Unconference - managing social media

notes by Alexandra McIntosh and Katie Wittenauer

Use of multiple social media platforms such as Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and blogs. Issues discussed included comparisons of who does what within the institution – in some museums, PR dept takes care of Facebook while Education covers Twitter.

In other cases, one or several people in one department do them all. This brought up issues of how to find out what the rest of the institution is doing, how to coordinate the use of multiple platforms in terms of workflow internally; how to maintain an institutional voice, and how to disseminate engaging information quickly and accurately which is also appropriate to the platform employed.

Additional questions raised included:

What are the expectations for these platforms? How many tweets are too many? (1 to 2 a day seems good)

How to measure success – feedback, responses to tweets.

Who are we reaching? What are the demographics? 

Are we really creating a community or a dialogue online? Are these platforms facilitating actual meet-ups?

Best practices in-house and online; blogging guidelines:

Using RSS to update another platform, copying and pasting, optimising twitter content on facebook (offering richer content because platform allows it) 

Using interns because they have the time, but also because they tend to be younger and more familiar with the platforms and thus successful!

Twitter as a good way for institution to respond – dispel frustration through an immediate response (or explanation) to someone’s complaint

What people are writing on twitter – behind the scenes information, calls for feedback, quirky things about the collection, time-based announcements (relevancy)

What hasn’t worked? Myspace wins as the loser in this category, hands down.