Social Media at the Victoria and Albert

On December 4th I attended C:Cubed, a event put on by Arts Council England and Screen West Midlands to bring people from the arts together with people from the digital, or wherever people like myself come from. The focus was on how arts organisations could do projects within the remit of the 4IP fund but like all these things it was the random serendipitous stuff that was the most interesting, especially given the perceived clash of cultures which, of course, turned out to be less of a clash and more a realisation that we’re all after the same thing at the end of the day.

In the morning there were a number of talks. Some were good, some were not so good but the best was from Gail Durbin of the Victoria and Albert Museum. The videos appeared on the C:Cubed website a while back but, annoyingly, were not set up for sharing so I did a naughty thing and made a copy of Gail’s talk, uploaded it to Viddler and annotated it with links to the items Gail mentions as she talks. It’s about 10 minutes long and well worth watching.

As I watched Gail talk I grinned and grinned and grinned. She absolutely got it 100%. Everything she said was textbook social media gold. And she’s demonstrably not a web nerd. Her jargon might be a little off but she approaches this stuff with exactly the right spirit for success. Here’s a quick checklist of the things she’s doing right:

• You don’t have to have lots of money to do it. Technologically speaking the V&A’s website is pretty shonky but that’s not stopped them. The blogs use WordPress (free) and most of the projects seem to be based on email, a social media tool we often forget about because it’s so ubiquitous.
• Web 2.0 is about task, not technology. Couldn’t have said it better myself. In fact I think I’ll be using this in my talks.
• You have to seed these sites [or else] nobody will contribute to them. Spot on. The notion of “build it and they will come” is wrong. You have to show people what you want them to do by doing it yourself. The point about using your full name is also important. People are more likely to interact and share with other people than they are an institution. Use the tools as you would have others use them. Flickr does this very well where all visible staff members are also active users of the site.
• You don’t always get lots of contributions and this is not a problem. The pattern of interaction in a social space is often like this with, say, 5 really active users, 50 occasionally active users and 500+ lurkers who might pop a comment in or rate something occasionally.
• It’s not for us to determine how people do these things. I think this is an important attitude for an institution such as the V&A to have. Many cultural organisations will have an idea, implicit or explicit, of what is “good” or “right” which is fine but doesn’t always enable engagement and people feel they might be getting it wrong and not contribute. That’s not to say you don’t need some filtering system but by giving people the leeway to curate the space themselves you allow interesting things to bubble through, often things you’d never considered.
• Sometimes you get more creative things if you limit what you’re asking them to do. “Limitations are possibilities” someone once said. Give people a challenge and make them work within certain perameters. Don’t make it too limiting, just enough to get them thinking. The problem with a lot of social media tools is you can do anything you want with them, which is great in theory but daunting in practice. This is one of the reasons Twitter works. It’s blogging but you’re limited to 140 characters so you have to get creative. Or to take a more traditional example, haiku.
• We accept everything (except offensive, irrelevant and half-finished, which is fair). The subsequent rating system is key to this, allowing users to easily promote the good stuff up the list. Digg.com is the classic example of user rating but here it’s being used on a much smaller scale.
• Sue Lawty’s blog. I love this example for obvious reasons. Sue Lawty was their artist in residence and was “deeply hostile to technology” but agreed to have a go at blogging. After a while she started getting feedback from people who had been inspired by her work to do their own and from this The Beach Project evolved. This is a great illustration of how this isn’t about technology, it’s about communication and sometimes the best people to use this stuff are the people who have the most averse reaction to it. (I’m thinking of you, Yarker!)
• 400 contributions from all over the world with no promotion. The World Beach Project has spread through word of mouth. Here’s a Google Blogsearch for it but that’s just scratching the surface. This sort of project is a classic “social object”, something that people want to tell other people about and, more critically, can have a go at themselves. You don’t need to promote something like this. If the idea is good enough you just need to seed it and have patience.
• Be prepared to fail and move on. The list of projects on the Things To Do page is very long and I’d imagine most of them have had a takeup between poor and reasonable. But because the set-up and management costs for these things is so cheap it doesn’t matter. I’d imagine people working at the V&A have ideas for projects involving the public every time they walk through a gallery. Previously they’d have had to go through a long winded process of planning and budgeting to see them in action. Now they can get them up and running in a few days and, if they work, develop them further.

I could go on and on but I think you get the message. Concentrate on the ideas rather than the implementation. Keep it small and manageable – you can grow if it works. Fail often and learn. Technological solutions are good but you can do a lot with email and a shonky website. And above all treat the people you want to engage with as people.

Did you find this as inspirational as I did? Anything you’d like to add?