Why Doesn't Anyone Comment on Your Blog?

When people ask about blogging, the question of comments comes up more frequently than any other. It's a bit strange. Why not ask more typical website questions, "why don't more people visit my blog?" or "why don't more people link to my blog?" There are many good ways to measure a blog's value, but somewhere inside ourselves, we feel that comments are the thing that validate a blog's existence. They prove that the conversation is two-way. They demonstrate that the blog is a more participatory vehicle than other kinds of media. So when people ask, "Why don't more people comment?," it gets me excited. It means that you are blogging because you want to hear from someone else.

But here's the problem: the vast majority of people who read your blog aren't reading it because they want or plan to comment on it. They are reading it to read it--to learn, absorb, and gain awareness of new things. When you read other peoples' blogs, do you comment? I do so rarely. I have to feel like the post is open enough to my experience, that the blogger and the community of that blog would find my voice worthwhile, that I have some strong reaction I want to share, that I won't sound stupid... and most of the blog reading I do isn't like that. 95% of the blog posts I read are exciting to me because they provide me with useful, interesting windows into new information. They're like magazine articles. I may talk about them with friends or pass them on, but only once in a blue moon will I write a letter "to the editor" to share my thoughts back to the author.

I push myself to comment wherever it feels right, and still, it often feels scary, weird, and hard. I don't want to validate non-commenting--I want to do whatever I can to encourage commenting--but I acknowledge the barriers. I feel them every day.

Museum 2.0's comment rate, on average, is 7 comments per post, and about 10,000 unique people read the blog each month. That's a lousy percentage--too low to print without several zeroes (and a little complicated to calculate on a per-post basis). Social media experts talk about the 90-9-1 rule: 90% of users are consumers, 9% are occasional producers, and 1% are frequent contributors. Most "successful" blogs are nowhere near 90-9-1. Consider Beth Kanter's blog about non-profits and technology, which is read by about 25,000 people per month. Her average comment rate is 3 comments per post. Does it make her blog less valuable or influential? No. It's just one part of the picture.

There are some blogs that have much higher comment rates than these examples. They tend to be small community blogs that serve a set of people who already know each other and want to connect with each other, like a family, friend group, or work team. If my dad blogged, I'd comment all the time. In fact, there are MORE blogs of this type in the world than blogs that are primarily expository, but the communities they serve are so small (often 10 people or fewer) that they are invisible to most of us. If you do indeed want to cultivate a community discussion, start with a blog "family" to fuel the blog, or, better yet, consider another venue like Twitter or a social network that is a more conducive environment to active participation among strangers.

The other reason not to let comments drive your efforts is that the posts which elicit the most comments are not necessarily the ones that readers value most. It's easy as the blogger to feel this way--after all, I get the most value as a content recipient when you comment back to me, so I (probably incorrectly) inflate the value of those posts. When people do vault over all the psychological barriers to comment, it's not necessarily an indication of a superlative post; it more likely means the post induces a strong reaction. The top three most commented-on posts on this blog are:

• What I Learned on My Summer Vacation (or, I am an Elitist Jerk)
  
• Warning: Museum Graduate Programs Spawn Legions of Zombies!
  
• Where I'm Coming From

What do these posts have in common? They are all personal and provocative. They aren't better than other posts, and they are certainly less informative than many. But in them, I wrote something personal which put me on a conversational level. There are many other stories and opinions besides mine to contribute to the conversations on these posts, and you have done so incredibly richly.

When I wrote the Where I'm Coming From post last week, I had no idea it would be so commented upon. I almost didn't post it because I thought it was overly self-absorbed. Instead, it generated the best comments I've ever seen here--thoughtful, long manifestos about why all of you do what you do. It's awesome. I'm grateful. I hope it happens again. But I'm not planning to shift all of my writing to this kind of personal self-reflection nor to the hyper-provocative content of the Zombies post. I'm not writing to get comments. I'm writing to learn, and hopefully to connect with you through that experience.

And so while I WISH that all of you feel comfortable enough in this space and close enough to me and responsive to my writing that you want to comment, I know that you, like me, probably aren't here for that. You're here to read, to think, and only very occasionally to discuss. That's ok. I want you for that, too.

There are many good tips and strategies for improving blog conduciveness to comments. But it's OK if no one comments on your blog. It can even be OK if no one reads your blog as long as you are getting something out of it. At ASTC in October, museum evaluation rockstar Randi Korn gave a great talk about the role of self-reflection in museum practice. She argued that reflection may be even more important than evaluation in the cycle of creating impact through your work. Blogging can be a wonderful way to take time out from your life to reflect, even if no one reads it. You have the chronicle of content, and that's really valuable, too.

Of course, if you are writing your blog for marketing purposes, you should care about the number of readers. If you are writing to have industry impact, you should care about the number of people who link to you. And if you are writing your blog for conversational purposes, you should care about the quantity and quality of comments. So think about why you are writing before you worry about how to get more comments.

Having said all of this, I know, deep down, why you care about comments. They are the most obvious way that you can see that all of your hard work has had impact on someone. Someone cares! Blogging means giving a lot to a faceless community, and every comment fills in a face. Getting a good comment is like getting a million puppies in the mail. I am so so so grateful whenever you write back and share your thoughts with all those faceless people and with me. But I've also learned not to rely on or have an unhealthy relationship with that gratitude. I'm ecstatic when you comment. I'm thrilled when someone links to me. I'm elated by reader numbers. But what keeps me going is an interest in writing, learning, and sharing.

And so I want to end with my own thanks. Thank you to the intrepid commenters who have jumped in on this blog and shared your stories. Thanks in particular to people like Paul Orselli, who always asks hard questions, and people like Alli, who was inspired just last week to share her first amazing comment. I encourage you all to make a practice of reading the comments on blogs as well as the posts--they reflect a diversity of experience that you can never find in the posts alone. But thank you also to all the bloggers whose work I read and rarely comment on. Thank you to Reach Advisors for sharing FASCINATING insight into visitors' brains. Thank you to Ira Socol who writes a great blog about education and accessibility and comments here frequently. Thank you to the Exploratorium Explainers who give me a window into the frontlines. Thanks to Maria Mortati and David Cheseborough and Dimitry van den Berg and Beck Tench and Shelley Bernstein and Paul Orselli (again) and all the museum bloggers whose work inspires and instructs me. I promise to try to comment more often, but if I don't, know that I still value and appreciate your work.

And if you have a question, an objection, a suggestion, an experience, or a friendly word to share, for god's sake, leave a comment.

Two Tagging Projects that Make Sense

Collection-tagging projects (in which visitors assign keywords to items in a collection) have always left me cold. Tagging is such a functional activity, and if you don't see direct benefit from doing it, the interest in it as a fun afternoon activity is pretty low. But over the last couple of months, I've learned about two tagging projects that actually get me excited--CamClickr at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Posse at the Brooklyn Museum. Why am I suddenly compelled to check out owl nests and describe Asian pottery? Because these projects take the basic act of tagging and wrap it in two powerful motivators--gaming and community.

If you think about it, there are two reasons to tag things:

1. to bookmark them for yourself so you can use them later
2. to describe them for a large group of users who might find them helpful in finding things later
   

I tag things on the Web all the time using Delicious. But I do it because it's useful to me as an organizational tool. Yes, I see the secondary benefit it provides to others in my network, but that's not what drives me.

When museums embark on collections-tagging projects, they are almost entirely focused on this secondary benefit. They aren't letting visitors bookmark objects; they are asking for descriptors to help people find them. Because museum staff are deeply entwined with the online collection and know the statistics on how many users are accessing it, they see a huge opportunity for tags to serve their online visitors. But here's the problem: visitors don't see the same opportunity. If each individual who uses your database doesn't think of herself as part of a user community, she has very little motivation to tag. When I view a museum collection online, I'm not thinking, "how could I make this easier for someone else?" I'm thinking, "how can I find the thing I want to see?" Unless I'm sufficiently dedicated to the institution to think of myself as a community member or repeat user, it's hard for me to imagine a good reason to tag.

That's why some institutions have used game mechanics to incentivize tagging. A year and a half ago, I wrote about Carnegie Mellon-created two games that allow you to competitively tag images on the Web. At the time, I commented that museums and other institutions pursuing tagging as a way to get user-generated content about collections should consider using gaming to motivate participation as well. And that brings us to CamClickr.

CamClickr

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology's CamClickr project integrates a simple set of game mechanics (levels and points). CamClickr and its parent project, NestWatch, are the newest public offerings in the Lab's suite of citizen science activities, which engage ordinary people in the collection of scientific data about birds. CamClickr is based on a mundane activity: look at photos snapped by webcams pointed at nests and describe what's happening. Are there chicks? Are there eggs? Is there an adult? Are there two adults? What are they doing? And while looking at nests is interesting for a while, the intrinsic motivation to look at another set of 15 photos of chicks with their mouths open is (for me) pretty low.

But Cornell did a wonderful job turning this tagging activity into a game with levels, score, and a leader board. Their promise that it is "fun, easy, and addicting!" is scarily true. I'm only at 99 points, but the leading players have logged tens of thousands of points--each of which corresponds a set of tags applied to an image. The CamClickr game gives you mini-wins (accruing points, moving to the next set) as well as larger motivators (jumping from level 1 to level 2). The game also blends the point-based motivation with changes in what is expected of the tagger. When you advance to level 2, you advance to a more challenging set of activities. Instead of just identifying how many birds are in the nest, you have to actually identify what they're doing. At first, this was a little scary for me--how do I know what a bird's doing? But because this activity was couched in a "level 2" construct, I got to first build my confidence on level 1, and when I got to level 2, I was willing to spend some extra time reading the additional material so I could "do it right." In this way, CamClickr gently ushers users into more sophisticated tagging activities, using the game mechanic both for motivation and as a gateway to build up user expertise.

CamClickr is a well-designed game, but there is minimal interaction among the players. Like any arcade game, I can view the top scorers on the homepage, but I don't have a sense of where I am in the list or who all these folks are. And I have only the haziest notion of the real audience for the tagging: the scientists who will use the data in their work. And that's where the Brooklyn Posse comes in.

The Brooklyn Posse

The Brooklyn Museum's project goes a step further, combining game mechanics with community membership to create a social tagging experience. The Brooklyn team decided to directly tackle the #2 problem with tagging by raising awareness among users of each other, thus creating a community for whom you are tagging. Here's how it works.

Step 1: join the posse. This is a community-building step in which you create a basic profile (selecting an artwork from the museum's collection as your avatar) and join the community of collection taggers. Suddenly, I know who the other folks are who will benefit from my tags--the other members of the posse. I may not have a prior relationship with them, but just perceiving their presence and my membership in their gang increases my interest in doing work for them. It's interesting that Brooklyn's tagging project is centered entirely around this posse. The page is clearly about members, not objects.

Step 2: tag stuff. When the Posse first opened, I joined, but then I ran into the same problem I've had with other museum tagging projects--I didn't feel compelled to tag. Yes, they allow you to both favorite and tag artifacts, and that's nice, but since I don't have a strong connection with their online collection, why would I tag it? I took a couple of half-hearted clicks, but that wasn't going to drive my interest, and it didn't connect me to the other users.

Then, in September, they opened up a game called, shockingly, tag. It's similar to CamClickr; you tag artifacts from the collection, accruing points for each tag assigned. But instead of levels, you play relative to other members of the Posse. The game tells you each time you have passed another Posse member's score, and gives you some reference for Posse members in your score vicinity to motivate you to keep playing. Best of all, the game features a really charming set of thank you videos that pop up when you pass other Posse members in which Brooklyn Museum staff (and their sock puppets) say thank you for tagging. That whimsical, friendly connection was enough to make me keep going to get to see the next video. It's like the little dramas that happen between PacMan levels--not great cinematography, but something with enough of a hook to drive you to keep playing.

For me, the tag game made all the difference in my interest in tagging. Suddenly, I had a reason to tag (albeit a silly one) - to get points. The game made me more aware of other Posse members by showing my status in relation to them, and subtly signaling to me that other people care about this stuff and are involved with it. It's also worth mentioning the friendly, fun attitude that the whole Posse site takes towards tagging. When you register your username, the system tells you it's awesome. It uses words like "yay!" liberally. And while that may turn some people off, it made me feel like I was in a fun environment--a Posse with whom I wanted to associate.

Next Challenges

These projects ably address a key problem with tagging: motivating users to do it. But once I, a non-expert in either birds or art, started tagging, I ran into another problem. I was afraid I was doing it wrong. Once I was aware of the usefulness of my tags to someone else--whether a group of scientists or a posse--I started getting nervous. What if the game was encouraging me to tag beyond my abilities? What if that bird wasn't actually eating?

I raised this fear with Shelley Bernstein at the Brooklyn Museum. She was surprised, and commented that (like all tagging projects), the Posse is looking for whatever words you associate with a piece of art. Right or wrong, they may add value to another searcher's experience. We talked about the confidence problem, and whether the game mechanic of points should be coupled with more instruction and or reinforcing language that might help me be more comfortable with the tags. These games do a great job motivating you TO tag. Now, maybe, they can do a better job rewarding you not just for the points you accrue but the useful work you are doing.

Because ultimately, the problem with tagging is that it doesn't always seem useful. If people are doing work for you with your collection, they want to know that it's going to help in some way. One of the best parts of Cornell's citizen science projects is the very real sense that you are helping people--scientists, no less--do their work. I'm willing to tag for non-visitors; if a museum told me they needed my tags to help their research, I might be interested. But I need to be tagging for someone. If it's visitors, show me the tags and how I might use them. If it's professionals, let me see where the work goes and have them say thank you.

We have to give visitors a real sense of how their tags are helping others (or themselves). That's the only way tagging can evolve into a true "visitor experience."

Scratch: An Educational, Multi-Generational Online Community that Works

Last week, I was reintroduced to Scratch, a graphical programming language designed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab. I first saw Scratch a few years ago, when I had friends working at the Media Lab, and at the time it seemed like a neat way for kids who were unfamiliar with programming to jump in and start designing their own interactive stories and games. It was a serious improvement on tools like Logo Turtle and Hypercard that I grew up with... but still, a programming environment.

Then, in May 2007, the Scratch online community (called ScratchR) was released. It's a place for Scratch users to upload, share, and remix their Scratch projects. ScratchR is a true social network, connecting hundreds of thousands of people--kids and adults--in about 200 countries around the world. It's an inspiration to anyone trying to create an online community around informal learning. In this post, a look at the intentional design choices that make ScratchR work.

There are four sections to this post:

1. An overview of ScratchR user types and related statistics.
2. Why people participate.
3. How kids and adults are able to play together safely.
4. How ScratchR makes strong use of platform power and social objects.
   

You may want to open a window with the ScratchR homepage so you can refer to it throughout this post.

First, a look at statistics on user types.

As of today, ScratchR boasts 236,997 projects created by 37,820 contributors of ScratchR's 174,425 registered members. Those are big user numbers. What do they mean?

As in any online community, ScratchR has spectators, joiners, collectors, critics, and creators. The ScratchR spectators are part of the 5 million+ ScratchR website visitors who check out projects but don't join. If you've clicked on a link to the site from this post, congratulations--you are a ScratchR spectator.

The 174, 425 registered members are all joiners. I'm one of them. I've joined the site, but I haven't yet uploaded anything or commented on anything. I'm still a "passive consumer" in the eyes of ScratchR, but my actions are tracked every time I view a Scratch project (as are spectators'). In this way, like on YouTube, my actions as a viewer still affect the creator community, because creators are aware of the number of views on their projects.

ScratchR provides four tools for collectors and critics. For any project, you can "love it" (which is like giving it a thumbs-up), "add it to your favorites" (which is a private collecting function), "flag it as inappropriate," and write comments about it.

And finally, ScratchR focuses most of their love on the creators--people who actually design Scratch projects and upload them to ScratchR. It's worth pointing out that there are many people out there who use Scratch to make things but don't share them with the online community. For this reason, part of ScratchR's goal--besides attracting new creators--is to seduce experienced creators to join the community. These experienced creators already have a relationship with Scratch, and ScratchR was originally created to help these people connect with each other and build more sophisticated projects together.

Here is the user profile by age circa July 2008 (per this report). While the largest grouping is from age 9-18, you can see the long tail of participants up into their 60s. Many adults have become engaged with Scratch both as mentors/educators and as creators in their own right.


And here is the creator profile by participation. While the majority of creators only upload one project to ScratchR, there is a long tail of usage. The spike at 21 projects is for creators who have created more than 20 projects.

Okay, so that's who is using ScratchR. But what makes it special? What makes them use it?

Why people participate.

Scratch's lead creator, Mitchel Resnick, likes to say that Scratch has a "low floor, high ceiling, and wide walls." That means that it's easy to start using it, you can use it to varied levels of sophistication, and you can use it for a diversity of purposes. Some people make games where you catch fireflies. Others make shows where hamsters sing and dance.

But all of those functions, and the extent to which Scratch is low, high, and wide, don't relate specifically to ScratchR. What make Scratch users come to the online community?

Some of the reasons are obvious. People want to share their projects to get a little bit of fame, to connect with others who create similar projects, and to be inspired by what others have created. And ScratchR provides tools to support these interests. Yes, you can mark projects as your favorites, comment on them, and "love" them. But you can also join galleries (like Flickr pools) for specific affinities. There are almost 15,000 design galleries on ScratchR, ranging from small critique groups to tutorial groups to Christian groups to anything goes groups.

You can also remix other projects. This is the most novel sharing tool I've seen on any social network. It's comparable to the tools that allow you to re-blog items of interest, but unlike situations where I make a response video on YouTube, ScratchR actually allows you to download the original project, add or alter the programming, and then upload the result as a remix (with credit to the original creator). This is a HUGE value-added for people to join the community--they gain access to the code to every project on the site, and are encouraged to share what they've made with it.

Adults and Kids, All in One Place.

Before seeing ScratchR, I pretty much thought it was impossible to design an online community that could safely support kids under 13 (the age that COPPA kicks in) working with people of all ages. ScratchR is not 100% safe, as I'll explain, but they have created a site that is fully functional for both kids and adults. Let's take a look at the safety of each aspect of the site.

Sign up: Pretty Safe.
When you sign up, ScratchR asks for your age. If you are under 13, instead of asking for your email address, it asks for your parent or guardian's email address (email addresses are only used to help you retrieve lost passwords). If you are under 18, ScratchR will display your home country but not your state or city. Everyone is instructed not to create usernames identical to their real names. Yes, people can lie about these things, but the worst that can happen is that a child will willfully lie about her age and enter her own email address and city/state. But that email address is never accessible to other users, and unless she is from a town of 1, she's somewhat protected.

Profiles: Very Safe.
Unlike other online communities, ScratchR does not allow you to "pimp your profile" with all kinds of information. As an adult, my profile shows my username, photo, city, state, and country. For kids, the profile only shows username, photo, and country (and most people use "sprites"--Scratch characters--for their photos). In fact, profile isn't even a tab--instead, it's called "My Stuff," and it is primarily for showcasing each user's projects, favorites, galleries, and friends.

Communication: Pretty Safe.
Unlike other online communities, there is no way to privately message anyone in ScratchR. If you designate someone as your "friend," that just means that you link to their projects from your page. There is no private chat. All inter-user communication happens in public comment boards connected to projects and galleries. Yes, it is possible for someone to reveal private information on a public comment board, but the number of community eyes on each board means that that kind of content can be seen publicly and addressed quickly.

Inappropriate Content: Debatable.
So if all of this is safe, why are there still some teachers and parents who won't let their kids participate? There is one section of ScratchR that could be deemed "unsafe": the Newest Projects section, featured prominently on the homepage of the website. Because projects are not vetted before they are uploaded and placed in Newest Projects, it is possible for projects to show up there that are inappropriate. Once they are up, they are likely to be flagged as such and removed--but there is the possibility for people to be exposed to offensive content during the narrow window of time when projects first go up. While this doesn't constitute a safety danger for any given user, it does mean that the content is not 100% controlled. It was more important to the ScratchR team to acknowledge every new submission prominently on the homepage than to check each one first. More generally, ScratchR relies on the community to largely self-police via the Flag as Inappropriate tag. Some adults may be skeptical of the efficacy of this policy, but as ScratchR scales up, it is hard to imagine another form of policing that wouldn't significantly reduce participation.

Of course, the question of putting adults and kids together isn't all about safety. There are so many awesome and fascinating educational interactions on ScratchR that emerge from the interplay among users. The adults aren't solely there as monitors--many are creators. The "high ceiling" means that many adults use Scratch for their own enjoyment. And that gets kids and adults discussing all kinds of things. For example, check out this discussion about the Monte Carlo method, Pi, and what it means to be forty.


How ScratchR makes good use of platform power and social objects.

ScratchR is really well-designed. In the platform power post, I wrote about the four powers a platform has:

1. the power to set the rules of behavior
   
2. the power to preserve and exploit user-generated content
   
3. the power to promote and feature preferred content
   
4. the power to define the types of interaction available to users

We've already addressed some ways that ScratchR does 1, 2, and 4. Let's look at #3--the promotion and featuring of content.

When you look at the homepage for ScratchR, you'll notice that there are seven starting points for checking out projects of interest. These are (in order):

1. Newest Projects
2. Featured Projects
3. Top Remixed Lately
4. Surprise Projects
5. Top Loved Lately
6. Top Downloaded Lately
7. Top Viewed Lately

It's worth noting that on a standard browser window, you can only see 1 & 2 before you have to scroll down the page. So order really matters here--and when we look at the order, we see the priorities that ScratchR supports:

1. Newest Projects - encouraging people to upload projects
   
2. Featured Projects - showing what the team considers to be high quality & diversity
   
3. Top Remixed Lately - encouraging creators to build on each other
   
4. Surprise Projects - suggesting that you explore all kinds of projects
   
5. Top Loved Lately - recency of users' preferences (encourages you to love projects)
   
6. Top Downloaded Lately - recency of users' preferences (encourages remixes)
   
7. Top Viewed Lately - recency of users' activities (encourages exploration)
   

Looking at this list, you see that the top four types reflect the values of the ScratchR designers. The last three reflect the interests of the users--and not in quantity (i.e. most views) but in recency. The ScratchR team intentionally wanted to avoid a massive popularity contest, so they promote activity on the site, not aggregate growth of views, loves, or downloads.

There are also ways from the homepage, without scrolling down, to download Scratch (of course!), join a gallery, and participate in a "design studio" (a ScratchR team-led gallery). Again, the ScratchR team is promoting use of Scratch and community-building around the programming environment.

Does it work? One of the most interesting things about ScratchR is the small range of views for each project. A featured project may have 200 views, and a very popular project may have as many as 1000 views, but most projects have somewhere in the 10s of views. On most user-generated content sites, the vast majority of content is barely viewed. But this is often obscured by design that focuses attention on the top viewed-content. On YouTube, the disparity between the top and the bottom has created famous users, and may make some newbies feel like they can never succeed. ScratchR's intentional avoidance of popularity as a metric of success may foster more participation in small community groups, like galleries, that can give satisfaction in loves, comments, and remixes, if not in huge view counts.

Of course, there are people who try to game the system, or translate an unhealthy interest in popularity to an unhealthy interest in something more valued by ScratchR, like "loves." There are many projects with comments from their creators like "I know this sux but if I get 10 loves I will make another one." But again, because it's not about popularity, some of the gaming can have really positive effects. If someone decides only to make remixes because that's more likely to land them on the homepage, they've made a choice to constructively build on the work of others. And that's a good thing.

The only criticism I have of ScratchR's design is that there is no way to embed Scratch projects in other places on the Web. UPDATE--this is not true. To embed a Scratch project, you need to scroll down on the project's page and look for the "Link to this project" on the right column. Thanks to Tom for pointing this out!

One final comment about ScratchR. Last month I wrote about Jyri Engeström and his theory that social networks only work if they are organized around a core social object and a verb that defines how people manipulate that object. ScratchR is incredibly strong on Jyri's list of requirements for strong social networks. The objects are the Scratch projects. The verb that people do is create. People share their projects via ScratchR. And the remixes are a true "gift" to participants to continue using the program.

I bring this up because I think ultimately the success of ScratchR comes down to the fact that it is a social network designed around an object that the Scratch team had already identified as social. The initial NSF proposal for ScratchR focused on creating networked opportunities for teams of kids who were already using Scratch and for whom a social component would add value to their education experiences.

And so I conclude this very lengthy post with a question:
What social objects do you already have in your programs, collections, and visitor experiences that are itching to have a broader social environment in which to grow?

How (and Why) to Develop a Social Media Handbook

What is the ideal role of your marketing or PR team in the creation and distribution of content on the social Web? I'd aruge that it doesn’t make sense for marketing to create and control all of the content produced in Web 2.0-land. After all, they control very little of the content produced in exhibitions, shared via programs, and expressed by public-facing staff and volunteers. If your museum has many voices in the real world, you will most powerfully and honestly convey yourself virtually if you can reflect the diversity of your institution. The trick is figuring out how to organize and track it all.

Let me give you an example. The marketing director for a mid-size science museum, Jeff, recently showed me a YouTube channel he’d discovered which was created by a camp staff member at the museum. The channel consisted of a few videos of kids making stuff at camp. Jeff said, “I don’t have a problem with this. I love that they are doing this. I have a problem with the fact that they aren’t clearly identifying themselves with the museum, aren’t linking back to the museum’s website, and just generally aren’t making it clear that this camp is a product of our museum.”

His concerns are valid. Whenever visitors enjoy a program or exhibit at the museum, it’s clear to them where they are. They are in the museum. They aren’t going to be confused about what institution created and distributed the content. On the Web, this is not so clear. If staff start blogging, posting videos and photos, etc., it’s important for them to clearly convey their association, so that visitors who check out that content know that they are (virtually) in the museum as they do so. And on the marketing and tracking side, "rogue" blogs, YouTube channels, and Flickr pools that aren't clearly identified can become an annoyance as staff try to get a handle on institutional impact on the Web.

Much as HR distributes an employee handbook that explains both regulations (i.e. no sandals) and opportunities (i.e. health benefits), the marketing or PR team should create a social media handbook that contains both rules and useful resources. This is different from having a social media policy, which is typically all stick, no carrot. Marketing directors like Jeff don’t want to be traffic cops. They want to enable social media activity, and that means providing both guidelines and resources. In this way, the marketing or PR director becomes a gateway in the most positive light--helping staff figure out what tools to use, how to use them, and how to get the most out of them.

On the guidelines side, a social media handbook would include:

• what is considered appropriate for internal and external distribution
• any rules about things that should not be shared with the public or need approval before being released (financials, pictures of kids without permission... this list should be small and discrete)
  
• how to get a new initiative approved by your manager
  
• elements that must be included in any initiative. These may include:
• museum logo
• analytics code
• link back to the institution
• links to other social media initiatives (i.e. staff Flickr users must friend each other)
  
• specific text, tags, or keywords
  

On the resources side, a social media handbook would include:

• lists of recommended tools and social sites
• information about how to pick the best Web tool for your program/exhibit/initiative
• recommendations for screen names and a list of screen names currently in use per tool
  
• approved logos in color, black and white, and a square version
• approved photos that can be used
  
• stylesheets and other graphical elements created for various types of Web templates
  
• information about where to find legal-to-use images, audio, and video and any licensing rules of the science centre
• a list of other social media initiatives at the museum
  

The ideal place for such a handbook would be on a wiki, where staff could easily upload links to new content they’ve created on the Web. That way, the wiki becomes both the handbook and a growing catalog of projects. It may make sense for the marketing team to track all of museum’s efforts cumulatively, and having access to such a list would allow them to ensure that they are seeing the whole picture.

The existence of such a handbook doesn’t mean there won’t also be times when there is controversy about the appropriateness of a given piece of Web content. But it will help that conversation happen in a way that is fair to all parties involved.

What would you include in your social media handbook? What guidelines or resources does your organization offer in this regard?

The Future of Authority: Platform Power

I have a lot of conversations with people that go like this:

Other person: "So, you think that museums should let visitors control the museum experience?"
Me: "Sort of."
Other person: "But doesn't that erode museums' authority?"
Me: "No."

One of the primary fears museum professionals (and all professionals) have about entering new relationships with audiences is the fear of losing control. For hundreds of years, we've owned the content and the message. While we may grudgingly acknowledge the fact that visitors create their own versions of the message around subsets of the content, we don't consciously empower visitors to redistribute their own substandard, non-authoritative messages. So when people like me start advocating for the creation of tools and opportunities by which visitors can share their stories, reaggregate the artifacts, even rate and review each others' creations, museum professionals of all stripes get concerned. If the museum isn't in control, how can it thrive?

We have to change the framing of this conversation. There is a difference between control and expertise. In these conversations, people often say, "don't expert voices matter?" and my emphatic response is YES. Content expertise matters. Content control shouldn't.

Museums should feel protective of the expertise reflected in their staff, exhibits, programs, and collections. In most museums, the professional experience of the staff--to preserve objects, to design exhibits, to deliver programs--is not based on content control. It's based on creation and delivery of experiences. And in a world where visitors want to create, remix, and interpret content messages on their own, museums can assume a new role of authority as "platforms" for those creations and recombinations.

The problem arises when expertise creates a feeling of entitlement to control the entire visitor experience. Power is attractive. Being in control is pleasant. It lets you be the only expert with a voice. But if our expertise is real, then we don't need to rule content messages with an iron fist. As Ian Rogers has said, "losers wish for scarcity. Winners leverage scale."

Single voices represented on single labels is not scalable. I believe we need to develop museum "platforms" that allow us to harness, prioritize, and present the diversity of voices around a given object, exhibit, or idea. This does not mean we are giving all the power to visitors. We will grant them a few opportunities--to create their own messages, to prioritize the messages that resonate best for them personally--in the context of a larger overall platform. The platform is what's important. It's a framework that museums can (and should) control, and there's power in platform management.

When you think of a platform for user-generated content, you may not think of that platform as having power. But the companies that run YouTube, Flickr, and other major Web 2.0 sites have lots of power. There are four main powers that platforms have:

1. the power to set the rules of behavior
2. the power to preserve and exploit user-generated content
3. the power to promote and feature preferred content
4. the power to define the types of interaction available to users

These powers constitute a set of controls which constitutes a real and valuable authority. Let's take a look at each one and how it might be applied in museums.


1. The power to set the rules of behavior.
User-generated content sites control user and community behavior, both implicitly through the tools that are and aren't offered, and explicitly through community management. Every Web 2.0 site has rules about acceptable content and ways that users can engage with each other--consider this article about the complicated and often highly subjective (read: powerful) Flickr community guidelines. These rules are not uniform, and their differences often influence the makeup of users who feel welcome and choose to engage.

When it comes to museums, comparable rules can guarantee that the museum remains a safe, welcoming place for visitors of all kinds. There are some "rules" already in place--like the rule that you have to pay to enter--that may have great effect on the types of users who engage in museums and the behavior they display within. Museums should consider, as Web 2.0 community managers do, what behaviors and visitors they want to support and which rules will make those people feel most at home in the institution.


2. The power to use and exploit user-generated content.
Platforms also have the power to set rules related to preservation and ownership of the content on them--often with quite strict IP statutes that favor the platform over users. Every time you post a photo on Flickr, you give its owner, Yahoo!, the right to use that photo however they see fit. The same is true on YouTube, and on sites like Facebook, which are "walled gardens," you can't even easily export your user-generated content (friends, events, updates) outside of Facebook itself.

Again, these rules reflect platform control, and when the control is too heavy-handed, users get annoyed and stay away. Museums will always need to retain some powers to manage the preservation of objects, to wield IP controls properly, and to manage the digital reproduction and dissemination of content. There are many models as well for what we do with user-generated content in the museum. There are some emerging case studies for this. The Smithsonian American Art Museum's current Ghosts of a Chance game is accessioning player-generated objects into a temporary part of their collection database, with clear rules about what happens to the objects at the end of the game (they are the responsibility of a sub-contractor). In the same way that Web 2.0 sites display a range of respect for user-retained intellectual property, museums can navigate and create their own rules--and related powers--for content developed by visitors on site.


3. The power to promote and feature preferred content.

When you go onto a user-generated content site like YouTube, you don't just see a jumble of videos. One of the greatest powers retained by these platforms is the power to feature content that reflects the values of the platform. These values may skew towards promoting content with the most popularity/views, the newest content, or content that is unique in some way. The choice of what to display on the front page is not just about design. There have been huge user-protests of both YouTube and Digg for perceived bias in the "featured content" algorithms that vault some content to the top. And while some sites strive for transparency, most find ways to feature the kind of content and behavior that they want to see modeled for other users.

This may be the most important platform power when it comes to museums because it is the one that allows the platform to present its values and model preferred behavior. And many museums are far from assuming this power. Most museum projects that allow visitors to create content only allow for the most basic of prioritization. Consider video kiosks where visitors can create their own short clips (a pet peeve of mine). Many museum video kiosks will feature clips from famous people but do nothing to prioritize and prominently display high-quality visitor submissions. The kiosks are organized by recency, not content value--and so new visitors walking up are not given a model for the kind of content the museum would most like to receive.

When museums do assume this power, it is often in a zero-transparency way that doesn't model behavior for users. When I spoke with Kate Roberts about MN150, the Minnesota History Center exhibition based on visitor-generated nominations, she explained that after the nomination period was over, they entirely shut down visitor engagement in the selection process. It just felt too messy to do anything but lock the staff in a room and sort through the nominations. When the exhibition opened a year later, visitors could see which nominations were valued and featured, but they couldn't get this information in an early feedback loop that would have allowed them to improve their nominations during the submission process.


4. The power to define available interactions.

This power is so basic that it is often forgotten. On YouTube, you can share videos. On Craigslist, you can buy and sell stuff. On LibraryThing, you can tag and talk about books. Each Web 2.0 platform has a limited feature set and focuses on one or two basic actions that users can take. Museums don't need to offer every kind of interaction under the sun--we just have to pick the few interactions that most support the kind of behavior and content creation that we value. Again, there's a lot of power in the decision of whether visitors will be allowed to contact each other, rate artifacts, or make their own exhibits. As long as you create a platform that is consistent in its values and the interactions provided, you will be able to control the experience as you open up content authority.


There are real opportunities here for museums to retain authority related to values, experiences, and community behavior. The power of the platform may not let you dictate every message that floats through your doors. But with good, thoughtful design, it can ensure that those messages enhance the overall museum experience.

Intranets, Yammer, and Other Web 2.0 Tools for Staff Communication

What's the most immediately useful application of Web 2.0 tools to your museum? It probably isn't new forms of visitor engagement (no matter how much I write about those relationships). So many museums suffer from departmental siloing, deluges of all-staff emails, the painful jujitsu required to collate seven versions of the same document... the list goes on. And while defining new relationships with visitors may be a complex institutional process requiring buy-in on many levels, there's no reason not to move quickly and confidently to improve the ways that staff communicate inside your institution.

Here are seven frequent staff communication problems, and tools to address them. They all involve tearing down silos, removing gatekeepers, and making it easy to get the information you want when you want it. Oh, and they're mostly all free.

1. Is your staff directory perpetually out-of-date?

Create a shared Google spreadsheet that lives on the Web and can be updated by everyone. This way, each new staff person can enter her own name, email, phone, etc., and change things as needed. You can even create a handy form to send out so people don't have to edit the spreadsheet itself. The document will always available in its most recent version on the Web, and you can easily add new fields as needed by your institution. Here's an example that took me 3 minutes to create: fill out this form to be added to our imaginary directory!

2. Do you have no idea what's going on beyond your department or team except when an annoying all-staff email announces locker cleanup this Friday?

Set up Yammer to host an internal, private free Twitter feed for your institution. Yammer works like Twitter--people send out short messages that anyone can read or follow. You can receive the messages on the Web, on your desktop, on your phone, or in an instant messaging client. The difference is that all of the messages are internal to your institution. This means a quick way to:

• let staff know about fundraising successes
• share funny visitor stories from the floor
• make staff aware of a big group, program, or event in the museum
  
• tell people there are cupcakes in the break room
• update folks on new media hits
  
• let staff know that an important donor is coming into the offices
  

Right now, most museums share this information via all-staff emails (or not at all when it comes to the quick stories that give the pulse of the institution). By using a service like Yammer, people don't have to read and delete emails clogging their inbox--they can let the messages they don't care about go by, and hone in on the ones that really interest them.

You don't need everyone to sign up to start using Yammer--you can start with a small team or a few interested staff members. The more people use it, the more diversity of information from across the institution you'll start sharing on a daily basis. Not only can it reduce the all-staff email frustration, it can give you a pulse on what's happening in every area of your institution.

3. Do you need a way to report, document, and share day-to-day information on a project or within your department?

Many museum teams don't see each other in person every day. This is true for operations teams, which often include part-time staff who don't intersect, as well as for development teams, which often involve outside contractors or remote staff. Some operations teams use a log book to keep staff updated on the activities of the previous day, but too many rely on word-of-mouth and lose the opportunity to document institutional history and convey knowledge from staff member to staff member.

Internal team blogs can ameliorate these gaps in interaction by providing a group-authored space where staff can share everything from daily log reports to research thoughts. You can set up a free blog via Blogger (my preferred platform) and set it to private, identifying a key set of people who are allowed to author and read posts. You will effectively have a departmental journal of work going on, discoveries made, major events that deserve to be discussed and memorialized. And since people can subscribe to blogs via RSS, staff can select the departments they want to follow "on-demand" without getting bogged down by lots of all-staff emails.

4. Do you need a way to do research and brainstorm collaboratively with your team?

Whereas blogs are a good reporting mechanism, wikis are a better collaborative tool. An internal, shared group wiki will allow you to explore different topics (i.e. create new pages for new areas of interest), refine mission statements, and aggregate research resources in a central area. I like Wik.is as a free, no-ad, easy to use tool, and have been using it with many clients to keep notes from meetings, organize information, and share resources. Most wiki systems also allow you to easily attach documents. A good wiki can easily become the homebase for creative group work.

5. Do you need a way to share links, images, and videos besides emailing them around?

You can create lists of links on wikis and blogs, but there are also tools that allow you to connect directly to other staff members while you are in the process of discovering and bookmarking items across the Web. Delicious is an online bookmarking system that makes it easy for you to "tag" websites of interest and save them on a single webpage. By sharing your bookmarks with other staff members, you can create targeted link lists for a variety of projects. For example, here's my Delicious page. You can see my network--the people who I'm connected with. We can surf each others' bookmarks, and if we choose a shared tag for a project, then anyone can search Delicious for that tag and see all bookmarks related to that project.

You can do similar things on Flickr and YouTube to share images and videos of interest. I "friend" people I'm working with, and our cumulative "favorites" on these sites become useful resources for image and video reference.

6. Do you need a way to author and revise documents with others?

Many people use Google Docs for this, though I find the interface a bit confusing. I prefer to use wikis to create group-authored documents. All of the text is available directly on the wiki page (no attachments to save or links to click on), easy to edit, and every revision is automatically saved. You can even subscribe to the recent changes and get them sent directly to your email inbox or to a feed reader like Google Reader. Here's a sample document that you can add to and change to get the feel for wiki editing, this time using a wiki service called WetPaint. (I chose WetPaint instead of my favorite wiki provider, Wik.is, because WetPaint allows non-registered users to edit pages.)

7. Do you need a way to put all of these activities in one place?

You may look at all of the above suggestions and think, "Oy. She wants me to sign up for blogs, wikis, yammer... this is way too many different tools to learn! How will I keep track of them all?"

There are two ways to organize all these kinds of Web 2.0 communication: you can do it for free by creating a custom homepage, or you can pay someone else to aggregate it in something like an intranet.

First, two ways to do it yourself:

1. For all staff: create a wiki that just features links to each of the different services you are using. You can easily edit it to add new blogs, shared documents, or other wikis that different teams are using. The wiki becomes both a record of all internal social media work and an easy place from which to access it. If you are really tech-competent, you can download the open-source version of Mindtouch (makers of wik.is) to create your own custom community site.
   
2. For yourself: create a Google homepage that has individual links to the different wikis and shared documents in use. You can embed a Google Reader into your homepage and enter all of the addresses for blogs and wiki updates into that reader to create an aggregate feed of posts and changes across all your internal sites.

Paying someone else to create an intranet--a webspace that provides all of the functions listed above (directory, wikis, blogs, updates)--can be very useful IF you are ready to make these new communication systems institution-wide requirements. Web 2.0-enabled intranets are fabulous because they don't require an administrative gate-keeper, but if no one uses them, they're not worth the money. If you're not sure you need an intranet, I recommend starting with some experimental, small projects and see how things go. If you get critical mass and want a more integrated system, you can spring for the intranet.

Here are three robust intranet solutions to consider:

1. ThoughtFarmer. This is my favorite "wiki-inspired" intranet solution, which provides dynamic, integrated staff directory, departmental wikis, and individual blogs, all connected in an attractive and simple to use interface. ThoughtFarmer costs $109/user (20% discount for non-profits, about $5000/year for updates) and requires a minimum of 100 users. ThoughtFarmer is the best option if you are a large institution with an interest in collaborative documentation, creative work, and messaging.
2. SocialText, like ThoughtFarmer, is a wiki-based collaborative internal workspace. The pricing is comparable ($5000 minimum startup), though there is a small business version for $10/user/month. SocialText is more customizable than ThoughtFarmer but lacks some of the more attractive user interface elements of ThoughtFarmer. SocialText is best for highly tech-literate folks who want to customize their own experience.
   
3. Google Apps. Google Apps provides more standard enterprise needs, like email, calendar, and instant messaging, and fewer Web 2.0 applications (Google Docs and Google sites). This is a good solution if you are looking for a new email and calendar server, but may not be perfect if you really want dynamic shared spaces.While you can use Google Apps for free, to have a version with no ads and good backup systems you'll pay $50 per user per year.
   

Remember, you don't have to do all of this at once. But if even just one of these seven problems is something that has you banging your head against the ticket counter every day, consider trying one of these suggestions. It will change your workflow--reducing your reliance on email, allowing you to get and receive on-demand information--and it will require you to be more proactive about "following" activities across the institution. The benefit is more flexible, varied content from across the museum, and smarter collaboration with team members. Fewer headaches guaranteed.

What tools do you use to make your collaborative work easier?

Exhibits and Artifacts as Social Objects

How can you design museum spaces so that exhibits and artifacts become social objects--things that people want to share with each other? This summer, I wrote about situations that bring strangers together in conversation by focusing their attention on a third party (the dog, the stuck elevator, the surprising event). While that post focused on conditions for talking to strangers, this one looks at the object of attention itself around which triangulation and social behavior happens.

I was intrigued by this article by Jyri Engeström about "object-centered sociality." Jyri argues that social networks that succeed are based around objects, not relationships. The objects don't have to be physical, but they do have to be distinct entities. Flickr has photos. YouTube has videos. Upcoming.com has events. Jyri suggests that more nebulous social networks, like LinkedIn or Facebook, can only succeed if and when objects are at the foundation of the experience. Facebook has a diversified object model--for some people, friend updates are the essential object, for others, it's virtual gifts. LinkedIn is now organizing the network more strongly around jobs instead of connections, which Jyri sees as a move to object-centered design:

Think about the object as the reason why people affiliate with each specific other and not just anyone. For instance, if the object is a job, it will connect me to one set of people whereas a date will link me to a radically different group. This is common sense but unfortunately it's not included in the image of the network diagram that most people imagine when they hear the term 'social network.' The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They're not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object.

This is great news for museums. Unlike digital networks, which have to manufacture or solicit online versions of objects around which users can rally, museums are full of objects. We know that the stories and connections between visitors and objects exist--we just have to find ways to use those connections to turn the objects into triangulation points for social behavior. Rather than convincing visitors that they want to be part of "the museum club," if we can find ways to make our objects function socially, the opportunity for a useful network may emerge.

Jyri offers five key principles for the design of such a network or service:

1. You should be able to define the social object your service is built around
2. Define your verbs that your users perform on the objects.
   
3. How can people share the objects?
4. Turn invitations into gifts.
5. Charge the publishers, not the spectators.
   

Let's look at these briefly one by one. I think that the second one is the most important and potentially useful to museum work, but they're all worth considering.

1. You should be able to define the social object your service is built around.
This one is easy for museums. It's exhibits, artifacts, collections--our stuff.

2. Define the verbs your users perform on the objects.
Currently, these verbs are primarily non-social: visitors watch and interact singly or in pre-defined groups. Occasionally, if the objects are provocative enough, visitors discuss, point, and share.

Ideally, we'd identify verbs that visitors could "do" to exhibits that are more transactive--using the exhibit as a triangulation point for a social interaction. This is hard to do when exhibit interactions are not personalized. On other services, the verbs are not necessarily inherently social, but both input and output verbs are represented. On Flickr, some users post photos and others view them. On Ebay, some users sell and others buy. The roles are fluid and can be redefined each time you have an interaction on the site. How could exhibits be a vehicle for an input and output--and a social tie from in to out?

If every visitor looks, there is no social interaction. If some visitors point and others look, there's a social interaction (as demonstrated in the RACE exhibition). If some visitors create and others consume, there's a social interaction. Thus, every exhibit that aspires to be social should encourage at least two verbs--one that transmits and another that receives. The visitors involved shouldn't have to directly engage with each other to have a social experience.

3. How can people share the objects?
Every time you produce an "object" on a social website like Flickr or YouTube, there are automatically-generated ways to share it. The objects can be emailed, embedded, linked, and blogged (if the owner supports it). There are many collections-rich museums that have created ways for visitors to create their own digital collections. Some, like the Brooklyn Museum's ArtShare Facebook application, make it easy for users to share their art interests with others. But we haven't found good ways in the physical museum for people to share the objects that interest them--beyond visitors taking illicit photos on cellphones to send to friends.

Are there models out there for sharing physical objects that can't be moved? There's an ice cream store in Santa Cruz with a "gift board" where people can leave gifts of sundaes and cones for friends. It's a public gift certificate system that emphasizes the way that ice cream--something you can only get in person at the store--can be shared. Perhaps there's a way for visitors to publicly memorialize the "gift" of artifacts to friends and family in a similar way.

4. Turn invitations into gifts.
How do museums enable visitors to "invite" their friends and family to visit? Imagine creating a mechanism where visitors could tell their friends not just how great the exhibit was, but give them a gift that encourages them to visit. Gifting is a powerful participatory behavior. The gift could be something as pedestrian as a discount pass, but ideally it would be the gift of a museum object or something related to one. Since we can't have visitors giving away exhibits, the invitation can be a gift of access, a gift of a story about an exhibit, a gift of a challenge to find a particular exhibit... anything that will inspire that potential visitor to go to the museum to "cash in" his or her gift.

5. Charge the publishers, not the spectators.
Not all Web 2.0 sites work this way, and museums are (hopefully) far from it. The concept here is that the people who want to share their content--photos, blogs, audio--are the ones who are willing to pay for it. This concept is reflected in the "premium" paid version of many services, which offer you better ways to publish rather than better ways to view content. Flickr only allows you to post 200 photos for free, after which you have to pay. You never have to pay to look at photos--only to publish lots of them.

What would this mean in museums? It only makes sense if museums display visitor-generated objects (in which case the participant/creators would pay for the privilege, or for prime vitrine real estate) or if visitors could republish museum-owned content. This does happen--plenty of museums charge a fee for use of their images--but they also charge spectators to see the exhibits. And museums charge other museums to "republish" content in the form of traveling exhibits. Could museums create a viable business model based on traveling exhibits and licensing fees alone? Probably not--and I'd argue it's a bad idea. Museums should not be in the business of licensing partially publicly-funded objects to visitors. We have enough trouble encouraging the republishing and sharing of museum content without crippling it with fees.


Do you have other interpretations of how these could be applied to museum exhibits (and whether it's worth it)? What are the social verbs that visitors could "perform" on your objects?

How Your Museum Can Be an Online First Responder

Imagine that your museum is ready to start creating content on a small-scale in Web 2.0. You're ready to make a few videos to post on YouTube. You're ready to write commentary about content related to your institutional goals. Where should you start? How should you focus your efforts to get the most viewership for your time spent?

Comment. Rather than starting your own blog or YouTube channel, find the sources out there that relate to your topics of interest and respond to them. Conceptually, commenting on other sites signals your institution's willingness to engage with others on their own terms. And pragmatically, it's a great way to drive traffic. By posting intelligent, insightful, value-adding comments and responses on pre-existing high-traffic sites, you can drive more visitors back to your own site and nascent Web 2.0 efforts than you can if you focus on creating your own little world of content. You can join the conversation that is already happening about your content where the most eyes and ears are engaged.

Let me give you an example. Imagine you are the Boston Museum of Science, and you are ready to make some videos to post on YouTube. Where should you start? When I search for "Boston Museum of Science" on YouTube, I find 83 videos. Sorting them by View Count, I see that two videos--one about wearable technology and the other about C3PO, have generated about 8,000 views apiece, compared to 2,000 or fewer for the rest of the videos on the list. If you scroll down on either of these videos, you'll see that they have generated a few text comments, but no video responses. The Boston Museum of Science could start their own YouTube channel and post videos about whatever they want. But why not link that effort to the videos that are already out there, and focus initial energy towards creating responses to the videos in which others have already expressed interest?

Posting a video response means that people who see the first video, those who were interested in that topic, have a direct and compelling opportunity to view your response video as well without having to click to another page. Unlike the "related videos" list, which is aggregated automatically by YouTube, video responses are self-assigned by their creator. While videos with millions of views often have tens of video responses, there are many in the thousands and hundreds of thousands without video responses.

You don't have to only use this technique to look for instances of your own brand or institution. You can also use it to find sources related to niche content at your museum or breaking news on which you can shed some expert insight. The key is to make your contribution relevant, distinctive, and enticing enough to encourage visitors to "click through" your name to your website.

Your goal with commenting should be to be "one of the few" rather than one of many. If you select sources that are too huge, like blogs that frequently garner hundreds of comments per post, your comment will often be lost in the swarm. But if you can find communities with a tight content fit to yours, a robust audience, and a low number of "first responders," you can make a major impact commenting in those arenas.

How can you find the right places to respond?

First, find yourself. Use a service like HowSociable to search for your brand across many social media sites, or use a more targeted blog search service like Technorati or Google Blog Search to find out what people are saying about you in the blogosphere. Others set up Google Alerts to get a message anytime a particular brand, program, or exhibit is mentioned on the Web. These services will link you directly to real-time conversations happening about your institution, whether via photos uploaded on Flickr or links on Delicious. I use Technorati to watch for anytime someone mentions this blog so I can read what they are saying and comment if it will add to the conversation.

Then, find others. You can use many of these same services to search for terms of interest, like "large hadron collider" or "new mexico arts." If you use Technorati, you can see the authority of each related source, which gives you some idea of how embedded that source is in the larger web community (authority is based on how many other sites link to you). By finding authoritative sites in your niche areas of interest, you can start scoping out the web communities around your content and find the ones that are best fits for your input.

Then, find the match. Just because someone has attracted millions of views by rapping in your museum doesn't mean you have to respond to that content. There is lots of content out there related to your institution, and you should find the conversations that make you most comfortable. Imagine that you are at a cocktail party, flitting between groups. Do you want to swap jokes with the gals in the corner? Sit down for an intense policy discussion? You may even want to engage many staff members--with different comfort zones--to be part of a team of first responders to the range conversations that relate to your institution.

Once you've found the places you want to comment, how should you go about it?

Your comment or video response should do two things: add positive value to the overall conversation, and link back to your own site. Think of this as a game with the goal of intriguing viewers enough to want more of your content. It's like trying to become the hit of someone else's party. You are not commenting just to say, "hey, we have an exhibit/program about this at our museum!" You should be commenting to say, "the most surprising perspective I've heard on this topic came from someone we interviewed while designing this exhibit. We learned that ..." Many comments are neither insightful nor enticing. You can put yourself ahead of the pack by doing both.

And make sure that you are linking back to your own site/blog/YouTube channel. There is a culture on Web 2.0 of "clicking through" to see where a commenter hangs his or her virtual hat. When someone writes a thoughtful comment on this blog, I always click on her/his name to see where it takes me. I often end up exploring a blog or website I hadn't heard of before. When you post a comment anonymously, you miss the opportunity to attract this kind of click-through exploration. Your comment is a dead-end, no matter how intriguing.

One last thought on clicking through: learn how to embed a link in a comment. It's quite easy. If the blog on which you are commenting allows HTML (and most do), here's the syntax you need to put a link in your comment:

If the comment is "check out this exhibit" and you want to link the word "exhibit" to the URL http://www.myexhibit.com, you type:

check out this <a href="http://www.myexhibit.com">exhibit</a>

Try it out, and preview your comment before you hit publish. You'll breathe easier knowing you closed your quotation marks and carats properly.

Of course, once you join a conversation, you'll want to keep up with it. Some blogs allow you to subscribe to the comment thread (so you can receive updates when people respond to your comments), but on others, you will just have to manually check back.

What conversation is your museum ready to join?

Wikis: What, When, Why

What's a wiki? What makes them succeed? This post explores the mysteries of Web 2.0's Hawaiian son as applied to museums.

Wikis are websites that are extremely easy for anyone (even you!) to edit. The most well-known example is Wikipedia, a user-generated encyclopedia which boasts over 6 million entries written and edited by about 30,000 volunteer participants. While there are some criticisms of its consensus-based model for information-vetting, there's no doubt of its success as a collaborative knowledge-creation project. Wikipedia has become one of the top ten most-visited websites worldwide and is the only one in the top ten that is a non-profit initiative.

Wikipedia, like YouTube and Facebook, is a giant in the world of Web 2.0. Its success can distort understanding of what makes a wiki work. After all, if Wikipedia could succeed as a collaborative documentation of well, everything, isn't your specific wiki bound to thrive as well?

No.

Consider these two stories of museum-related wikis that struggled. In May of 2007, Woody Sobey released a wiki for science museum educators to share their demos. As the director of education at a small science museum, Woody thought it would be useful for his staff to share and have access to demos being offered by science museums all over the country. Ideally, the site would flourish, and any museum educator could log in to find great chemistry, physics, and biology demos to share with their own visitors.

Great idea, right? But from the beginning, WikiDemo suffered from a lack of participation. People went to check it out, but no one added their own demos. Woody had seeded the site with about 12 demos from his own museum, but the wiki never took off.

My second example is more personal and slightly embarrassing. This spring, I was a member of the advisory board for the New Media Consortium's 2008 Horizon Report on emerging technologies in museums. The convenors set up a lovely wiki and gave us specific instructions to answer research questions posed on a series of pages. On March 22, they released the wiki. In April, a few of us contributed to the wiki. And then on April 29, the conversation really got rolling... over email. We had 40 "emerging technology" professionals on the team, and we couldn't sufficiently self-motivate to do our work on the wiki instead of an antiquated email list. Our final task involved emailing a word document to the convenors. I don't know if that was their original plan or a reaction to our poor use of the wiki, but it certainly didn't reflect our supposed digital chops.

Do these examples mean you should never use wikis? Nope. But wikis are a very specific tool. They require more of their audience in terms of participation than other Web 2.0 sites and don't offer traditional rewards. The participatory "ask" is high--to create original content. Wikis don't explicitly acknowledge individuals with "profile power"--content is prioritized, not identity.

So when do wikis work?

Wikis work best in situations in which content, not socializing, is primary. They work when the individuals involved are motivated to assemble and co-create content. They are best-used in situations when a team of people is working together on something and needs a central place to document their efforts, or when a group of people come together to share lots of content in parallel and want to document it (i.e. a conference). The wiki has to be the best tool for the job. Otherwise, people won't contribute.

When is a wiki the best tool for the job? Here are two cases with related examples.

1. Wikis are great for documenting events with many parallel content tracks.

In August, I attended a one-day Freelance Camp in Santa Cruz. There were about 200 participants who self-organized 26 hour-long discussion sessions around a variety of topics. We used a wiki to document all of the sessions so that after the conference, participants (and people who weren't able to come) could access the notes from session they missed. The organizers set up the wiki and posted the schedule, and then told everyone that each session had to have a "scribe" who would keep the notes and post them on the wiki, linked from the schedule. It was an extremely easy way for multiple people to document parallel sessions and make them available to everyone.

Why did this wiki work? Because the ask was immediate and specific, and everyone saw the value of having notes from sessions they couldn't attend. After the conference, the wiki switched from being a participatory site to a useful record.

In a more museum-focused environment, check out the wiki for the Tate Handheld Conference held last week in London (for more on this event, check out this blog post by Nik Honeysett). While the wiki appears to have relied on a core leader instead of randomly selected scribes, the result is the same: documentation of a very interesting event, featuring keynote slideshows, resources cited, and discussion topics. Imagine if every major museum conference had a related wiki with volunteer scribes' notes from each session. It would be a great way to extend and memorialize the conference without putting undue burden on the convenors.

2. Wikis are useful when a distributed team is designing a project together or managing a changing set of projects.

This is the most basic reason to use a wiki. If you are writing a report with other people, creating the content directly on a wiki is much simpler than endlessly emailing around partial documents. Wikis allow you to create the content in discrete segments--pages--and then decide how to organize the content. For example, imagine you are creating a multi-chapter planning document. At the beginning, you can create pages for known components, like schedule, budget, etc. As time goes on, you can easily add new pages and then figure out in the end how to organize and prioritize all of the segmented content.

This ability to organize content segments, like moving post-its around on a table, makes wikis more useful than other collaborative document creation tools like Google Docs. Google docs is good if you are writing a single document or creating a single spreadsheet. But if you are initiating a larger, less defined project, a wiki can help you organize the content as it is generated in parallel by the team members. There are several museums that use wikis on a department-wide basis internally to keep up with projects going on on multiple tracks, share files, maintain staff and volunteer contact information, and generally coordinate work.

A great public example of a wiki-based project is WeAreMedia, a wiki with the goal of creating a "social media starter kit for non-profits." Funded by the Nonprofit Technology Network and led by Beth Kanter, WeAreMedia is similar to the Horizon Project in that it brings together professionals and asks them to share their expertise towards the creation of something greater for the field. Unlike the Horizon wiki, however, WeAreMedia is a bottom-up project that asks the participants to lead the design and conception of the individual modules. That goal means that a wiki is useful, because participants can contribute segmented content and then work with facilitators to decide how to organize it.

For the Horizon Project, we were asked to use the wiki to answer questions. And while a wiki is useful for answering questions, it was not sufficiently MORE useful for the advisory board than answering the questions via email. We wanted to have a discussion--and the wiki wasn't the right place to do it. WeAreMedia, however, is a wiki to create content for an overall project. There are other places on the Web (like Beth's blog) to have discussions about the content, but the wiki is specifically a place for putting it all together.


Ok, so now we know when to use wikis. But what makes them work well? Since wikis are about content, not socializing, you have to find ways to motivate people to participate. But that involves more than just getting them in the front door.

Here are three rules of thumb for "working wikily":

1. Wikis work when participants are invited in on familiar terms.

The entry point to wikis is steep. Sure, you can start slowly by just joining the wiki community, but in most cases, you have to actually write something on a public pag to be considered a participant. It can feel daunting to edit or add to something that someone else--especially someone else you admire--has created. And if it's not something you've done before, not part of your daily practice, you might want to avoid learning the technology, no matter how simple it is.

WeAreMedia has several entry points that attempt to make participation more comfortable. When you go to the site, you will see many ways to participate, on and off the wiki, along with the anticipated amount of time each contribution might take. I didn't want to add to the wiki directly on my first visit, but I did take their easy suggestions to join a swarm (2 min) and add a slideshow to their slideshare list (1 min). And I did these things without having to register as a member of the wiki.

2. Wikis work when they draw content from a variety of locations.

The goal of a wiki is to aggregate content of interest. If you run a huge wiki, like Wikipedia, you don't have to worry about finding desired content and pulling it in--people think of Wikipedia as a go-to place. But if you are starting a wiki, it is the new kid on the block, and needs to be integrated into pre-existing conversations accordingly.

There are many ways to do this. You can do it physically at an in-person event like a conference. Think back on the WikiDemo example. Woody launched it with an email to the ASTC listserv--a good group to target for his content. But people who read a listserv aren't necessarily incentivized to contribute to the wiki. He had the right people, but not the right time. Imagine if he had instead launched the project at the ASTC conference, and had spent the conference walking around with a laptop, asking people to contribute a demo. There are sessions related to science shows at which he could have reached a hundred science demo performers with a right-time, right-place interest in sharing their demos.

For the WeAreMedia project, Beth has readymade online spaces in which she can do this same kind of targeted solicitation of content. One of the nice things about WeAreMedia is that Beth Kanter is blogging the experience of running the wiki, sharing her observations and experiments. This week, she wrote about the balance between participation on the "homebase" (the wiki) and "outposts" (blogs, twitter, discussion forums). As she puts it:

In facilitating this community discussion to get at the curriculum, I've used blog posts that point people to the wiki page, one-on-one emails to specific people who self-identify, tweets, FriendFeed NpTech Room posts, and a little on Facebook. I'm not trying to control where the conversation takes place - I want it to be as easy as possible for someone to make a contribution and if that happens off the wiki, that's okay. As the wiki gardener, I just need to be able to gather up these valuable nuggets of insights from nonprofit technology professionals, and add them to the wiki curriculum or do some light editing of what's there.

Beth is a very active "wiki gardener," and she realizes that many valuable contributors are not necessarily compelled to go to the wiki and edit it themselves. So she reaches out to potential participants in a variety of ways and gets their content on the wiki in their own terms. My guess is that once you see your thoughts reflected on the wiki, as written by Beth, you feel affirmed and accepted as a participant, and thus more likely to contribute directly.

3. Wikis work when they are organized in a way appropriate for their content type and volume.

This sounds obvious, but it's not as easy as it sounds. Think of how Wikipedia works. There's one primary way to navigate to pages: the search bar. Since Wikipedia has so much content, that's fine--you don't need an outline of the articles to find what you want. You want to search, find, and go. But most wikis don't have enough content that a search bar is sufficient to find the points of interest within. The wiki from the Tate Handheld conference does a great job addressing this by listing every topic on the right sidebar for easy navigation. The Freelance Camp, however, is lousy at this. You have to know to start from the conference schedule to go to each individual session page, and you have to use the BACK button to navigate to other sessions.


What project or event would you consider coordinating and documenting via wiki? What wiki questions and tips do you have to share with others?