A whole year went by? The Museu Picasso’s 2.0 journey

It really feels like just a few days ago that we started this blog and the museum’s active presence on social media, but — believe it or not! — we’ve just had our first anniversary! To celebrate, we opened the doors of the museum to the online community one Monday, which is the day of the week we are closed to the public, to give our visitors the special privilege of having the place to themselves.

How did it all start?

When we first started — rather shyly — we were one of only a few museums in this country with a 2.0 presence, and for those few, initially there were no references or links on their museums ‘official’ websites to the social platforms.

Getting the Picasso 2.0 project up and running was relatively simple. Having identified the potential and drawn up the overall project, the support of the Museum’s director was not only instantaneous but nothing short of enthusiastic. The presentation to the museum team (MW blog) was another milestone which we reached far more quickly than might have been expected, considering the initial difficulties many other museums had to overcome. Here at the Picasso, although the 2.0 realm was still uncharted territory for most of staff, seeing the good example set by some of the world’s leading museums [that’s youJ)] in pioneering the social networks was a decisive factor, opening up perspectives and future implications for the project. The writing of the blog is now shared by 17 staff members here, and we have also had a number of guest bloggers.

Which have been the most successful projects?

We have had successes and one or two failed projects. Of note among the former, the Become a Fauvist photo competition, which as well as attracting a lot of submissions, many of them very good, led to our being invited to explain it in the Louvre! Another was the collective writing on Facebook based on works in the collection.

Failures? Of course we’ve had a few, because when you’re learning and experimenting that’s part of the process. I’ll mention two here: our attempt to mobilize people on Facebook to create a two-minute video with a soundtrack inspired by Picasso’s work. It seemed easy with a webcam, but either it wasn’t or the proposal wasn’t appealing enough and just didn’t catch on. The other was the attempt to do video interviews near the Museum to ask people what they knew and thought about the Museum and 2.0. That didn’t work because most of the people who were approached didn’t want to be video-interviewed.

The lesson we learned was that even in the more informal 2.0 context, initiatives have to be planned and prepared well if they are going to attract and engage a participatory audience.

In April two happy moments contributed to the celebration of our first anniversary:

 - the publishing of the book Twitter for Museums whose only downloadable chapter is the one on the Picasso’s Twitter experience.

- and…the Best of the Web award by Museums & the Web to the Museu Picasso in the social media category!!!!!!!!!!! (Huge thank you!!!!)

Read the full post at the Museum’s blog

I’ll appreciate any feedbackJ)

Conxa

@innova2