When we thought we had all the answers, all of a sudden, they changed all the questions.

– Mario Benedetti

#SocialMuseums

Introduction

The emergence of social media platforms and mobile technologies has revolutionized the

relationship between museums and their visitors. These institutions are certain they need to be

present in online social networks to connect with their communities; however, how to embrace

social media effectively is not so clear due to the complex nature of social platforms (Gonzalez,

2017, p. 1)

Museums, whose main objective is heritage preservation, are traditional non-profit

organizations resistant to change with complex bureaucratic administrations. On the contrary,

social media is intrinsically vertiginous, shaped by platform organizations and users constantly

following new trends. The old museum model no longer works in the new social media context

(Agyeman, 2018). Museums are new to web 2.0; finding a proper evaluation framework to

develop an effective social media strategy is still a challenge (Stewart, 2012, p. 22).

To make the challenge of designing a successful social media strategy more difficult,

traditional public behavior has been changing since the arrival of Millennials and Generation Z

visitors into the galleries. They are tech-savvy, constantly using their mobiles to share online

moments and to create original digital content. To fulfill the new visitors' expectations, museums

are improvising strategies to create new, experience-driven exhibitions. Today, most museums

have Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter accounts to target younger generations (Pepe,

2019) and allow visitors to take pictures in their galleries since sharing Instagram-moments

creates immersive and meaningful experiences for visitors (Agyeman, 2018; MuseumNext,

2019; Barco, 2019).

Thesis

Museums are embracing media platforms with a variety of strategies depending on their

audiences’ needs, the size of the museum, resources available, and their ability to innovate. Case

studies of the British Museum, the Royal Ontario Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the

Museum of English Rural Life, and the Tactile Museum in Varese show that each of these

cultural institutions builds its own successful path to the right social media strategy by constantly

learning lessons from trial and error and experimental experiences.

Purpose

This research intends to provide a better understanding of how museums can utilize

media platforms efficiently in the heritage field as well to provide tools to design successful

social media strategies that reinforce museums' mandates and add value to the institutions and

their communities.

Method

The methods used in this research combines content analysis and multimedia material

analysis (University of Georgia, n.d.) of content from online sources. As museums are non-profit

public institutions, most of their financials, annual reports, and strategic plans are accessible to

the public online. To study recent social media strategies, this paper also analyzes online articles

and interviews with institutions’ social media managers. The multimedia analysis focuses on

websites, social media accounts, and blogs from the institutions selected that reveal the level of

interaction between museums and audiences and the success of social media projects.

The museums selected do not represent the practices of museums as a whole, but they

serve as examples of a variety of successful social media strategies. The museums selected are:

The British Museum (BM): Founded in 1753 in London, it is one of the largest and more

prestigious heritage institutions in the world with collections representing all periods of time and

cultures (TBM, n.d.).

The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM): Founded in 1914, located in Toronto, it is the largest

cultural institution in Canada and one of the largest worldwide, showcasing art, culture and

nature from around the world (ROM, n.d.a).

The Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO): Founded in 1900 in Toronto, it is one of the largest and most

distinguished art museums in North America (AGO, n.d.).

The Museum of English Rural Life (MERL): This is a rural thematic institution located in

Reading, United Kingdom, established in 1951 to safeguard the history and collections of rural

life and people (M, n.d.).

The Tactile Museum in Varese: This is a small private institution in Varese, Italy. Visitors are

invited to touch collections of tactile wooden models that reproduce aspects of the landscape,

architecture, art, archeology and design (MTV, n.d.).

Organization of the Paper

This paper is divided into two parts. Through an academic literature review, the first part

examines how the Web 2.0 era has created user-centered and community-building museums and

opportunities to produce new values. In the second part, through analyses of the five museum

cases, this paper identifies three major challenges museums face when using social media:

coping with the complexity, binding the mission or mandate with social media strategies, and

improvising and experimenting.

In Perpetual Beta Mode

Nina Simon, the author of The Participatory Museum, introduced the phrase ‟perpetual

beta” to define a never finished project in the dynamic context of the new digital era. The

launching of the Web 2.0 or social Web, made possible a more interactive web, focusing on user-

generated content and participatory experience through network designed platforms (Simon,

2007). However, everything launched in the Web 2.0. is always in an experimental phase or

‟perpetual beta state,” constantly being improved to achieve better user satisfaction. Nina Simon
observes that museums also are becoming content platforms when visitors start sharing gallery

experiences and co-curating exhibitions and collections. Moreover, visitor participation

represents valuable connections for the institution just as online social platforms value their user

connections. Museum services, such as gift shops or restaurants, are modules creating value

comparable to software plug-ins. Museums, as well, are entering into a perpetual beta mode

when they are constantly improving and transforming exhibits and projects to satisfy visitors’

desires (Simon, 2007).

Creating Values

Jasper Visser, director of the online magazine Museum of the Future, asserts that the

digital era is bringing an opportunity to create values that can reinforce institutions’ missions and

improve the relationship with their community (Visser, 2014)—an opportunity that museums

have some difficulty taking advantage of. The result often means that digital technology is

incorporated as an add-on within specific exhibitions just because it is a trend, but fails to

consider visitors’ needs (Chan, 2015). In fact, a successful technological transformation is a

matter of implementing long-term digital strategies that reinforce the mandate of the museum

while adding value to the institution and its community (Dodge, 2016).

Coping with the Complexity: Cross-posting Platforms

My analysis of the three larger institutions—the R.O.M., the BM, and the AGO—

revealed that the complexity of social media is a major challenge larger museums are facing.

Sustaining a long-term dialogue with audiences through different social media platforms and

channels is extremely demanding. Usually, the dimension of such complexity is underestimated,

resulting in financial and human resources saturation (Byrd-McDevitt, 2019). Larger institutions

with large, global, and diverse audiences are more affected by this issue than smaller or thematic

institutions responding to smaller communities. This research examined how three larger

institutions coped with this problem.

The British Museum: A Third-party Platform

 The BM created its first social accounts on Twitter and Facebook in 2009, later adding

accounts on Instagram and YouTube with significant success. Nonetheless, by 2014, the

museum's social media structure was collapsing under the unmanageable multi-platforms cross-

posting. Each channel has particular characteristics and identities demanding many museum staff

hours and resources to create and coordinate content online to engage a global audience with five

million followers across the platforms (Charr, 2019). The British Museum’s senior digital

marketing manager, Kate Carter, explained this circumstance in an interview for Hootcast: A

Hootsuite Podcast:

[In 2014] we were in a situation where we were cross-posting a lot. We were thinking

about what are we going to share on social media on Wednesday and would adapt that

message like we would edit the characters down to fit it on Twitter. We might think of

the image differently for Instagram, but essentially we were sharing the same kind of

stuff (Carter, 2018).

In 2016, the BM decided to change to a centralized management system through a third-

party company (Hootsuite Media Inc, n.d.) that manages the multi-channel postings on Twitter,

Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube from one single platform. Now, the museum team has more

free time to focus on user conversations, coordinate media content creation, monitor and join

conversations in real-time, and improve user experiences from one single dashboard (Bickham,

2018; Boulton, 2019).

In her interview, Kate Carter explained the success of this new approach:

Now we plan totally differently. We plan every channel separately as well as thinking

about what’s coming up this week, next week, next month, etc. We’re also thinking about

what does that trajectory look like on Facebook and on Instagram and we do different

climatic series of content on the different channels and they really kind of stand alone

now in a way that I think has helped them all grow and become more engaging (Carter,

2018).
Twitter 1

Facebook 2

Instagram3

1
https://twitter.com/britishmuseum
2
https://www.facebook.com/britishmuseum
3
https://www.instagram.com/britishmuseum/
YouTube4

The ROM: Everybody on Board

By 2012, the ROM was already struggling to manage the amount of online content from

a single office, and started a process of making the ROM website accessible to all museum staff

in different departments, delegating responsibilities that continued later with the use of social

media (Dodge, 2014a).

Ryan Dodge5, manager of Digital Engagement Strategy at the ROM, published an article

on Medium.com, explaining how, back in 2014, he organized monthly workshops with staff to

discuss ideas for content to post online (Dodge, 2016). The staff of each area were trained and

had their own social media account, enabling direct conversations between curators, specialists,

and museum front-line staff with the community about research, programs, exhibitions, objects,

or collections (Dodge, 2017). However, Dodge remembered the initial resistance from some

members of the staff who did not understand the value of spending so many hours online. The

process to bring everybody on board took almost three years with periodical meetings for

training and brainstorming (Dodge, 2017).

4
https://www.youtube.com/user/britishmuseum
5
W. Ryan Dodge was the Digital Engagement Strategist Manager at the ROM from July 2012 to January 2019.
Today, he is the Head of Digital Experiences at the Canadian Museum of History.
 Today, the ROM connects to the community through four main platforms: Facebook,

Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. Facebook and Instagram Live are the most used channels

because of their low cost and high impact enabling real-time conversations.

Flayer with the floor plan connecting to staff accounts7.

Staff accounts6.

The Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO): Complete Decentralization

To cope with the complexity of social media the AGO implemented a decentralized

management system, where each department is responsible to create their own communication

strategy according to their own projects.

In 2011, Marty Spellerberg, who was the new media developer, remembered in an

interview (Spellerberg & Alexander, 2019) how the gallery started to give central attention to

online communication through its website. The strategy adopted at that time involved

distributing responsibility for content management throughout the organization. After this

6
https://twitter.com/ROMtoronto/lists/rom-staff/members
7
https://medium.com/@wrdodger/a-new-social-media-presence-at-the-rom-cca20db04b3a
decentralization, Spellerberg decided to coordinate groups from different areas, brainstorming

together weekly to create content and make decisions about which channels to use to cross-link

messages. Spellerberg created and coordinates a shared Twitter channel where each department

adds content about their projects, programs, and exhibitions (Spellerberg, 2010).

This shared responsibility structure where each department is in charge of their own

social media strategy with a general coordination is still working for the gallery today. Amanda

Hadi, director of social and online media for the AGO, described in an interview for Flare how

art education officers design tech-friendly courses, customer service reps answer questions via

email, and curators talk about their shows on Twitter (Hadi, 2016).

The AGO utilizes several social media channels: Photosharing, YouTube, Twitter,

Facebook, Linkedin, and Instagram. The gallery also hires third-party companies to design and

develop online applications free to download through the iTunes Store and Google Play.

Twitter8

Facebook9

8
https://twitter.com/agotoronto
9
https://www.facebook.com/AGOToronto
YouTube10
Instagram11

The above analysis of remarks by managers within the three major institutions highlights

that managing a museum’s social media communication can be excessive for a single department

because of the overwhelming demands on time and financial resources. Underestimating the

impact of social media complexity can lead to excessive pressure and overwhelming

responsibility on the social media manager's shoulders, resulting in saturation or resignations

(Byrd-McDevitt, 2019).

Binding Institutions’ Mission with Social Media Strategies

Through analysis of three of the case studies (the AGO evaluates its social media strategy

by projects, making difficult to evaluate a global result; the Tactile Museum, is a private

institution that does not publish the information required for this research), this paper examines

the relationship between the cultural institutions’ missions or mandates and their social media

strategies to understand if a successful long-term strategy depends on the alignment of social

media strategy with the museums’ mandates.

10
https://www.youtube.com/user/ArtGalleryofOntario
11
https://www.instagram.com/agotoronto/
 The BM: Under the Shadow of a Strong Mission

The British Museum states on its 2018-19 Annual Review (The British Museum, 2019)

its powerful mission, associated with the museum brand (Hootsuite Media Inc., n.d.) for decades:

A museum of the world, for the world.

The museum’s mission is repeated as well on social media pages, reinforcing the

association between the mandate and online communication.

The museum’s social media strategy is expressed on the BM’s website page (The British

Museum, n.d.), “Social Media Code of Conduct,” reinforcing the mission of engaging with a

global audience and community: “Our social media presence is focused on helping people find

out more about, discuss and engage with the Museum’s collection, public program and research

across the globe.”

 In her interview, Kate Carter, reiterated the purpose of the BM’s social media presence,

adding: “So, what we believe we’re doing with social media is really fulfilling our mission,

which is to bring this world collection to the world” (Carter, 2018).

The British Museum Report and Accounts for the Year Ended 31 March 2019 reports that

the social media audience grew by 12%, attracting nearly twice the number of followers on

YouTube compared with the previous year (The British Museum, 2019b).

It is evident that the BM’s mission statement provides a strong guide to the tone,

communication, and strategy followed in its social media communication. However, this model

may be a little rigid and might constrain the creativity in the media content and the engagement

with audiences.

The ROM: Values Over Mandate

The ROM’s mandate is defined by the ROM Act (ROM, 2017, p.7) as follows:

The collection and exhibition of objects, documents, and books of any kind to illustrate

and make known to the public the natural history of Ontario, Canada, and the world; the

collection and exhibitions of objects, documents, and books of any kind to illustrate and

make known to the public the history of humankind in all ages; the promotion of

education, teaching, research, and publication in any or all fields related to the objects of

the Museum as referred above.

The ROM website’s page “ROM Social Media” (ROM, n.d.b) defines the ROM’s Social media

strategy as follows: “The purpose of online communication at the Royal Ontario Museum is to

build connections with our communities through conversations.”

Ryan Dodge, in an interview with the website #Svegliamuseo, explained that the social

media content has room to move outside the strict boundaries of the mandate, prioritizing

valuable network building and forging connections with audiences (Dodge, 2014b).
 According to the 2018-19 ROM Business Plan, ending 2018 the museum generated over

146 million social media impressions. However, Dodge remarked in his article in Medium

(Dodge, 2017) that he relies on data analysis to decide about the ROM’s social media strategies,

anticipating user habits and trends, before considering whether or not to follow the museum's

mandate.

The Museum of English Rural Life (MERL): A Risk-taking Approach

The MERL is a thematic rural museum with a clear mission stated in its 2019 Business

Plan (MPR, 2019, p. 4): “We create opportunities to experience heritage that build a sense of

place and identity for Reading and its surrounding communities. We play a leading part in the

transformation of Reading’s reputation as a cultural centre.”

The museum's social media strategy is part of its digital strategy and states (MPR, 2019,

p. 7): ‟We are fostering a culture of risk-taking and agile approaches to how we take advantage

of digital technologies and new ways of working.”

Surprisingly, the MERL is running a very successful social media strategy that is not

necessarily tied to the museum’s mission. Popular for its radical approach, the strategy has

adopted the use of humour, an ironic tone, and memes, the museum demonstrate an

understanding of the language of social media platforms. This small institution knows its

community very well and seems to understand how to communicate and interact with its

audience through a few selected platforms. The programme manager and digital lead at the

Museum of English Rural Life, Adam Koszary, confessed in an interview for Fast Web Media

(Koszary, 2018), that he first decided to use an unconventional style on the museum’s social

media channels ‟spurred by boredom to do something different.”

This small institution demonstrates that a successful social media strategy involves

complex factors related to the channel, the audience, and the tone, rather than one single factor

related to the museum’s mission or mandate.

Improvisation and Experimentation in the Perpetual Beta Mode

The online medium is subject to systematic changes. Nothing stays the same for too long:

website, application, game, or even platform. In this context, cultural institutions have no other

option than to improvise and experiment in the online perpetual beta mode. Following are some

examples of experimentation and improvisation.

The BM’s Experiments with Facebook Live

The BM is experimenting with the use of Facebook Live, the channel video streaming

service, which allows curators to broadcast about any object from the museum collections to

audiences all around the world (Hootsuite, 2018).

12

The ROM: Emojis and Hashtags

The ROM launched an innovative use of emojis and hashtags to support the museum’s

objective of building stronger community engagement (Dodge, 2014; ROM, n.d.b) and connect

younger audiences. “We are always looking for opportunities to connect people with our

permanent collection,” Ryan Dodge told the Toronto Star. “And sharing it via a trending topic is

a fun, topical and engaging way of doing so” (Bañares, 2018).

12
https://www.facebook.com/pg/britishmuseum/videos/?ref=page_internal
 13
14

The Art Gallery of Ontario: Playing with Mobiles

The AGO took advantage of media trends. For example, the museum was part of the

popular game PokemonGO, inviting visitors to discover their favorite characters in its galleries.

13
Retrieve from https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2018/07/17/bacon-or-meteorite-royal-ontario-museum-gets-in-
on-worldemojiday-action.html
14
https://twitter.com/ROMtoronto
 15

16

The AGO also participated in #ArtSelfies, a popular social media trend that allows

visitors to take pictures in the museum gallery beside their preferred artwork and share the

experience instantly online (Collie, 2016).

15
Retrieve from https://www.flare.com/tv-movies/what-its-really-like-to-be-a-social-media-director/
16
Retrieve from https://www.cbc.ca/arts/pok%C3%A9mon-go-is-invading-canadian-museums-so-how-are-they-
responding-1.3681364
 17

Finally, the AGO has experimented with crowdfunding when it initiated a crowdfunding

campaign to support the Infinity Room based on the popularity of the exhibit Yayoi Kusama:

Infinity Mirrors in social media; however, the AGO failed to reach its goal before the proposed

deadline (Sandals, 2018). The gallery believed that a great number of the followers of the artist

and the exhibit would support the campaign, but this turned out not the case. Crowdfunding is

part of social media culture and complex as media platforms are.

The MERL: The Best Duck

On April 9, 2018, the Museum of English Rural Life posted a photograph of a ram in its

twitter account along with the caption “Look at this absolute unit.” This posting followed

hundreds of memes posted previously, referencing an original tweet with the same caption

showing Morgan Hewitt with the Queen of England (Know Your Meme, 2019).

17
Retrieve from https://www.flare.com/tv-movies/what-its-really-like-to-be-a-social-media-director/
18

19
20

Taking the risky communication approach paid off: Within 72 hours, the museum’s tweet gained

over 98,000 likes and 27,600 retweets (Know Your Meme, 2019).

Another series of tweets showing photos of ducks continued with a surprising challenge

to the British Museum to post photos of the best ducks in their collection, which was answered

by the larger institution and then followed by other museums and galleries (Richardson, 2019)

The museum postings went viral, promoting the museum brand globally. The MERL

18
Retrieve from https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/absolute-unit
19
Retrieve from https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/absolute-unit
20
https://twitter.com/TheMERL
keeps experimenting by telling museum stories in different ways to raise awareness, but their

posts often demonstrate intuitive creativity (Koszary, 2018).

21

Tactile Museum in Varese: An Unexpected Influencer

The museum gained popularity and social media attention thanks to its engaging postings

during the #MuseumWeek, an online/offline event with the participation of cultural institutions

from all around the world winning over larger institutions such as the Louvre and the British

Museum (Traldi, 2019). The Tactile Museum’s director and co-founder, Livia Cornaggia, is

21
Retrieve from https://www.museumnext.com/article/the-museum-of-english-rural-life-leads-museum-social-
media-duck-hunt/
responsible for the digital and social media strategy of the museum. She competed during this

week with the most prestigious cultural institutions, reaching the top four influencer list during

#MuseumWeek (Root, 2017).

22

The successful tactic was simply to respond to every user comment in real-time, giving a

meaningful and valuable experience to participants.

22
Retrieve from http://www.museotattilevarese.it/
 23

Small museums usually struggle to raise funding, constraining their ability to launch

advertising campaigns promoting their exhibitions and collections through traditional media. For

this reason, the use of social media platforms has become the principle way to manage resources

to communicate with their communities and attract visitors. The economic constraints are

balanced with the freedom to be creative and take risks with their online communication in order

to make an impact in their community.

Conclusion

After conducting a multi-media content analysis, and reviewing the academic literature as

well as interviews with museum professionals, this paper finds that in general terms there is no

“magic formula” to designing a successful social media strategy.

Cultural institutions understand that social media engages and connects with audiences

providing value to the museum. The common goal among museums with a social media presence

is to attract and engage more visitors and enhance visitors’ ability to interact with collections and

exhibitions (Chen, 2018). In general, larger institutions include social networks in their digital

23
Retrieve from https://twitter.com/museotattile_VA
strategy for multiple purposes such as brand awareness, engagement with educational programs,

and activities promotions while smaller museums focus on reinforcing the relationship with their

community (Gonzalez, 2017, p.1).

Social media conversations need constant attention as users value feedback in real-time.

Large institutions experience a struggle to coordinate the same message along different

platforms, which requires trained staff and many hours of cross-sourcing online, responding and

monitoring the public reaction. An efficient social media strategy will cope with platform cross-

posting, real-time conversation, and the coordination of the tone and communication over

different social media channels. The complexity of social media platforms and the overwhelming

amount of resources that are needed to keep an active conversation in real-time with large

communities around the world usually are underestimated, resulting in frustration, lack of

cooperation, or the exodus of the staff (Byrd-McDevitt, 2019). The case studies referenced in

this paper show how large institutions have designed different solutions to cope with the

complexity of social media. The BM hired a third party company to simplify crossposting,

browsing all the channels in one platform. The ROM brought on board and trained staff,

curators, and specialists from all departments to cope with the real-time hours consumed by

conversation with the community. The AGO from the beginning decentralized responsibilities,

delegating to each department the elaboration of social media strategies to engage with their

audiences according to their exhibitions, collections, marketing communication, or education

plans. In general, there is a trend to contain the complexity by reducing the number of social

media platform museums use to the four most popular platforms: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube,

and Instagram.

In large institutions, social media strategies tend to respond to the museum mandate or

mission. The staff of the digital or marketing department in charge are usually professionals with

a high level of specialization, while smaller institutions are managed by staff multitasking and

managing social media communication with a more intuitive approach and a trial and error
process. However, smaller institutions have more freedom to be creative and to take greater

risks, without the constraint of closely following the mission or mandate of the institution.

The social media adventures of cultural institutions in their efforts to apply strategies in a

medium in perpetual beta mode is allowing each institution to create its own original path to

success through a learning process based on improvisation and experimentation.

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