Museum Social

Rdmond: Make your Museum API, part 1: Ruby

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 10:50:23 -0400

Rdmond: Make your Museum API, part 1: Ruby:

From my other Tumblr:

(Photo by Marcin Wichary)

For a while now I’ve been working on an API for the Guggenheim Collection Online — don’t get too excited, it’ll be a long time before we start handing out API keys — and I thought it would be a good time to share a few of the things I’ve learned, especially…

When I first came across the Metal Museum while working on...

Mon, 14 May 2012 15:01:19 -0400

When I first came across the Metal Museum while working on Museums in Social Media I was intrigued just because it sounds cool and because I like museums named after the thing they’re about, like metal, mustard, or hammers (yes, there are two Hammer Museums — and I think I’d rather go to the one in Alaska over the one in Los Angeles).

These “Repair Days” events look great. You can watch some artisans at work and leave with busted pot or wrought iron chair all fixed up. It brings people together around a real activity and I bet every time you sit in that chair, you’ll remember the person who fixed it.

Isn’t that the kind of experience we’re all aiming to give our visitors?

", I think that the generation ahead of you always tends to set you puzzles—and the thing that always..."

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 14:17:31 -0400

“, I think that the generation ahead of you always tends to set you puzzles—and the thing that always puzzled me about the post–World War II generation is: Why did they go from being optimistic about science and rationality, and things like planning, to a dark, almost apocalyptic pessimism in the 1970s? It’s an incredibly quick switch, and the example I just gave you about the correct liberal way of doing a film about torture is a good one. You go out and elegantly film people, sometimes in silhouette, recounting terrible, horrible experiences—combined with haunting, Arvo Pärt–style music over bleak landscapes. And that’s it. I’m not being cynical or flippant about the peoples’ experiences—but I just think that the editorial approach was to wrap those experiences in a rigid melancholy that traps everyone—audience, filmmakers, and the tortured—in a feeling of helplessness. And it’s called moving. So I decided to do a series that went back and looked at the rise and fall of that optimism about science and rationality and planning to try and understand more why it failed.”

- In Conversation with Adam Curtis, Part II | e-flux (via jomc)

artistsstudios: Louise Bourgeois’ Studio

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:09:23 -0500

artistsstudios:

Louise Bourgeois’ Studio

ytginnyc: sfmoma: Tomorrow is Jackson Pollock’s birthday....

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 11:21:05 -0500

ytginnyc:

sfmoma:

Tomorrow is Jackson Pollock’s birthday. Y’all ready?

publicartfund:

Happy Almost Birthday, Jackson Pollock.

Shoes with lots of history (Jackson Pollock’s)

"Projects that are open to participation—where the audience is invited to comment on and collaborate..."

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 09:46:13 -0500

““Projects that are open to participation—where the audience is invited to comment on and collaborate in the making of the work using a technological system set up by the curator, institution, or artist—do question authorship. But authorship, it turns out, is not the biggest problem in our age of user-generated content. Who made it becomes of secondary importance to who uploaded it, who tagged it, and who now owns it.””

- Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook in Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media (2010)

Online, Can a Museum Be A Person?

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 12:35:09 -0500

Online, Can a Museum Be A Person?:

English version of En ligne, un musée peut-il être une personne?

En ligne, un musée peut-il être une personne?

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 12:32:41 -0500

En ligne, un musée peut-il être une personne?:

My essay on museums and social media for the French Ministry of Culture’s blog.

(via Fast Company) Looking at this video and then back to The...

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 12:00:37 -0400

(via Fast Company)

Looking at this video and then back to The Best Connected Artwork at the Walters”, I can’t but think that if you can do this in real time, on the giant video floor with data streaming from Facebook, you can certainly come up with an engrossing visualization of all the interesting connections within a collection. Or better yet, a real time visualization of people using (searching, viewing online, linking) and interacting with (tweeting, blogging, pushing buttons) the collection. Something like IMA’s dashboard, but sexier and more focused

This was something I really found lacking in Talk to me. It would be interesting for that exhibition to do more talking back.

I want to see this done with art, as art.

Craft the Backs of Fences

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 15:38:56 -0400

Craft the Backs of Fences:

Over on my other blog, a little more design wisdom from Steve Jobs…

The Best Connected Artwork at the Walters

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 23:01:21 -0400

Here’s a different way to think of museums as being social:

This graph shows the connections between works of art and users of the Walters Museum of Art online collection. The Walters website has a Community Collections feature where anyone can make and share their own selection of objects from what’s available. On the chart, the blue nodes are individual community collections connected by the lines to artworks (green nodes). I’ve included only artworks that occur in two or more collections, so the collections are connected to each other through the objects they share (and, inversely, the object are connected through the collections that share them)

I’ve long been skeptical about personal “collections” on museum websites. They’ve always seemed like dead ends to me—useful, perhaps, for some classroom activities but not much else. I’m still skeptical of the concept as we often see it, but as the website becomes less of a destination and more of a platform for other kinds of interaction I’m becoming more interested by the trails that those interactions leave behind. “My collection” may be a dead end if it’s just the result of picking objects out of a collections database interface, but if it’s the record of things I’ve tweeted, or tagged in a mobile app or used to create a mashup or something else more concrete as part of some activity then it’s starting to tell us more about how real people use a museum.

The Walters’ “Community Collections” are still just objects picked out of a database, but I like their redesigned online collection and they’ve made it very easy to share things that catch your interest. As I was reviewing it as an example for my students—and having just assigned Nicholas Christakis’ TED Talk “The hidden influence of social networks” the previous week—I began to wonder what the network of these community collections would look like.

Behold, the graph.

There is one thing that this graph can tell us right awy about how this community, acting as a community, sees this collection. The yellow node in the middle of the graph is the artwork with the highest “degree centrality”. It is, in a way, the most popular work of art. It has the most and best connections, and if there were a cold or flu running through the collection, this work would be sure to catch it. It is Ingres’ Odalisque with Slave:

The next 4 most central objects are:

What interests me about this list is that no one was asked to make it, it simply emerged from an activity with no particular goal. If you asked people to vote on “the most important work in the collection” I’m sure you would get a completely different answer. Of course, “central” on this graph doesn’t mean “important” in any conventional sense. What then does it mean? I don’t know—I just made the graph for fun—but if we can invite more meaningful interactions with collections and watch the connections and paths that are drawn along the way, I hope that it will become another area of curatorial interest, or community interest for that matter. Whatever it means, the position of Odalisque with Slave in this graph is not really a fact about the painting but as much as its a fact about the painting as a element in a human activity. At a time when we’re often wondering why people should, would or do go to museums and why museums should be funded those are important facts.

Some technical notes: The data was collected on October 23, 2011 by simply screen-scraping. The graph was made with NetworkX and if anyone knows how to get NetworkX to spread the nodes out to make a less cramped graph, please let me know!

Why the Walters? It’s just what I was looking at (because I think they’ve done a good job on their redesign), I could figure out pretty quickly how to get the data (an API would’ve been nice!) and it was a manageable amount.

Where now? (September in Museums & Social Media)

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 10:38:43 -0400

There’s not much surprise in the numbers of new Twitter followers and Facebook fans for museums in the whole of September. The 10th anniversary of September 11th naturally brought a lot of attention to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. There is, however, a great difference in the scale of this interest, with the Memorial gaining 70% more followers on Twitter, but an amazing 591% (56,804 followers) on Facebook! My take on this is that a Facebook page is itself something of a destination, so a lot of people may “like” a Facebook page around a big event just as they would visit the site — a vote of commemoration as it were. Is Facebook the shallowest end of visiting, Twitter the shallowest end of joining?

There is also Saatchi. Having spent a long time as the “biggest mover” on Facebook, they look now to be repeating that on Twitter.

Making these graphs has been an interesting experiment, and I think the graphs raise some questions. For instance, the group of “Big Movers” on Twitter is very distinct. There is a sizable gap for museums between about 10,000 and 50,000 followers (between the grey/red and the blue dots), and another between 100,000 and 200,000 (between the blue and the green). Most of the institutions with between 50 and 100K gain new followers at a rate well above average. Not only is their rate above average, they rates are all very close together, right around 22%. What is it about this zone? Does is correlate to anything outside of social media?

However, these graphs are getting a bit repetitious (and the day job has been very busy) so I’m going to stop with this format, certainly on a weekly basis. Instead, I’m going look for better ways of visualizing these numbers in order to dig out some kind of useful information and post those results.

Any suggestions? What visualizations would help make sense?

Twitter

Big Movers

Museum	Start	Finish	Change	Pct
Natural History Museum, London	70,966	86,931	15,965	22.50%
Science Museum	80,268	95,420	15,152	18.88%
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum	61,837	74,424	12,587	20.36%
Asian Art Museum	56,359	68,337	11,978	21.25%
American Latino Museum	49,957	61,558	11,601	23.22%
MIT Museum	44,454	55,407	10,953	24.64%
American Museum of Natural History	49,731	60,430	10,699	21.51%
The Walters Art Museum	47,079	57,605	10,526	22.36%
The Jewish Museum	43,856	53,851	9,995	22.79%
de Young Museum	49,068	58,721	9,653	19.67%
Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History	47,755	57,202	9,447	19.78%

Smaller Increases

Museum	Start	Finish	Change	Pct
Saatchi Gallery	5,778	17,277	11,499	199.01%
National September 11 Memorial & Museum	7,068	12,027	4,959	70.16%
Moscow Museum of Modern Art	3,834	5,096	1,262	32.92%
Curbs and Stoops	1,995	2,544	549	27.52%
Art Center Gallery	1,079	1,359	280	25.95%
Sweeney Art Gallery	1,563	1,927	364	23.29%

Facebook

Big Movers

Museum	Start	Finish	Change	Pct
Saatchi Gallery	117,333	175,439	58,106	49.52%
National September 11 Memorial & Museum	9,604	66,408	56,804	591.46%

Smaller Increases

Museum	Start	Finish	Change	Pct
Central Park Zoo	3,008	4,245	1,237	41.12%
National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum	23,885	32,274	8,389	35.12%
Auckland Art Gallery	2,198	2,748	550	25.02%

The Fortnight in Museum Social Media 9/11–9/24

Sun, 25 Sep 2011 23:43:21 -0400

I’ve got to make up for missing last week’s post, so this one will be a double.

The British Library finally passed 200,000 Twitter followers, so they will now be counted in the “big leagues.” Saatchi, long the biggest mover on Facebook, is suddenly coming on strong on Twitter as well. They made the list of over-achievers with a 7.5% increase for the week ending 9/17, and followed up the next week at the top of the big movers with an increase over 65%.

The National September 11 Memorial & Museum beat out Saatchi as the biggest mover on Facebook for the week of 9/11. It looks like the New York City Fire Museum got a lift also both on Facebook and Twitter. I walk past this museum often (it’s just around the corner from Guggenheim HQ). Did you know fire chiefs get beautiful ceremonial megaphones?

9/11–9/17

Twitter

Big Movers

Museum	Start	Finish	Change	Pct
American Latino Museum	53,508	56,293	2,785	5.20%
Natural History Museum, London	76,607	79,185	2,578	3.37%
National September 11 Memorial & Museum	9,382	11,956	2,574	27.44%
The British Library	197,036	199,357	2,321	1.18%
Science Museum	85,447	87,754	2,307	2.70%
Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History	50,629	52,838	2,209	4.36%
Asian Art Museum	60,595	62,550	1,955	3.23%
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum	66,385	68,324	1,939	2.92%
American Museum of Natural History	53,701	55,382	1,681	3.13%
The Walters Art Museum	50,806	52,476	1,670	3.29%
de Young Museum	52,574	54,228	1,654	3.15%
MIT Museum	48,101	49,729	1,628	3.38%
The Jewish Museum	47,333	48,886	1,553	3.28%

Over-achievers

Museum	Start	Finish	Change	Pct
Art Center Gallery	1,135	1,237	102	8.99%
Moscow Museum of Modern Art	4,189	4,535	346	8.26%
Adam & Philippa	1,833	1,984	151	8.24%
Saatchi Gallery	6,011	6,462	451	7.50%
Miami Children’s Museum	1,873	1,993	120	6.41%
New York City Fire Museum	1,315	1,398	83	6.31%

Facebook

Big Movers

Museum	Start	Finish	Change	Pct
National September 11 Memorial & Museum	44012	65524	21512	48.88%
Saatchi Gallery	161728	171627	9899	6.12%
Pera Muzesi-Museum	17288	20385	3097	17.91%

Smaller Increases

Museum	Start	Finish	Change	Pct
Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh	4126	4563	437	10.59%
Henry Morrison Flagler Museum	1002	1107	105	10.48%
New York City Fire Museum	1303	1380	77	5.91%

9/18–9/24

Twitter

Big Movers

Museum	Start	Finish	Change	Pct
Saatchi Gallery	8,117	13,449	5,332	65.69%
Science Museum	87,754	92,236	4,482	5.11%
Natural History Museum, London	79,185	83,064	3,879	4.90%
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum	68,324	71,028	2,704	3.96%
Asian Art Museum	62,550	65,211	2,661	4.25%
MIT Museum	49,729	52,204	2,475	4.98%
The Walters Art Museum	52,476	54,904	2,428	4.63%
Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History	52,838	55,225	2,387	4.52%
American Museum of Natural History	55,382	57,740	2,358	4.26%
The Jewish Museum	48,886	51,141	2,255	4.61%
American Latino Museum	56,910	59,091	2,181	3.83%
de Young Museum	54,228	56,295	2,067	3.81%

Over-achievers

Museum	Start	Finish	Change	Pct
South Florida Museum	2,610	2,876	266	10.19%
The Wren’s Nest	1,165	1,253	88	7.55%
Museum of Nature & Science	1,108	1,175	67	6.05%
Sweeney Art Gallery	1,741	1,838	97	5.57%
Art Center Gallery	1,244	1,306	62	4.98%

Facebook

Museum	Start	Finish	Change	Pct
Saatchi Gallery	173,147	174,869	1,722	0.99%

Smaller Increases

Museum	Start	Finish	Change	Pct
Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum	1,499	1,641	142	9.47%

Museum Social Media Week, 9/4–9/10

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 10:22:52 -0400

Not much usually changes among the “big movers”—the top 13 museums on Twitter and top 5 on Facebook—but this week the Tate overtook the Guggenheim to become the new #3 in Twitter followers. Congratulations Tate. Their recently published Social Media Stategy is worth reading as a good example.

The usual suspects populate the big movers on Twitter and Facebook with one exception. It’s not surprising that National September 11 Memorial & Museum should make the list this week. Their 170% increase in Facebook fans far eclipses Saatchi, who has been the sole big mover for the last few weeks.

The New Orleans Museum of Art makes it first appearance this week. Almost all their new Facebook fans came on September 7, so we can probably ascribe it to their hosting an annual free event, Culture Collision.

The British Library is maybe a couple of weeks away from passing 200,000 and joining the big leagues.

Twitter

Big Movers

Museum	Start	Finish	Change	Pct
American Latino Museum	50,677	53,508	2,831	5.59%
Natural History Museum, London	72,934	75,716	2,782	3.81%
Science Museum	82,032	84,551	2,519	3.07%
Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History	48,277	50,629	2,352	4.87%
The British Library	194,120	196,419	2,299	1.18%
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum	63,412	65,644	2,232	3.52%
Asian Art Museum	57,714	59,896	2,182	3.78%
American Museum of Natural History	50,931	53,066	2,135	4.19%
de Young Museum	50,131	52,080	1,949	3.89%
The Walters Art Museum	48,353	50,217	1,864	3.85%
The Jewish Museum	44,969	46,831	1,862	4.14%
MIT Museum	45,758	47,538	1,780	3.89%

Over-achievers

Museum	Start	Finish	Change	Pct
National September 11 Memorial & Museum	7,347	8,432	1,085	14.77%
Curbs and Stoops	2,064	2,290	226	10.95%
Moscow Museum of Modern Art	3,888	4,189	301	7.74%
독립기념관 (The Independence Hall of Korea)	7,255	7,696	441	6.08%

Facebook

Big Movers

Museum	Start	Finish	Change	Pct
Saatchi Gallery	135,155	159,635	24,480	18.11%
National September 11 Memorial & Museum	10,824	29,280	18,456	170.51%

Smaller Increases

Museum	Start	Finish	Change	Pct
Central Park Zoo	3,110	3,993	883	28.39%
National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum	25,476	28,945	3,469	13.62%
National Museum of American History	16,673	18,107	1,434	8.60%
The New Orleans Museum of Art	6,269	6,647	378	6.03%

Consarnit! Tate is the new #3 on Twitter

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 10:05:06 -0400

Well, I’ve been watching this with some anxiety for the past couple of months and not saying anything in the hopes it wouldn’t happen. After patiently, relentlessly chipping away at our lead, on September 7 the Tate has passed my own Guggenheim in number of Twitter followers. That day they ended with 440,852 to our 440,828. It’s almost like it was on purpose.

It’s hard to be too upset. Back in May the Tate’s Jesse Ringham and Selina Jones spoke about what they were doing at an ArtsTech meetup. They gave a fascinating presentation and it was really nice to meet them. So, congratulations.

Not bad for a museum with all it’s branches in the same country.

Top Social Media Gainers 8/28–9/3

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 10:30:06 -0400

Summer’s coming to a close and Curbs and Stoops tops out the list of biggest percentage gains on Twitter (a good reason to make trip out to Bushwick?). Saatchi is still the only big mover on Facebook, but people (Americans at least) are turning to 9/11, baseball and Gettysburg.

Twitter

Big Movers:

Museum	Start	Finish	Change	Pct
Natural History Museum, London	69,327	72,056	2,729	3.94%
Science Museum	78,421	81,131	2,710	3.46%
American Latino Museum	48,097	50,677	2,580	5.36%
The British Library	191,010	193,293	2,283	1.20%
Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History	46,252	48,277	2,025	4.38%
Asian Art Museum	55,140	57,142	2,002	3.63%
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum	60,630	62,596	1,966	3.24%
American Museum of Natural History	48,604	50,401	1,797	3.70%
MIT Museum	43,344	45,103	1,759	4.06%
The Jewish Museum	42,874	44,555	1,681	3.92%
The Walters Art Museum	46,095	47,775	1,680	3.64%
de Young Museum	48,037	49,593	1,556	3.24%

Over-achievers

Museum	Start	Finish	Change	Pct
Curbs and Stoops	1,786	2,064	278	15.57%
Monroe Gallery of Photography	1,730	1,864	134	7.75%
Tribute WTC Visitor Center	1,139	1,223	84	7.37%
SchomburgCenter	1,258	1,347	89	7.07%
Moscow Museum of Modern Art	3,635	3,888	253	6.96%
The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust	2,625	2,805	180	6.86%
M Shed Bristol	1,036	1,104	68	6.56%
National September 11 Memorial & Museum	6,819	7,255	436	6.39%

Facebook

Over-achievers

Museum	Start	Finish	Change	Pct
National September 11 Memorial & Museum	8545	10378	1833	21.45%
National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum	21951	24910	2959	13.48%
Gettysburg National Military Park Museum and Visitor Center	4325	4732	407	9.41%
Melbourne Museum	7496	8100	604	8.06%
National Museums Scotland	6559	7080	521	7.94%
Auckland Art Gallery	2150	2293	143	6.65%
The Leonardo	1221	1289	68	5.57%

Top Social Media Gainers 8/2011

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 11:03:10 -0400

Graphs for the month of August:

For an explanation of these charts see New Methodology

Facebook

In August, Saatchi added 49,126 new fans for a 72% increase. As we’ve seen before they’re the only museum or gallery breaking away from pack on Facebook and qualifying as a big mover. A further five stand out as over-achievers with Red Star Line leading the way. Their “Do You Know This Girl” contest was clearly popular and helped double their fans in one month. Not bad for a museum that isn’t open yet.

Museum	Start	Finish	Change	Pct
Red Star Line \| People on the Move	1,183	3,492	2,309	195.18%
National Museums Scotland	4,072	6,942	2,870	70.48%
National September 11 Memorial & Museum	5,630	9,173	3,543	62.93%
ShoeZeum	2,082	2,944	862	41.40%
Australian Museum	1,638	2,083	445	27.17%

Twitter

On Twitter, the British Library is getting closer and closer to the 200,000 followers mark. The rest of the big movers has been a fairly consistent list.

Museum	Start	Finish	Change	Pct
Natural History Museum, London	52,216	70,129	17,913	34.31%
Science Museum	63,218	80,268	17,050	26.97%
The British Library	177,214	191,762	14,548	8.21%
American Latino Museum	35,794	49,263	13,469	37.63%
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum	48,798	61,837	13,039	26.72%
Asian Art Museum	43,602	55,774	12,172	27.92%
MIT Museum	31,890	43,822	11,932	37.42%
American Museum of Natural History	37,530	49,133	11,603	30.92%
The Walters Art Museum	35,320	46,574	11,254	31.86%
de Young Museum	37,461	48,537	11,076	29.57%
The Jewish Museum	32,501	43,352	10,851	33.39%
Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History	36,605	47,247	10,642	29.07%

As for the over-achievers, all of whom had increases greater than 20%, Monroe Gallery of Photography came out of nowhere in the last few days of August to claim the top spot with a 70% increase in followers, almost all over the weekend of the 26th to the 29th. The last two entries, Pera Muzesi-Museum and Detroit Institute of Arts did not make any weekly list but, slow and steady, put together a good performance for the month.

Interesting that, of the 21 museums with a 20% increase or more, two are in Istanbul: Istanbul Museum of Modern Art and Pera Muzesi-Museum!

Museum	Start	Finish	Change	Pct
Monroe Gallery of Photography	1,085	1,855	770	70.97%
Moscow Museum of Modern Art	2,464	3,759	1,295	52.56%
독립기념관 (The Independence Hall of Korea)	5,052	7,207	2,155	42.66%
Sweeney Art Gallery	1,143	1,563	420	36.75%
Istanbul Modern \| Istanbul Museum of Modern Art	16,546	21,643	5,097	30.81%
Kelsey Museum of Archaeology	1,913	2,428	515	26.92%
Musée du Louvre	3,827	4,703	876	22.89%
National September 11 Memorial & Museum	5,625	6,912	1,287	22.88%
Pera Muzesi-Museum	10,578	12,914	2,336	22.08%
Detroit Institute of Arts	12,859	15,656	2,797	21.75%

Top Social Media Gainers 8/21–8/27

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 10:31:05 -0400

This is the first weekly update in the new format, so for an explanation of these charts see New Methodology

Big Movers

Nothing too exciting among the Twitter “big leagues” (the top 13), but in this new format we can see how close the British Library is to reaching 200,000 followers. Their just-above-average 1.68% increase wouldn’t have made the previous lists, but even at that rate they’ll reach 200,000 in 4 weeks. Once they do, we’ll add them to the big leagues. The rest of the big movers are filled out by the usual suspects from previous weeks led, in terms of percentages, by the MIT Museum, AMNH, and the American Latino Museum

Museum	Start	Finish	Change	Pct
Natural History Museum, London	64,804	68,511	3,707	5.72%
The British Library	187,177	190,327	3,150	1.68%
American Latino Museum	45,335	48,097	2,762	6.09%
Science Museum	75,022	77,679	2,657	3.54%
American Museum of Natural History	45,467	48,017	2,550	5.61%
MIT Museum	40,358	42,826	2,468	6.12%
The Walters Art Museum	43,233	45,681	2,448	5.66%
Asian Art Museum	52,217	54,585	2,368	4.53%
The Jewish Museum	40,032	42,319	2,287	5.71%
de Young Museum	45,414	47,641	2,227	4.90%
Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History	44,181	46,252	2,071	4.69%
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum	57,917	59,941	2,024	3.49%

Saatchi was the only big mover on Facebook, adding 24,663 fans (30.8%) putting them past 100,000 total.

Over-achievers

The standout among the Twitter “Over-achievers,” making their first appearance here, is The Monroe Gallery of Photography. Not sure of the reason for their sudden jump.

Museum	Start	Finish	Change	Pct
Monroe Gallery of Photography	1142	1730	588	51.49%
Kelsey Museum of Archaeology	2136	2371	235	11.00%
Sweeney Art Gallery	1375	1499	124	9.02%
Moscow Museum of Modern Art	3349	3635	286	8.54%

On Facebook we see the National September 11 Memorial & Museum again. As for the Titan Missile Museum (I now have a reason for going to Sahuarita, Arizona), I suspect this recent mention on Gawker is responsible for this week’s new fans

Museum	Start	Finish	Change	Pct
National September 11 Memorial & Museum	7,232	8,341	1,109	15.33%
The Titan Missile Museum	1,028	1,158	130	12.65%

New Methodology

Sun, 28 Aug 2011 15:30:33 -0400

After making the graphs for “How Many Followers is “A Lot”?” parts one and two, I’ve decided to change the way I make weekly updates. First of all—graphs every week! Second, I’m going to pick out three groups: the “Big leagues,” “Big movers,” and “Over-achievers.” I’m not completely happy with these names so I’m open to suggestions for better ones.

Big Leagues

As the “How many followers” graphs showed, Facebook and Twitter each have a group of institutions with many more followers than the others and that gain more new followers each week than most institutions have in total. There are more of these on Twitter (13) than on Facebook (5) with only 4 being in both: MoMA, the Met, the Guggenheim, and the Tate. Full listing with figures for the week ending 8/20 are at the bottom of this post

This group is fairly static, so I won’t be saying anything about it unless there’s something interesting to point out.

The Big Movers

This is the most interesting group. They have gained as many or new followers as most of the big leagues though but that gain is much larger as a percentage of the whole. Looking at the data from last week, they are in blue (click to enlarge):

Museum	Start	Finish	Change	Pct
Natural History Museum, London	60,667	64,804	4,137	6.82%
Science Museum	70,285	74,080	3,795	5.40%
The British Library	183,870	187,177	3,307	1.80%
American Latino Museum	42,130	45,335	3,205	7.61%
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum	54,453	57,299	2,846	5.23%
American Museum of Natural History	42,720	45,467	2,747	6.43%
Asian Art Museum	49,526	52,217	2,691	5.43%
MIT Museum	37,894	40,358	2,464	6.50%
de Young Museum	43,048	45,414	2,366	5.50%
The Jewish Museum	37,727	40,032	2,305	6.11%
The Walters Art Museum	40,969	43,233	2,264	5.53%
Victoria and Albert Museum	62,210	64,399	2,189	3.52%
Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History	41,837	43,650	1,813	4.33%

With the 1.2% average increase marked by the red line, it is very easy to see how these “big movers” are far above the average while the “big leagues” lie right along it. The Natural History Museum, London’s 4,137 new followers are roughly equal to the Design Museum’s 4,756, but they represent an almost 7% increase compared to 1.21% for the Design Museum.

With 187,177 followers, the British Library is very close to the big leagues, but I just can’t quite put them in that group until they pass (the arbitrary number of) 200,000 followers. They should be there in about a month. Let’s watch.

Over-achievers

This group is made up of institutions with small followerships, but very large increases. They are hard to spot unless you look at graph by percentage increase (note that the scale of the x-axis in this graph is logarithmic):

These are the institutions with the greatest percentage increases, and though the numbers aren’t very dramatic in this graph this group can show increases of 50%, 100% or more in a single week. Enough weeks like that will put you in the big movers, and enough weeks as a big mover will put you in the big leagues.

Museum	Start	Finish	Change	Pct
Tribute WTC Visitor Center	1,000	1,093	93	9.30%
Moscow Museum of Modern Art	3,067	3,349	282	9.19%
Istanbul Modern \| Istanbul Museum of Modern Art	18,731	19,992	1,261	6.73%

If you look back at the previous weekly update you’ll see that the Twitter top 10 is a combination of “big movers” and “over-achievers.” I didn’t seem quite right for Tribute WTC Visitor Center to be in the #1 spot with only 93 new followers, so I hope this new method will provide better context for the numbers.

Big leagues data for 8/14-8/20

Twitter

Museum	Start	Finish	Change	Pct
MoMA The Museum of Modern Art	681,216	688,636	7,420	1.09%
Smithsonian Institution	475,281	481,183	5,902	1.24%
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum	422,954	427,989	5,035	1.19%
Tate	421,561	426,982	5,421	1.29%
Design Museum	393,557	398,313	4,756	1.21%
The Andy Warhol Museum	341,582	345,047	3,465	1.01%
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York	335,734	340,015	4,281	1.28%
The Getty Museum, Los Angeles	290,765	294,402	3,637	1.25%
Brooklyn Museum	282,879	285,939	3,060	1.08%
Whitney Museum of American Art	260,538	263,505	2,967	1.14%
SFMOMA (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)	260,770	263,437	2,667	1.02%
Walker Art Center	240,381	242,253	1,872	0.78%
LACMA Los Angeles County Museum of Art	227,320	229,913	2,593	1.14%

Facebook:

Museum	Start	Finish	Change	Pct
MoMA The Museum of Modern Art	827,382	832,485	5,103	0.62%
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York	542,001	544,661	2,660	0.49%
Musée du Louvre	383,993	385,988	1,995	0.52%
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum	289,155	290,101	946	0.33%
Tate	279,259	282,672	3,413	1.22%

How Many Followers is "A Lot"? (Part 2: Facebook)

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 12:08:08 -0400

So, here is the July data for Facebook.

(I am aware of the typo in the second graph but I don’t have time to remake it!)

Overall, Facebook is a quieter country with slower growth. The average increase in the number of fans is 4.4% (compared to 6.9% for Twitter), and there are fewer than half as many “Big League” institutions:

Name	Finish	Increase	Percentage
MoMA The Museum of Modern Art	818,864	20,597	2.58
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York	536,880	14,594	2.79
Musée du Louvre	376,566	15,181	4.2
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum	286,145	9,164	3.31
Tate	271,039	11,124	4.28

In absolute numbers, only Saatchi stands out as a “Big Mover,” though when you look at the growth as a percentage you can see the magnitude of the increase at National Museums Scotland thanks to all the attention surrounding their reopening, even though their fandom is comparatively small.

The back-of-the-envelope conclusion is that Twitter is a bit more active which I didn’t expect for the simple reason that many more people use Facebook than Twitter (750M+ vs. 200M+, ignoring the question of how many users are actually active). In what sense is Twitter “more active?” At least in the sense that people are more willing to click the button to start following a museum. In July, the top 5 museums of Twitter gained 148,099 followers, while the top 5 on Facebook gained less than half that, 70,660. The obvious question is how closely this is tied to the growth of the social networks themselves since Twitter is currently grwoing faster than Facebook. Other questions:

Do people turn to Twitter more than Facebook for the kind of information museums have to provide (e.g., impersonal, general-interest, event-based vs. personal and gossipy)? I know this is true for me.
Are the kind of people who use Twitter the kind that are more likely to be interested in museums (or live in urban areas near them)?
Do museums that use both see differences in their interactions between Twitter and Facebook users?

What’s your experience? Do you detect a similar inertia among Facebook followers. Do you find Twitter followers more energetic, or more ephemeral?