I counted at least 27 sessions that had “Engagement” in the title. I got the sense at some of these that there was indeed a feeling of urgency, and an awareness that the stakes for the success of this enterprise are very high. I think they are.

I was even in a conversation where someone said that “engagement” was being overused. It is not. I think the need for engagement is a critical matter, and serious thought and experimentation around its methods and application should certainly be a central issue for museums.

Why?

Engagement is about looking at the institution and its offerings from the outside. It’s about understanding where people’s heads and hearts are, and finding ways to meet them there, draw them in, draw them up, draw them out into the heady worlds of science, art, and history. It’s not about dumbing things down. Engagement is about making sure that museums remain relevant so they can maintain their position as essential institutions in the life, education and thought of this nation.

This is really important stuff. I am excited and greatly encouraged by this focus of attention by so many at AAM2012, by the desire to learn how to better engage with all your constituencies, be they families, the board, non-traditional museum goers, teenagers, or funders and politicians for that matter. I hope many of the ideas I heard discussed and described will be learned from and where possible, applied.

Although I’m not sure it is generally seen in these terms, the call for more effective engagement is a recognition of the reality that museums are in heated competition. They compete with all manner of distractions. They compete in the realm of entertainment, ideas, education and politics. They compete for hearts and minds and money. As such, museums MUST effectively engage. They must be relevant, alive and smart. They must communicate their value and deliver on its promise. It must be made clear to everyone that museums are vital and necessary institutions for communities, for our national intellectual life, for education, and for our shared hope that the future can be better than the past.

There is clearly a lot of exciting and even experimental work being done at museums (See “Audience Engagement: 75 Ways to Connect in 75 Minutes”). This is terribly encouraging, but I also felt some frustration and on occasion even bewilderment on the part of some attendees who seemed stressed by a lack of time and budgets. “How can we do all these things being asked of us?” And then there is a question implied but not expressed: “How can we compete with the money and expertise of our commercial competition?”

The answer to this was visible at AAM2012: Creativity and passion.

As keepers of the flame of a higher purpose—that the light of knowledge must burn brightly—museums can be profoundly inspirational institutions. They must be. And they must be visionary—holding tightly to their greater reason for being: to bring light, beauty, understanding, wonder, innovation and knowledge to the world, and to make sure that people continue to care deeply about these things. This passion can be contagious, and it CAN be communicated. It can be used to help the broader world engage with the vital work being done by the museum world.

Take heart, take courage and take inspiration from the work and accomplishments of your peers. Museums can compete, they can engage, they can endure without compromising their core values or undermining their reason for being. It’s just a matter of learning or inventing how to do it. Thank you AAM2012 for helping to show the way.

Related Posts: Museum Marketing for Non-Marketers, Advertising in the Facebook Age: Bronx Museum Free Campaign, New-York Historical Society Website

SEO: Be honest.

Use the page title, description and tags to genuinely help people find and understand the content of the page. Don’t put tags on the page for things that are not directly relevant to the content. Don’t title the page something it is not.

SEO: Explain your content.

In a perfect world, the URL, title, description and one of the tags should all reiterate the most important thing on the page and this should be unique to that page of your site.

SEO: Link things up.

Links are GOOD. My page about brand health is linked to from every other page that mentions brand health including this one. This tells the search engine that when it’s looking on this site for information on “brand health” that’s where it should direct everyone. It’s the go to page for that subject, and when they go there it should be (see “Be honest” above).

Be generous with links. They are the life blood of the internet and you should be linking off of your site to authoritative sources not your own. This is not only good web citizenship, it’s also good SEO. Search engines respect sites that help people find quality information.

There is much more to it of course, and what happens off site is critical, but this is the really important stuff that you can do as a matter of practice and it will go a long way toward making your content more accessible on the web.

If you want to learn the specific steps you can take to significantly improve your on-site SEO, then get this handy guide we created: “15 Simple Things You Can Do to Dramatically Improve On-site SEO.”

When I came into the office the following morning I was thinking of discussing it as a viral phenomena and communicating to my creative team how serious my teenage daughter had been about my watching it. This urgent design to share something with others is at the heart of a successful viral campaign and this clearly had the secret sauce.

It turns out that all the 20 something’s in the office had already seen it. They, like my daughter, had heard about it from their friends on Facebook and watched it the night before, probably just as I was watching it.

We watched it again in the office to discuss it’s construction, and were impressed with its effective use of some tools from a classic propaganda toolkit, how it oversimplified things for effect and suggested that if you support this cause and help catch Kony (using the military) that this would somehow solve the complex problem of child abduction in Africa. (See article in Foreign Affairs.)

In the video there were instructions to gather in towns and cities across the nation on April 20, last Friday night, and help “make Kony famous” by putting up posters at an event called “Cover the night.” My daughter and 4 of her friends made plans to go to Union Square at midnight on the 20th to be a part of it.

I agreed to drive them there and see that the situation was safe, and get them back home as soon as I could.

We arrived at Union Square at just after midnight, and the east side of the park was entirely sealed off with police barricades and a long row of police cars that lined that entire side of the park. Police were standing around everywhere. No sign of Kony make famousers though. Maybe the NYPD did not get the memo that there were problems with Invisible Children’s grass roots mobilization. My daughter and her friends had not gotten the memo either.

We drove slowly around to the other side of the park and finally spotted them. There were 6 or 7 lonely looking people and some of the small Kony 2012 posters from the “Kony 2012 Action Kits” attached to a few of the area light posts. The words my teenage passengers used for this somewhat sad scene was, “It’s a huge fail!”

My daughter and her friends refused to get out of the car. They had expected to see thousands of others, and to join them in the cause and the action. When it turned out that only a few people had shown up, all the air went out if the event. I was told to drive them straight home.

They immediately checked the meet-ups and realized that something had gone wrong. They reported, “80,000 invitees and something like 15 people responded.”

So the Kony Video had somehow died on the vine between it’s explosive success as a viral video with 70 million views in the first six days, and this planned mass action a month and a half later. This may have been a result of the dramatically mixed PR heaped on the organization and the campaign in the wake of its success. It also may have had something to do with our ever shortening attention spans. A month and a half in the social media universe is like a lifetime. Some interesting charts relevant to this were put on Mashable yesterday and they show a dramatic decline in on-line attention following the release of the video. It seems that perhaps what is born on social media can die there quite rapidly.

The other phenomenon of interest for our work as marketers is the reaction of my child and her friends when they saw that this event was not broadly supported—they immediately wanted to have nothing to do with it. As they exited my car that night after we drove home, the posters that they had paid $30 to obtain a month before were left crumpled on the floor of the car like so much useless detritus. Their value and importance had collapsed like the Twitter activity surrounding the topic.

What is it in the context of a public facing institution like a museum? What is it when you do not have a large or consistent marketing budget or even a dedicated marketing department?

Marketing is not about selling stuff to people that they don’t really need, or even about creating demand. It’s about communicating the unique and valuable offers that you have to those who are ready to listen. Essentially it’s about letting your existing and potential audience know what great things you are doing.

It’s very important to remember that for the most part, marketing never convinces anybody of anything.

What it really does is connect a consumer who is ready to buy with a product is suited to his or her needs. That’s all. So it’s really about communication.

You have products: your exhibits, memberships, public programs. Your consumers have needs: to see an interesting exhibit, to be part of something, to have their children learn about something.

You already have what your constituents or consumers need. They just don’t know about it yet. This is the role of marketing—effectively letting them know what you are doing and doing this in as engaging a way as possible.

We have collected 11 essential things you should know in order to be a more effective museum marketer.

If you can learn them and live them, you will certainly have an easier time marketing your museum and it’s exhibits, programs and development offerings.

Website Copywriting: The Good

Let’s start with the good. The truth is that just about every client I have worked with starts out with great optimism, very interesting ideas, and the willingness to participate fully in the development of their new website. This attitude is key to their success. It sets a tone of teamwork within their company that engages colleagues and encourages everyone to share the information that helps me, as a website copywriter, to fully understand the company’s strengths, weaknesses, and positioning in relation to competitors. With this information, I can begin to craft the right tone of voice to capture the target audience’s attention and zone in on the key messages that need to be conveyed about the company.

Website Copywriting: The Bad

The bad tends to be a result of garden-variety over-scheduling and stretched resources. After the excitement of launching, a website project dies down, and the bulk of information has been passed off to me as the website copywriter so I can begin writing, clients very reasonably return their focus to their usual daily business commitments. However, inevitably, questions will arise as I begin to write – some clarifications or additional information will be needed. Requests may not seem urgent (“Oh, I can send the project details to her next week”) or may just be annoying (“How many times do I have to remind senior staff to send updated resumes so the website copywriter can write their bios!”). None of these items will be in itself mission-critical, but taken as a whole, not following up with them slows the process down or weakens the result.

Website Copywriting: The Ugly

On occasion, sad to say, things can get temporarily ugly. Or, at least, frustrating (for all parties, not just the website copywriter). If there is disagreement among the client’s senior staff about the essential direction of the company, its core brand positioning, or its most important products and services, then the web project (if done properly) will inevitably bring this to light. Strong copywriting is crystal clear, and when there is disagreement on core issues, the clarity of the writing highlights that fact. Website copywriting should really take place after an in-depth discussion about the company’s mission, its target audience, its market position, and its brand promise. Clients may genuinely believe that all of their colleagues are on the same page, but, sometimes they are not. Holding in-depth discussions prior to launching a website gets things out in the open where they can be resolved, ultimately helping the company become a stronger competitor in their market. It is an opportunity to get all minds working at their best toward a shared goal – a stronger company.

Website Copywriting: The Rewarding

Finally, happily, there is the rewarding. After the new website launches, clients experience the tangible benefits a satisfying coherence between what they are saying about their company and what their website is saying about it. Depending on the functionality of the new website, clients will have new (and much less time consuming) avenues of communication with their customers. White papers and newsletters will be seen not only when they are emailed to existing customers, but will also become part of a more robust online presence, building the company’s reputation as a resource for key industry information, and contributing to content on the website which in turn is critical to search and traffic.

Website copywriting (and design too, but that’s another conversation) is challenging. Teamwork between the website copywriter and the client, and among the client’s key staff people, makes the outcome well worth the effort in terms of bottom line impact to business development and client retention.

If you want to know more, click below and get our guide to selecting a copywriter for your website project:

Website Copywriting Buyer’s Guide

The Exhibitionist Magazine Issue #2

Cover July 1997

See December 1997 Issue

The Exhibitionist Magazine

Cover December 1997

See July 1997 Issue

“Nobody reads ads. People read what interests them. Sometimes it’s an ad.”

—Howard Gossage

We launched the Free campaign for the Bronx Museum this week as they announce to the world, and particularly to the Bronx, that they are going free to the public.

The campaign, sponsored by the New York Community Trust, has launched on bus shelters and subway stations throughout the Bronx. We also spruced up the front of the already spectacular Bronx Museum of the Arts building with signage so passers by won’t miss the message.

Contrary to the escalating admission prices for arts institutions throughout the city, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, under the direction of Holly Block, has been able to make its contemporary art offerings, robust public and educational programs all free to the public.

Tronvig Group was asked to devise and execute a campaign directly addressing the Bronx public. We wanted ads with imagery that was authentic and engaging. With the help of photographer Tom Rauner, we photographed Bronx residents having fun at real Bronx Museum programs. We shot them posing for the camera Facebook style to make it more approachable and familiar. We also put them clearly inside the museum with recognizable exhibited work behind them. (In this case the Bronx themed paintings of Cuban born artist Emilio Sanchez who is on exhibit at the Bronx Museum through June 17, 2012.)

What’s important, we feel, about these ads is that they are not simply showing what’s on display—as is typical of the genre—but feature WHO is inside, and the who in this case are everyday people: the general Bronx public. By photographing residents of the Bronx inside the museum having fun, we are working to visually escort viewers though the front doors. Museums—especially contemporary art museums—can be intimidating for the uninitiated, and by working to take the mystery out of the experience we hope to make it more inviting generally: “Hey, that could be me. It looks like fun.”

So, not only are we announcing that the Bronx Museum is free, but also that YOU should come on in because this is a place where you can feel at home and have fun. Museum advertising often speaks primarily to the converted. This is an attempt to start up a conversation with museum virgins by means of an attention grabbing and heartfelt kiss.

Beyond the visual treatment we also address this same audience with a headline that features the perks of attending some of the Bronx Museum’s most popular public programs, like First Fridays (in April its actually on the 20th…) where there is music, food, drinks and of course art…and it’s all free. This is an offer designed to appeal to anyone.

See you in the Bronx.

To learn more read our guide specifically created for museum marketers