I recently had an informal meeting with Ikon, Birmingham’s contemporary arts gallery, where we discussed how they can use social media effectively. Many galleries, museums, and other attractions have profiles in a number of social networks and Ikon is no exception. The main social media activity from Ikon is on Facebook and Twitter where they have developed a fairly active following. The Twitter account is particularly interesting when used to live blog from a series of talks. Encouraged by this initial success (which has come relatively easily), Ikon are keen to push forward and develop a more comprehensive social media strategy. I asked Ikon three key questions, and discussed a number of solutions for them. Ikon are keen for you to add more in the comments below.
Who talks for Ikon through social media channels?
One of the most difficult things to get right when tweeting as an organisation is voice: should Ikon tweet as Ikon, or tweet through individual members of staff? If the latter, then should these staff run a personal and work Twitter, or change their user names to include “Ikon” e.g. @JonHickmanIkon? Here are some options:
- One organisational Twitter account:
- This is Ikon’s current approach and is working fairly well, but we were concerned that the Tweets might end up lacking personality and become broadcast in nature.
- One option on the table is to sign Tweets by the appropriate member of staff, to add a sense of personality to them.
- Another idea was for the Ikon account to be run by one person as their main account, something similar to the excellent organisational tweeting from OverheardAtMoo.
- We also discussed being playful with the identity of @IkonGallery: can followers guess who is tweeting at any given time?
- Tweeting as individuals:
- This can be problematic because staff are mixing their professional life and personal life.
- This format also means that should someone leave the organisation, followers travel with them.
- Personal + Work Twitter:
- This split personality approach gets over the objection to mixing private and personal thoughts, however it is is difficult to maintain when personal interest and work overlap: which account do you tweet from?
- This solution doesn’t prevent followers moving with the member of staff, who can change their name (as timesjoanna did when she moved from the Birmingham Post and ceased to be postjoanna). Any social capital generated here is to the individual not the organisation.
- There was an interesting discussion about mixing private & personal twitter accounts at West by West Midlands (hear the audio, led by Kasper Sorenson)
If you have any thoughts on these approaches please, do add a comment below.
How can Ikon’s social media be more engaging?
At the time of writing, Ikon has generated a Twitter following of 447 and a Facebook fan base of 766. It’s dipping its toe into being conversational with these communities. Answering the question of voice will certainly help to make Ikon more conversational. Current Ikon social media activity merely supports its traditional activity through trnasmission of marketing messages and by live blogging events. I suggested to Ikon that if its social media is to be more engaging it needs to move beyond reporting what is happening, and become the thing that is happening. Essentially this would mean 360° social media arts commissions; a project that would allow public collaboration and participation with the artist. A simple example of this would be for an artist to set a theme for a photographic project, with images collected from the public via Flickr and curated into a physical exhibition by a the resident artist. It is easy to see how this idea can be developed within a number of media, and into something much more in depth.
How would you use social media for collaborative arts? Please do add any thoughts to the comments.
What audiences could Ikon serve through social media?
As the social media audience is still a niche audience, Ikon wanted to know how much effort it should put into this activity. This is especially important if we are to consider a social media arts project as outlined above. I turned this on its head slightly, considering the different groups that Ikon serves or hopes to serve and how they feel about social media:
Members of the public who fall into Group 2 are an easy win: they will be interested in artistic projects and social media projects, and would perceive a lot of benefit from a social media arts project. The objective of a social media arts project might be considered to be to move as many of the potential audience into the Group 2 quadrant. Those in Group 3 are difficult to engage in social media or arts: they have no interest in either aspect. Groups 1 & 4 are potentially the most interesting for Ikon and other arts organisations: they have an interest in one of the two aspects, and this may be enough to get them engaged with a social media arts project. The hope is that then they will reappraise their engagement with arts or social media and continue to explore the newer interest.
The educative possibility of driving people from Group 1 to Group 2 is especially worthy of note. Digital inclusion is high on the government agenda, with several initiatives and policies driving towards the aim of increased online participation. Organisations such as Ikon have an education and community development remit. Driving users towards social media through participatory arts would be a valuable contribution to both organisational aims and the wider agenda of digital participation. This could be delivered through teaming up with social media practitioners and enthusiasts, using the popular surgery format pioneered in Birmingham.
How do you think Ikon could develop audiences and contribute to digital participation? The comments are yours…
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On the “who’s tweeting question”, I’m finding the Ikon’s account a little odd at the moment. It’s anonymous, but attempts personality – see tweets like http://twitter.com/ikongallery/status/3544602999
my position on this is that it forms a sort of club around people who get the concept (either because they know who is tweeting, or are happy not to know, or know enough people who work at the Ikon to guess) – which risks alienating new people (new to Twitter, or the Ikon).
I think it’s a case of asking yourself (as the tweeter) whether “the ikon” (the organisation) is doing something – or are you. If you can’t say “we” (or who in particular) then I think this is exactly the sort of communication that risks building barriers rather than including people. I’ve written at length about this http://www.jonbounds.co.uk/blog/670/you-are-not-your-brand-online-%E2%80%94%C2%A0and-especially-not-on-twitter/
I come down on the idea of “signing” org tweets – with another twitter acc if the user is comfortable with that – unless they are purely informational.
There are also Customer Relation Management questions, if an org is serious about this it still has to be handled with efficiency and care – even in “unordered” media. If someone has an issue who’s monitoring (and monitoring is more efficient than following) and who has to deal? It is too important to be left to chance.
The only tool I’ve seen do all of this so far is CoTweet – worth investigating.
I think your quadran diagram is a very good way/example of explaining the different segments of users, and I think this could be applied not just to the ikon gallery but to other organisations in explaining this scenario.
An idea to help increase engagement from their followers on twitter as an example would be to encourage them to be part of the arts project, by “crowd sourcing”: dates and times for opening/closing each event, ideas for shaping arts projects (which you’ve already touched upon), volunteers to participate in the projects, source ideas for exhibitions, get social media users to engage on all levels of the quadrant – segment 3 is the always going to be the most difficult to include.
Getting segments 1 and 4 of people seems to be the best way of getting interest – maybe some sort of mix between the two camps could be the answer?
Either way – you’ve highlighted some interesting points for further discussion.
The tweeting question is one that a lot of us in Arts organisations are trying to answer at the moment, and I’ve found Jon Bound’s writing on the subject to be really helpful. I’m also part of Pete Ashton’s metapod connect course where we’ve been looking closely at these issues.
I tweet a bit on behalf of @belgradetheatre and we’re very much still trying to find our voice. For the Belgrade it seems increasingly as though Twitter is a place for us to converse with other Arts and partner organisations rather than our audience, who are more likely to be on Facebook.
I’d imagine the Ikon would differ from us on that point but I’m starting to think that a number of separate accounts might be the way to go – similarily to how the Guardian has a number of more specific twitter feeds. It makes sense to me for @BelgradeBoxOffice to talk about tickets and last minute offers whilst @BelgradeCommunity could be a place for our Comm & Education company to liaise with and source partnership orgs. I’m still thinking this through though!
The Belgrade did a lot of branding work a couple of years ago and I think that’s helped inform the personailty of our online voice. We’ve got a fairly clear idea of who we are and how we’d like to be perceived. If Ikon has done anything similar then it might be helpful to look back at that.
Re: online events etc, I’m sure you’re already aware of the Youtube symphony orchestra http://www.youtube.com/symphony and although it was obviously a huge scale, expensive project, it’s a great example of what’s possible.
I don’t think there is any definitive answer to how an arts organisation should be using Twitter and other social media tools – I think it differs for each organisation and their audience.
The RSC’s audience seems a lot more confident talking to us on Facebook rather than Twitter, but then Twitter has allowed us to be more creative about what we do. For me the reason we use Facebook and Twitter is to firstly engage people with our brand and secondly to communicate with audiences in an environment that is familiar to them where 2 way communication is common place (and, from a marketing perspective, all this will evetually lead to a ticket sale).
Our main success has been the live(ish) tweets from the set of the filming of Hamlet – 3 actors sent updates which were then broadcast on Twitter. Each actor was identified at the beginning of their tweet by their initials. I think that what people want from Twitter (and what has worked for us) is the stories that arts organisations generate – the everyday goings ons which are interesting to the general public – but do the Facebook users want the same thing? I worry that creating different RSC accounts with different personas may just lead with people losing interest or becoming frustrated at having to sign up to follow different accounts to get the full picture of the organisation.
On another note I wonder whether we are becoming a bit too obsessed with Twitter and hence alienating a good chunk of our audiences.