Her point was simple: know your audience – not only their interests, but their information-seeking habits. For some audiences, traditional radio, TV, or newspaper marketing may make much more sense. For others, or for specific campaigns, online approaches may pay off.

This was a great reminder that even when we feel like new online applications are ‘taking over’ marketing and education, they’re still small in terms of total audience impact. On the other hand, it underscores the point I wanted to make yesterday – they’re not to be feared. At this point, a social networking presence is only a fractional part of a typical museum’s audience relations. So an online presence alone won’t overhaul the museum’s image or vastly change visitation or reputation. But at the same time, the nature of the audiences who are following social networking activity can be very important – if they’re connectors, whose word of mouth is powerful, they’ll be more likely to widely spread the message of their experience with your institution. That audience may contain a few smaller but very influential sectors of members, visitors, and donors. And that audience may also contain the most helpful peer group, providing great feedback and professional conversation.

But when it comes to social networking, it’s different. I was active very early in the online conversation, beginning in the early 1990s on a nascent (and very homely-looking) Internet.  I found BBSes and forums where people discussed history and folklore and culture, got an .edu address and started emailing friends and strangers who had interesting things to say. I saw the graphical Web arrive, moved through a series of search agents and email clients, built webpages on increasingly useful and increasingly less  hideous editors, and set up an array of blogs.

Looking back over my Internet user history, I realize that there’s really no suite of web-based applications that I’ve used consistently for five years in a row.  This is true for most longtime users of the internet. Where was your first email account? When did you first post a photo online, and where? A few sites have lasted 10 years. Some have made it five. Some reward participation for three years or so before being supplanted by an improved version of the same service, or a new service that incorporates the value an old service delivered, but enhances it in new ways.

Given the amount of water under the bridge, my expectations for web applications are, well, realistic. I don’t leap at every newly launched site, because there are far too many. Intriguing ideas don’t always pan out into workable, pleasing web environments. And occasionally a great idea or platform simply fails to be heard above the noise, and therefore doesn’t draw enough user community to provide a good commons. So I generally give new introductions a little time to see if they attract the early adopters and maintain their interest. And when something is getting early traction among people with good judgement, it’s probably earning its attention. Once it’s breaking through, it’s really time to experiment – to get involved and begin exploring the potential of the service.

So it was with Twitter. I certainly wasn’t in the first wave of Twitter users, and neither were most museums. But within six months of its introduction, it had won a following among people who found that it did something few other sites could do so easily or so well – deliver information constrained to quickly digestible, highly engaging nuggets in real time.  I started paying attention, as I had earlier with blogs, Flickr, MySpace and FaceBook, and lots of other interesting and widely used applications too numerous to list.

And what does this approach have to do with museums? Well, a few weeks ago I got into an email conversation about Twitter on a museum ListServ. As a result, I found myself on the other end of the phone with a writer who covers museum technology for an association journal. While we chuckled over the technology a bit, I found that I was having a familiar experience: that of having a hard time conveying my attitude to social technology to a museum staffer. “Is it just a passing trend?” he asked. “Is it worth it?”

Those are questions I’ve encountered everywhere recently, as Twitter has started to  saturate the awareness of marketers and educators in the museum world. There seems to be a discussion of whether social networking is “worth it” every week on LinkedIn, various museum blogs, on the ListServs, and on Twitter itself. As someone enjoying Twitter a lot, I found myself reaching out to answer the question with a hearty “Yes!” each time it was asked. But I’ve started to realize that I’m answering the wrong question.

The wrong question is a familiar question. It’s a question that I’ve heard asked in the museum world since I joined the profession in 1999. Even at that late date, some museums were asking themselves if their website or domain name was “worth it,” and whether it was “worth it” to give every staffer an e-mail address . Was it “worth it” to advertise online?  What about setting up for eCommerce – “worth it?” Was it “worth” migrating newsletters and email blasts to email? “Worth” posting collections or exhibit information, or were we giving away the farm? Every decision seemed to be agonizing, as cautious voices warned against wasting time on a protocol that might not yield fruit according to some concrete measure. By the time the data supported the worth of the activity, we found ourselves playing catch-up.

In the end, most of these uses of technology that resulted from such agonizing decisions are taken for granted today. But most of us are still embarassingly behind, fretting about whether or not we have the capacity to enter social networking. The basis for the hand-wringing is exactly the same: what if we don’t have the money (which, in the case of free applications, translates to staff time)? What if we don’t have any proof that we’ll be rewarded for the time invested?

This chronic foot-dragging seems to be endemic to the museum field. But the questions being asked really have very little to do with the specific technology being discussed,or even with budgeted time. They have more to do with fear of change, and with a general lack of nimbleness within the field.

Museums who hem and haw, chin-rub and “hrmmmm” while deciding how they’ll integrate social networking appear stuffy and lumbering, averse to experimentation and overly protective of their images, as if their institutional identity were so fragile that a single untoward Tweet would destroy their decades-old legitimacy. And it’s no accident. Our institutions appear stilted, repressed, and fearful – because they are – at least when it comes to opening ourselves up to conversation we don’t fully control.

It’s not the merits or demerits of any specific website or networking platform that are the problem. While analysts scurry to quantify Twitter’s performance as a fundraising mechanism, or FaceBook’s impact on event attendance, or how collections on Flickr influence the perceptions of museums among 25-to-39-year olds, museums are mostly sitting and waiting for some definitive answer on whether participation will be “worth it.” Worth taking the perceived risks of devoting some thought and time to the online conversation and to opening ourselves up to others directly.

The danger is that by the time such a determination is so obvious as to produce 100% confidence, the train will have left the station.

It’s becoming clear that most web applications, but especially social sites, have a peak lifespan of perhaps two or three years. The underlying technology changes so rapidly that paradigm shifts happen with a quickness. Twitter is highly interesting now, but it may not be in five years, after a new iteration of immediate, conversational information sharing develops. It’s foolish to waste too much time studying Twitter before getting involved in it, piloting strategies and ideas and, most of all, listening and participating. The same is true for most other networking sites. The ultimate results can’t be observed from outside; they can’t be imagined or forecasted. They will be created in the doing, and as we become involved, we will be there helping to shape the future of conversation around and about museums.

If museums sit and watch the conversation happen while determining whether it’s “worth it” to join in, they experience a significant opportunity cost: the cost of not being included the conversation. In short, the cost of irrelevance. Sure, Twitter may not be a long-term communications platform. Nobody knows where it’s headed.  But it is now, and what’s happening there is important now. Ditto FaceBook, Flickr, and any number of other interesting networking and sharing sites. The conversation amongst museums, museumgoers, museum professionals, and the wider public is something that exists, and has vitality, completely independently of the platform on which it’s taking place.  That conversation reaches back well more than 100 years, and reaches forward into a future that’s difficult to sketch. It has an enduring nature that will not essentially change as long as museums remain museums, places of exploration and learning from ideas and objects. We can trust this conversation.

But we can’t have this conversation in an empty room after everyone has relocated to a cafe down the street. Museums need to be where people are talking. Once, it was enough to present ourselves in glossy magazine pages or newspaper travel and leisure sections, talk about ourselves, and then sit back in our offices hoping readers talked about us, and, we hoped eventually were motivated enough to show up at the museum and talk to us.

Today, we have the opportunity to let people talk to us right now. We can directly engage in the conversation. We can be so interested in our users, so interesting ourselves, so vibrant and vital, that we inch our way up the list of important institutions in people’s lives – institutions that form part of their daily realities and maintain a consistent voice, institutions that help people build and experience their own identities. But we can’t do it if we are skittishly testing new conversational arenas with our toes, rather than wading in bravely to engage.

We don’t have time to watch each new and promising platform thoroughly prove itself before getting involved. By the time that data exists, the conversation may well have moved on to somewhere new, about which we’re equally nervous. We could miss these boats again and again, always for the same reason: that we were too scared they might not go anywhere – while, meanwhile, we remained staidly on the shore, safe and dry, but still not going anywhere.

I believe staffers in museums need to cultivate a quality I think of as nimbleness when approaching new communications platforms. That is, we need not to be hesitant and plodding, but fast-moving and agile. We first need to trust ourselves: know our institutional identities through and through; who we are, what our style is, what our central messages are. Once we have that strong sense of institutional self, we can comfortably try new platforms while feeling secure in our own values and messaging. We can dabble a little, pilot a little, test a little. We can experiment, examine, inspect, re-visit and re-try. We can talk to people and listen to their feedback. We can ask where they’d like to see us, and show up there.

The barriers to entry on some of these new platforms couldn’t be lower, and that seems to be one reason people fear them. But it’s really a reason to embrace them. Most are free, and most of them require minimal time to set up a presence. If posting becomes a burden, there’s not usually a penalty for letting an account sit idle for days or weeks (especially when the alternative is not being there at all).  If the museum finds it’s not connecting with an audience using that platform, that time can be spent on another.

What’s certain is that time spent reaching out to the public is not time wasted. It’s always “worth it” to be involved in the social networking conversation. What’s not worth it is to overly scrutinize any platform to the degree that it becomes a justification not to take part. We need to stop overthinking the social networking environment – we need to spend our time identifying possibilities, piloting new projects, testing ideas, and reporting successes rather than seeking justifications not to take part or maintaining a “show me” attitude that results in lost opportunity.

Museums, be nimble. Museums, be quick. “Should we or shouldn’t we,” “Is it worth it, or isn’t it,” – these are the wrong questions. “How should we” is the right question. Connecting – in whichever way you choose to do it – is never a mistake.

Last night, my boyfriend (hereafter referred to as Snoopy) dragged me into a game session, guiding me through the creation of the peaceful burg of Hamfist. Step by step, we constructed an agrarian town with a farm-based economy, one school, and a number of low-density commercial areas featuring businesses like auto repairs and taco stands.

Before long, we were presented with more choices of resources to develop, including – hey! -  a Sim-Museum. Huh! Museums in SimCity. How does this gameworld see museums?

We chose to build the Natural History Museum for Pulchritudina, our lovely hilly region. Sadly, over the course of the game, we found that visitation was somewhat below projections (okay…there was one visitor) and that the museum was underperforming financially (okay…draining the city’s public funds).

“You only really need to build museums when you want to attract retired old people,” said Snoopy, an old hand at the game with many museums under his belt. Interesting! Minutes into my new museum’s existence, we were already dealing with grim financial realities and overly narrow demographic appeal. We were already cutting jobs and trying to attract young families and urban professionals, to no avail. This game was starting to feel all too realistic.

This made me wonder about the role of museums, generally, in the SimCity world. Turns out that there’s a lot to it. One enterprising gamer has set about recreating New York City in SimCity, complete with Museum Mile. The game designers make available downloads of notable buildings, such as the Guggenheim. In gaming forums, users trade “cheats,” or sets of instructions to create new outcomes – here, a gamer describes how to add art and science museums to raise the city’s overall education level. Step by step, players can unlock codes that allow them to build historic sites and monuments , including the Haga Sophia and the Smithsonian Castle, within the game.

But what’s the point? SimCity locates the value of museums squarely in attracting and building an educated citizenry. A poster to MacGamer.net advises players

“City museums and Major Art Museums offer relics of old for the people who routinely tell kids to get off their lawns. The presence of museums assists the schools and prevents seniors’ brains from turning as mushy as the rest of their bodies. Don’t bother with them until you have a fair number of years behind you.”

Hm. So museums are mainly an educational service to the schools and an intellectual amusement for retirees? So the young professionals, young families, new immigrants, travelers and tourists,  groups of friends and couples on dates would rather spend time in SimCity’s amusement parks, movie theatres, and city playgrounds, leaving the richness of Sim natural and cultural history to a few narrow constituencies – and only one a free-choice audience.

I’d like to beef with SimCity’s simplistic presentation of the role of museums in towns like Hamfist. But those public-funding problems, disappointing admissions numbers,  and stakeholder constituencies sound mighty familiar. Museums do play a role in economic and community development, but unless we offer a value proposition other than ‘we’ll entertain your elderly and educate your young’, it will go unrealized. I’m sorry that the Sim game designers didn’t aim higher when developing their game museums – but maybe I should really be sorry that museums aren’t widely perceived as aiming higher, even in real life.

We closed the museum.