The working life of Museum of London

Last week I wrote up my conclusions from the research I carried out on Museum of London (MOL) and its use of Facebook and blogs. To summarise:

• 100% of members want MOL to continue on Facebook,
• Most members would recommend MOL and MOL on Facebook to other people,
• Very few visitors were engaging with MOL through Facebook and the blog sites,
• More effort needs to be put into improving the communication on Facebook and blog to make it effective,
• MOL was not utilising Facebook or the blogs enough at the time of research and used it for information purposes only,
• It appeared that people wanted to receive information but not necessarily engage with MOL in any way other than to read emails, update alerts, and the blog entries, and
• People want to be prompted and guided to available content in the most convenient way.

So what are we doing now to ensure we utilise these available resources in the best way possible?

I have taken the feedbacks and lessons learned from my research to ensure that more use is made of all of our social software sites and activities. Although there are resource constraints, I have been attempting to:

• Add regular Facebook status updates on the MOL Facebook fan page,
• Twitter regularly on the MOL Twitter account,
• Blog more frequently on this blog site, and
• I have been vigilantly ensuring that all comments on MOL Facebook, YouTube, blogs, and Flickr, and all tweets and Twitter messages at Museum of London is responded to.

In addition to this, I am working on a new ‘Online’ section on the Museum of London website to bring together all these activities into a central location. I am also emphasising the use of social software to my colleagues and attempting to pass on responsibilities to various departments to manage some of these tools.

We are a long way from accomplishing all that which can be accomplished with all the available social software, but slowly and surely, we are heading towards that line were our visitors are able to engage with us in their preferred platforms and we are able to say ‘yes, we are listening and we care’.

On another note, I have finally visited our Modern London Galleries currently under development, due to open in spring 2010 and I have taken many, many pictures, so watch out for my next post to find out about all the exciting developments!