 So this is Bob Beattie, the Vice President for Programs of AASLH, and Bob, you're going to start the welcome, right? Yes. Thank you, Susan, very much. Thank you to everyone who's there. I'm looking. We've got a robust list of people, including, and there's no pressure on me, but the Chair and Vice Chair of the AASLH Board of Directors, Steve Elliott and Lynn Ireland are joining us. So I have to give a shout-out to them, not because they make me, but because I need to apologize ahead of time if I stumble or sound stupid. That's a joke, by the way. They're wonderful people. And it's funny, Susan mentioned we know how to chat. Do we in the museum field not know how to talk? That's one thing we definitely are very good at. So glad to see all that flying by. I've said this to other groups we've done things with before. We at AASLH in particular love this medium for sharing information, and we love learning times because of how interactive it is. So you guys in the chat and in the question area can really make this a very interactive experience, as interactive as it possibly can be, and it's really up to you and the presenters, of course. So I think we've built a very good program today. This morning was fantastic. So today, this afternoon, is using social media to tell your collection stories. AASLH has been engaged in this. I see we've got the first poll up is where you're joining us from. So go ahead and take a minute, please, or a second, and tell us where you are located just so we have a little idea. And it looks like we're trending in the Midwest and the West, which is fantastic. Good numbers in the Southern United States as well, and then other. Very interesting. So welcome to everybody. Social media, obviously, has become a big deal very, very quickly in the world and also in our field. And AASLH has a robust Twitter feed. We're on LinkedIn and Facebook, and I know many of you are as well. And we just see this the same way a lot of you do, some excellent opportunities and excellent, quick, low-cost, effective way to reach your stakeholders. What better way to do that than using collections, using those stories of objects, artifacts, and other material from the past. We also are just looking to see what type of institution you represent. Where are you located? This gives us an idea about who we're serving as a membership. I'm sorry, in the webinar as well as who here is making the call today. So I'm looking to see history museum is in the 24%, 25%, I'm sorry, 21%, 22%, which is good numbers. You would expect, I see some multiple of this, multi-disciplinary museums, art museums, of course. Welcome to each and every one of you. I'm sure there's some others on here, too, that are a combination of those. So AASLH has been involved in connecting to collections through the Connecting to Collections Bookshelf and have worked very closely with the person I'm about to introduce, Nancy Rogers, who is the Senior Project Coordinator in the Office of Strategic Partnerships at IMLS. Together with Abby Sweat, Nancy has been not only a great colleague, she's also become a very good friend and has become a champion for this entire Connecting to Collections initiative, much of the work that you're going to learn about today and the other things that have flowed through Nancy either directly or she has been the one who's led efforts as well. So before we do that, I have one last question I want to ask. We want to get a little bit of an idea of who is watching the webinar. Are you watching this by yourself? Are you participating in a group? So go ahead, take just a second and tell us a little bit about who's doing what. It looks like most of the early things are individuals with about 20% in a group of two or three. Remember that this is archived as well, so those of you who are individuals and are very excited about what you've learned, we're going to have a link that you can share this with your colleagues. And those of you who are watching it in groups now, we hope that this will spur some discussion from you, some thoughts, and allow you the opportunity to interact a little deeper. Hopefully, you're taking some notes and those things. And I just saw Lake Wales, Florida. My father is a graduate of Lake Wales High School, so welcome, Stephanie. So with all that being said, I'm going to shut up. You don't have to listen to me anymore. I'm going to turn it over to Nancy Rogers, our good friend and colleague at IMLS to give you a little bit of background and ask you some more questions. Thank you all for joining us. Thank you, Bob. I'm Nancy Rogers at IMLS, and I am very happy to be talking to you today about this Connecting to Collections initiative, which is now at the end of its fourth year. You see on your screen the cover of the recent report on this initiative, which we'll be sending to Congress. We'll be sending it widely around to the field. And I hope that you'll take the time to look at it on our website. And I'm just going to give you that address right now, www.imls.gov, G-O-V. I once got an email at G-U-V, which was a little strange, G-O-V slash Collections. And you'll find all the information about Connecting to Collections there. This initiative was begun four years ago because of a report that was issued in 2005 by Heritage Preservation and IMLS together called the Heritage Health Index Report. And that report showed just dismaying statistics about collections care in our institutions in this country. And IMLS determined to shine a bright spotlight on this problem, the problem of inadequate collections care. And we also wanted to give cultural heritage institutions the help they needed to address the problem. So right now, I'd like to find out how many of you have been engaged in Connecting to Collections. So we'll see a little poll, just answer yes, no, or not sure. Because we kind of want to see how, well, one thing I'm happy to see is the new people joining this family. I mean, so far 35% of you have not been engaged. Believe me, you're now part of a family that will just keep getting emails as the family keeps growing. So with that, are we almost through with this poll? I think I'm going to slide this over here and take the other one. All right. We're going to move now to IMLS, as you may know, is a government agency. That's the GOV. And it has three major goals for everything that it does. And all I'm going to say now is that this initiative, Connecting to Collections meets all of the goals of the agency. And now we'd like to see how you've been involved in Connecting to Collections. Have you received a book? And you can click more than one of the answers here. So some of you may have gone to the National Summit and received a bookshelf, or you may have watched a webcast of one of the forums and been involved in your statewide planning grant. So I'll give you a minute to work on that. But I wanted to tell you that most of the components of Connecting to Collections have been completed, the summit, the forums, the bookshelves, the workshops, the statewide planning grants. We have 57 of them out there because they go to Commonwealths and territories as well. The bookshelf has been distributed to almost 3,000 institutions. And most of them have gone to museums, 69% to museums, and 51% have gone to history museums and historic sites. But there are some parts of Connecting to Collections that are still open. The implementation grants for plans to implement what's been done during the planning phase are still available. And the next deadline is December 15, 2010. And of course, there are also the other webinars for you to look at. So most of you, 39% of you, have received a bookshelf. That's interesting. As you know, we'll have two webinars on using your bookshelf best. And 35% almost the same have not been involved at all. So as I say, welcome to Connecting to Collections. And I'd like to be able to go to the next slide, Susan. There you go. Thank you. So this is the one I just talked about. And I'm going to move on to the statewide planning grants because if you have not been involved in Connecting to Collections up till now, this is a great way to join. Join the planning and or implementation grant in your state. The implementation grants have only gone to five states thus far. I'm hoping we're going to make a whole lot of them in the fall at the December deadline. But there are implementation grants in California, Connecticut, Delaware, North Carolina, and Rhode Island. Those grants are looking at determining the greatest needs in your state for your collections. Do you need more work on emergency planning or for training for staff or safer conditions for your collections? So this is the kind of thing that you can join. And I want to tell you a little bit more how you can join. If you look at this last slide, it's just a map of everybody who's so far part of Connecting Collections. And after these webinars, I hope a lot of those holes are going to be filled in. But one way that you can join a network is to look on our website, the collections website at IMLS. And we have there a state-by-state list of everybody in your state, every institution that's been involved in Connecting Collections. You'll find that if you just go to the About section and there's a click for State Impact. So this is something you really should do. It will be a way for you to know to share on a bookshelf, to join in perhaps a survey or regional face-to-face meetings, but a really important aspect of Connecting to Collections. And now I'm going to turn this webinar over to our two real experts. Nancy Ravenel was one of the fabulous speakers at our workshops, our face-to-face raising the bar workshops we call them. She is from the Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vermont. She's an objects conservator. But in addition to that, she has created content for the Shelburne Museum's photo stream on Flickr. She has a fan page for their carousel on Facebook. And she's one of their voices on Twitter. And she really knows what she's talking about. And Colleen Dillon-Schneider is a museum and nonprofit professional pursuing her master's of public administration at the University of Southern California. And she writes the popular blog called Know Your Own Bone, which focuses on the evolution of community engagement practices using social media in museums and cultural centers. And I'm going to let them take over this webinar now. And I'm just thrilled to have you all here. Thank you, Nancy, for that very nice introduction. And I'd like to thank IMLS Heritage Preservation and ASLH for inviting me to take part in this webinar. And I'm thrilled that Colleen Dillon-Schneider is here as well commenting on what I'll be presenting. Thanks so much. This is Colleen Dillon-Schneider here. And I just want to say thanks. And I'm very excited to be here as well. So to start out, I just wanted to give you a basic definition. Social media are platforms where people interact to share information and ideas. And I'm not using this image of a town potluck by accident. I tend to think of social media online interactions as something like a cocktail party or a town potluck. There'll be some people that you know and some people that you don't know. And in my mind, the best interactions happen when both parties are equal partners in that conversation. So I'll just preface it that way. I'm going to focus on how we might think about leveraging social media to raise awareness for our collections and the need to care for them. And I'll share what we're doing here at Shelburne Museum as well as tell you about some projects that have inspired me. So I'm a newbie at this system here. So let's see. I'm not seeming to be able to drag my first poll up there. My first question is, what social media are you personally using? And Nancy, this is one of those that they can choose more than one. So multiple answers. And when you are ready, you tell me and I'll slide that aside and then go to your next question. Well, thanks. Yeah, why don't we put up the other one, which is what social media is being used by your institution? And if you are using other social media websites, for instance, Stig or Delicious or Stumble upon or any other social media websites, feel free to go ahead and put that in the chat and the question answer because we want to make sure that we're counting those two. Thanks, Colleen. And I guess we'll let this go a little bit longer as people are. Well, no wonder the audience this morning was hungry for this information because you have people on social media. That's great. It's really great how much Facebook we have here with 500 million users. It's really great to see so many museums representing over there. And it's great to see that there's a, you know, Wiki's really a nice combination of things here, too. Great. I see them slowing down. So I think I'll go away and let you move on. Thanks. OK, so to tell you a little bit about Shelburne Museum, if you haven't been here. We are a Museum of Art and Design on 40 acres with 39 exhibition buildings. And we're sort of separated. The administration offices are above that blue line and the museum itself, the exhibition buildings are below that blue line and what the blue line is, actually, is US Route 7. And in many ways, that is our digital divide. For just until about two years ago, there was absolutely no high-speed internet below that blue line. The departments that were located on the same side as the exhibitions were still on dial-up. So I'm an interesting choice to be talking to you about technology because we certainly do walk that line of both having access and not having access. I'm sorry. My next question is, who within your organization produces content for your institution's social media account? This is one that you can put your answers right here in that center panel, as opposed to off on the side. I love the answer, Nancy. Yeah, that's happening from across the street. For me right now, there's a lot of marketing and PR, it looks like. Yeah, and Colleen, you wrote something about where social media should be within an organization, didn't you? Yes, I did. I wrote about how a lot of institutions think that social media suggests why only in the realm of the marketing or PR department. But usually, and Nancy, I know you want to talk about this a little bit and your slides a little bit later, it's best to really listen to your audience and really place social media. Make sure the whole institution has a say so that you can best utilize the strengths of the institution to tell your collection stories, whether that's in the marketing department or conservation or somewhere else. Yeah, and I love seeing that in some cases, there's an interdisciplinary committee, too. That's great. All right. Is it possible to move this aside as people are keeping? That'd be great. So as I said, really here at Shilber Museum, social media does reside primarily with PR and marketing. And we do have a PR and a marketing manager. However, there were things that we wanted to put out there from the conservation department. And so that's how we started up. Flickr, which is where the photo sharing service that we use, has content from conservation education and PR. The discovery we're finding for our material there is through search engines. And it's findable through the terms in the text and the tags that we have on the site. I noticed in the questions that you all provided to Heritage Preservation when you signed up that there were questions about voice. I use my own. And really, I look at this as an extension of the tours and the slideshow formats that I use when I give presentations in person. A lot of you are on Twitter, both personally and for your institution. These are updates in the form of short updates, updates in the form of short messages with service both over the computer as well from text, messages from phones. Here at Children Museum, the content comes from the conservation department from me as well as from PR. And our education department has a separate account. So they were looking for a slightly different audience than what our Twitter account was providing us. So they decided to create another account on Twitter. YouTube, the videos here are produced by our PR and marketing manager with additional content coming from the Director of Conservation Curatorial, really an interdisciplinary group. Facebook, the museum's page is administered by PR. But then there, as Nancy mentioned, the dental carousel here at Silver Museum has a page on there that I administer. It was originally aimed at former and future interns, but it's also attracted carousel enthusiasts and restores. And it's become a useful aid in fundraising. And I'll get to that a little bit later. The services play well together. You can update Twitter from Facebook and Flickr to Twitter and to YouTube or vice versa. I'm sorry. You can update from within Flickr. You can update to Twitter. And from within YouTube, you can update to Twitter and Facebook. So just some quick examples of who else is using social media. We see a great group here that are already using it. But I wanted to share with you, in particular, some of the places that I look at that I enjoy seeing what they put up. The American Alpine Club Library, I love the solution for compact storage that they made from kennel fencing and tennis balls. I think that was really fun for me to see. The New York State Archives, in addition to sharing videos from their own collection, they have a nice video about what it means to be an archivist. Large museums have the resources and the personnel to create polished content. The Indianapolis Museum of Art has their own platform for sharing videos about art. But they also port out their videos to YouTube so that they can widen their audience. And smaller museums are using it really effectively to share their message about how they care for the collections. The Montclair Museum House is a historical house museum that participated in the Baltimore Connecting to Collections workshop. And they have this really nice series on the progress made to repair a secretary in their house. So let's get down to the, oh, as far as what museum that was, with the art storage made of kennel fencing, that was the American Alpine Club Library. And so down to the nitty gritty of all of this. Generally, I find it pretty effective to have a plan before you get started. And so my first question for you is, who are you interested in reaching through social media? So thanks, Susan. Some great answers there. And just so everybody who's here knows, a lot of really great questions are being asked in the question and answer portion. We are, indeed, pulling out some of those questions and putting them to the side. So please don't think that we're ignoring your questions. We'll definitely go back and address them at the end. So keep the questions coming as you see fit, and we'll do our best to address them at the end. Some nice, there's some general, and Johnny Depp, I like that, good specifics as well as generalities. OK, thanks, Susan. Let's see, can I manage this? There we go. So as you probably are aware, the Pew Center for the Study of the Internet and American Life has some great statistics on this. And as you all were expressing, it's generally thought that younger people, younger adults, are heavy users of social media. However, you will find all segments of adults on using it. And I was pretty surprised with this Facebook page that I had aimed at recent graduate students, or actively graduate students, that really demographics for this Facebook page, which now has over 100 fans, skews pretty heavily to the over 40 crowd. If you administer your Facebook page, you have a link to your demographics within Facebook. And another interesting study that the Pew Center did was looking at how people are getting online. And they're finding that increasingly people are using mobile devices to access the internet. So out of curiosity, are you using a mobile device to access the internet? Generally, there's a good poll. And something that's happening right now is the Museum Computer Network Conference. And I saw a statistic that was communicated via Twitter this morning that there is a statistic that by 2015, it's estimated that 80% of people will be going online using mobile devices. Wow, that's interesting. How bad has it happened? So one of the things that I really like about these social media sites is that they already have interfaces that are designed specifically for mobile phones. So it's a great way if your website isn't mobile-friendly yet, you still have your content easily available to somebody on their phone or iPod touch or smartphone. There's also geolocated social communities. So that means that people are communicating about places when they're actually using their mobile devices. And so again, out of curiosity, are visitors checking into your institution? I'm sorry. Let's see. I'm still not able to move the polls for some reason. I know. And I'm sorry. For some reason, my... There we go. The poll's there, but oops. We're having like a sticky mouse problem here now. Thank you. Yeah, so it's interesting. Shelburne Museum is sort of in this cell phone dead zone unless you're on AT&T. But despite that, people are still checking in on Foursquare. We are about 20 minutes south of the University of Vermont. And so there is a sort of a social geolocated community savvy crowd that seems to be visiting us and checking in. Some of the communities that I find pretty interesting. Goa'la really hasn't caught on here in Vermont, but it is one of those geolocated communities that allows you to upload photos when you're at a place, which is an interesting way to see what your public is looking at when they're at your facility. I'm sorry. Yeah, so these are geo-located communities use the GPS in your cell phones to determine where you are. And so you can check into a location and let your friends know where you are. So Goa'la allows you to take a picture. And by looking at the photos, you can see not only what they're looking at, but if for some reason there's damage to an object, you can almost see when it happened. Again, if they're using Goa'la to visit your site. Foursquare is perhaps the most popular of these communities. And they allow their users to submit tips about places. And you'll see here that the University of Southern California has provided tips about the different places on campus. When you check into places, the more places you check in, you can win badges or become mayor of a place. And businesses will provide discounts or free coffee to the people who happen to be mayors of a particular location. So one thing I've been wondering about is with our 39 buildings, if we added tips about those particular buildings that people could see when they checked in, provide them information about something that's been recently conserved or maybe a surprising bit of information about an artifact. We have one of the 10 oldest easy chairs in America. And it's in a historic house. And it's not terribly what you have to go and pick up a label to see it. If somebody checked in at that building, then they could get that information about our chair if we left it as a tip. One thing that I found really helpful in getting the buy-in I needed from administration was to create some guidelines for myself before I got on. So I'm curious, did I'm going to skip the constraints slide? Paul, Susan, again, I'm still not able to move anything around on my screen here. I know you're not able to move them. And first, I'll slide them into place. So you want the question about guidelines? Yes, please. OK. Thank you. Sorry, I'm still I'm having, as I said, a sticky mouse problem here. I think I'm going to have to go to my trackpad. And I'm wondering if the, can the audience see these? See the pole that's in the center there? I don't see it. OK. Jonathan is going to grab it because something weird is happening on my end. Thank you, Jonathan. Yeah, we don't have anything written down at this point in time. Right now, it's up to a general code of conduct. Our IT manager does sit down with each new employee and talks about what they need to think about with regard to social media as part of orientation. That's interesting that so many don't. Thank you so much. If that is something that you think your organization would benefit from, their institutions like Indianapolis Museum of Art have put their social media participation guidelines online for others to see. Another thing that I find really useful is in terms of getting buy-in from my administration was to create a strategy to really articulate what the intended audience of my social media project would be and how it would impact other departments and who my, what outcomes I hope to gain. My first social media project had to do with this adopt a carousel animal initiative that we have with our dental carousel here at the museum. Patrons adopt animals. They provide a stipend for summer interns to come and work on these animals. They get to name the animal. The intern sends the donor updates while the animal is being cleaned. And to do that, we felt like we needed to send some fairly sizable images through our email system. And that was not only just slowing down our email server, but also if the donor wasn't clearing out their mailbox, chances are they would bounce. We found that being able to upload those images to Flickr prevented the bouncing because all they were getting was a hyperlink. And also, we could share it with potential interns about what it's like to work here at Children Museum in the summer. The first year I shared our Flickr site with the applicants, we got three times the number of applications that we typically do. So that was kind of a good thing and a bad thing. It meant I had to go through more applications. But all in all, we've been really happy with this. We've managed to adopt one carousel animal solely through the internet. The donor called up and gave us her credit card number over the phone. It was fantastic. But mostly, we find that it's a combination of in-person cultivation as well as using the internet resources as an aid towards discussing it further. And also, I wanted to let people know that through the Minnesota Historical Society, there are worksheets that will help you develop your strategies and your guidelines. And that's available to the museums and the web website. And I've given you a short URL right here. And it's also, I saw that Rose Daly, a former intern here, had provided the URL for a wiki that I've created with all the resources here. And you'll find that also listed on that site there, too. Another thing that really helped me in gaining some buy-in from the administration to start a social media program here was that I really understood how to get in and around Flickr. And so I created an account under my own name and played in it sort of in my own little private sandbox before I did anything under the name of the museum. And other people are doing this as well. I'm going to introduce a project to you called Wikipedia Saves Public Art. And that is a project that was created, started by Richard McCoy. He's an object conservator at the Indianapolis Museum of Art and Jennifer McCoolay, an art history professor. As part of a collections management course, they taught at the Indiana University Purdue University in Indianapolis. But this project has spread now to Washington, DC, Milwaukee, and even Middlebury, Vermont, where I live. This project was inspired by Heritage Preservation Initiative, Save Outdoor Sculpture, in which volunteers cataloged and recorded the condition of sculpture all over the United States. The resulting records are available through the Smithsonian Institution's online research information system. And they served as a starting point for the Wikipedia Saves Public Art. So Richard and Jennifer had their students write articles on Wikipedia about sculpture on the university's campus. And one of the things that they did in developing these articles was that they used the GPS to locate each of one of these sculptures and put that information into Wikipedia. They started using the DGPS, but then they started using Gewala to find those coordinates. And again, so this is the location of the sculpture. Their Wikipedia link is down in the bottom of the screen when you see it. Another thing you can do using Gewala is to create a tour of sculptures. And so Richard created a tour of the public art on the campus in his own name before they had started to do the same thing under the Wikipedia Saves Public Art logo. Something that I mean, I am the object conservator here. I have to work on objects, get them ready for exhibition, get them ready for outgoing loan. I'm going to make use of things that I'm already using. And one of the things that I, two of the things that I create is documentation of the treatments that I undertake. And so what you're seeing here on this Flickr page is a during treatment shot of a setee that I worked on by Louis Comfortifany. So I'd like to know if you have thought about what you're already producing that could be reused in a social media context. Or what are you already using with your social media? Jonathan Wilson, our collections manager, is pointing out that we've also used images from our collection surveys. And oftentimes, it's the fellows who work with him who nominate those images to me to put up on Flickr. Mystery, items needing identification, that's great, press releases, publicity photos. Another thing that we've found works really well for us is to engage with simple tech and easy partners. For me, I really have, basically, video is not my medium at all. But with the flip camera, I don't know how many of you have one of these. But they are just really simple, like two button video cameras. They record in high definition. And they have very simple editing tools that will port your video out directly to YouTube. And I find that to be really helpful. It is the camera that our PR manager used to do a proof of concept for our YouTube presence. But now what she's done is she's found that there's a community television station in the area that will provide us with high end equipment. And will let her sit on their computers and use their editing software to create much high. She wasn't happy with the level of control she had over audio using the flip camera. So she's a lot happier using their equipment and their software. They do this free of charge to us. What they get out of it is that, obviously, they're looking for content. And so what they will do is they will rebroadcast our public programs. If we have a lecture, we'll record that. And then they'll broadcast that over their TV station. Another thing you could do is to keep an eye on what your colleagues are doing. Here's an example from our neck of the woods. The Echo Lake Aquarium and Science Center has a project called Voices of the Lake. And what they want to do is to crowdsource people's thoughts on why they should provide good stewardship for Lake Champlain. And they got their idea from the mattress factory, which is a Museum of Contemporary Art in the Pittsburgh area. They have a kiosk or a setup and a program called I Confess. And the idea is that visitors come into this kiosk and talk about why they love the mattress factory and why it's important to them. So again, not a huge step from talking about why you love this museum to why you think you should save Lake Champlain for the future. And a mattress factory got this idea from the Brooklyn Museum, who does so many wonderful things in the social media realm. They had used Mac computers with their webcams to upload videos using Quick Capture directly to YouTube for people to talk about their reactions to this exhibition, The Black List Project. Now all of these museums, Echo, Mattress Factory, and Brooklyn, they all talked about the pros and cons and the problems and what they really liked about this on their blogs. So they're sort of troubleshooting as they go and helping each other. So this brings me to assessing your successes and failures. That's, I think, also a really important part of what you're doing. Why continue to do it if it's not getting the results that you want? What Echo found was that most of their visitors to their museum were families. And so they got a lot of little videos about we want to keep Lake Champlain clean for Champ the Lake Monster, which is really lovely. But again, it wasn't what they wanted. And the other thing they did was they went out to libraries hoping to collect stories. They're going to the communities to collect stories. And they found that people didn't want to talk to computers. They were really happy to talk to the flip cameras, but not to the computers themselves, not with that YouTube Quick Capture. So they've created using a software called Omeca, which is an open source software that's created for museums to create their own online exhibitions. They're letting people upload their images, their audio, their video, stories, links about why they want to, why we should save Lake Champlain. So again, they looked at what they were doing and retooled to fit their needs better. They're also taking some of those videos and porting them out to YouTube just so that they have a bigger spread of information. I tend to use the reactions that I'm getting on Twitter as a marker as to how I'm doing. And I saw that Darius here from the Tenement Museum, I don't know if she actually responded, if this is her responding or not. We've never met. Hi, Gary. Nice to see you. And so she was very kind in promoting our Stetsatee project to the folks that follow Tenement Museum. And as you saw, I also look at the analytics that comes through the various social media components. And then so oftentimes you'll hear people asking, what's the return on investment on all this? Yes, it does take time. And again, I don't tend to look at what we're making in terms of donations or anything else, or even how many, it's hard to know how many people are coming based on what they're reading through Facebook or Twitter or what they're seeing on Flickr. But I do look at this as an important tool for outreach and education. There are amazing success stories. And I think one of the most amazing to me is this at Bletchley Park. And if you're not familiar with Bletchley Park, it was the School for Codebreaking in Great Britain during World War II. And it's where the enigma was constructed. They have acres of land and multiple structures. They're predominantly run by volunteers. They're funded solely by gate and rentals. And they had very serious structural issues with their buildings. Dr. Susan Black was or is a scientist who was familiar with the institution and was really sort of taken aback by the conditions that she was seeing there. So she offered her assistance to the staff. And she began blogging and using her account on Twitter to talk about Bletchley Park and began a campaign to raise awareness. The site, in turn, Bletchley Park, hosted events where visitors offered to blog or tweet about their visit could visit for free. And they also invited visitors to upload their pictures to a group on Flickr. She also, Dr. Black also took the initiative. She happened to be on Flickr at a time when the British comedian Stephen Fry happened to mention that he was stuck in an elevator. And she managed to get his attention. And then he started talking about Bletchley Park and advocating for it, using his audience to help them out. As I understand it, he did a comedy show in support of them. Now, as Dr. Black said in her presentation to museums in the web last year, essentially it was geeks talking to geeks about something that appeals to geeks in a geek format. It was kind of the perfect storm there. So again, your mileage may vary with this. Again, what she was doing was educating and creating new advocates for the institution. Here we've seen sort of a modest version of that. There is a Shelburne Vermont group for the town. And they invited an image of one of our summer work project interns cleaning a carousel rounding board to their group. So we put the image up. They invited it in. We put it in their group. And now collections care is a community activity. If the information in your pictures aren't online, aren't available, others can't amplify your message. Here the Eidel Dorg put images up of their personnel cleaning their outdoor sculpture and Wikipedia Saves Public Art shared that link with their followers on Facebook and Twitter. So what's there to lose? I've spent a lot of time talking about positives. Can we put up the pros and cons for people to provide us with their thoughts? And I know I gave you less space for cons. We're really seeing a lot of the fact that it's free and cheap being a pretty big pro over there. Oh, and a lot of concern about copyright. Yeah. And time. Yeah, time is an issue. Again, I think the pros, that way, the cons, I mean, I think we've managed to learn more about who is here. We've been able to know a little bit more about what they're looking at. Because Flickr is really an extension of the documentation I'm doing anyway, getting that up doesn't take all that much longer. Doesn't take that much time out of my day. Reaching the right audience. I wonder how you define what the right audience is. Right, and to tackle this issue of time, I would say that social media is one of those things where the more time you put into it, the more yield you'll get, which, you know, there isn't a minimum amount of time that you need to be spending on Facebook or social media. If you have any time to put some effort out to engage the audiences, to listen to what your audience has to say, to do some testing, and see what kind of stories about your collection gain audience engagement, then that kid that will really pay off. So it's, in essence, the amount of time you put into it is what you'll get out of it. Colleen, there are several questions that have come together that speak to that. How much time does it take? How do you measure the return on one a segment of time? Any insights in that? Yes, actually, that's really interesting. You get a lot of questions. I usually get a lot of questions about that. And the very frustrating answer is that it's completely dependent upon your audience. For some, or actually, as an example, when Nancy and I were going over this presentation, we were talking about the fact that, as you all saw, the Shelburne Museum has two Facebook pages. My most recent background is in marketing at a museum. And when you're from a marketing perspective, you're kind of this rule that it's not good to have them with a one Facebook page because it can split your audiences. You risk having an ununified voice. But what the Shelburne Museum did was they saw this opportunity to engage a different audience more in-depth under their collection stories, and they utilized that. So this is kind of all a long way to say that what's important is knowing who's listening to you and who you want to reach. And doing some tests to find out what kind of Facebook statuses get the most likes and get the most comments. And then capitalizing on the things that you learned because just as much as social media is a thing that where you can put out what's going on in the museum, it's also equally important, it's not more important, to really listen to what people are saying. And once you gather that information, you can utilize it to help you with fundraising, to help you with gathering members and those sort of things. So unfortunately, the short answer is it's completely dependent on your audience and it's very important to pay attention to what they are liking and kind of capitalize on that. There are some little tricks that you can use, though. There are certain websites that say that the best day of the week to post on Facebook is on Tuesdays because most people are on Facebook on Tuesdays. And whether that's true or not, it's something I always like to think about, you know, when it's Tuesday. If there really are more people on Facebook on Tuesdays, it couldn't hurt to update your status. And certain things about certain times of the day to, like after lunch, that are best for updating Twitter statuses. But when it comes to how long you should be spending, you know, doing social media, what kind of pages you need to have and how many you need to have, those are completely dependent on what you're wanting to reach. And I'll pull it out too that as far as I know, the people who are following the carousel on Facebook they're not fans of Shelburne Museum on Facebook. It's two separate audiences by and large, at least those carousel restores. They're a niche audience and therefore they're more interested in learning about and talking about that particular object than anything else in the collection. So that's something to keep in mind. I saw a question roll by about asking why the Education Department has a different Twitter account. They saw that the audience for the Shelburne Museum's Twitter account was pretty broad ranging and they wanted to speak to, see if they could speak to just homeschooling parents, mommy bloggers and teachers. And they primarily talk about their programs. They don't look at the museum as a whole, whereas the Twitter account for the museum as a whole talks about the museum as a whole. And in fact, I will often retweet what they've, repeat what they've said on Twitter. If that makes any sense. Can I ask a detailed question? This Colleen's statement kind of reminded me too. There was a question about what's the difference between a Facebook business page, a group. It sounds like there are a lot of different ways to get at it. Are there recommendations? That's a good question. Actually Nancy, I have a question for you. Is the Keri South page, is that an organization page or is that a fan group? Or do you happen to know what kind of page that is? It's an organization page. Okay, great. Yeah, I had to pick one. I think that the organization page is amazing because if somebody likes your page on Facebook, it shows up on their news feed. So that means that every time that you write something, there's an opportunity for engagement because as soon as they log on to Facebook, any one of these 500 million viewers that could potentially be following your museum, there's an opportunity for engagement. The thing to be careful about if you're creating an organization Facebook page is that you can't change the name of that organization page after you've created it without losing all of your fans or your likes, quote unquote. So for instance, if you were to start, let's say Nancy had started, she started a Facebook page for the Carousel, but as they were going through the Carousel conservation, they realized that the crowd was actually interested in something else. She couldn't, you wouldn't just be able to change that Facebook page and have all of your likes transfer. You'd have to create a new one. So that would just be my little word of wisdom as far as that goes. But yeah, I'm a fan of the organization pages. Okay, can I keep fielding you questions? Please do. Yes, please. Great, my next curiosity is about pop-up ads or ads that come with some of the social media sites. How do you manage that? How do you deal with it? We're not using, yeah, actually I think it's something that comes along with it. I'm not sure there's a whole lot you can do to manage it. That is one of the perhaps negatives if you will about the social media sites. So get used to it. Yeah, I think most people tend to just, when I'm looking at it, I just kind of filter that stuff out. I don't see it anymore. Okay, and the follow-up question then from Sally is what's the cost of having a free service? And there are going to be some of those costs that you need to deal with. There was a question scrolling back about whether this makes you vulnerable at all to security issues. Yeah, that's a good question. Go ahead, Nancy, I'm sorry. That is something that our IT manager watches pretty carefully. Yeah, I mean, there is always a possibility that when you're monitoring your feed, looking at what people are saying out there that you could click on the wrong link and infect your computer. We just have really, we tend to be vigilant about our security on our individual computers as much as possible. And then unless I really know what the link is, I don't click on it. Some of the sites on Twitter anyway, HootSuite for instance has a preview that you can just kind of mouse over the link and then you can get a sense of where it's actually pointing you to. I mean, that is a problem with short URLs is that you don't necessarily know where they're gonna take you to. On the copyright issue, because my museum that I work for primarily has things in the collection that are out of copyright. Essentially, I just make a point of not taking pictures of anything that is where somebody else holds the copyright to it. For instance, we do have some paintings that were painted in the 50s and we're also showing contemporary art. You won't find pictures from me about that. I try to not put images onto Facebook directly. I tend to put them on Flickr because Flickr carries over the metadata that you might be adding to your images as part of my photo documentation for conservation. I add information into the image background about what the object is, its accession number, that it belongs to Shelburne Museum, who made it, all that information. So that information gets transferred with the upload into Flickr. I also basically at the request of our rights and repro department don't allow people to upload the images. There is the copyright there. And so therefore I'm careful about then linking from Flickr to, you know, from Facebook to Flickr or from Twitter to Flickr, so that ideally that information carries along with it. Well, and there was a similar question about whether there's a portal to easily cross post these things. There's things like, yes, there are portals. There's third party apps that allow you to cross post. Okay, do you recommend them? I really like the ones in Flickr and YouTube that allow you to blog directly from those sites. So I can, from within Flickr, I can put an update on Twitter through Flickr. Okay. Yeah, those things are really, really helpful, but one word of caution about using those or even using the types of things on Twitter where you can set status updates to be released during certain times of the day is it's important to remember that if you can, to try to go back and see the unique conversations that are going on on each social media site that you posted it on, because as Nancy kind of touched on, a lot of times your social media sites will reach different demographics, excuse me, so sometimes your Twitter account will reach different people than your Facebook account. So it's really interesting or helpful to monitor what each one is saying and how they react to everything and what's appropriate for one social media site demographic might not be appropriate for another one. And I would echo that. And in fact, I think too that the language between Twitter and Facebook are pretty different. I know that some people think that it's great that you can do updates on one and they show up automatically on the other. I personally would rather see different updates in each of those arenas, but I think that's something you have to weigh for yourself. Okay. I'm glancing through the questions as I'm sure you are. There's a lot of them. Well, I think one area where people are also curious is the hard numbers. How do you know how many people have been at your site? Is Google Analytics how you should go? How do you get that data back to you? Google Analytics works. Google Analytics definitely works. Another good way to do it is if you're using Twitter or Facebook, there's a website called Bitly. It's the IT.ly. And if you're going to put in what it does is it shortens the links and then you can track the links, see where people are clicking it from and how many people have clicked that link. So you can use that to kind of gauge how many people are clicking on different links. So for instance, on one day if you want to test how well something is doing on Twitter, you just go ahead and use the Bitly link and see how many people are using it. And if you want to do it on Facebook, you just do it on Facebook. If you want to test both, you can use that same Bitly link on both. For me, that's been a really helpful way to measure it. Nancy, is there anything that you use? Again, just using the native analytics within Facebook. Who tweet gives you back some analytics as well if you use their particular shortener? You can get the click-throughs there. Flickr and YouTube have great analytics attached to their sites that give you information about where that click is coming from. So in other words, that's how I know that people are looking for information on retieing springs and happening upon the images of how I retied the springs on that set T. And it's a lot of people who are looking for information on retieing springs. It's interesting. I hope they're not disappointed when they come across my cable ties. Toward the end, Nancy, you had referenced a photo of one of your summer interns working on the swan board. And that certainly connects your community back to helping join the conversation about the care of collections. Can you talk a little bit about other opportunities that people might think about doing that? There are ways that... Beyond the group thing? Yeah. Well, I think... Doing that, the outcomes. Well, I think you can do that just about on any outlet. I mean, we certainly have seen that on Facebook when we've reposted images from Flickr on there about me working on crazy quilts or something else like that. People have responded very positively. Again, with Twitter, images, we link images onto Twitter and people ask questions about the objects as well as what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. How much do you think about developing mobile content as your future? It's something that we're thinking about, although we're not exactly going at light speed. I think we're thinking a lot about how our visitors are, how they visit the place, what kind of interactions they're looking for. I know that when I'm on the grounds and looking around, I kind of take a mental image of how many people are looking at their mobile phones. I look at the Twitter updates to see who's do a search for Shelburne Museum and see who's checked in on Foursquare here or if they're mentioning they've been here. That gives me a sense of whether or not they're doing it right here and now or if they talk about it later. I think all of that will help inform us as to whether we'll create any kind of mobile site or input or sort of communication for people when they're here on the grounds. Colleen, do you have a sense of that? You want to comment on mobile? I think that like social media, mobile is going to be a thing that is going to suddenly, we're suddenly going to find ourselves surrounded with it. And so I think that it's good to be thinking about it right now. I think that right now we're still at a point where it's okay that not everybody has a mobile application, but I think that as Nancy mentioned the statistic that by 2015, 80% of people will be accessing the web via mobile devices is definitely something that it's important for us to plan for in the future. Okay. I like this question from Liz in Fulton, Missouri. What if your museum's projects are not as sexy as working with carousel animals? Then what do you do? Well, again, we've featured our collections survey of our costume collection where we were looking at, we spent an entire day looking at white baby dresses. And then we just focused on sort of one really beautiful example. Again, I asked the fellows to choose things that they were surprised at or thought other people would like and we featured those. And some of them were sexy and some of them were not so sexy. Some of them were just surprising. Why would Shelburne Museum have a Chinese dragon gown in the collection? We posted that using Anne Edgar's idea of having a news tag. We posted that for Chinese New Year. And then several weeks later, there was again a niche interest. Somebody who is studying dragon robes put up a picture, retweeted our picture and then also had found a blog post from a university that had a virtually identical piece. So again, this is, you know, the crowds helping us out learn about our own collections. Marvelous. This afternoon as the audience has been posting, I've been moderating their comments and none of them have been unseemly, but someone asks, what do you do with, you know, if an unsavory element enters your social media site? Do you moderate? How do you handle that potential? I think one of the cool things about social media, especially with one of the values of the younger generation that's getting on social media right now is the value of transparency. So on museums, there could be some benefit to letting not all of the not just positive comments come through, letting some negative comebacks come through as well, excuse me. But at the same time on things like Facebook, or you know, if you're a museum as a blog, you do have the ability to pick out any biting comments that you feel might really jeopardize the museum's voice or might be a comment that you want to be associated with on Google, then you definitely still have that ability. But that hasn't been said. This idea of transparency is extremely important in using social media. So breaking down the tone a little bit and making the museum accessible, having an accessible tone is very important. And being able to, again, answer in the question if it's raised in a way that's not inflammatory, really just sort of taking it step by step. I had a situation where we had posted a video of the carousel organ working and somebody just kept coming back and suggesting it wasn't our organ. Just kept, again, it's the organ from this place. It's the organ from that place. And finally, other people started chiming in. I didn't have to moderate him. People started telling him, look, dude, it's the one from Shelburne Museum. Okay. Well, I think we're beginning to wind down. My head's just so full of ideas right now. Are there last comments that either of you would like to make? I have one, if I may. When I was reading through the question and answer, I saw there was one interesting question from Whitney Reep. I'm sorry, I'm shying, butchering your name from Salem. And she asked, does anybody cross-reference Facebook fans with membership faces? And I just thought that was a really insightful question because to a museum visitor, the institution is all one entity. So it's all one experience. So if they come in to buy a museum membership and they've been engaging with your collections on Facebook, it doesn't really occur to them that the person that they're signing up for, the person in membership who they're signing up for is different than the person that they've been connecting to on Facebook. So I just want to thank Whitney for bringing that up because I think that's a really great opportunity for people to further engage social media and use it even beyond conservation collections but into the double bottom line of a lot of museums. Super, you might have noticed that I posted the link that the archives from the previous session are already available and this one will be up very shortly and there's a discussion area tied to each of these webinars that we can continue the conversation there too. So if there's somebody who had to leave a little early or someone that you want to connect to this, that would be a way to do so. I want to thank both Nancy and Colleen for rounding out what has been an incredibly full day of super ideas. Now the thanks are all going to come in and I'm going to click, click, click and make these public as I moderate. I also want the audience to be sure to hit the evaluation button and I will find the short URL for that. It often opens behind the scenes in another browser window so we'll get that posted also. And thank you Susan so much for all your help on all of this. Yes, thank you Susan. Yep and thank you also to Bob and Elsa and Kristen and Nancy and everyone who's really helped us out in making this, making helping us be here today. That's great and it's a good time to again remember our sponsors AFLH Heritage Preservation and IMLS. Thank you for sponsoring this. There are more webinars to come, one next week on the Bookshelf series and then we run through December so if you want to again check out this site if you haven't registered for all of them, there we go. Whoops, I'm trying to make that public in the, there. Okay, wonderful, thank you again.