We’ve kept this quiet so far but along with the start of the Sydney Design 08 campaign the Museum launched a small Facebook presence. Importantly this presence is managed as a joint effort between the Museum’s Marketing Department and the Web Services Unit, rather than just being a web project.
Sydney Design has a profile as well as the Powerhouse itself.
The Powerhouse profile is not getting a push at the moment but Sydney Design is being promoted through our email newsletters and it is gaining friends like a celebrity. That said, we’ve got a lot of work to do on these still and there are plenty of bugs. Time is always a challenge and you’ll notice that we’ve taken a minimalist approach to listing exhibitions and events so as to not have to struggle to keep everything up to date.
But, we’re very excited that these efforts are not being contained within the Web Services Unit, but are being run by marketing staff. This is an important strategic development, hopefully further embedding social media in the core of the Museum’s operations.
Come and friend us.
(And if anyone knows how to get the MyFlickr application working properly on Facebook Pages with different Flickr accounts then get in touch – we’ve tried everything!)
2 replies on “Powerhouse on Facebook”
Will be interested to follow how your marketing dept. get on, as social networks and the like can be very sensitive to overt ‘marketing messages’. Marketing departments often take a while to realise that these sites aren’t another advertising/communication ‘channel’ but instead a social space.
Are you looking at the time it takes to do this Seb? As you know I have been tracking the Facebook efforts for the Australian Museum Eureka Prizes to demonstrate that, apart from set-up, there is really minimal maintenance (although this could all fall into a heap as we try Twittering from the dinner!). I’ve been logging our progress on Museum 3.0.
Since then have had other successes – Science in the City set up their own fan page using an intern initially (I wasn’t even aware they’d done it although did suggest it might be a good idea so was really pleased when I came across it).
Also met with our Members people last week who are keen to get started and have written about that project on my Audience Research blog. As Frankie notes, they want to use it both as a promotional tool and social space for their younger members. We hope to populate it with content from various events once their intern starts.
I agree it’s so great when people want to get on with it without (or with minimal guidance from) web units. Are you also working with other areas??