Firstly, Maxwell, I love this newsletter. Read it every time. Thank you.
As for this opinion piece, I disagree. As a former museum marketer, I get tired of people beating up museum marketing, especially social media "content". It comes from business naivity and nonsense comparisons. The impact of social media content is wildly overstated, and that's usually because it's pushed by agencies who have a vested interest in aggrandising social media. Follows, likes and even shares are just vanity metrics, when museums need to urgently focus on the bottom line.
Social media platforms bring no real value to organisations, their business model is parasitic. Orgs and businesses spend billions on social media content, so that social media companies can harvest their followers data and sell it back to those compnanies. Museums are being told their marketing is awful and that they should invest tens of thousands of pounds into consultants, agencies, creators and full time staff, that's a huge investment and all this is to get on a hamster wheel, competing for the attention of people on the inifinite scroll of Insta or TikTok. Sure, small museums benefit from viral social media posts (and have smaller structures to get edgy content signed off), but it's a misunderstanding of scale and market maturity to think that viral posts would have the same effect on a large museum. If you hypothetically get 40,000,000 impressions on a viral post and a 0.01% conversion rate where people actually visit the museum instead of mindlessly hitting ther like buttton, that's 4000 extra visitors, huge for a small museum, but not so much for the British Museum.
The opportunity cost of spending thousands on digital "content" (it's an awful word isn't it?) is spending thousands on the core product, which is live programming. What's funny about the opinion piece above is the statement "the world is digital", no it's bleedingly obviously not! And increasingly we're (rightly) seeing social media as a crappy, shallow, toxic copy of the real world. Investing more and more money into digital to "engage" with audiences, and hope that they visit or buy something, is a race to the bottom, because you'll need evermore increasing resources to meet the greater perceived demand.
What museums actually ought to do is invest in their core product - get human bodies through their doors with spectacular and inspiring public engagement programs so that people organically share their experiences on social media themselves. So instead of hoping the content hamster wheel will bring visitors, you're in a virtuous circle of investing in audiences real experiences, and turning the tables on the parasitic social media platforms by inspiring people to create content for you, because they want to.
Firstly, Maxwell, I love this newsletter. Read it every time. Thank you.
As for this opinion piece, I disagree. As a former museum marketer, I get tired of people beating up museum marketing, especially social media "content". It comes from business naivity and nonsense comparisons. The impact of social media content is wildly overstated, and that's usually because it's pushed by agencies who have a vested interest in aggrandising social media. Follows, likes and even shares are just vanity metrics, when museums need to urgently focus on the bottom line.
Social media platforms bring no real value to organisations, their business model is parasitic. Orgs and businesses spend billions on social media content, so that social media companies can harvest their followers data and sell it back to those compnanies. Museums are being told their marketing is awful and that they should invest tens of thousands of pounds into consultants, agencies, creators and full time staff, that's a huge investment and all this is to get on a hamster wheel, competing for the attention of people on the inifinite scroll of Insta or TikTok. Sure, small museums benefit from viral social media posts (and have smaller structures to get edgy content signed off), but it's a misunderstanding of scale and market maturity to think that viral posts would have the same effect on a large museum. If you hypothetically get 40,000,000 impressions on a viral post and a 0.01% conversion rate where people actually visit the museum instead of mindlessly hitting ther like buttton, that's 4000 extra visitors, huge for a small museum, but not so much for the British Museum.
The opportunity cost of spending thousands on digital "content" (it's an awful word isn't it?) is spending thousands on the core product, which is live programming. What's funny about the opinion piece above is the statement "the world is digital", no it's bleedingly obviously not! And increasingly we're (rightly) seeing social media as a crappy, shallow, toxic copy of the real world. Investing more and more money into digital to "engage" with audiences, and hope that they visit or buy something, is a race to the bottom, because you'll need evermore increasing resources to meet the greater perceived demand.
What museums actually ought to do is invest in their core product - get human bodies through their doors with spectacular and inspiring public engagement programs so that people organically share their experiences on social media themselves. So instead of hoping the content hamster wheel will bring visitors, you're in a virtuous circle of investing in audiences real experiences, and turning the tables on the parasitic social media platforms by inspiring people to create content for you, because they want to.