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Biomedicine in museums

We're apparently lagging behind on the social web media side

By September 26, 2009No Comments

Rose Sherman (Director of Enterprise Technology at the Minnesota Historical Society) is circulating a survey about how museums are engaging their communities through social media technologies — blogs, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc.

Rose asks a lot of relevant questions, like:

  • How frequently, on average, are your social media web sites updated?
  • What function(s) in your organization has staff assigned to use social media tools to engage communities?
  • How many full time equivalent (FTE) positions are assigned to use social media tools to engage communities?
  • What function in your organization is primarily responsible for actively using social media tools to engage communities?
  • On average, how many hours per week do staff spend on actively using social media tools to engage communities, e.g. they Tweet, update Facebook pages, post photos to Flickr, post videos to YouTube, etc. ?
  • Do you have a full time position(s) assigned to engaging with your social media networks?
  • Do you have a social media policy? (e.g. http://sites.google.com/site/wharman/social-media-strategy-handbook?

Thought-provoking questions which remind me that the function of such surveys is sometimes to make you aware of what you haven’t done yet. A small museum like ours is particularly provoked by questions like “How many full time equivalent (FTE) positions are assigned to use social media tools to engage communities?”.  I would rather have preferred: “How many infinitesimal part time equivalents …”.

So we’ve got lots to do on the social web media side.

You can fill in the survey here.

Thomas Söderqvist

Author Thomas Söderqvist

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