![]() ![]() Unlike the photo to the left, we never posted hashtags and calls-to-action around the museum encouraging this behaviour. The interesting thing about Friday Night Live is that beyond displaying the event’s UGC on a screen in the museum, we never actively encouraged people to share. By 2014, after failing repeatedly it became clear that we had to change our thinking about how we connected digitally with our visitors while they were visiting. We began to understand that people wanted to do what they do on their devices in the museum. The tours were not well attended, and I would stand around for almost an hour before someone found me. ![]() What we found was that people weren’t interested. We used a number of incentives like memberships and discounts in our gift shop to sweeten the pot. We tried tours, quizzes, scavenger hunts, even where’s waldo-type searches for me. The pilot event demonstrated that there was an opportunity for us to engage with UGC content.ĭuring 2012/13 we upped our UGC game and tried a number of different ways to encourage digital participation onsite. ![]() We would notice people engaging with the wall, even waiting to see their photos pop up, then taking a selfie with their photo on the wall and sharing that. Text based Twitter walls were common at events, but photo-based? That was completely new, at the time there were only two service providers! On an average evening around 2,000 attendees would share around 450 photos, or roughly 22%. People were sharing photos on social media at an astonishing rate back then and we aimed to display that content as part of our new event, Friday Night Live. That is a lot user generated content (UGC) but is any of it meaningful? Can we use this as a data source to inform decision making? Are selfies really the scourge of the museum world like they are made out to be or are more people taking (collecting) photos of artifacts? Is there a benefit to encouraging visitors to share their photos? Do we need to incorporate digital engagement experiences into our exhibitions, or can we be more reactive? Below I’ll dig into these ideas and attempt to extract some meaningful information from this lot of UGC.Ī LIVE photo wall in the Museum A live photo wall in the museum, are you crazy?īack in the fall of 2012, we were one of the, if not the first museum in the world to display visual UGC live in a museum. 263,693 photos as of January 25th, 2018 to be exact. In a little over 4 years we have aggregated just over a quarter of a million photos shared by our visitors. Currently, he is the Museum Computer Network’s part-time Digital Content and Community Manager and a consultant with Cultural & Heritage organizations across North America. He was also a member of the Virtual Museum of Canada Advisory Board. Ryan is active in the global museum community and has volunteered with the Canadian Museums Association’s Young Canada Works in Heritage Project and sat on the board of ICOM Canada. His role is focused on digital content creation, campaign and community management, as well as building capacity within the institution. Ryan Dodge argues that museums do not always need to own the experience – there is power in following your visitors’ leadĪbout the author: Ryan Dodge is the Royal Ontario Museum’s (ROM) Digital Engagement Strategist.
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