New engagement with old stuff

An unlikely leader in content development, museums point the way with engaging tactics.

Content development is priority for anyone in social media and marketing these days.  But undoubtedly museums have one of the most challenging content scenarios; to make old stuff new again.  Colleen Dilenschneider from IMPACTS and author of the blog “Know your own bone”  (an exploration of creative engagement in museums and cultural centers) was recently in town sharing more than a dozen examples of effective engagement – an inspiration for more examples in the creative museum genre:

The Effie awards has honored The Field Museum for several campaigns, the most recent was a delightful and successful rebirth of “Sue” the 67 million year old T Rex fossil.  The resulting 10 year anniversary launch spanned traditional and new media and drove over 450,000 tickets – breaking all goals set for the campaign.  The Effie site showcases  this work with a succinct video presentation and a well written/documented  pdf case study.

Colleen inspired these Pittsburgh examples with her sharing of the Museum Analytics site – lots of data from museums across the globe with the ability to parse by city.  As you can see by the Pittsburgh page the top online activity is led by the Warhol Museum  and by The Mattress Factory.  The Warhol twitter feed showcases everything Andy from time capsules to the BMW in a lively conversation with a stunning following of close to a half million followers.  “MF I Confess”  allows visitors to confess their reactions to the Mattress Factory installation art in quick, fun and irreverent videos.

The Field Museum, Warhol and Mattress Factory -very different venues –  yet each with inspiring content development that transforms the old into new engagement.

Room for discussion:

Look to your market for a museum to use as a “client” for to brainstorm content development.  What guides the process of content development for that museum?  What content ideas can you come up with that would meet the limited resource criteria of a non profit and still create engagement?