uk/bulletins/
www.moma.org/
www.communicatingthe museum.com/paseo-del-arte.html
In doing this, they take on not only the interpretation of their own collections, but also attempt to connect more directly with what is going on in the world around them. Some have carved out dedicated debating spaces for this, while others attempt to design dynamic and responsive elements into exhibitions dealing with contemporary issues.
But how successfully can a museum chair this kind of dialogue and are they even the right places to do this? The Science Museum and Natural History Museum (NHM) in London have looked carefully at how they can build debate into the fabric of their operations. The Science Museum's Dana Centre was launched in 2003 as a venue dedicated to the adult debate of contemporary science.
The decision to create the facility followed "huge focus groups" asking people what would get them into the museum, says its event programmes manager Kat Nilsson.
"It is about creating a space for dialogue for adults, as the main museum is often thought to be for kids and families," she says.
"So we try to reintroduce adults to the Science Museum. Suppose you come across a cool podcast on the Metropolitan Museum's website - perhaps the American painting curator enthusing about Emanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware. In a couple of clicks, you send the reference on to a colleague who shares your interest in Leutze."
Having found gold, you're now more likely to go back to the Met site and, importantly, your colleague is, too. When you do, the museum offers you a personal space on its website. This allows you to conveniently cluster links to the information that interests you, such as images of Leutze's works in the collection, and share your space with other enthusiasts.
At your request, they will email you - and your colleague - with news related to your specific interests. By now, you have bought into the Met's world, and are most likely telling your friends and colleagues about it.
Welcome to community marketing - carefully targeted communication aiming to influence individuals linked into a network formed around a common interest, in order to use that network's inbuilt capacity for relaying information. Think of it as the Web 2.0 equivalent of the grapevine.
Sometimes called viral marketing or word-of-mouth marketing, community marketing is booming thanks to the convergence revolution in information technology: podcasts, videocasts, iPhone and the rapid development of social websites, such as MySpace and YouTube, with their tens of millions of posters and bloggers.
We use these technologies to seek out information that was previously fed to us by advertising or the media. We comment on it, compare it and share it with like-minded people. In other words, we harness it for our own purposes, and to have fun.
A useful way to imagine the future is to look at the business world, where innovation and competition create a dynamic highly responsive to social change.
Kristine de Valck, a professor in community marketing at the HEC School of Management in Paris, says that as people plug into different networks according to the subjects that interest them, they become more confident and effective in exercising choice.
She adds that consumers increasingly expect involvement, and even a degree of influence and control. The balance of power between individuals operating through informal networks and the traditional "bricks and mortar" institutions of society is shifting.
For a taste of how it works, de Valck suggests checking out some commercial websites (see box). Look at how Harley Davidson promotes itself by providing events and services for bikers all over the world, or how "influential moms" can share survival tips with others on Procter & Gamble's Vocalpoint.com
Other sites, such as BuzzParadise, link consumers simply to "buzz" (share word-of-mouth comment) about their experience of international brands. Brand owners everywhere are giving more status and power to their users - not from choice, but because technology is diluting the information monopoly of formal organisations.
Trust is behind much of the growth in viral marketing. Internet research agency Forrester says the means of communication in which people of all ages and groups place the highest level of trust is word-of-mouth. The next most trusted media is the branded website, while the least trusted is ads received on mobile phones.
We are as sceptical of institutional spin as we are sensitive to uninvited spam, and prefer to rely on those we know and trust, who share our interests, to test messages for credibility and services for quality. This is the key to the scoring system of sellers' trustworthiness on eBay, for example.
The crucial difference between successful viral marketing and spamming or junk-mailing, according to de Valck, is permission. Both may be well targeted, but to be effective, the communication must be invited by the target or at least welcomed as a relevant message from a trusted source. Only then will the receiver be likely to act on it and to pass it on to their network.
To create a virtual community is not simple and takes careful thought. The key is finding an issue that captures people's attention. People must care about the issue, have opinions about it and be enthusiastic enough to share their views, says de Valck.
To attract the online public, and particularly the growing tribe of digital natives (basically everyone under 30), museums need to "get it" in terms of opening the door to real interactivity.
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York is one museum that gets it. Like the National Gallery, Tate and other leaders in the field, it posts podcasts authored by curators or department heads. As part of the Red Studio project on contemporary art, MoMA invites members of the public to contribute an audio file of their own thoughts on artists or their works, then posts them as podcasts to create a rich and varied texture of interactivity on its site.
This strategy of exploiting user-generated content exemplifies the shift to user focus. Nancy Proctor, the head of new product development at Antenna Audio in the US, says that visitors asked to give their opinion on one of Niki de Saint-Phalle's Tirage series (before and after they were told that the pictures were produced by firing a hunting rifle into paintballs concealed within the canvas) turned out to value the unprecedented experience of being invited by a museum to express their views even more than the information itself and its related insights.
Aim at the right target group
Tapping into the power of this shift to a user-centred perspective can help a museum transform its communications - and even its role in society.
As Will Gompertz, the director of Tate Media, said at Agenda's Communicating the Museum conference in July: "If you have a Mondrian or a Picasso, there are people around the world who are interested in that. You have to work out how you are going to respond to them. If you don't respond or reach out to them, when they decide to go and look at some Mondrians, they will go and see someone else's."
Tate now sends out 14 different interest-specific bulletins, after starting with just one in 2001.
Vicent Argudo, the director of Spanish radio station ScannerFM, says community marketing techniques can be likened to guerrilla warfare.
Speaking at the Agenda conference, he emphasised the need for very careful targeting. You can't afford to waste ammunition by sending the same email to people with completely different needs and perspectives (teachers and gallery owners, for example).
Make sure your website is full of hyperlinks and uses the terms that will be typed into search engines rather than museum vocabulary. He said museums should start with the people to whom they are already best connected - their current visitors.
Once you have their email addresses, and their permission to use them, they give you indirect access to the members of all their networks. Each positive contact is potentially multiplied many times.
Be nice to bloggers
This multiplier effect is clearly seen in blogs. You need to be active in searching out bloggers among your visitor communities. Once you have found them, check out what they have to say about you, or about your latest exhibition. (This takes time and commitment, but so does any research.)
And don't just be passive, says Argudo. Don't hesitate to respond online to what you find, whether good or bad. This can cement a relationship that turns a simple visitor into a committed advocate and ambassador for your museum.
The Cité des Sciences in Paris is another museum that recognises the importance of creating advocacy by leveraging visitor interest. Its Visite + programme, which uses new software developed by project leader Roland Topalian, keeps a record of your itinerary and involvement with different exhibits, has it waiting for you on your return home (if you choose to register for the service), offers you a personalised log of visits over time, and lets you create links with others sharing your interests if you wish.
Another useful strategy is to leverage your campaign through effective partnerships. Tate seeks out communication partners likely to be acting as hubs to community networks overlapping its target.
Its head of marketing Claire Eva cites agreements with photo-sharing site Flickr, and a publicity operation with MySpace, which featured Tate gratis on its homepage for a week at a cash value of £150,000, as successful examples of trading on the museum's assets.
The formula is simple and seductive: if you can find a partner whose users are as interested in your brand as yours are in theirs, you can achieve a lot without resorting to massive marketing budgets.
Not so different from what we were doing before, you're thinking, just in digital format instead of print? Wrong! The internet is not just another medium. It transforms the way we do business because it reverses the relationship between user and institution, putting the visitor in the driving seat.
Hugh Ernest is based in Paris and writes on innovation and organisational change in museums
Related site and page references
Community spaces
www.flickr.com/explore/
http://uk.youtube.com/
http://uk.myspace.com/
Business sites
www.harley-davidson.com
www.petco.com/petco_Page_PC_communityhome_Nav_371.aspx
www.buzzparadise.com/
Museum sites
www.metmuseum.org/podcast/episodes.asp
www.metmuseum.org/mymetmuseum/
www.tate.org.uk/bulletins/
www.moma.org/
www.communicatingthe museum.com/paseo-del-arte.html