Great Expectations: Sustaining Participation in Social Media Spaces

In recent years there has been a dramatic rise in the number of participatory media technologies which museums have employed to engage people in new ways under the rubric of Web 2.0. Blogs, wikis, podcasts, vodcasts, photo and video sharing, virtual environments, tagging, annotation and other authoring tools offer people new opportunities to engage with museum content processes through co-creation and interactive cultural experiences. Arguably, these platforms and tools are creating new relationships between institutions and the public.We contend that to create sustained participation in social media spaces, museums need to reconsider their relationships with the public and thoroughly explore user motivations and intentions for participation in social media activities. We suggest some ways in which museums might design and evaluate their social media initiatives to ensure their success and sustainability, and offer some questions for further research.