Planning Social Media Workshop

I spent part of yesterday afternoon in a fantastic 'thinking' workshop on planning social media. Planning social media for your institution requires you to rethink why you have a collection; Why isn't the stuff that's on the floor of your galleries also on your website, and why isn't some of the stuff on your website on your floors? It recognizes a shift in moving from a web of websites to a web of data and also a shift to web applications. What I hadn't been expecting in this workshop was such a profound focus on marketing. Brand and marketing strategy came up frequently in the first half of the session. Perhaps most daunting was the realization that social media doesn't fit neatly into one department. It bridges across the web, IT, and marketing depts. at a bare minimum. For institutions with particularly siloed departments, the word 'collaboration' can be a strong and scary word for how those groups work together.

Quite a bit of interesting discussion evolved over the course of the afternoon and rather than summarize the sesion itself (Seb and Angelina have their slides and information available in a variety of formats, just ask), I'd like to highlight some of those conversations, questions, and interesting snippets from the presenters and audience that came up, in an effort to continue the discussion here with those interested.

• Comment cards: Your marketing teams should be searching technorati, flickr, YouTube regularly (they can come in RSS) to see what people are saying about your institution. The good, the bad, the ugly--the stuff you have nothing to do with. These are the comment cards they never filled out.
• The goal: to create an active, engaged community using social media--this will then reduce resource requirements internally
• Key: Maintaining those communities after the launch of an exhibition, program, or other component
• LAM crossover: curatorial helpdesk or reference desk system where the curator's role becomes that of a reference librarian in a way; curators become facilitators in this new role, not just the go-to oracles of deep content and questions
• Seb: "We can't be just about 'facts' anymore--people can get those anywhere [on the web]--we have to be about experience and experience tends to be social and participatory"
• Conversion: social media doesn't necessarily bring in more visitors unless it is strategically aligned; "situational relevance of social networks"
• Managing expectations: how you measure your online experiences--traditional metrics come out of a different world to evaluate social media you have to have a very clear purpose first: are you blogging to get people in the door? are you counting the number of people who see your flickr images or are you interested in those who tag those images or who upload their own? Your metrics of success have to match up with your purpose. You can't create a blog for the sake of it.
• Authenticity: people won't except a fake marketing ploy in response to their questions or interests; the information still needs to come from an authentic person (i.e. the curatorial voice). Our users are too smart for that.
• Challengs: IF a social media tool replaces what someone else does, what does it do to that person's time practically speaking? How do we deal with these labor issues? Will it replace someone's work? Do your content creators deserve some cut of the pie?

And that's just a taste of the discussion topics that were generated yesterday from 2-530p. What do you think? Is your institution the kind that will react to social media or become proactive about it? Will you be able to make the pitch to the marketing and curatorial depts to make this happen?