 It's really my great pleasure to introduce three colleagues from Auckland Museum that I surrounded by here. We've got Gareth DeWaltis, who is the Digital Content Production Manager at the Museum. And then Rebecca Loud here is a pictorial librarian, and Zoe Richardson is the Assistant Librarian at the Museum as well. And I'm really delighted to have this session because Gareth was telling me, and I believe that this collection leads social media game, one thread that they're going to talk about. I kind of grew out, got an impetus from a presentation that Chris McDowell, that those of you who went to the India for, I think, two years ago, or one year, 2013, Chris gave this really great presentation about link data and connections across collections. And it was great to see that kind of spur on some ideas with Auckland Museum folk, and this social media game emerged from that talk. So it's really great to see those connections coming from India presentations. So please join me in welcoming them to present. Thanks, everyone. Welcome along. So we're going to talk about the social media game that we kicked off in February of this year called One Thread. The idea behind today's talk is that it's kind of, we'll be taking you behind the scenes, a little bit looking back on the project, some of the things we learned, and perhaps providing a few hints to anyone who's considering starting their own similar sort of project. So we'll be covering things like we've found inspiration for the project, while we start the project and what we hope to achieve, the brains behind the project, who we work with at the museums, how we establish and maintain those relationships. We'll cover off a few tips on the tools we used and developing and encouraging your player community. So we'll move right on. So, yeah, for any of the latecomers here, just again, just sort of calling out this wonderful image that my colleagues here found, and you'll recognise that gentleman there and the front there is US President Richard Nixon in a tractor somewhere in New Zealand. It's like Waipukero or something. Yeah, from the Auckland Star, so I'm just going to kick that off. Okay, so first of all, I thought we'd just talk about why there's three of us up here. We found to run a successful collections-led social media project. We really needed to bring together the skills of collections and digital staff, digital and collection subject matter experts. Because as we later learned as we went through the project, some of our partner organisations did encounter difficulty pairing up collections and digital colleagues, and that sometimes affected their ability to gather the content for games. So if you're planning your own similar project, it's well worth your time up front connecting those collections and digital stuff as soon as possible. So, I've kind of already been over this, but yeah, my name's Gareth, I'm the Digital Content Production Manager at Auckland Museum. And I'm Zoe Richardson, and I'm responsible for internal and external image supplier across all museum collections. And I'm Rebecca, and I'm the Pictorial Librarian, so I look after the museum's painting and photography collections. Okay, so what is One Thread? So One Thread is a game that we created to increase awareness of and interest in collections held across New Zealand galleries, libraries, archives and museums. It was very much a collaboration between the contributing organisations in this collaboration. Within this sector was key to its success. It allowed us to showcase the relatedness of collections that was held across all the contributors. And each game worked more or less like this. It was based on a common theme that was set by Auckland Museum or set in collaboration with the contributors. And all the contributing glams would post images of collection items to their Twitter accounts, sometimes with cryptic clues for the public to then guess what the common thread was. So players would kind of follow the clues across accounts. Games ran between Wednesday and Friday, and our Twitter followers would then DM us with the guesses of what they thought linked the clues together. As we moved through the week, the clues got progressively easier, so we're kind of encouraging people to do well at the game. And at the end of each game, we'd announce the answer, announce the winners and add those winners to a leaderboard. We had a range of glams playing during the run of One Thread, and so we'd just like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the support of Te Papa, Nelson Provincial Museum, Waikato Museum, in helping us get One Thread off the ground. We thought the best way to understand the game was to play it. Throughout this presentation, we're going to be posting clues, and at the end you'll get the chance to guess what the common thread is. We'll also be posting on Twitter as well, so you can follow through the feed, and we do have prizes at the end as well. Please travel that for people who can guess what the thread is. So this is your first clue. It's a book titled, An Account of the Manors and Customs of Modern Egyptians, and it was written by Edward William Lane and published in 1842, and it comes from Auckland Museum's Library's Rare Book Collection. Okay, so what was the inspiration for One Thread? As we heard in the intro, the inspiration came from a talk that Chris Dahl gave at NDF 2013 on linked open data. In his talk, Chris talked about the challenges and practicalities of searching common collections across New Zealand glands, and in Chris' talk, he focused on Colin McCann as a way of tracking across collections to search for those sort of common collections. And this kind of got me thinking about how our own overlapping interests with other New Zealand memory institutions, how those panned out, and could we create our own kind of lightweight social media game to help showcase these collections. So to put that in a bit of context, we were at the time that this game kicked off. We were in between collections online systems. We had an old one that was up and running, and it was soon to be replaced by a new version. So it was good for us, and the game was also kind of very useful for smaller institutions who don't have their own huge collections online database. So why would we do this? Warning, there's going to be buzzwords. In alignment with our content and engagement strategy and Future Museum, which is the Auckland Museum's strategic document for the next 20 years, we aimed to provide a game that provided real engagement with our audience. So that sits alongside our sponsored posts and general likes and favourites. So we were looking for a real engagement with our collections. And if you have a look on the left, that's an image that was tweeted by one of our players. It's a student at the Stout Centre who printed out all the clues of our first game. And we love it because it's like him in a natural environment engaging fully with museum collections. The thesis writing was put on hold that day. So moving on to building the community. The first step in this project was putting together a community of contributors. We found that the most useful places to hunt for contributors was here on that NDF network, the emerging museum professionals page on Facebook. And even simply direct messaging account coordinators at the organisation at the Glam accounts. So these are great places to start looking if you're planning your own social media project. And I think like us, you'd find that your network quickly expands as signed up contributors put the word out amongst other digital colleagues. By the start of the first game we had four regular contributors and then over time a wider cast of Glam's who joined in as it suited their own publishing schedules. So once you've gathered together your interested contributors you have to make sure there's a clear understanding amongst everybody about how the game works. So we managed that by putting together a content plan that right from the outset that clearly set out how the game worked and how the production cycle would operate. And initially it was a little bit of back and forth to develop that content plan and iron out the game format and identify each participating organisation's collection strengths to make sure we were working with each other. But once that content plan was finalised it formed a really valuable reference document for new and existing contributors. Managing the communication between four or more institutions can be really challenging. We mostly relied on email but we kind of acknowledged that these threads could get really long really unwieldy and it's got a bit of a burden on infrequent players. So I think in future we'd make better use of free and reliable messaging platforms, things like Slack make more use of project management tools like Trello which we'll come to shortly. So here's your clue number two. Here's your clue number two everyone. This is a souvenir flag from our history collection featuring Her Majesty Queen Victoria and listing her colonies. It is made of printed cotton and accessioned into the collection in 1999. So how did we come up with the ideas for each of the games? Well this kind of changed over time. So originally we selected things based around current events or celebration days. The first game we played was during the week of the 14th of February so of course the common thread was Valentine's Day and we also did a Sri Lanka versus New Zealand game to tie in with the Cricket World Cup. We thought our players would cotton on to it pretty quickly so we started to think more broadly about how we could theme our games and this has led us to more general themes such as important years in history, famous people and that kind of thing. We also had to be conscious of what we had in our collection but also what other contributors had in their collections. So ideas like the theme in a game around Edmund Hillary would have been really great for us but probably wouldn't have worked for a lot of the contributors that we were working with. So we started to think more broadly about that theme so how could we tie in Edmund Hillary with a bigger theme. So that's how we decided on 1953 which is the year that Hillary claimed Everest and to say not a theme largely involved three of us meeting up for brainstorming sessions and the ideas that have came from watching TV, at work, all sorts of places as well. So clue selection, for me this is the really fun bit. Once we had a theme we'd sort of have a general research jot down some general ideas around the theme and then we would go to Vernon and Presto which are our two collection management databases and we'd spend some time sort of selecting clues. And we tried to think as broadly and as sort of laterally as possible around selecting the clues and we often used the cryptic clue, the associated cryptic clue to sort of steer a collection item towards the theme. We also tried from our end to include a wide variety of collecting areas in the theme so included natural sciences and human history objects alongside documentary heritage connections. Ruby Harina really privileged position with regards to sort of unrestricted digital access to all of the museums collections and I think that's really key alongside a really good broad collection knowledge you need sort of access to the collections and that collection literacy is really key in this kind of game. This little lady is your clue number three. This is Helen Shag from our land vertebrates collection. Her scientific name is Stickto Carbo Feather Stoney and she was collected from the Chatham's ecological region and district. Okay so the other side of building a community of contributors of course building a community of players and this is where you'll need to put in most of your effort. So I'll just kind of quickly cover some of the tactics that we use to encourage our players to keep on tuning in. Provide feedback. So you really want to devote time to responding to guesses and guiding players onto the solution. It's important to stick to a predictable publishing schedule so that players know when it's time for a new game, when one ends. Provide a how to play primer to help build the audience and promote these primers frequently. You'll find that these are useful to your contributors and they'll start promoting it independently. Respond to player suggestions. They'll quickly tell you if gameplay can be made better and then write these changes back into your content plan. Record player progress through the game. As we touched on, we created a one thread leader board. So it helps create a little bit of competition between players but it's also a little bit of a platform that you can base a reward system on, which is the next point. So it's important to reward your players. In as many ways you can do this, from free tickets to behind the scenes tours, which is what happened over this side. One of the leaders of the board, we took on behind the scenes tours down to the basement 2. I should really love that. As we found one thread worked best when there was a community of memory institutions working together, players really enjoyed following clues across collections and participating in the exchanges between their glands. So, here's your clue number 4. This odd little nugget is your clue number 4. It's a sealed end of a telecommunications cable that stretched from Bamfield Creek Vancouver Island to Fanning Island. The cable was completed in 1901. Behold the Majesty of the Trello. For people who don't know about Trello, it's a free project management and workflow platform that can be adapted to almost any task and we used it really successfully to collaborate both internally and externally with other contributors. We loved that it was really visual and you could allow us to see all of our contributors content uploaded before it was published. It has an inbuilt messaging and notification functionality which we used to sort of prompt our fellow contributors and helped us plan and play the game. It's really easy to use, intuitive and we used it as a place for our potential future games to be sort of socialised and shared there. Thanks Paul. I think as Zoe says it's a really flexible system and we found that other contributors picked it up really fast so we didn't really have to guide people through it. So continuing on the planning and publishing theme and coordinating your own game, we'll just kind of take a deeper look at how a clue moves through the production cycle. So here's a snapshot of that clue workflow. On the left you can see there's the trailer card. We collaboratively create the clues. Trailer is very flexible and allows you to add a number of details that are useful to the contributors like details of the clue itself, due dates, production status checklists, image attachments, links to collection databases. All this information is incredibly useful for contributors who spread right across the country and streamlines that whole process of organising and publishing a game. So when they're in the middle of playing a game, contributors can reference back to this and see how the whole game is going to play out and influence how they post their own clues. Why did we select Twitter? We found Twitter was a really good fit for a responsive, quick-paced game like this. By contrast we find that Facebook or Instagram can in some ways be reasonably closed environments and don't lend themselves well to that kind of fast-paced participatory gameplay. I kind of want to stress the importance, as came up in Adrian and Amanda's talk earlier on, about the importance of using analytics. So Twitter offers a really good free analytics package that helps you monitor the success of your posts. So it's really easy to see which ones are performing best with your players and use those insights to guide your future game selection. So here's clue number five and it's a snazzy pair of shoes from our applied arts collection. They are from Clarks in England and a navy in white and they have a Cuban heel. So I'm just going to fill you in on why it was really beneficial to be involved from a collections point of view. I got involved because it was a really great opportunity to highlight the collection and some of these items might not have surfaced in exhibitions or in publications so it was a really great chance to share with other people what we had. We particularly love using quirky, odd obscure items and objects that people might not expect that we have. So on the right here you can see this is a cast lead icon which we used in our fakes and hoaxes game and it's one of the infamous Shadwell forgeries made by a pair called Billy and Charlie in England during the middle of the 19th century. We also hope to get people thinking differently about our collections. So on the left we have a Fox Torbit salt print which we used in one of our games where the clue in the answer was solved. And aside from promoting the collection it was also really great to participate in OneThread because it helped build and acknowledge the collection and it was really fun to be involved with and provide an opportunity to work with my colleagues but also my peers and other institutions as well. Turning to the benefits from a web and digital perspective one of our objects was to change the relationship between us and our visitors on social media. So away from passive likes and more towards more genuine engagement with collections. And Twitter really allowed us to do this. The platform as it was a good fit for the project it was lightweight and responsive medium and it suits these quick-paced games and thread conversations with contributors and players. You can directly ask your players how well the game is going and ask what might be improved allowing you to respond quickly and refine the game. Your players can create derivative works in some games. You can see on this slide there are instances within games where players spontaneously posted their working showing how they derived their own solutions. And so the hashtag for working became a thing. And it kind of worked into another way of rewarding players and encouraging them on. The players' answers might be delightfully incorrect or identify connections that we never intended. But either way it formed a pool of ideas that informed future game selection. We found banding together as a network helped promote the game locally and even raised our profile internationally with key influences like Mirage and Mad Dixon. And of course it improved the reach. We began to see these stats from Twitter analytics. You can see these nice little peaks that align with the One Food Gameplay with reach going up from Wednesday to Friday. So here's your final clue. This photo was taken by Arthur Ninus Brickon and it features Vivian Walsh after he made several successful flights in Papakura during April of 1911. So we'll just wrap up with a few lessons learned. Emphasizing again the importance to monitor, refine, rinse and repeat. Twitter offers this really good free analytics package which helps monitor the success of your posts. See which ones perform best with your visitors and use those insights for future game selection. We found a lot of value in publishing as a network rather than going alone. Players enjoy this interplay between glands and we took our collections into new geographic territories. So usually our reach just stuck with Auckland who was going right throughout the country and it was same for smaller institutions as well. We've retweeted their content. And expect drop-offs. That's okay. Contributors and players will come and go. But you need to consider how long can your project survive without the other contributors and write this contingency into your content plan. Okay, we also learned to create reasonable publishing schedules. So one of the things that we could have improved on was playing our games further and in advance and setting the frequency of which we played the games more realistically. So every three weeks might have worked better for us in every week. Also plan your exit strategy. So ideally we would have liked the game to continue till the end of the year. But that was perhaps a bit ambitious as contributors dropped off. We weren't able to dedicate as much resource to create the games. Which leads on to our next point which was devote resources to the game. While Twitter is a quick publishing platform it's still required a fair amount of team effort and staff time to plan each of the games and finally create content. And providing help for the players. So Gareth created a web page on the Auckland Museum website which we used to have full instructions for the game and the leaderboard and it was a great touchstone for people to refer back to to get full instructions rather than tweeting it out every time. Be flexible. So we were really responsive to player feedback and we modified and altered the game as we went along to sort of meet the player's needs. And this opened the door for a lot of future collaboration. So we've got the network of our fellow GLAMs and all of the content is still active and accessible so it can be used again. So as we wrap up has anyone guessed the one thread? Oh we've got one. What is it? No. I'll go through them again. Manners and customs of their modern Egyptians Queen Victoria, Stitcher Cabo, Feather Stoney Oh we've got one. Ding ding ding. Anyone else get that? Just in. It's the streets of Central Wellington. So some of you native Wellingtonians might have got that one. There is chocolate for those. Okay. Great. Well thanks. Thanks for listening everyone and any questions? So the question was what's next for the benefit of the video? That's a tough one. No plans for anything immediate right now. We'll probably take a break from this. Take some of the lessons learned and then start forming our next project. But we'll keep you updated here to be interested in collaborating. So I sort of supply images to Gareth on a daily basis for digital content and he sort of knew that I was willing and able to and had access to all of the collections so it was an easy fit. And then Rebecca sits two desks down from me so pushed my way in. Pushed my way in. And it's been a good fit. It's sort of organically. Yeah it started organically but like I was saying that a connection between collections and digital stuff was vital. I couldn't have pulled it off on my own. Needed that collection's expertise. Management, okay but was it hard to convince them that this is something you should be spending your time on? I'm just going to repeat the question again but that's your question around did management take a bit of convincing to spend your time on the game? Not at all. Everyone was very supportive but we did tie it back with the Future Museum and our public engagement strategy so we'll tie that in. Made that explicit in the content plan so we weren't going rogue. I think some of our contributors did raise questions about their management we're asking them the point of the game and what they're getting from it though. So it was probably an issue for other contributors. But in some ways it was a bit of a pilot to see how we could improve that natural engagement beyond those likes and favourites so that was really successful. Thank you for that fantastic approach towards engagement. You mentioned that you were coming from just the likes of general engagement. How did you actually measure that engagement? Sorry to have to repeat this for the videos. That's the really tough side getting that qualitative side down measuring that. It was kind of lightweight so we'd be asking them kind of doing informal surveys within Twitter getting feedback and response and changing the games as we went along. But if we did a similar game a new project I think we'd be more focused about those qualitative measures in the content plan. How was it promoted to begin with? I think that was one of the benefits of banding together. If we're broadcasting from one organisation we're broadcasting to an existing audience and we found it really took off when it was four of us or more of us working together and as I say they really enjoyed that interplay. We broke down that broadcast model so people were talking directly to the glands and we made it really informal so it was self-promoting in a way. And some of those international influences kind of picked it up and that helped promote it as well. Anybody ask someone down the back there? How many entries per one thread? It varied, it really varied. We've actually just played a game on our own where we didn't collaborate with other people but we were doing sort of like six or eight but then sometimes we did all the lyrics of a few of my favourite things from Sound and Music and that was sort of 30 entries and they'd get progressively easier. Another difficulty in terms of measurement, we got a sense kind of anecdotally that there was this big lurking audience when you internally saw people taking photos of themselves playing but they weren't actually sending us the DM so it was a challenge both to kind of make people feel comfortable and convert them and make sure they could send in their guesses but yeah that lurking audience really hard to measure. We just had a lot of internal like our Auckland Museum staff playing which was really good because we could get feedback at lunchtime over it so get your staff involved. And thank you Bonnie for playing too. Yeah Bonnie in the audience. So what do you think you could have done better? I think the big one was changing the publishing schedule to nice kind of discreet three week blocks so then the contributors know what they're signing up for. I think it initially felt a bit kind of endless and nameless for contributors and so it felt a bit too much and some might have backed away but you could come take it in those three week blocks, rest it for a while then come back and then it's more manageable. Anybody else we've got a couple more minutes before you go and have a cup of afternoon tea? Yeah one more here. So what was the quick question around what came first, the collections or the game or yeah. Sometimes both. So yeah like when we started off with Edmund Hillary that started off because we have a great collection of his and so we thought oh we could use that and then but we then had to think well that might restrict people so we had to think about another theme. But yeah a lot of the time I think the themes came first and then we would like look to see if we could actually fit stuff in. And that's where it was easier for us because we've got a huge collection compared to other people. In a psychopathic collection. Yeah so that was easier for us so that's why we had to help mitigate that. That's why we're very keen for the smaller contributors to be very active in nominating some themes so then we already knew that it would work well with their collection. Thanks so much guys for a really fantastic presentation. Yeah.