Page 102 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2014

AC/E digital culture ANNUAL REPORT 2014With regard to the followers’ level of activity, or engagement, the museum that did best on Facebook was the Museo Romántico in Madrid, with 31%, followed by the MNAC, 26%, and the Fundació Gala‐Dalí, 25%. On Twitter, however, the largest index of interaction was the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, with 91%, followed by the Museo Thyssen with 76% and the Museo del Prado with 38%.The report showed that the museums’ audience on Facebook was larger than on Twitter, but on Twitter the engagement, the interaction, was much greater. None of the museums scored high enough with both parameters for them to have what can be considered an “influential community”, the closest being the Museo del Prado, the Reina Sofía and the Guggenheim.If we compare these figures for followers with the 59 million visits per year that the more than 1,500 Spanish museums receive, they look smaller still. Nonetheless, in comparison with other major international institutions, we see that our museums are still far behind the figures for leaders such as the Tate Modern, with 600,000 followers on Facebook and almost a million on Twitter, but higher than some such museums as the Louvre, with barely 61,000 followers on Twitter.Good figures, both for number of followers and for engagement, almost always go hand in hand with a clear loyalisation and attraction strategy and well‐ defined aims, which are essential when an institution enters the world of Web 2.0. Below I give some other examples that might be considered inspiring in this sense.A traditional institution such as the Real Academia de la Lengua Española, the RAE, has managed on Twitter (@raeinforma) with the hashtag #RAEconsultas to provide a highly interactive service to resolve doubts and definitions that has reached 500,000 followers. Something similar hasbeen achieved by the Fundación del Español Urgente (@Fundeu), with 175,000 followers.AC/ETo give something more is always a way to obtain followers. In this way, the Eiffel Tower, has achieved more than a million followers with a 360‐degree virtual visit in Facebook made with Google Street View technology.A great effect is also obtained by showing followers what visitors do not normally see, for example, the montage of an exhibition. The Pinacoteca de São Paulo closed a whole floor for a year to change the permanent exhibition. To maintain public interest it created a very striking communication action entitled “Aos curiosos” (for the curious ones) that let its Facebook fans spend three minutes at a time controlling a robot cat which walked around the closed floor with a camera showing images of the work in progress.A community’s engagement is created on the basis of a large number of followers and a high level of interaction with themOne moreexample of themany things aninstitution mayoffer itsfollowers can beseen withGuillermo Solana, artistic director of the Museo Thyssen, in Madrid. Solana has developed an initiative which is pioneering in the world: to show the Thyssen collections through Twitter, thus converting the collection of tweets into an entire art course on the basis of the works on exhibition and a guide to the museum made up of 308 tweets, later turned into a book and the #Thyssen140 initiative. The originality of this approach was to show that, in spite of the 140‐character limit, one could attach photographs and describe a picture part by part, tweet by tweet, and later collect all these tweets in a document using existing free tools such as Tweetdoc. In this way a whole course was created, an educational course via Twitter which won more and more followers day by day simply through recommendations between them.Similarly, the Museo Thyssen has also started activities with network “influencers”, tweeters on cultural issues with many followers who are invited to presentations or visits and who afterwards act asWHERE WE ARE HEADING: DIGITAL TRENDS IN THE WORLD OF CULTURETHEME 8: ARE THE SOCIAL NETWORKS ANY USE TO THE CULTURE INDUSTRY? CURRENT PAGE...102