 Institute for Conservation and Historic and Artistic Works. Go ahead, Susan. Hello, everyone. I'm really pleased to see how many people are here today, and we have a lot of people that will be joining us as we start. So welcome to today's webinar. I'm just going to go through a few things. We have upcoming webinars. The next one in August is about the Reorg program for UNESCO. It should be fabulous. And then in September, we're going to have a webinar on caratacidermy. And in October, we have two, one on insurance and one on labeling and marking objects. And the ads for those will appear fairly shortly. And we now have conservators and preservation professionals that are monitoring the discussion board on the Connecting to Collections Care website. So don't hesitate to ask questions. Please join the conversation. And remember to participate in the discussions, you need to be a registered member of the online community with a password. You can do everything else, including read the discussions without registering, but in order to post something, you need to register. And check us out on Facebook. Like us, follow us on Twitter, and check out the online community. And so I'm going to send this. And you can always contact me at this email address if you have anything to say, good, bad, and different. I'm perfectly happy to listen. And at the end, we're going to post this again, but there'll be an evaluation. The evaluations are really important, so I'd really be happy if you take the time to respond to the evaluation. And now I'm going to turn it over to Tom Stanley and Malik Liesin from the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology. Take it away. All right. Hello, everybody. Thank you all so much for being here today. My name is Tom Stanley. I work in the Public Relations Office here at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology, also known as the Penn Museum here in Philadelphia. My office, the PR office, consists of just two full time and one part-time staff members. So personally, I wear a lot of hats in my role here at the museum. One of them is as the museum's social media coordinator. I'm responsible for managing and maintaining the museum's social media accounts, which exist currently across about a half dozen different platforms. The networks where we have the most success and to which I'll devote the majority of my energy and our time today are Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, though we do experiment with some other networks to varying degrees of success. Hello, everybody. My name is Malik Liesin, and I am a project conservator at the Penn Museum. I work full time in the museum's open conservation lab as part of an exhibit called In the Artifact Lab, Conserving Egyptian Mummies. Sorry, I'm going to advance my slide here. So these are just two images of what that open conservation lab looks like. In addition to my typical conservation duties, which include carrying out examination, research, and treatment on Egyptian objects in the Artifact Lab, my job responsibilities also include speaking to the public twice a day during dedicated chat sessions and maintaining a blog and participating in social media. And here are just two images of other conservators in our department chatting during those open window sessions. Just to make this clear, I came into this job with very little professional social media experience. I had blogged for the American Institute for Conservation, or AIC, blog, but any other social media experience was personal and pretty limited at that. At the museum, it is my responsibility to manage the Artifact Lab blog. And you can see a screenshot of it here. So I'm responsible for generating the content, responding to comments, and keeping it up to date. My main use of social media at work is Twitter. And then here's an image, a screenshot of our Twitter page. I use this to notify people about what is on the blog. And I also use it to learn about what is happening at other institutions and other places or people of interest. I collaborate with Tom to share content in other ways, including on the museum's Facebook page and Twitter account, on Flickr and on Instagram. I must also mention that I'm not the only conservator that blogs at the museum, or other conservators, and everybody else at the museum. They write for our museum blog, and they also occasionally contribute to the Artifact Lab blog. And we encourage all of our interns to write for our blogs as well. And here are just some screenshots of conservator posts on the museum blog. Before we go any further, we have two brief poll questions that we thought we'd just start out just to familiarize ourselves a little bit more with all of you. So Susan, if you want to pull the first one over, thank you. And we'll just give you another 15 seconds or so to answer this one. So it looks like we have a real variety of representation, which is great. OK, I think that's good. And Susan, could you pull the second one over? And we'll just give you a few more seconds to finish this poll. OK, great. Thanks, everybody. This is interesting information for us to collect. So folks, before we go too much further, we should talk about social media on a fundamental level and what sets it apart from other online content. Social media accounts for more online time today than any other type of online activity. Here, as you'll see, in the first half of 2014, this survey found that a full 28% of all online time was being spent on social media. Furthermore, the top 100 most visited websites worldwide include a variety of social media channels. Facebook is the second most visited website on the web as of March 2015. Twitter is not far behind at number 8. LinkedIn, which is a platform for professional social networking, is at number 12. We've got Reddit, which is a combination of news and social network coming in at number 24. Instagram at number 34. Pinterest at 35, and so on. If you're looking for places where people are already spending their time and devoting their attention, social media is the place. These sites are roughly defined as online spaces where people can incorporate other users into their own network and share with them updates of various natures, generally based on text, photos, videos, and links to other pages. So lots of people use social for lots of different reasons. They'll use it to connect and keep up with friends and acquaintances. They'll use it to broadcast what they care about, what interests them personally, and what matters in their own lives. And they use it to find out about news, events, and interesting things that they didn't know about when they woke up this morning. As others in your network contribute to these massive conversations, you and others can interact with other content by liking it, commenting on it, sharing it from your own account, or even in some cases, voicing your disapproval of it. As I'm sure you know, businesses like cultural institutions have the ability to create institutional accounts for their own organizations to contribute to that sharing of content. And right here is the cornerstone of why museums and historical houses and other cultural institutions should be using social media to share their content with the world. People are already putting their eyes on social media and mass and sharing content from every corner of the internet. These platforms serve as a way to aggregate content, to capture the attention of existing users on those platforms with interesting links, photos, and videos, whose interaction with your content will often lead other users to discover your account and then possibly take the time to learn about your institution. So what do we mean by content? Well, the content you share via social media should consist of individual examples of how your institution works towards its mission. Regardless of the specific makeup of your institution's collection, chances are you're interested in preserving it and using it to educate the public through any number of different approaches, such as with public exhibitions. You might also be frequently adding to that collection. You might be regularly loaning pieces of your collection to other institutions. You might be restoring and conserving pieces of your collection to help them withstand the progress of time. All of these elements of collection stewardship are part of your institution's story. You wanna tell that captivating story to the public by making good use of the media available to you. So your organization's website should be the foundation of your content. This is where you can say absolutely everything you want or need to say about what your organization is all about in really as exhaustive a way as you so choose. If you ask me, I think anything that any member of the public would wanna know about your institution should be addressed to some extent on your website. The more time and resources you have to devote to your web presence, the more you have to captivate people's attention and interest. This is sort of the difference between social media and web-based media. It can be a little hard to define, but we tend to think of web-based media as one-way lines of digital communication, like a website. Whereas with social media, it's more like a large conversation with other users to which you're contributing in your own ways. Other online web content, such as a YouTube channel or a blog, it can be viewed as falling on one side or the other depending on how you use them. But here at the Penn Museum, we typically use those as a foundation for larger content and then we'll link to that content from social media channels like Facebook and Twitter. Okay, we actually have a third poll question that we thought we'd pull up now before we keep moving on and we'll give you about 20 seconds or so to answer this one. This is just to get an idea of how many out there, how many of you out there are using social media at work? Most people are using it at home. Okay, great, it looks like a lot of you are. I think we can go ahead and pull that down, thank you. So I think that, and what Tom just said, he's provided some really compelling reasons for why cultural institutions should be using social media. So we thought we'd move on to the how. We're gonna be using a lot of examples from our own institution, but hopefully these will provide some inspiration and ideas for sharing your own collections online. I'm going to discuss some examples of how I use blogging and social media to promote the work that I haven't been involved in at the museum. And during this discussion, I will mention some different platforms that Tom will describe more fully with further examples in a few minutes. So again, you're looking at a screenshot of the Artifact Lab blog and this is my main form of web-based outreach here at the museum. The conservation department set this blog up with the help of our IT department when the project first started. It is a WordPress platform. It is really intuitive for the most part. So once they gave us the account, we uploaded the images, made the categories, and we manage all of the content. I'm saying this just so that you know that you don't really need advanced IT experience to support or to manage a WordPress site. We set up our blog so that we have several different pages, including an FAQs page, a page for news stories that we want to feature and an Ask Us section where we encourage people to ask questions or leave comments. But the meat of the blog is really the post that I put up on a regular basis, writing about things that we are doing in the lab and objects that we are working on. After working in the artifact lab for almost three years now, I have settled into a routine of blogging at least once a week. After some discussions with the head of my department, I aim for writing blog posts on content that I think would be interesting to both our conservation colleagues, to Egyptologists, and to the general public, but obviously not all of my posts may appeal to all of these audiences. And this blog really offers a place for us to share new information and to tell news stories about objects in our collection and share important behind-the-scenes work that goes on in order to preserve our collection. Like most museums, it is not possible to constantly be sharing new information like this in the galleries. So the blog allows us to expand upon the stories that we were already sharing in the galleries, allows us to expand upon these stories and provides more information for people who are interested. It is also a way to share a collection with audiences beyond those who are able to visit the museum on a regular basis or at all. The blog is not primarily a form of social media. It is often a one-way line of communication, but not always, and I'll show you why in a second. But we have found it to be a great way to engage visitors and colleagues in conversations in new and exciting ways. It is also something that dovetails well with true social media efforts. I'm going to highlight a few different ways that we've used this blog to either generate content to share on social media or to follow up on content that was already shared on social media, essentially showing how all of this is related and how the content supports each other and ultimately helps to promote preservation of and access to our collection. One straightforward thing that we do is just share information about what we're doing in the lab. For example, you can see in this screenshot completing the treatment on object like this Egyptian late period painted wooden coffin, which is partially pictured here. I actually shared a bunch of stuff about this treatment as I did it. So here are some screenshots of the various different posts. And actually I shared 11 different posts about this project to be exact. I wrote about interesting things that I observed in the initial examination, any analysis that I carried out, conservation treatment decision-making and finally the after-treatment images, which you can see in the lower right-hand corner. We don't really get tons of comments on the blog with the final post showing before and after treatment images generated several pretty interesting comments. So definitely turned this into a social interaction. And every time I wrote about something new, I posted a message on Twitter with a link to the blog. And here are just some of the tweets related to those posts. Sometimes Tom would beat me to it and then I would just retweet his post because he's tweeting for the museum and I'm tweeting for the artifact lab specifically. During this time I also received some emails from colleagues with questions about the treatment by putting the content images out there on the blog and through social media. I was creating a new way of engaging with my colleagues and offering opportunities for correspondence and professional exchange, again using the blog to create social interactions. Another way that we use the blog is to follow up on things that we have already posted on social media. For example, we were working on an inventory of our Egyptian collection in storage and came across a tiny animal mummy. We wanted to x-ray it, so I snapped a photo of the mummy with my phone and sent it to Tom to see if he thought it would be good content for the museum's social media sites. Guess what this is kind of thing. He immediately posted the image on Facebook and Instagram and you can see these two posts here. And if you look on the right hand column on both of those posts, you can see how we immediately got a lot of comments and likes. He wrote, place your bets now, we were about to x-ray this mystery mummy. When we x-rayed the mummy later that day, I sent Tom x-ray images to post for a follow up and here are the follow up posts. And I then blogged about this and here's the blog post and then promoted the little mystery on Twitter, on the Artifact Lab Twitter account. So this kind of thing is definitely popular. It created a lot of different content. It's engaging because you're not just providing this content but you're asking people to weigh in and be a part of the discovery process via social media. Third type of post I created on the blog and then linked to on Twitter is a summary of a lecture or conference I've recently attended. Here's an example. I really like these posts because they're pretty straightforward. They kind of write themselves and they allow me to make connections to other institutions or people. I make sure to tag these posts with the name of the conference. You can see I've pointed this out with the red arrow on the slide and or institutions or people involved so that when people are searching for more information online, they will possibly run across my blog post as a result. If I can't attend a conference or something of interest but I'd like to know more about it, I could recruit someone who is attending to write a post for me. This is yet another way to engage more people and make it more social. I also like to connect posts in some way to original content that I have produced, either a link to an object that I worked on or a topic that I've researched. This helps direct attention back to the work at our own institution. And speaking of recruiting other bloggers, guest bloggers are really the best. While I've done most of the blogging for the Artifact Lab blog and some of their conservators, like I said in our department, they have contributed as well, I'll also occasionally ask interns and sometimes people who aren't even working here at the museum to write posts for us. It not only helps relieve me of some work but also helps provide some variation in the content. One of my favorite guest bloggers is a now 12 year old rising seventh grade student from Atlanta, Jessica Schwartz. Jesse and I met two summers ago when her and her family visited the museum. She was immediately fascinated by watching us work in the lab. She has returned to the museum several times in the past two years and we invited her behind the scenes to learn about what it is we do in conservation. I asked her to write about her experience visiting us for our blog and I wrote something about it too. As it turns out, her father has a special connection to the museum as well and subsequently the whole story of Jessica and her father's connection to the museum was written up in a front page featured in the Philadelphia Inquirer. We like to link to pertinent news stories on our blog as well. So of course we featured this one on our list. Now, Molly here and the In the Artifact Lab exhibition have been pretty much endless sources of content for me as a social media manager. Obviously when the piece in the Inquirer came out, I went ahead and trumpeted that from our social media channels. It's a great idea to use content that was created by other people especially when it talks about your institution because it's a win-win situation for everybody. Doing so gets more people to read that publication which the writer and publisher will certainly appreciate. It humanizes your brand to a certain degree in showing that someone else in your organization a real person is reading and appreciating some of the same publications that some members of your audience are probably enjoying. And of course it gives you free content that you don't have to take the time to write or create yourself and that's a huge bonus. But Molly here has given me so much more than that just that one news article. The In the Artifact Lab exhibition is a constantly changing environment where every time I visit, no matter what Molly is doing it's different from what was going on the last time I dropped by. Whether that's because she's performing a different part of her duties or because she's looking at a different piece in our collections. Both of these changing elements provide unique snapshots of the overall purpose behind Molly's work in the Artifact Lab exhibition and they're perfect for me to share via social media not to mention for visitors to experience during their own trip to the museum. Furthermore, Molly and the other conservators who work in the Artifact Lab are themselves a big part of why this exhibition is such a goldmine of social media content. These are real people working in here who open the window twice a day and answer questions from visitors about their work. Every day. And that human element of the story makes it a lot easier for a lot of people to really get engaged and excited about the work that they're doing and about the objects with which our conservators are working. But you don't necessarily need to have an open conservation lab in order to have great social media content. The Artifact Lab exhibition is only a small part of what we share on the general social media accounts for the museum. Just like your own collection has our collection has plenty of different objects at our disposal that can serve as the basis of content that lends itself really well to sharing. As an example, what you're looking at right now is a screenshot from the Penn Museum's online collections database. Now, this is a digital record. It currently includes entries representing over 700,000 objects here in the museum's collections. It has more than 150,000 photographic records. The entries herein range from fairly basic listing and object type material, provenience to rich entries with deep descriptions of the object written by museum curators and references listing exhibitions in which the object was included, bibliographies through various museum publications. This database is a practically endless source of social media content for me. And its individual entries all serve to illustrate what we're all about here at the Penn Museum in their own little way. Depending on where I'm sharing it, my approach is gonna be a little different. So let me demonstrate that a little bit. First, we're gonna look at Facebook. Facebook offers you four unique ways to post an update from a company page. One is a text update, which consists only of written text with no extra bells and whistles. Another one is a link post, where if I paste a URL into this text box in the caption, a handsome little summary of the page to which I've linked will appear below my text. Once that summary has popped up, you see that summary there, you can go into that caption and delete the URL from the text box, and the link summary will stay there. It just looks, the caption looks a little cleaner without an ugly link at the end of it. If there's an image on the page that you're linking to that's large enough, it'll populate there as well, as you'll see. If the page only has smaller images, then it will pull a photo and appear as a smaller thumbnail on the left-hand side. This is an auto-generated image. It just pops up on its own when you drop in that link, but you can also replace the auto-generated image with your own image if the one that was generated automatically isn't looking quite the way you want it to look. Another type of post is a photo post, where you upload an image and use the text box to provide a caption. This gives you the ability to use a larger image than a link post would. The liability here, though, is that you don't have that sleek-looking link box if you have a page that you want people to visit after they see your picture and read your caption. It's either a link or a photo, you can't have both. So the way around that is to include a link in the caption, excuse me, as I've done here. One thing to be mindful of is that in your newsfeed, Facebook will cut off a caption with a dot dot dot if it's longer than just a few lines and your link is usually gonna go at the end of your caption. So keep your caption short or have something captivating enough that people will actually click on read more. It doesn't seem like much work, but to a lot of people, you'd be surprised. And finally, a video post is where you upload a video clip directly to Facebook as opposed to putting it on YouTube or some other video site and linking it to it on Facebook. Right now, Facebook is just dying to compete with YouTube as the go-to online video outlet. And so the Facebook algorithm that chooses what lands on your personal newsfeed, it gives extra preference to videos that were uploaded directly to Facebook. Now that's not to say that just any video is gonna be successful on Facebook, but it usually gets a good head start over the other types of posts just by being video content. Each of these types of posts can be useful for approaching your content in a different way. With regard to our collections, the most frequent type of post that I'm using is a photo post, typically with a caption that links back to the collections database. So, here's a post from a few weeks ago. Holidays, I should mention, are very big on social media. Anybody who has gone anywhere near Facebook on a Father's Day or a Mother's Day, you know what I'm talking about. These holidays, they're good opportunities for institutions to chime in. And for this past Father's Day, I use it as a way to connect to our collections database. So here's the Facebook post that I published that day. As many of you might know, Ramsey's The Great was a father to more than 100 children during his lifetime, which I think makes him a pretty relevant reference for the holiday. I took a strong photo of one of our most captivating objects representing Ramsey's. And in this short caption, I made the connection to the holiday, the holiday that nearly everyone else on Facebook was already talking about. I included a hyperlink in my caption that linked back to the collections database and the entry for this particular object. It's not a necessity that you link anywhere in your photo posts, but it's a good habit to be in because once they take the bait, then there's a good chance that they're gonna explore your website further and learn more about your institution than from just the page that you sent them to. Now let's take a look at publishing on Twitter. And we'll use a different anchor for content as well. The same goal of sharing your collections can be reached on Twitter, but through a somewhat modified approach. And I know this tweet's gonna need a little explanation. For starters, one fundamental thing to consider is that tweets are limited to 140 characters, meaning that you'll often have to truncate your messages into a punchy one-liner or two-liner at most. Twitter also allows you the opportunity to post images and hyperlinks, both of which you'll see here. But the problem there is that both of those also cut into your use of characters, which makes your punching us even more important. And particularly on Twitter hashtags, which are words or phrases that are marked by that pound sign in the front, those are an important way of connecting with other users. Someone who's interested in Native American wampum, for example, they could search for the hashtag wampum on Twitter and find tweets from others who are talking about wampum and often those tweets link to richer content about wampum. But hashtags can also be used in funny and creative ways as well. Twitter's homepage shows users hashtags that are trending, which means that they're being heavily used currently and institutions can often play with these hashtags when they're relevant to them. So here's a tweet from over the winter where the hashtag ruin a classic rock song was trending. I saw an opportunity to share an example from our Egyptian section and it went over very well. Thanks to other users retweeting and commenting on this one tweet, it gained over 14,000 individual impressions on users on Twitter, which is considerably more people than we even have following our account. And it brought dozens of people from around the world directly to our website where they were able to learn more about the museum and its Egyptian collection as a whole, as well as about the broader story of ancient mummification, which is elaborated upon on this page. But you don't necessarily need a big database of your objects, nor do you need original content quite as dense as ours in order to put together some quality social media posts. Here we have a recent post from the museum's Instagram page. Instagram is a unique social channel in that it relies completely on photos or videos and their captions. You can't post there unless you have a photo or video in your post. You also can't include hyperlinks to other websites in your captions. You need captivating visual content or you have nothing here. So while I often use Instagram to simply share some of those great photos that we have waiting for me in our collection database, I'll also use it to show ways in which we're using our collections to engage our visitors. So one day not long ago, I wandered up to the in the artifact lab exhibition during one of Molly's open window Q&A sessions. And I happened to catch her speaking with a visiting colleague. I just pulled my smartphone out of my pocket, snapped this photo, wrote a brief caption and shared it. The people who follow the pen museum on Instagram see this going on and it serves as a reminder to them that they could be this person in the photo if they so choose in this very scenario. All they have to do is come and visit the museum. This whole process took about 10 minutes or so. I should note that Instagram relies on mobile technology. You can see it from a computer, but in order to post content, you need to be using a smartphone or a tablet. And I know this post is back talking about Molly again, but your photos on Instagram can be based on just about anything. Objects in your collection, archival photos, visitors to your institution. The list goes on and on. A little creativity can go a very long way. What all of these have in common is that we're using specific examples from our collections as representations of that larger picture. Anecdotal evidence, if you will, of why our collections matter and why people should be interested in them. So let's say you've caught someone's attention with your content and they hit the like button for one of your posts or even follow your page on one of these social channels. You'll see here on the screen a list of recent interactions that people have had with our Facebook page. Now, whether those people recognize it or not, they have now become potential advocates for your collection. They're now going to occasionally see your content, whether they're looking forward or not because they happen to be on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. And sometimes they'll enjoy it enough to hit like or to share it or retweet it, whatever the case may be. That activity is often shown in the news feed for other users who have not yet interacted with the page at hand. Here, for example, is a post that showed up in my own news feed on Facebook last week. I've never heard of this page before but it popped up in my news feed because one of my friends, Kate Jackson, interacted with it. These are ways that in which other users can be introduced to your organization's social accounts and potentially make that connection as well. The fact that it was someone who I know and trust personally who interacted with this content here, it makes me just a little bit more likely to interact with it myself. It's almost as if Kate Jackson had herself publicly endorsed this page. And the more of these high quality impressions that your page can make on someone, the more likely that they are going to be, not only to share your content for you but also physically come and visit your collection and post their own photos and experiences with it as well as, of course, talk about your collection in forums outside of the social media spectrum like regular all face to face conversation. Now, different institutions should focus their energies on different social media channels. There is no one size fits all approach. I will say that I think every institution should have its own Facebook page. It's free, it doesn't take too much time to get started and it's fairly easy to use on a fundamental level. Once you're there, you wanna make sure that you're maintaining it though, at least every now and then to make sure that it's in good shape. This means, for one, post quality content regularly or semi-regularly. Here at the Penn Museum, we will post on Facebook at least once a day, on Twitter a few times a day, on Instagram a couple times a week but that's a lot to ask for some smaller organizations. As long as you're posting on these channels on even a weekly basis, that's enough if that's all you have time for but it's important to be regular and not have lapses of a month or so because then people start to forget about you or think you've gone dormant altogether. You wanna be checking for notifications of activity and responding when necessary. Sometimes folks will be using Facebook pages or Twitter feeds and interacting with them to find out important information about your institution like what time are you open? Is this exhibition on display? They might have a substantive question that they post as a comment on one of your posts and the longer the gap is between when they post and when your response is, the less valuable it is for everybody. So it's a good idea to be on top of notifications as they come in. You wanna check every now and then to make sure your basic info is up to date. I know that ticket prices change, hours change, exhibitions change, all kinds of things change and so when those major changes happen, you wanna go through and make those edits to your basic information on your page as soon as they do but you also wanna go through every couple of months and just take a look at everything and make sure everything is up to date because it's easy for something to go under the radar. And you wanna make sure your efforts are sustainable. It's pretty easy to, it's a common mistake to front load a whole lot of work because you get excited about getting on social media and all the great things you could do with it and you might post a whole bunch at first and then realize, wow, I don't have time to keep this up and things sort of drop off. So think about the long term when you're getting things started and be realistic in terms of how much time you're gonna have to devote to social. Now, once you're on Facebook, that might be all that you have time for but consider others. One thing that you'll find on Twitter is an abundance of accounts with very narrow and specialized interests. If your collections are particularly specialized as well, this is a great place to connect with like-minded institutions with which you may already interact or find others that you've never known about before. Here you'll find opportunities to get into the real nitty-gritty elements of your collection or you work with it. If you take another look here at sort of the back end of the museum's collections database, most regular people would not be interested in knowing that you can download the object data from our collections database. Most people don't have a use for that data. They don't care about that. But some people do. And when they're familiar with your institution and you have something like this that is really useful to them in their own very specified line of work or field of study, their interaction with it can draw a whole lot of new attention to your institution. And as I mentioned before, anyone who has an abundance of visual content or the time and ability to create it, then the photo-based platform of Instagram is definitely something for you to consider. But the regular maintenance duties I displayed a moment ago should apply to whatever social media channels you choose for your institution to use. It's much better to have a good, well-maintained presence on one social media channel than it is to spread your efforts far too thinly on a whole bunch of channels. And there are some free tools at your disposal that can help you to keep your account functioning on a regular basis. Facebook, it offers some excellent scheduling functions for posts that page administrators can use, making it so that you can have your posts published at a time when it's more likely to attract people's attention. Let me give an example. Let's say you have a lecture video to share. It's an hour long. You don't wanna share that video at 9.30 in the morning because most people are just starting their work day and they don't have time to watch an hour of lecture. Instead, schedule it for later in the afternoon or even in the evening when people are more likely to actually have time to devote to watching it. Remember, people continue using social media well beyond the end of the work day. So it can be very advantageous for your institution to be posting content outside of office hours during weekends and during evenings as well. And with other channels like Twitter that don't necessarily have built-in scheduling functions, you can instead implement any one of a variety of social media management tools, some of which are free and others of which are available on a paid basis. A really great free management tool that I like to recommend is called Hootsuite. Hoot like an owl would hoot. Once you've joined and plugged in the accounts that you wanna manage, Hootsuite lets you schedule the publication of your content and it also lets you monitor other people's content that might be mentioning your organization. Now on Twitter, if someone mentions your organization by name, like for us, it's at Pen Museum, we'll get a notification on Twitter. But we don't get a notification if somebody just mentions our organization conversationally if they just write Pen Museum is great in a tweet. That's not gonna pop up on Twitter. Hootsuite gives you the ability to search on keywords. So if somebody were to just include the term Pen Museum in a tweet, I can see it and I can record react accordingly if necessary. At the Pen Museum, we use a paid service. It's called Sprout Social and it offers some more robust analytical information about reach and audience, but it does cost a few dollars. And again, there's no one-size-fits-all approach. There are other social networks that you might wanna consider for certain purposes as well. Pinterest is a photo-based social channel that is good for an institution with plenty of rich visual content. Some of the most successful content on Pinterest has to do with creative processes and showing how other users, showing users how to do things that will prove upon their lives or their happiness. Flickr is less social than other networks but it's a terrific way of putting your content out in front of a huge number of people. Let's say, for example, you've got a 16th century manuscript in your collections and it has text and art that are unique to anything else in the world or perhaps it's just a perfect representation of works from its time period or its culture or its author. One approach is to take high quality images of that manuscript and publish them on Flickr in the public domain. I know that sounds crazy to some people but the positive exposure that the work will receive through being shared by others based on its unique qualities, chances are they are going to outweigh any concerns that would be arising from others, potentially making money off of your issue by repurposing it from the public domain. I should mention that the Penn Museum does not generally engage in this because we do make some money off of the images that we've taken in our photo studio but if your institution is hungering for attention and you've got some really unique pieces of content then this might be something you wanna look into. At the end of our presentation we have a rundown of some links that we wanted to share with you folks and therein is a lecture video by a fellow named Will Knowle who works here at the Penn Libraries. He goes a little deeper into that and I'd recommend you give that a watch if you have time. And another social media channel that I wanted to touch on Reddit. Reddit is this fascinating combination of social media and news which Molly and I have used for some great publicity in the past. Reddit features a page called IMA where people with unique backgrounds or experiences invite this site to users to ask me anything. Our Ask Me Anything session was inside the In The Artifact Lab exhibition. It was Molly and our head conservator, Lynn Grant and it went exceptionally well and brought us a lot of new attention and even new visitors. But I should mention that Reddit is a network of quite brutally honest users and when somebody tries to use Reddit and especially this page for just shameless self promotion as opposed to facilitating useful conversation your experience with it cannot possibly go a lot less smoothly than ours did. So here at the museum we are really fortunate to have a social media guru like Tom Stanley. I'm sure you all will agree with me. But I think that Tom and I both wanna emphasize that social media efforts do not have to be complicated, difficult or time consuming and the nice thing about social media is that it does not have to require a huge commitment. You don't need to have somebody dedicated to it full time. I think it's worth emphasizing again Tom's recommendation to focus efforts on one well-maintained platform rather than spreading yourself too thinly across several different platforms. More is definitely not always better. Yeah, in fact, when I started managing the social media accounts for the Penn Museum it was about two and a half years ago and at that point I was only a part-time staff member and I at that point as well had plenty of other responsibilities on my plate beyond social. I did a good job with it. I kept all of our accounts functioning on a continuing basis. At that point we were only on Facebook and Twitter since then I've been made a full-time employee and I have more time for things like posting more frequently and branching out on a new social platform. But a single person working part-time was able to sustain the social media presence for an institution our size. And I bet the same would very likely apply to many of the institutions you folks are representing. Personally I have found blogging and sharing my work through social media to be extremely rewarding. I have connected to colleagues in ways that I normally would not being active in social media has made me more aware of ongoing work at other institutions and it can be a lot of fun. I think the key is to finding a way to fit it into your daily or weekly routine to not stress too much about coming up with amazing content all the time. You can let your collections and your work speak for themselves and people are gonna be interested so you can really just keep it simple. So this is something that I've really learned along the way. In closing this portion before we I think we might have some time for questions at the end, we'd like to leave you with some tips and I'm gonna start with the tip that I received when I first started blogging. I was feeling really intimidated because I had read other people's blogs and I thought that they were so clever and interesting and I felt like there's no way that I was gonna write something so interesting myself. And I was told something that really helped me which was don't feel pressured or be particularly clever or funny but don't be afraid to have fun and use your own voice and that's really what blogs are for and it's what makes them more interesting and engaging. They're not academic writing. Also take inspiration from other posts. There's no need to be original all the time. This applies to blogs and all of social media. I'm as guilty as anyone for not being a regular reader of other blogs but I use social media to draw my attention to blogs and posts of interests which is why promoting information through social media is so important and reading other people's interesting posts often inspires me to write something and then I'll be sure to credit that person or institution when I do. And don't be afraid to start slowly. You can just start by if you aren't on a particular type of social media but you wanna get started you can just start by following other people and seeing how they're doing it. Seeing how they're shortening their links seeing how they're posting images how often they're posting and you can get your feet wet that way and I think that that often is going to be the best way to kind of learn about some of this stuff. Some of my ideas folks I highly recommend that you make use of video when you can on Facebook specifically. But remember that people have very short attention spans nowadays so try to keep your video short. A 30 second video is pretty ideal and you can have some of success with some longer ones but try to keep it short generally. Get your aim and sizes is right. There are a lot of different ways to have an image appear on Facebook and depending on the way in which you're posting it and on Twitter as well and Instagram I mean Instagram is just square photos but with Twitter and with Facebook sometimes you can put up a photo and displace in kind of a wonky fashion. So do a little research in terms it doesn't take much but I would recommend you look up some of the ideal image sizes for these social platforms in that list of links that we have at the end for you one of those is a great summary of image size recommendations for Facebook. So take a look at that I would recommend. Give proper attribution for content that was created by others. I'm speaking specifically here with regard to photos. We haven't run into any images issues rather as the Penn Museum in terms of misappropriation of other people's content but when somebody is taking a photo and has asked for an image credit then do your best to give it to them and when you're able tag pages for other institutions if they've provided you with content sometimes the link through to their page is gonna be enough but remember this is a community so be friendly, be knowledgeable about privacy issues. If you're taking photos of visitors for example, what we do here at the Penn Museum is if we are taking photos of people who are minors then we'll have release forms signed by their parents indicating that we can use their photos on our social media or in our publications or what have you. We keep signs at our desks indicating that people who are over 18 can be photographed at any time and if they'd like for that not to happen they should notify a guard. They never notify a guard. The signs are there sometimes people I'm sure aren't seeing them but we have ourselves covered in that regard. Deal with criticism gracefully as it comes in through your social accounts. Sometimes people will have a snarky comment to put on your Facebook post and sometimes you just have to live with it. This is how social media works. People will comment on things that they don't know about and sometimes they'll say things that are rude but are valid and so be mindful that this is what it is. It's a community of users and they're gonna speak their mind every now and then especially if something strikes a chord with them. Don't be afraid to delete things off your page that are really malicious or threatening or have any kind of swear words or racial slurs or something. Those don't belong on the Facebook page of a cultural institution. And lastly, keep an open mind because this field is always changing. Instagram is only a few years old. Twitter only a few years older. I'm sure some of you might remember MySpace. Well, that doesn't really exist anymore and who knows how the ones that we're using are gonna be faring a few years from now. As new technologies appear, check them out. Think about whether they're gonna work for your institution and embrace them if you have the opportunity. Don't be bashful, don't be scared. So there are tons of tips and ideas out there. These are just a few that we wanted to share in addition to everything else that we've covered today. This final slide that we put together are just a few additional links to other sites and articles that may help answer additional questions that you might have or help you along the way as you get involved in social media. The very first one is a link to the AIC Wiki, a page on PR and outreach, which is, it's a Wiki, so probably we need to update it, but it gives you a nice, it's a nice foundation for some of the different platforms that are out there. And we've gotten, I just wanna, before we go on, I just wanna say that we're getting some really interesting comments and questions in the comments box and so we really appreciate all of your very engaged, our engaged audience today, this is great. We got a little, we kept going and we wanted to ask two additional poll questions, so if we could just quickly pull up the next poll, we just wanted to get a sense of how many different web-based platforms you're all using for work-related purposes, not personal. So obviously Facebook is a big one. Facebook's always the winner. A lot of people on Twitter too and a good amount of people on Instagram. Good, and Tumblr number four, that's interesting. Yeah. All right, some interesting numbers there. Great, and then finally, we're interested in knowing which of these platforms are any others that you've found to be the most useful for your own needs, the needs of your institution. And if you could just please answer this question in the chat box. And while you do that, we have a lot of questions that we know we won't be able to get to all of them, but we might be able to pick out a couple that would be good to address right now, that we'd have time for. So let's start at the top. Margaret Brooks, Pembrokeshire. Hi, Margaret. Do you have problems with data protection images for images of items? I wouldn't say that we do. We have, I mean, we have a lot of data here, but thankfully we have a pretty active and engaged IT department. We had most of our data on physical servers here and we've recently moved to a cloud-based service called Box. It has its bugs, but I've definitely found it to be a pretty helpful system on the whole. It certainly does cost some money and I wouldn't be able to speak to how much, but I wouldn't say that we have any major problems with data protection for our images. You know, Tom, I noticed in the comments as I could look at them during this, that a lot of people were commenting and asking about image protection and watermarks and putting images out there in different social media sites. And I first wanna say, I feel like it's important to not be afraid of sharing images. I mean, Tom can speak to this more from a technical perspective and the privacy issues, but you kind of touched on this, but it might be worth addressing again. Yeah, I would say that I remember that with most of these platforms, they're not gonna have the ability to, like once you post your image there or the video will have you, it's gonna be sized down considerably so that the site will be able to publish not only this but all the hundreds and thousands and millions of other posts that are coming in as well. So even if you take a high quality image and pop it into Twitter, or rather, you know, Twitter or Facebook, it's not gonna be coming through quite as high quality as when you put it in. And what I like to do is I like to size it down to really just the size that it needs to be and not any larger. And I'll share it there and somebody could go in and take it and repurpose it somewhere else online, but these aren't, you know, once I've sized it down and it's not necessarily a printable image anymore and while there could be some concerns, they're outweighed by the attention that I'm bringing to the objects. Another thing, sorry, Tom, I'm gonna jump. There's another question that just came up in the comments box and I know we're not gonna be able to answer all of these but somebody asked if we could please address issues with naysayers, people thinking maybe social media is an outreach. And I mean, I feel like it so speaks for itself and like you said from the beginning, you know, that everybody, those numbers of how many people are on these different social media sites but like how in your job, you know, how well supported do you think this is from the museum and how has that been a challenge for you? Yeah, sure, there are definitely naysayers and people who don't think it's worth their attention. But I would look at the decline of print as a really a testament to the growing importance of web-based content and social media in particular. We were at one point in a media environment where there were just a few television channels and plenty of magazines and print publications but it was a one-way line of communication and print is disappearing. In the public relations office, we're very much aware of this and instead people are all just writing their own content and sharing it through these social media channels. As print declines and as web-based media grows, I think the folks who are naysayers about it will have to come to terms with this eventually. Generally, those are folks who have been around longer and who didn't necessarily grow up with this kind of nascent technology, but I did and I'm watching it get bigger and bigger all the time and it's gonna reach a point where it can't get any bigger but we're not there yet and we've got a long way. Let's take a look real quick at some more of these. We've got from D. Stubbs Lee in St. John, Canada. Anything our museum posts on the web, Facebook, is required to be published simultaneously in English and French. Oh my goodness. We do not have to deal with something like that. I understand that you would being in your particular geographic location but thankfully we are just in English and I don't have to deal with anything quite so nightmarish as that. So I would think images would be like a great, like you can- Images, yeah. I don't need to be translated many times. Yeah, I mean your caption will be, but yeah, a heavier reliance on visual content and less on text is what I would recommend in your case, D. Generating short links, let me- There's actually a lot of people who answer that in the comments box. So if you didn't see that. It's a website, I prefer to use a website called bitly, B-I-T dot L-Y. If you type that into your URL browser, you're gonna get right there. And you can make an account for yourself for free and you can save, like every link that you pop in, you're gonna have a history of all the links that you've popped in and how many times people clicked on them and where those people are. It's a great tool, I'd recommend it. Twitter about to increase the limit from Brad and Pocasset, Massachusetts. That would be great, Brad. I haven't heard anything about that, but I'm all for it. Registering hashtags. Lisa, I have not registered any hashtags before. To be honest, I've never heard of such a process. So I'm curious and I'm gonna look into that after I get off of here. Image protection. We sort of touched on that earlier. Image rights. If you have some image rights information that you really wanted to include, you're right that on Twitter, we would be running out of space given the 140 character limit. We'd be running out of space pretty quickly. What I like to do is I like to go on a Photoshop or an alternative to Photoshop. There is one that I mentioned in that helpful links piece in our presentation. But just go in there and physically add one to the photo. Unless you've been given specific instructions, don't ever modify this photo. Chances are if you're adding a photographer's name to the photo in modifying it, they're gonna be okay with that modification. I think we have like less than a minute left. We have one minute left. We have one minute left. Somebody is just asking in the comment box about do we have interns posting for us? We definitely do. The artifact lab blog that I moderate, we don't, I'm the one checking things and nobody checks my posts. They go directly up. Our blog. Our blog, we do have our chief of staff keeping an eye on our blog. He approves things and then sends them to our web manager to post. And as I'm writing my blog posts and my web content, my social media content, I am keeping in touch with curators for the curators and keepers and experts here on staff. And even if it's not too extreme of a content, not too detailed rather of a caption, then I'm typically running it by somebody and saying, hey, does all this look okay? Did I phrase this correctly? That kind of thing. I think that's all that we can do for now. Thank you everybody. Please do the evaluations and we'll see you next month. Thanks everybody for tuning in. Yeah, this was great. Thanks everybody. Thank you. Bye bye. And next month, remember, excuse me, that the Riyadh webinar said thank you, Mike and thank you, Molly and Tom.