News
Research that Sumo are conducting in to the way museums use social media hit the headlines this week, when Wall Street Journal columist Pia Catton interviewed Sumo's Jim Richardson for her Culture City Online column.
The article is below:
Measuring Museums by Social Media
The Museum of Modern Art may have nearly 530,000 followers on Twitter, but what is its true online impact? That’s what Jim Richardson is trying to find out.
Richardson (@sumojim on Twitter) is the founder of the British design and marketing agency Sumo, which specializes in arts. He is measuring the social-media reach of not just MoMA but museums around the world, pushing past easy metrics like Twitter followers to quantify more nuanced signs of online engagement.
When he started tallying museums on Twitter, the list had about 500 museums. “When it got to 800, it got to be too much,” he said. So he put the list on Twitter and asked for suggestions. Volunteers mentioned museums that were missed. Now the list stands at 1,700.
“It’s taken on a life of its own,” Richardson said.
The effort began as a way of analyzing how museums used social media. “There are a lot of museums using Twitter, but there are a lot that are using it ineffectively,” he said. “Some don’t tie what they are doing with the goal of the organization. What should they be using the tool for?”
His list includes the number of followers for each museum as well as the organization’s true reach (size of the engaged audience), amplification (retweets, mentions and inbound message ratio) and network (which includes the follow/follower ratio). This information is provided by the San Francisco-based firm Klout, which measures and analyzes digital influence.
Earlier this month, Richardson found that the average number of followers among museums on the list is 3,692.
“It’s useful for museums to have a bench mark,” he said, adding that museums can use the information to determine that they are above average or that they need to work harder to engage with the public.
The data is sure to be a central topic at the MuseumNext conference held on April 30 in London, which Sumo organizes to bring museums leaders from around the world together.
Richardson is also using the information for a book about how museums can develop strategies on using social media. The title — “Social Media Guide for Museums” – is part and parcel of his message: “It’s not catchy, but it’s a title for Google.”