 Marina Tatou everyone. Thank you so much for coming this morning to listen to me talk. This is only my second NDF and I have to say it's a tiny bit intimidating talking to a room full of amazing glam professionals. When up to a little over a year ago I had never worked in a museum I knew very little about how a museum worked. My career has been spent working in media so I've worked in everything from print magazines, newspapers, online breaking news, social media, digital marketing. I even had a stint moderating comments on the Daily Mail which I wouldn't recommend and I've created content around big commercial sponsorships for big websites. So the common thread for me has been about reaching large audiences through high volume of content. So this talk is going to be a whistle-stop tour of how some of the techniques I've used previously in media publications can be moved into the museum setting and it's really helped shape our storytelling online over the last year and I've got loads of practical examples to show you. So let's go back, let's turn back the time to one year ago. Actually I wrote one year ago and then I realized it's more like 18 months ago but anyway. So our new centralized website was launched in 2000 earlier in 2016 so this focused on delivering practical information to the museum visitors so very much a kind of marketing and corporate website. Everything from events, exhibitions, to where to park your car, what about the digital visitor? So we have our Te Papa blog so this is the place where our experts blog from a first-person perspective about the work that they do. This blog existed outside the central publishing system so while there was quite a decent traffic and a really engaged group of Te Papa bloggers using this platform there was no editorial governance over what happened there so they published whatever they wanted to, whenever they wanted to. We also have a bunch of other sites so you might recognize Squiddy there so we've got Buildersquid probably nearing the end of his life now. We had a rich media site called the Channel in a separate arts website amongst others. We also have our newly launched collections online website but for the purposes of today's talk I'm only going to be focusing in on the editorial storytelling on the website and the blog and then not forgetting social media so we've got Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and these social media accounts before my time had been streamlined and many ghost accounts shut down. So what was the opportunity well to grow our reach, engagement and awareness of our brand through what we do best? Great storytelling but using topical timely editorial content in order to grow and maintain a larger audience. So this is about how do we create fit for purpose online content and not just lift content out of exhibitions and onto online as an afterthought. Okay so having a look now at the modern newsroom which I'm aware this is not. For newsrooms to survive they must maintain that volume of audience that is attractive to advertisers so that's about finding the right balance between entertaining and serious content. Fake news and clickbait aside news organizations know how to tell stories they know how to meet the demands of an audience and this shows through the huge share of traffic online so while we don't have the classic audience, advertiser model, we don't have those pressures associated with that what we do have is a responsibility to open our collections and our knowledge to as many people as possible. So let's talk about analytics. Analytics is our absolute best friend. We can take a leaf out of how newsrooms live and die by the analytics. By using an analytics based approach and deeply analyzing all of our content that we put out we can turn the spotlight from our needs to our users needs. That means we can do things like double down where we see popular content merging. We can also more controversially stop doing what isn't working and try to convince people why they shouldn't be pursuing that line of strategy. So for example we noticed that on the blog the long form style of kind of academic writing wasn't a big driver of traffic for us and we needed to tailor our content to be much more accessible, shorter, scannable, lots of headings, I'm sure you're familiar with all that and this is particularly for our kind of growing mobile audience. If you're in a newsroom and you're a good skilled online editor you know how a story is best told. It's just something that you kind of know how to do. So whether it's a video, an article, an Instagram post or a blog it's about adapting content for different pathways. So how does the user actually find your content and what is their mindset when they find that content. So I'll talk a little bit more about this. So I'm just going to move on to an example here which is a little how to build bug bot video that we put out when the bug lab exhibition was on. In a similar way that smartphone journalism has bought reporters closer to the action. Are there budget lo-fi ways to tell stories? Yes there is. I think the prolific use of smartphone content on your newsfeed has meant that we're quite used to seeing kind of lo-fi content. It doesn't have to be made for TV quality. So this little video was so easy to put together. We really didn't need much to produce this. We just needed a pair of hands, a camera, some Sharpies and some kind of canned music over top. This video was really popular and it's when I checked on the Facebook page about a week ago it had 61,000 views which is pretty awesome for a little 42nd video that really didn't cost much to produce. So audience, to talk about audience demand, the content team is in a really really fortunate position. We have so much content to choose from, like too much content. How do you choose? So our access to our subject matter experts and their guardianship over our collections is really what our unique selling point is and it sets us apart from everyone else. One of the biggest challenges has been bridging the gap between our experts and our audience demand into the digital content team. And so now I actually just want to introduce the team. We have Daniel and Rachel. Put your hands up, make yourself known. We also have Kate Whitley. She's our media creator. So we're a very small but perfectly formed team and very talented and this is the work that this team do day in, day out, matching our audience demand with our experts and being that excellent kind of feedback loop in between those two groups. So one of the things we did do, which was some work around the blog, so we introduced some publishing workflows. This is about creating kind of a best practice environments. When we bring the two skills together, subject matter experts and the digital content team, it's a really powerful combination of skills to help grow our audience. So while we actually don't want to lose the unique voice of the expert, we do absolutely need to apply some rigor and planning around the creation and more importantly, the promotion of content. And it's always good to try and encourage a bit more of a lighthearted approach where appropriate because we know our audiences really respond and love that. Okay, so this is a brag slide. I'm just going to go right ahead. So when I look at the stats from the last, from previous six months, from the last six months of the previous six months, this is where we're at. We've increased our website traffic by 22%. We have 244% higher search engine traffic and nearly 300% increase in social media referrals. So overall, we've grown the traffic to our non-visitor audience. That is the content that doesn't necessarily rely on the physical visitor coming to the museum to be able to enjoy it. We've grown that by 175%. So just a bit of a recap on the tips previously. Make content short and accessible. Long form academic content was not working for us. Make sure that we're using insights to inform our program. And then not everything has to be high production. So I want to get to a very kind of important point in this presentation. And that is about how we actually have grown our traffic. So search engine optimization and social media are the two pathways that we concentrate on when it comes to creating this non-visitor content. And I want to talk a little bit about what the difference is between these two because it's a big deal. And it really changes how we approach content. Social media. This is content that burns brightly for a short amount of time. It is catchy. It is new, hopefully. People love seeing new things. It's visually striking. It hopefully has a very clever sell. It encourages audience participation. And the audience for this is the time killers, the people who are scrolling through their feeds, sort of minus the effort. Mike's talk yesterday, he talked a lot about this in terms of people not really knowing what they're looking for, but they just want to be entertained by something. Then we have our Google traffic, which I'm sure you're all aware is a audience that is way more task focused. So they are looking for a job to be done. And when we're creating content around this, we're looking at our headings, our page titles, we're creating friendly URLs. So it's about that audience demand. And this, the Google content is much, much more well researched. I think the social media content is really just more about kind of a gut feeling about what's going to work and what isn't. And also a little bit based on insights. So sometimes content actually does span these two things. And when it does, that is the winner. So let's have a look at the SEO growth. So 244% increase to SEO. This is about not just about researching seasonal trends in Google AdWords and other tools, but it's about finding where the gaps are and then filling them. And I want to talk about our Matariki case study. So Matariki is one of the biggest success stories for us in terms of building an audience through Google. This, the content package that we developed in 2016 had nearly 60,000 unique page views. And then this year, 2017, we did increase that by 112%. Most of this was delivered through optimizing our content. This is arguably our most successful page, not arguably it is our most successful page. This Starfax page came about because we realized that there was a global search demand for the keywords Matariki Starfax, but there was no page out there. There's a little bit of controversy around using the word facts here. So facts, technically speaking, a fact is something that has been proven. But we think that a fact in this context can just be kind of a piece of information. So we had to do a little bit of convincing. And it's really worthwhile kind of bending the rules a little bit sometimes because this Starfax page has been huge. So this is the increase from 2016 to 2017. And the best part about this is that we did absolutely no extra work in 2017. So for Matariki, just the word Matariki, we index at number two. I think sometimes we even indexed at number one, but 90% of all the traffic to this page comes through Google. And I just want to show you, this is probably a little small to see down the back, but this table demonstrates the number of pages that we produced, new pages we produced for 2017. So you can see that most of the pages we developed in 2016 had huge increases in 2017. So we were kind of hoping that that trend will continue next year and that we'll see similar increases. So this is about doing the work, biding your time, not being impatient and just letting that kind of grow by itself. Our evergreen content is really well placed to rank in Google because we have a high volume of traffic. We have a good range of multimedia content which is designed to be consumed on mobile. And yeah, so this means that Google will favor our unique content. Okay, so moving on to something a little more recent. I just want to talk about how we can turn this sort of burn bright content into relevant evergreen content very easily. So this is our Māori Language Week Te Reo Māori Activity Book, which the team had a kind of hunch about the fact that this would perform very well. So they actually just kind of did this themselves and our team so talented that Rachel actually drew a lot of the birds in this book. So we promoted it for Māori Language Week. This was a really huge success. We had over 10,000 unique page views in August and September and that came from social media promotion and Google. But by ensuring we didn't anchor the resource in a particular time, we're able to just, when Māori Language Week is over, we just tweak the introduction to make sure that the content remains relevant. So we just took out the words celebrate Māori Language Week in the date and just changed it to celebrate Māori Language. Very easy, simple fix and that means that our content remains relevant for the all the rest of the year until next year when we can then pop in the dates again and away we go. Hopefully we'll have like a star fax moment. So to recap, SEO is so worthwhile for us to invest in because we do the work once and we reap the benefits later. Social media on the other hand has a much higher churn. It's much harder to kind of keep it up. It's a bigger risk and a bigger gamble. So in the last six months we've really focused on using social media as a content marketing tool and in the same way that media sites live and die by the front page, we see social media as kind of performing a very similar function. So that's where the audience lives, live 24-7. What's helped drive this has been much more rigor around the planning and production of our content according to platform and the type of audience that exists there. We've also done some work around short URLs so instead of using a bitly link we always use to pop up short URLs now and we we kind of have some fun with the URL and get a bit playful in terms of using that as a device to help tell the story in the same way that you would with a hashtag. Another much-loved device that newsrooms use is embedding social media into a story. So this is something that we've actually begun doing as well and it adds like a real richness and a layer to the story. It gives us an opportunity to close the loop between our own social media accounts and platforms. So here's an example of the Watercolor World project that Tapa is part of and a tweet from patrons Clarence House with their 70,000, 700,000 followers are using one of our collection images and then we were able to embed a further tweet from our rights manager Victoria Leachman saying yay thanks for using the image. So just a little recap on creating content. Whether we're building short burn content or whether we're building evergreen content, there are some golden rules. Understand the different pathways and the way the audience arrives at content that helps grow and maintain our audience and by research user demand and a deep understanding of analytics this guides our experts towards content that is universally interesting. No talk would be complete about online journalism without talking about headlines and the art of writing a headline. Without a good headline, don't expect your audience to read the article. Recently someone told me that goldfish have a longer attention span than a person. It's worth bearing in mind next time you kind of scroll through your newsfeed at high speed. A headline is often the first point of contact with a user and it can very easily be the last if you haven't done a very good job. So my single piece of advice for great headline writing is don't be cryptic. It's very tempting to be cryptic, mysterious or ambiguous in the hope that the user will click on it and see what it's about. But while clickbait is not okay, it's okay to leave the user wanting more as long as it delivers what it promises. So you need to get that balance right. I'm just going to talk a little bit more about some examples of our digital content editors and our experts working together. So meet Rare Books Guy. Does anyone know Rare Books Guy? Is he here? No, yeah. So this is Martin Lewis. He's our research librarian. He in a casual conversation happened to mention to Rachel that there was a lot of frequently asked questions that he had around the type of tiniest books, biggest books, etc. heaviest books. So voila, we have user demand right there. So he, with our help, wrote a blog and it became one of our most popular blogs of the year. But one of the great things about applying a kind of journalistic lens on to creating stories is it's actually this was actually kind of surprising, but it's been great. It means that news organisations are much find it much easier to pick up our stories now and either rip off or repurpose or kind of do it their own version of the story. So Martin's story was picked up by News Hub and then their content partner MSN. Another one of Martin's blogs that we worked with him on about marbling. He was invited on to Radio New Zealand to talk about that. And they even use our headline, which is awesome. So this is this is the one that's exciting me the most because this happened like in the last two weeks. So we have this amazing story about a cave in Martinborough and over thousands of years, hundreds of rare and and extinct birds have fallen into this cave and the cave has a load of bones in there. Moa, Kakapo, Kiwi, Takahae. So sometimes the subject matter experts are actually just better at talking rather than writing. So we interviewed our expert, Alan Tennyson, and we wrote a story that was basically a new story. We toyed with the headline Kakapo Death Pit, but then Daniel pointed out that it sounds like a bad 80s rock band. So we backed off from that, which is kind of a shame actually, because next thing you know, the media have picked up the story and they're running with various versions of Death Pit, etc. So the story is just a really great example of how we put the work in and we structure stories in the right way. Then media organizations can spot them a mile off. I think that this went actually out on the New Zealand Herald and then ran all their sister publications and then stuff picked up the story and it went around all their publications or their local rags around the country. We've also had Atlas Obscura do a version of the story and now apparently BBC are actually making queries about the story. So our little measly 1600 unique page views on the blog has now blown out to a further reach of 300,000 potential readers to the story. And I think this is great. I mean, I think this story actually is just a really good yarn. It's a dark cave. It's got drama. It's got birds. People love birds. It's bones. So this is this is the kind of direction that we really want to take now because this really is worthwhile for us. And it really shows that we can actually use our own platforms to break stories. I mean, why not? Another example of how we can actually dock into sort of fast moving news stories, while still grounding our content in our collections, is this example. So the day that John Clark, aka Fred Dagg, passed away, our curator, Stephanie Gibson, wrote a really quick story about how she went over to Melbourne and to acquire his gumboots. So this meant that we could inject credible, but unique content into a big story early enough to start appearing quite high in the searches in Google. So reacting fast is key here and it's probably not something that we're really used to doing. But when we do it, it can really drive new users to the content. And no talk would be complete without the ultimate in timeliness, which is our live live streams. So we've done a couple of these recently. This was used to great effect recently for our wrong-for-carta opening poverty, streamed on YouTube and then embedded into a web page and received thousands of views. We also streamed our Kappa Haka on Facebook that reached 1.5 million people. So this just gives you an idea of other ways that you can actually reach our non-visitor audience around the country, people who can't come here. So to conclude, oh, yeah, five minutes good, the work of the digital content team has meant the way we create and promote content in the way we create and promote content and the way our audience's consume content is changing. We're building up a really great unique bank of original content that has the potential to gain rankings and SEO as well as employing strategies for more exposure and engagement through content marketing. This all adds up to more brand awareness and ultimately increased access for our users to our prize collections, stories and knowledge. Meaning we can connect our users with our past and present whoever they are and wherever they are. Thank you. Kia ora. All right, we have time for questions so if you do have any please raise your hand and we'll bring the microphone to you. Kia ora, Meredith from the Nelson Provincial Museum. What's the interface between your team and your subject experts, the curators? Are they coming to you with content daily or are you hunting and chasing them down? A bit of both. Sometimes they'll come to us with an idea but it's a balance because we don't want to put them off entirely so we think of we give them suggestions and we work with them to make the most out of it even though we kind of know in our heart of hearts it's not going to be a big hitter and then we just it's just about having that conversation open with them all the time and providing feedback and suggestions and tips. So we actually Rachel sends out a monthly top of the blogs newsletter. We have a little leaderboard so the top blog of the month sounds kind of silly but it actually works because you find that they're actually quite competitive. So sometimes we're always got our ears open for story ideas and we are a really small team so sometimes we see stories that we can't possibly cover but it's a little bit of both actually. We have to keep the dialogue open. We'll get them to take us on just tours of the store which is great for us because we love going behind the scenes and then they'll just say, ah, that's what our audience is going to love. So I think that's generally where the biggest story sometimes has come from is when we ask them to do it. And we have a camera in the team now too so we just take a camera and take some photos and we've got a story. Yeah. Hi. I'm interested from the perspective of how you did you develop a strategy before you started because any of the change that's occurred from your previous you know, I've seen a bit of a change all those stories so I'd engaged with them myself personally. So obviously I've sort of seen it the last year so I'm interested in that process. It's a lot of trial and error. Obviously I'm telling you about the success stories today. There's been a lot that haven't been successful but I think that it's I mean even though you know we're the digital content team and we're the experts in this field we are always learning and we're also always getting surprised about the audience. You know we think we've got an audience segment cracked and then we do something and it flops so it's been something that is constantly evolving so this new kind of direction for us to actually do the interviews ourselves is brand new so that's kind of a bit of a change of direction for us so it's an ongoing process I'd say. Yeah. Oh, there's one over there. Hi, it's David Reaves from Auckland's museum. I was wondering about a blog or other article with still images versus something with video or moving images is there a really an appreciable difference in audience interest and uptake? Yeah, I mean I think it depends again on where you promote it if it's going out on social media then obviously a video is social media is all about video now so I don't think we've done a comparison like for like because I think those stories are different so you know it depends on how we want to tell I think for us we really need to be looking at how we can produce more video quicker shorter video that's more appropriate particularly that social media audience not the Google search audience but the social media audience yeah so it depends yeah. That brings us to the end of our time so please join me in thanking Michelle.