“This month’s fossil fish, is what we call in the palaeontological trade ‘a bit of alright’, that is, it is aesthetically rather on the ‘girl you gonna make me sweat’ end of the fossil fish scale. Don’t claim you haven’t been warned as this month’s underwhelming fossil fish is revealed.”
So writes Mark Carnall in a post for the University College London’s (UCL) Museums and Collections blog.
The post highlights three important aspects of museum blogs: a regular schedule, an individual voice, and collections.
After visitor information, blog posts represent an important part of a museum’s website. They can show what is in the stores, give a glimpse behind the scenes, and reach people who have never visited the museum before.
As the point of entry is often via social media or a Google search, blog posts might also be the way in which visitors reach a museum’s website or hear about it in the first place.
Writing, publishing and promoting regular content online requires time and resources. So it’s important to plan a strategy, at least provisionally. What should you consider?
Tone
“The voice we wanted to use is very personal – people on the ground, not marketeers,” says Jack Ashby, the manager of the Grant Museum of Zoology, which is part of UCL.
As a university museum, the Grant doesn’t have a strong corporate line to towe and can even be “snarky” at times, he adds.
Kevin Bacon, the digital manager at Royal Pavilion and Museums Brighton and Hove, favours a “light scholarly tone”.
The institiution’s blog, which is mainly written by staff, encourages varied voices and also has guest posts. The museum has also used a blogger-in-residence to create unique content and drive traffic to the site.
Elaine Macintyre, the digital media content manager at National Museums Scotland (NMS), says its blog is “more like people talking to you” than the main museum website.
But some museums, often funded by local authorities, have to contend with stricter content constraints.
“It’s important to know where to draw the line and not get yourself into trouble – make sure you know about your institution’s social media policies,” says Terri Dendy, the joint author of the popular blog Ministry of Curiosity about life as a museum professional.
Audiences
Understanding a blog’s potential audience can be tricky, particularly for museums that appeal to a broad range of people.
Ashby says the three main audiences for the UCL Museums and Collections blog are museum visitors, museum peers and, occasionally, the media.
Bacon says Brighton museum doesn’t have specific audiences in mind, since people often arrive at the relevant website pages via Google searches, rather than via the navigation bar.
Different types of articles can help attract a varied audience.
Schedule and writers
A defined schedule for publishing content does not suit all museums.
“Trying to corral people to write ‘image/object of the month’ posts didn’t do so well,” says Bacon.
Brighton Museum and Art Gallery’s policy is to wait until people “really feel they have a story to tell”. It publishes about six posts a month on its blog, often written by front-of-house staff.
To support this, staff can take part in blog training, which includes sharing statistics to highlight the blog’s value.
NMS also runs regular training sessions covering the aims of its blog, guidelines and examples of types of content. Any member of staff can submit a post.
Some museums carefully coordinate their blogging output. Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum (Ramm) has a blog rota for its research collection blog.
The UCL Museums and Collections blog has a timetable for different types of posts.
Specimen of the week posts are published on Fridays, and every four weeks or so they are joined by fossil fish of the month. Other posts are published on an ad hoc basis.
In order to encourage staff to write posts, job descriptions at the Grant Museum include social media work.
Kristin Hussey, the joint author of the Ministry of Curiosity blog, recommends having a blogging pool. “I can’t tell you how many places I’ve seen who have one person really dedicated to social media – then they leave and the whole thing falls apart,” she says.
Blogs are not just for museums with large numbers of staff and resources. There’s a lot you can do with limited resources and free blogging software. Volunteers and board members can make excellent bloggers, and other advocates for the service (such as teachers, local businesses or even regular visitors) can also write articles.
Platforms
Museums should be wary of using platforms separate from their own site to publish blogs, such as Medium or Instagram, says Mike Ellis, of digital consultancy Thirty8 Digital.
He thinks museums’ valuable content should be on their own site, and then other platforms should drive traffic there. Second best, he says, is to use blogging platforms such as WordPress or Blogger with a feed on the main site.
WordPress can also be used as a content management system (CMS) for the museum’s site – in other words, it can be used to upload, organise and monitor content to a website.
Ellis recommends using WordPress as a CMS partly because of its user-friendly interface, the range of content it can handle (from online exhibitions to tickets) and because it is adaptable to different designs.
In a 2014 paper for the Museums and the Web conference, Scott Bomboy and Rebecca Sherman point out that WordPress works well with Google searches and Google Analytics, and has an interface users are likely to be familiar with.
Brighton Museum and Art Gallery used to publish its blog on a Wordpress.com domain. When its website was relaunched int 2014, it was easy to import content onto the new site, which uses WordPress as a content management system.
Manchester Museum's blogs – including Egypt, which is the only UK museum blog in the worldwide top 10 according to one measure – is on a Wordpress.com domain rather than the museum’s domain.
One blog or many?
For large museums with varied collections, or those with a wide variety of functions, a crucial question is whether to have an overarching blog or one for each department.
There is no easy answer. One blog is likely to attract higher numbers of people to fewer pages and should ensure regular posts, since there will be more writers available. Separate blogs may also be more difficult to find online.
But a museum may lose visitors who are interested in a specific subject area and want the in-depth perspective of more specialist blogs.
Museums have different approaches to this, and it may be down to how blogs started and available staff, rather than a deliberate policy.
Ramm has two blogs (one specifically aimed at researchers and the other exploring its world cultures collection), while NMS has just one.
“We want the blog to represent the diversity of everything that goes on at NMS, but also on a practical level we don’t have the resources to maintain several blogs,” Macintyre says.
Short-term projects or high-profile exhibitions often have their own blogs, partly to keep funders abreast of developments. The best way to ensure that this content is not banished to internet limbo after the exhibition ends is to post all posts on the museum’s main blog as well.
Promotion
As well as including in e-newsletters or emails to members, sharing blog posts on social media is an essential way to drive traffic.
Brighton Museum and Art Gallery’s blog is shared through Facebook and Twitter as a matter of course. More visual posts are also shared on Instagram and Pinterest.
A little can go a long way – the same post can be assigned a range of hashtags, for example, and posts can be publicised more than once.
So writes Mark Carnall in a post for the University College London’s (UCL) Museums and Collections blog.
The post highlights three important aspects of museum blogs: a regular schedule, an individual voice, and collections.
After visitor information, blog posts represent an important part of a museum’s website. They can show what is in the stores, give a glimpse behind the scenes, and reach people who have never visited the museum before.
As the point of entry is often via social media or a Google search, blog posts might also be the way in which visitors reach a museum’s website or hear about it in the first place.
Writing, publishing and promoting regular content online requires time and resources. So it’s important to plan a strategy, at least provisionally. What should you consider?
Tone
“The voice we wanted to use is very personal – people on the ground, not marketeers,” says Jack Ashby, the manager of the Grant Museum of Zoology, which is part of UCL.
As a university museum, the Grant doesn’t have a strong corporate line to towe and can even be “snarky” at times, he adds.
Kevin Bacon, the digital manager at Royal Pavilion and Museums Brighton and Hove, favours a “light scholarly tone”.
The institiution’s blog, which is mainly written by staff, encourages varied voices and also has guest posts. The museum has also used a blogger-in-residence to create unique content and drive traffic to the site.
Elaine Macintyre, the digital media content manager at National Museums Scotland (NMS), says its blog is “more like people talking to you” than the main museum website.
But some museums, often funded by local authorities, have to contend with stricter content constraints.
“It’s important to know where to draw the line and not get yourself into trouble – make sure you know about your institution’s social media policies,” says Terri Dendy, the joint author of the popular blog Ministry of Curiosity about life as a museum professional.
Audiences
Understanding a blog’s potential audience can be tricky, particularly for museums that appeal to a broad range of people.
Ashby says the three main audiences for the UCL Museums and Collections blog are museum visitors, museum peers and, occasionally, the media.
Bacon says Brighton museum doesn’t have specific audiences in mind, since people often arrive at the relevant website pages via Google searches, rather than via the navigation bar.
Different types of articles can help attract a varied audience.
Schedule and writers
A defined schedule for publishing content does not suit all museums.
“Trying to corral people to write ‘image/object of the month’ posts didn’t do so well,” says Bacon.
Brighton Museum and Art Gallery’s policy is to wait until people “really feel they have a story to tell”. It publishes about six posts a month on its blog, often written by front-of-house staff.
To support this, staff can take part in blog training, which includes sharing statistics to highlight the blog’s value.
NMS also runs regular training sessions covering the aims of its blog, guidelines and examples of types of content. Any member of staff can submit a post.
Some museums carefully coordinate their blogging output. Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum (Ramm) has a blog rota for its research collection blog.
The UCL Museums and Collections blog has a timetable for different types of posts.
Specimen of the week posts are published on Fridays, and every four weeks or so they are joined by fossil fish of the month. Other posts are published on an ad hoc basis.
In order to encourage staff to write posts, job descriptions at the Grant Museum include social media work.
Kristin Hussey, the joint author of the Ministry of Curiosity blog, recommends having a blogging pool. “I can’t tell you how many places I’ve seen who have one person really dedicated to social media – then they leave and the whole thing falls apart,” she says.
Blogs are not just for museums with large numbers of staff and resources. There’s a lot you can do with limited resources and free blogging software. Volunteers and board members can make excellent bloggers, and other advocates for the service (such as teachers, local businesses or even regular visitors) can also write articles.
Platforms
Museums should be wary of using platforms separate from their own site to publish blogs, such as Medium or Instagram, says Mike Ellis, of digital consultancy Thirty8 Digital.
He thinks museums’ valuable content should be on their own site, and then other platforms should drive traffic there. Second best, he says, is to use blogging platforms such as WordPress or Blogger with a feed on the main site.
WordPress can also be used as a content management system (CMS) for the museum’s site – in other words, it can be used to upload, organise and monitor content to a website.
Ellis recommends using WordPress as a CMS partly because of its user-friendly interface, the range of content it can handle (from online exhibitions to tickets) and because it is adaptable to different designs.
In a 2014 paper for the Museums and the Web conference, Scott Bomboy and Rebecca Sherman point out that WordPress works well with Google searches and Google Analytics, and has an interface users are likely to be familiar with.
Brighton Museum and Art Gallery used to publish its blog on a Wordpress.com domain. When its website was relaunched int 2014, it was easy to import content onto the new site, which uses WordPress as a content management system.
Manchester Museum's blogs – including Egypt, which is the only UK museum blog in the worldwide top 10 according to one measure – is on a Wordpress.com domain rather than the museum’s domain.
One blog or many?
For large museums with varied collections, or those with a wide variety of functions, a crucial question is whether to have an overarching blog or one for each department.
There is no easy answer. One blog is likely to attract higher numbers of people to fewer pages and should ensure regular posts, since there will be more writers available. Separate blogs may also be more difficult to find online.
But a museum may lose visitors who are interested in a specific subject area and want the in-depth perspective of more specialist blogs.
Museums have different approaches to this, and it may be down to how blogs started and available staff, rather than a deliberate policy.
Ramm has two blogs (one specifically aimed at researchers and the other exploring its world cultures collection), while NMS has just one.
“We want the blog to represent the diversity of everything that goes on at NMS, but also on a practical level we don’t have the resources to maintain several blogs,” Macintyre says.
Short-term projects or high-profile exhibitions often have their own blogs, partly to keep funders abreast of developments. The best way to ensure that this content is not banished to internet limbo after the exhibition ends is to post all posts on the museum’s main blog as well.
Promotion
As well as including in e-newsletters or emails to members, sharing blog posts on social media is an essential way to drive traffic.
Brighton Museum and Art Gallery’s blog is shared through Facebook and Twitter as a matter of course. More visual posts are also shared on Instagram and Pinterest.
A little can go a long way – the same post can be assigned a range of hashtags, for example, and posts can be publicised more than once.