I now have ten weeks to write up my final report and submit it to the Churchill Trust so am going to spend some weeks going over my notes, looking through the hundreds of brochures and material I have brought back and contemplate what I have learned.

I will also load my photos on to Flickr so will link to that when they are up.  I meant to do it while I was away but between meetings, blogging and sightseeing it got a bit much!

I want to thank the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust for the opportunity to travel overseas and meet with museum marketing staff.  The experience was life changing and I am both humbled and honoured to have been chosen as a 2008 Fellow.

For anyone who is thinking of applying for a Churchill Fellowship I can not recommend it highly enough.  It is an incredible learning experience (and a lot of fun).

Applications for next year’s fellowships open in November and you can download the application from here.

So I will probably be a little quiet for a while on this blog while I contemplate and write up my report.  If you are interested in social media in museums I encourage you to keep reading some of the blogs and check out the websites  I have linked to on the side of this blog.

There are some amazing things happening around the world and social media is allowing us to all share this information.  So keep sharing, keep reading and get in to it.  It’s happening all around us…

The Pacific Science Centre is really the first museum or gallery who told me  they were aiming to reach an older demographic – most other museums I met with were looking to build their family market but PACSI has this segment pretty well covered with the majority of families, children, school groups and summer camps attending their museum.

Its a highly interactive museum with lots of things to touch, play with, walk through etc.  They have a gorgeous butterfly atrium where you can walk in and watch tropical butterflies fly around you.

The atrium is heated to maintain the tropical environment for the butterflies so throughout the year its a great place to go and keep warm in the chilly Seattle winter.  But this week with their 40 degree heat the PACSI tweeted that for the first time in a long time it was cooler in the Butterfly atrium than it was outside!

They have a great media following on their Twitter account and managed to get some great media coverage from this tweet.

The PACSIs strategy for retaining audiences is coming heavily from their membership program which is excellent value for money.

Members receive free entry to the Centre, to the exhibitions, receive guest passes and receive magazines and access to other science museums amongst other benefits.

This year with the global economic situation PACSI are focusing their energy on getting members to renew rather than attract new memberships. Their campaign is mostly direct mail to the members as this has been the most cost effective way for them.

They are talking and interacting with  their members through an enewsletter but also a newspaper style newsletter which is issued quarterly and has been so popular they are now inserting it into the daily newspaper once every quarter.  The paper is full of science related stories and fun facts and aims to engage with families and children.

We’re about to jump on the plane for a delightful 40 hour flight home.

So, the last entry will be this weekend after I’m back in cold cold Perth – I think quite a shock after the heatwave in Seattle.

I’ve had an amazing time and learned a lot but all good things must come to an end.

So see you back in Perth.

The main gallery is in the heart of Seattle’s downtown and has a good collection of contemporary art.

The SAM currently has a no photography policy in its galleries but is looking to change this to encourage visitors to engage and experience the gallery spaces and  the art.

It has been really interesting seeing how people view art and museum objects these days, and more and more it is through the lens or screen of a digital camera. While it is odd in the gallery space the flow on effect of sharing photos with family and friends (look out people I have over 1000 to share!) means more people are experiencing, learning and becoming aware of the objects, artists and importantly for us, the museum and galleries.

SAM has a new media manager who is running the Twitter, Facebook and YouTube applications for the SAM and they have around 4,000 fans and followers on each application.

Their Facebook application is very much used for event announcements while the Twitter account is encouraging conversation amongst their community.

One really nice project SAM is running is the ART HIT whereby one of their curator’s load’s up a work of art with a description on Facebook. At first they were worried that the text being uploaded was too long for Facebook users but fans seem to love it and it is really encouraging dialogue about the art.  You can check it out at http://www.facebook.com/seattleartmuseum

They are actually two museums on the same site and run by the same company – started by Paul Allen of Microsoft fame (you can Bing him for his story).

The EMP was designed by Frank Gehry (you’ll remember him from the Guggenheim Bilbao) and is an imposing building of blue and metallic waves.

I first heard about the EMP because of its architecture (thanks Damien) but again heard of it when Michael Jackson died.  The EMP was fast to respond to his passing with a showcase featuring his black sequined jacket and the famous one glove.

They also quickly encouraged the community to contribute with a message board and chalk messages outside the museum. Hundreds of people came and shared their thoughts, memories and emotions on his life, music and his passing. The day he died Twitter melted down and so did EMPs feeds and blogs.

It’s an interesting museum with a unique set of visitors.  The EMP gets hard core music fans as well as families and the Science Fiction Museum also has hard core sci-fi fans and families.

And within this they are trying to connect and attract the local market and encourage tourists to come.

So social media has become an integrated part of their marketing strategy.  They are using Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Flikr to build their online community and their public programs and events are encouraging repeat visitation as well as encouraging fans to join the social networks.

The sci-fi community have very much taken ownership of their online spaces (as you’d expect) and are quick to respond and react to invitations and feeds from EMP.

Their traditional marketing has changed somewhat over the past few years both with the introduction of social media but also with a change in management.  Their print media has been reduced but this is mostly attributable to the loss of one newspaper in Seattle due to the economic crisis and also to the budget cuts to the museums.

Direct mail has played a key role with EMP/SFMHF and the latest exhibition on Jim Henson Muppet exhibition has been well received through the dm campaign.

I loved the idea that the museum is hosting an adults only event this weekend with muppets and beer – ah to bring back the nostalgia of our generation’s childhood with our current love of beer!

I also particularly liked the furry walls where visitors can touch, feel and write in the fur on the walls.  So much fun for adults and children alike.

It was crazy and bizarre and wonderful.  It was super hot so we spent the weekend in the aircon but managed to see most of the strip at night.

A great weekend and I am glad we took the time to get there.  All up we came out even stevens and I even managed to see Elvis!

In February of this year the Met launched a photo sharing competition through Flikr.  They were looking to create a new marketing campaign and wanted to include real people in the ads so they looked on Flikr.  And lo and behold people were already taking photos of themselves in the galleries and loading them onto Flikr.

The Met decided to build on this and created a group on Flikr where people could load their photos up and be judged by Met staff and possibly be featured in the new marketing campaign.

The response was overwhelming and they received some hilarious and wonderful photos from their fans.

They chose a number of photos to be included and sought permission from the photographers and the people in the photos to use them.  They also paid the photographers a fee even though under the Creative Commons license they didn’t have to.

The ads were turned into billboards, subway ads, newspaper ads as well as used throughout the Met site.  It gained great publicity and wide coverage of the campaign.

But some of the community were not happy with the campaign.  The Met did not tell people that they paid the photographers  and many community members thought they were ripping the photographers off.  Professional photographers were also upset that a professional job was given to “amateurs” to do.

And the online chatter started.  Elyse tells the story of sitting at home watching it unfold and thinking she should get involved and say something to correct the community.  But she didn’t.

Eventually one of the people in the photo corrected the community and the issue sorted itself out.  Perhaps this could have been avoided if the Met stated upfront what they were doing in terms of payment and permission, but we are all learning in the online space so it’s an interesting case study on transparency and being upfront with your community.

From the Met’s point of view the campaign has been a hugely successful – I really like the idea of it as well and you can check out some of the winning entries on Flikr.

So yesterday we talked a lot about the changing face of marketing and that social media has really shaken us up on how we look at our audiences, our community and look for innovative ways to communicate but most importantly to listen.

We agree that traditional marketing channels still have a place in the scheme of attracting people to our organisations and exhibitions as people are digesting media in so many different ways and that social media is not a marketing tool but a way to start a conversation with the audience.

But the conversation needs to start internally.  The Met has a marketing taskforce that meet on a regular basis to discuss their audiences and how they can attract and retain them.  Staff of all levels are encouraged to discuss new ideas and initiatives to communicate and converse with the community and it has been the more junior staff who are coming up with new and interesting ways to interact with their audiences in the social media sphere.

And wow!  It is so beautiful. A real classically beautiful building that really has stood the test of time (with a few renovations).

The Frank Lloyd Wright building was completed in 1959 and this year marks its 50th anniversary.  To commemorate this the Guggenheim have curated a show on the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright.

The exhibition was fascinating with lots of archival footage, images and original drawings and plans of buildings, many which were  never built.  I can just imagine the client receiving the drawings from Frank Lloyd Wright in the mid 30′s and just thinking “what is this?”  He was so revolutionary in his designs.

It’s a weird feeling walking up the spiralling ramp of the Guggenheim and I wonder if they have issues hanging art on the curved walls.  In any case it is truly a spectacular building.

If you find yourself in New York (or Bilboa later this year) I’d recommend the exhibition.  It’s fascinating.

The New Museum - art on the building says Hell, Yes

So yesterday (actually it was Monday – this has taken a while to get going) I went to the New Museum.  Its unique from all the other galleries I have been to in that it displays art by current artists.

Their marketing has been very innovative in that they have strong media partnerships and have used their current artists to help with their campaigns.  One example they gave was when their current building opened in 2007.  There was an enormous billboard up the road from them which they could not afford (if if they did would blow the marketing budget!)  Calvin Klein had booked the billboard and the new museum approached them and in partnership, over a number of days dripped a design over the top of the CK ad campaign.

The drips of paint eventually outlined the New Museum building.   You can see how it panned out over a couple of days here on YouTube.

Now that is an innovative partnership!

The New Museum is also on Twitter and Facebook and the accounts are run through the marketing department.  We spoke a lot about communicating with the community online and making sure you are transparent when you do it, so the community know who is talking to them.  Again the issue of the organisational voice came up and the responsibility of the organisation to make sure they are adhering to their organisational directives but also to build and encourage a strong community who value and embrace your organisation.

The New Museum do this in a number of ways including encouraging their international visitors to stay in Bowery and visit the local businesses through a local map as well as encourage the local community to participated and enjoy the museum.  This weekend the New Museum is holding a Block Party which is free for everyone to attend and they have loads of activities throughout the day.

So this weekend we went down to Coney Island for the Siren Music Festival.  It was absolutely free and there were two stages of bands playing from midday until 9pm.

I was keen to see The Raveonettes and Built to Spill and they didn’t disappoint.  We also caught Black Francis (Frank Black) and his wife with their band Grand Duchy which was pretty good and Leigh was happy to be that close to Frank considering we missed the Pixies in Perth.

A great day of music and we managed to take in all the sights of Coney Island.  I loved the old rides and the carnival atmosphere.  And the sun was out so it was a perfect day.

Sunday was spent in Brooklyn wandering around the flea market after we walked over the Brooklyn Bridge.

I managed to get in some gastronomical US delights and ate buttermilk flapjacks and twinkies.  Urh – never again on the twinkie front and was glad for the 1km walk after eating that!  Suffice to say the food here has not helped matters and its only the massive amounts of walking to and from musuems that I think is the saving grace.

Its only 2 weeks now until we come home.  This has been the most amazing trip and I have learned so much and seen incredible museums but I am also looking forward to coming home, cooking a stirfry and doing my own washing.

But enough of that, it will come soon enough and I’m sure when I get home I’ll be wishing to be back here.

I would absolutely recommend to everyone to apply for a Churchill Fellowship (submissions open in November).  I heard past Fellows say it was a life changing experience and I really think it is.  For me just stepping in to the world’s great museums and galleries has been a privilege but to be able to meet and talk with their staff and learn from them has been an experience I won’t forget and I am looking forward to taking their lessons and sharing them.