One good idea, two responses and some lessons

It’s 125 years since Vincent Van Gogh’s death. Starting May 3 and for 125 days, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam will be answering 125 questions regarding the painter, his life and his work. The museum invites anyone interested to ask a question to send it through their website and a page especifically created to present the results of this Q&A (watch the promotional video and visit the webpage).

Museum Next starts here

Christian Lachel, BRC Imagination Arts (Photo: Maria Vlachou)

It seems to me that the three words that were mostly heard at the 2015 MuseumNext conference were: emotion, stories, engagement. Words that clearly mark the change that has been taking place in museum attitude, aiming to establish, with the help of their collections, a better, more relevant and meaningful relationship with people - more people, different people, common people.

A presentation that was wholly dedicated to this subject was “Emotionalizing the Museum”, by Christian Lachel of BRC Imagination Arts. “Does the experience transform your guests and compel them to share it with others?”, Christian asked. And this is probably the right question to ask. Although the transformation we all so much desire to make happen might take time to be consciously acknowledged by individuals (if it is acknowledged at all), the compelling wish to share with others is a more immediate indicator of the occurance of a meaningful encounter. And the starting point is people’s heart, acoording to Christian. The process of creating an engaging experience is one from the inside to the outside and not vice-versa. One that aims to involve people through a meaningful story, looking then for the right tools and creating the appropriate physical environment for the encounter.

Christian Lachel, BRC Imagination Arts (Photo: Maria Vlachou)

Another issue that repeatedly came up was that of digital vs physical. At the same time that museums are racing to embrace the new digital tools and platforms in order to create more engaging and meaningful experiences, they often seem to take a step back, re-evaluating the advantages and strengths of the physical encounter.

An inspiring project of the Brooklyn Museum, the Ask Mobile App, has gone through these stages of thinking and evaluating (which are openly shared on the museum’s blog – a great example of professionalism, generosity, transparency and accountability that more museums should have the courage to implement). As Shelley Bernstein explained to us, at a time when the Brooklyn Museum is re-evaluating a number of points of contact with its visitors (its austere foyer, its confusing reception area, the lack of seating), it also wishes to improve their experience allowing them to ask on-site and in real time any question they might have regarding the objects or the exhibitions in general. The project is still being tested in its details and will be launched in June. 

Shelley Bernstein, Brooklyn Museum (Photo: Maria Vlachou)

At an earlier stage, the museum had members of its staff on floor and discovered that visitors loved engaging in conversation with them. Such a large museum would need a lot of people, though, to be able to cover all areas. In order to optimize the idea of the direct and in-real-time contact with a member of staff, they decided to turn to technology. A team of six people will be available to answer visitor questions sent through their mobiles using the Ask Mobile App. Evaluation so far has shown that people still consider this contact to be personal and the museum is confident that this will be one more way of fulfilling their mission of being “a dynamic and responsive museum that fosters dialogue and sparks conversations”. For one thing, the museum has discovered that people seem to take more time looking at the objects... looking for questions to ask!

Is there anything more personal and physical, though (and funny and inspiring), than being taken to a museum tour tailored to your needs and interests by Museum Hack? “I hate museums!”, this is how Nick Gray started his presentation. And he did hate them... once. Now all he wants is to share his passion for them with people who still hate them, people who feel that museums are not for them. A colleague from the Museum of Architecture and Design in Oslo called Museum Hack “our natural allies”. And aren’t they indeed! Nick’s favourite object at the Metropolitan Museum is the fragment of an Egyptian queen’s face. This is what he had to say about it (quoting from memory): “If these are the lips, can you imagine the rest? How beautiful she must have been? And although we don’t know who she is and which tools were used to make her, we know she’s made of yellow jasper. Yellow jasper was so-so expensive, that the only other object at the Met made of it is this tiny. In a scale of hardness from 1 to 10, where diamond is 10 and marble is 3, jasper is a solid 6. It makes marble feel like rubber...”. Aren’t museums f***ing awesome?!

Nick Grey, Museum Hack (Photos: Maria Vlachou)

My visit to the recently renovated International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum somehow put all these thoughts and ideas to the test. It’s a museum that greatly combines the physical and the digital, using technology in order to enhance the meaning of the objects, to share powerful stories and to engage the visitor – both emotionally and intellectually – in the discussion of quite sensitive universal questions. The three main chapters of the story are “Defending Human Dignity”, “Restoring Family Links” and “Reducing Natural Risks” and each space/chapter was created by a different architect, proposing quite distinct environments. One of the most touching moments for me was in the room that exhibits the gifts offered by prisoners of different conflicts to the Red Cross delegate in charge of their case. It made me think of the beauty, sensitivity, creativity and humanity that can still emanate after the horror of barbarity, brief glimpses of a renewed hope. I must say, though, that the most powerful moment was touching the extended hand of a witness on a screen, a gesture that would trigger their testimony. A brilliant conception, linking the physical to the digital and creating a profoundly emotional and memorable experience.

I must say that in almost every museum visit, presentation and discussion during the conference, there was an underlying issue for me: can museums fulfill their social and educational role, can they be relevant and engaging, if they don’t also clearly assume their political role? Right on the first day, Gail Dexter Lord introduced the concept of soft power as “the ability to influence behaviour through persuasion, attraction or agenda setting”. How can museums exercise this power? "We cannot take sides", colleagues often exclaim. Oh, but we do... Sometimes with our silence or by pretending to be neutral; more often with the objects we choose to show or not to show, the stories we choose to tell or not to tell.

More than taking sides, though, assuming our political role is to assume that there is actually more than one side to every story and to allow for space for these views to become known, to be discussed, so that citizens may get better informed, see their own views being challenged, meet and listen to the ‘other’, develop empathy and understanding, take a stand. Museums are not islands and, as Tony Butler (Derby Museums / The Happy Museum Project) said, “What’s happening out there is as important as what’s happening inside”. Isn’t it urgent, and doesn’t it make sense, that museums in the 21^st assume their role in promoting democracy?

Gail Dexter Lord (Photo: Maria Vlachou)

More on this blog:

What have we got to do with this?

What have we got to do with this? (ii)

'Just' a museum, 'just' an artist?

The long distance between California and Jerusalem

The educational dimension

Silent and apolitical?



Links that might be of interest:

Black Cultural Archives

Brooklyn Museum blog

cogapp

Curators Without Borders

International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum

Locatify

Museum Hack

The Happy Museum Project

Uzeeum

The rules of love

Kent Nagano, Music Director of MOntreal Symphony Orchestra (Photo: Körber Foundation)

When the Vice Chairman of the Körber Foundation, Klaus Wehmeier, opened the 4th Symposium on the Art of Music Education last week in Hamburg, he quoted someone from a previous edition of this symposium who had said “I want to share what I love”. I thought that this is precisely what brings most people, professionals, of different cultural/artistic fields to this kind of meetings: their love for something and the wish to share it.

Self-barometer

All photos taken from the Facebook page of Accion Poetica.

The Eurobarometer carried out a new survey on Cultural Access and Participation (full study and executive summary). The previous one had been in 2007, before the crisis hit Europe, so this recent study may give us an insight into the possible effects of the crisis on peoples habits and practices.

Speaking in very-very general terms, and in what concerns Portugal, the study shows that Portuguese participation is under the European average in all activities considered in the survey, both in terms of attendance and in terms of involvement in artistic activities. The biggest differences refer to reading a book (EU: 68%; PT: 40%), visiting a historical monument or site (EU: 52%; PT: 27%) and going to the cinema (EU: 52%; PT: 29%).

The main barrier to access referred by Europeans is lack of interest or lack of time. For the Portuguese, lack of interest was the main reason for not participating, marking a higher percentage than the european average in all activities considered in the survey. The activities that least interest the Portuguese in comparison to the rest of the Europeans are reading a book (PT: 49%; EU: 25%), visiting a museum or gallery (PT: 51%; EU: 35%) and visiting a historical monument or site (PT: 44%; EU: 28%).

The reason I want to write today about the study of the eurobarometer is not to analyze graphics and results. It is to question how we are going to interpret them and what we are going to do about them, being professionals in the cultural sector. 

The results were primarily met on Facebook and the blogosphere with pessimism or a certain fatalism; with statements such as “We are a country of uncultured” or “The Portuguese don’t want to know about it, they are not interested, they think it´s not worth it” - with some kind of implicit accusation, I thought, of the kind “Is it worth doing anything for those ignorant and ungrateful people?”.

I confess that I was full of questions, some of them permanent ones, frequently discussed in this blog, regardless of the existence of formal studies. Trying to summarize them here, I would like to consider two main issues:

Question 1: How large was the definition of “cultural participation” in the study? Did it only consider attendance and involvement in what we may call “formal cultural institutions”?

Having access to the full report and questionnaire, I was happy to see that the definition was not a narrow one (it did consider participation through the internet, activities like dancing or doing photography or handicrafts), I am just not sure if, the way the question was asked, it also helped those surveyed consider their activities in such a broad sense (how many people, for instance, would have thought that dancing at a wedding or club is a form of cultural participation?). The “Public Participation in the Arts” surveys of the American National Endowement for the Arts, carried out every four years, do give is this kind of details regarding the “what exactly; where exactly; how exactly” – all reports are available online, but check, for instance, the last full report, referring to 2008 (some highlights here), or the highlights of the 2012 survey, the full report expected to become available  2014.

Regarding especifically participation on the internet, one should highlight that the Portuguese mark above the European average in what concerns playing computer games (+11%), putting their own cultural content online (+3%), listening to radio or music / dowloading music / reading or looking at cultural blogs (all +1%). 

Question 2: Are people little interested in culture in general or in the kind of culture “formal cultural institutions” offer them? Do we programme bearing in mind people’s interests, concerns, existing knowledge, questions, needs, practical and psychological barriers that might be keeping them away? Are we ever going to question the way we are doing things and the sincerity of our statement “We are here for the people”?

Some personal facts: some times I look at the agenda of exhibitions in museums and, judging from the titles, nothing sounds exciting or interesting enough for me to go all the way and visit them; a number of concerts and interpreters, of all musical genres, are promoted as “the best in the world”, but this is simply not enough for me to make the decision to buy the ticket, as the world is so full of “best” artists; in what concerns lesser known artists, the big majority of the institutions presenting them behave as if we should already know about them, adding absolutely nothing to the title and/or name.

So this may be my problem as culture consumer. But it might also be a problem for cultural institutions that wish to communicate with me (at least, they say they do):  a problem of choosing interesting and inspiring titles; a problem of choosing subjects (meaning stories) that might appeal to a more diverse, less specialized, audience; a problem in trying to attract more using basic information that is only understood by few; and also a need (I would even say obligation) to understand what people choose to do in their free time and why. Because, when I, as a person /consumer, don´t go to your exhibition / concert / theatre play / festival, it’s not “simply” because I am uncultured, uninterested, ignorant or ungrateful (and frankly, I don’t appreciate hearing you say this about me...). It might be because someone else was more sincere in wishing to communicate with me and engage me and did a better job in getting my attention, interest and precious time.

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In 1996 Mexicans would, in average, read one book a year. Writer Armando Alanis Pulido, concerned with the decline of literature and poetry and with the widely held idea that poetry is opaque, difficult to read and understand, turned to city walls in an effort to make it part of people´s everyday life. He initiated a movement called Accion Poetica (Poetic Action). Since then, it has spread in about 20 Latin American countries and even crossed the Atlantic. The other day the newspaper Le Monde had this title: The walls in Latin America speak of love. Only one, unique, signature: Accion Poetica.

Still on this blog

The Louvre, my son and I

Opera and the City

Don’t shush me!

The industry of the vast minorities

On public value

We are for people. Or... are we?

Ministry of Culture: Which culture? Whose culture?

What can make the difference?

Crise oblige?(ii) Programming challenges

To be or not to be (free on Sundays)? That’s not the question

The difference between ‘more’ and ‘diverse’

Changes: are we paying enough attention?

Thomas P. Campbell to me

Some time ago, I watched a presentation by young social media expert Jasper Visser entitled The future of museums is about attitude, not technology.  Even before watching it, the title stroke a chord with me. Indeed, what impact can technology alone have if one doesn´t know how to use it, if one doesn´t understand or is not interested in exploring the possibilities it offers and use them with vision and imagination? This requires attitude, indeed; or rather, it requires the ‘right’ attitude.

A couple of weeks go I received an email from Thomas P. Campbell, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He wished to inform me about a new project, called 82nd and 5th, a series of new videos, where a Met curator talks about a specific work of art in the museum collection which has inspired him/her or changed his/her life or way of thinking. Thomas P. Campbell informed me that I could subscribe in order to receive all new videos by email and suggested I informed my friends about it.

It´s not the videos I wish to talk about (the quality and interest of which you can easily verify on the museum website), it´s the details in communicating this new initiative. As you can imagine, the email I received was not from Thomas P. Campbell himself and I received it because I´ve subscribed the museum´s mailing list. The Met could have easily done what most museums do: send an email to all those on the mailing list from its general email address. Instead of this impersonal way of communicating, they created a specific email address, the museum director being identified as the sender. He´s the one addressing us and presenting this new intiative, asking us to use it, embrace it and help the museum promote it. And this small detail makes a whole lot of a difference. It shows attitude.

Indhu Rubasingham, Tricycle Theatre artistic director (Photo: Alastair Muir for The Guardian)

I had another special encounter with a cultural organization´s director a few months before. When I called the Tricycle Thearte in London in order to reserve tickets for a play, the phone rang, but before getting through to the box office, I listened to an automatic answer. It was a message from the theatre´s artistic director, Indhu Rubasingham, who thanked me for getting in touch in order to buy tickets and asked me to consider paying an extra pound per ticket in order to support the theatre in its work. It was a simple, direct, friendly message, that made it impossible to resist. I supported a theatre I had never been before, which is something I haven´t done for those theatres I´ve been attending for some time now. Maybe because nobody ever asked. Indhu Rubasingham and the Tricycle Theatre have got attitude.

None of the examples given above required a huge investement. Actually, they didn´t require any investment at all. Lack of money or fancy means cannot be an excuse for lack of attitude. Furthermore, a lack of attitude when having the means, but not using them to their full potential, also indicates a lack of vision.

One of the most common concerns of culture professionals when I give training in cultural communication around the country is the inability to use the technology and the means available autonomously in order to promote their venues, work and activities. I especifically refer to organizations belonging to local authorities or private foundations which are not allowed to have their own websites (they´re usually an item on a sub-sub-menu) or manage their own facebook pages. Information is managed centrally and not by those who have the best knowledge on the subject matter and are more interested than anyone else in promoting it. And who would do it better than anyone, if they had proper training.

Let´s be the client for a moment. Are you interested in finding out if the Electricity Museum in Lisbon organizes birthday parties? Well, you start by searching for the museum on Google, like I did. The first links refers you to EDP (Portugal Electricity) Foundation website, where the museum is an item in the menu. Reaching that page, it seems like you´ve arrived on a portal presenting boxed news. Each box is a link to pages with a desciption of the current exhibition; the permanent exhibition; the latest statistics or other news. The museum itself has got no menu. 

(URL: www.fundacaoedp.pt/museu-da-electricidade)

 

Do you wish to visit the Museum of Ceramics in Sacavém? A search on Google will refer you to (by order of appearance): a reference regarding the museum building on the website of the now extinct Institute of Museums and Conservation; the Greater Lisbon Tourism; Wikipedia; Lifecooler; a number of other websites... If, by intuition, we decide to search for Municipality of Loures, we will find a link leading us to a page with a general description of the museum under Municipality of Loures / Getting to know / Tourism, Culture, Leisure / Museums. 

(URL: http://www.cm-loures.pt/Ligacao.aspx?DisplayId=2#topo)

I chose the examples of two museums I like. Because this makes me think of how much different and better, given the tools available, my online and at a distance relationship could be (not to mention their relationship with those who don´t really know them and might be interested).  There are may more examples of this sort. How can a museum or a cultural venue ever establish a relationship with current and potential visitors/users when it´s so well hidden (starting from their URLs)? Or when the information it can actually give is so static (and boring and incomplete)? When there´s no open, direct, constant, informal dialogue?

A communications professional like me totally understands the need for coherence and I believe this is the main concern of local authorities or foundations which manage a number of venues and projects. Nevertheless, the solution is not to control them to the point of struggling them. People develop relationships with the organizations they visit, with the projects they love, not with the entities that manage them. No central communications office in a municipality will ever chat with people on Facebook on the day-to day life of a municipal museum, the items in its collections, the activities it has to offer the way a person who works in that museum would. There is, undoubtedly, a need for guidelines, for training, for orientation. But people are eager to receive them and be able to put them to good use in order to better promote what they´re doing and get to the people they wish to communicate with. It´s not a good idea to leave this to those who know less, who are – inevitably – less passionate, who have no real involvement in it – as is the case with Wikipedia, the tourism office or Lifecooler. This shows lack of vision which eventually condemns to a lack of attitude. And there´s no future there.

Every time I think of all those frustrated professionals whose only wish is to communicate (and I think of them a lot), I´ve got Sting´s song at the back of my head:

When you love somebody

Set them free…

Free… free….

Set them free…

The industry of the vast minorities

Image taken from the website The Long Tail.

In the morning of the 17^th of November I changed my plans and went to Centro Cultural de Belém for two reasons: the puzzling title of the international symposium organized by the Lisbon Estoril Film Festival, Art vs.Culture and Cultural Industries; and the fact that writer Hanif Kureishi was going to participate in the first panel discussion.

It ended up being a frustrating experience. I tried hard to understand how what the majority of the speakers was saying was actually related to the symposium´s theme, which I had found so intriguing. In the end, it actually felt like I had attended a private conversation that would have taken place anyway, no matter what the title of the symposium was. Rancière, Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer and others were quoted more than once and it was obvious that some of the panelists were actually having a good time among themselves, while I was trying to control my frustration and the feeling that I had wasted my morning.

I ended up leaving without understanding the “Art vs. Culture” statement, but I do think I understood one thing: some of the panelists were actually regretting the fact that the “industry” dominates creativity, leaving no space for less ‘popular’ or less ‘mainstream’ works to get to be known (and maybe... become as ‘popular’ or as ‘commercial’ as others?). There were moments where the actual complaint didn´t seem to be that they were left with no space to be, but that the ‘industry’ didn´t allow them to have an equally wide audience. Rather confusing, no?

I thought it odd that this could be an issue today. And I also thought that, if this is actually what was meant to be discussed under the title “Art vs. Culture and Cultural Industries”, the panel should have included a couple of speakers that could have brought the average age of the panelists a bit below 65 (Hanif Kureishi did actually try to recentre the debate, mentioning what he´s been noticing among his children and their friends, confident that these times are extremely creative, thanks also to new technologies, but noone followed the lead, so he gave up and, visibly irritated, concentrated on his cell phone...).

I also think that these are very creative times, especially in what concerns niche products. A creativity without boundaries, that can be conceived, produced and distributed without being dependent on the rules of the ‘industry’. Or... which actually has got space thanks to the ‘industry’. Considering the specific case of books (all panelists were writers or scriptwriters), Chris Anderson´s The Long Tail: Why the future of business is selling less of more  tells us of the numbers of books that would have never sold a copy in a normal bookshop (no space to store hundreds and hundreds of books that would sell small quantities), but which actually sell thanks to Amazon and it´s suggestions (“people who bought this, also bought this”...) and the fact that it can ship any book, as it doesn´t have to store it until it´s ordered. Nowadays, books can also be printed on demand, can be made available on the internet, can reach the most distant places (and let´s not forget e-books).

This is also the time where young talents in music upload their work on the internet for anyone who might be interested, making themselves known through “liking” and “sharing”; this is the time where concerts ae organised in people´s living rooms; where film festivals take place on You Tube.

I know this is a much larger issue and that it wouldn´t be possible to tackle here all different aspects of it. But I was wondering, is anyone denied space these days? Isn´t it true that niches are not given but actually create their own space? Could this all be more of a question of who we really try to connect with? ‘Popular’ products (I use the term to refer to sales, not content) probably still need the ‘industry’ and large formal cultural institutions for their distribution, but niche products (which might one day become ‘popular’) seem to be able to live quite independently these days, happy to be who they are. Could it be so?

More readings

A década em que todos puderam ser famosos para 15 pessoas (special report by Público newspaper, 8.01.2010)

Culture and Class (John Holden, 2010)

Still on this blog

La crise oblige? (ii) Programming challenges
The long tail

On social media one... socializes

Image taken from Devon Smith´s presentation The science of social media building.

A commom assumption is that all means of communication serve one single purpose: advertising. And more specifically: advertising a calendar of events. Very often we come across various promotional materials advertising the same event (an exhibition, a concert, a theatre play, a debate), in various formats (outdoors, posters, postcards, leflets, newspapers, newspaper ads, TV and radio spots), all with the same information (what, when, where). I believe that the use of each promotional material should have a concrete objective. The choice of format, the contents to be introduced, the timings of distribution, they all contribute in the promotion of an event, but, beyond this and most of all, they contribute in building something larger in terms of communication: the idea, the feeling and the involvement one wishes people to have in relation to the institution or person that promotes it.

The social media are still a rather new means, which has not been adequately studied yet by the majority of us in terms of purpose, possibilities and impact. I am talking specifically about Facebook, the one I use the most. Following the activity of a number of institutions (both cultural and other), I reach the conclusion that, as a social medium, Facebook is, first of all, just that: a space to socialize. As a friend of mine says, we should look at it as a café, a public space where people converse and share – ideas, opinions, experiences, information. It´s a space where we want to be because... everybody else is there, because we want to be part, because we don´t want to be left out, because we also want to converse (especially about ourselves...). Based on my personal experience, organizations that do just that, converse, are the ones I feel more involved with, meaning I give like´s, I share and I comment (thus contributing for a specific post´s larger visibility). In the case of organizations that limit themselves to promoting their calendar events (and which also exagerate in the number of posts or post a number of them consecutively), I pass over them or even hide them from my news feed, letting my ‘friends’ do the sorting out of what´s more relevant and interesting (and then, yes, I do pay attention).

This has been my experience with using Facebook at a personal and professional level. In the meantime, and although the majority of us have not properly explored these means yet, this area has already got its specialists. I was very fortunate to meet one of them during a seminar at the Kennedy Center last July. Her name is Devon Smith, she is very young, clearly a specialist, and she holds the post of Director of Social Media in Threespot, an agency that designs digital engagement strategies for not-for-profit organizations. I learned a lot in that seminar (the presentation is available here and it´s very clear), while, at the same time, I saw one of my greatest suspicions being confirmed: Facebook doesn´t sell tickets...

This is exactly why we should carefully consider why we are there, which is the best way of guaranteeing our presence and what we expect to get out of it. Among what I learned with Devon Smith, my experience as a user and my ideas on what communication means for a cultural institution, here´s what I think:

Why are we on Facebook

- To talk with our ‘friends’, people who like us, who like our way of being, who like what we have to say, who like our work;

- To strengthen our brand, that is, the idea we want people to have about us, about what it is we stand for;

- To multiply our ‘friends’, because through the ones we have already got we can make more, helping to spread our word further and further and, thus, broadening our base of supporters.

How should we be on Facebook

Before anything else, I should say that I feel it is essential that our voice in this conversation is concrete, recognizable, the one our ‘friends’ are interested in listening to. Some time ago I wrote a post called Faces, where I was writing about the importance of humanizing our institutions, of giving them a face, because it is a way of creating a relationship with people, of involving them. In this case, it´s about the importance of also giving them a voice. And as Marc Sands, the brilliant Director of Marketing of Tate Modern, puts it, people don´t want to listen to him, they wish to ‘listen’ and ‘talk’ to Nicholas Serota, the museum director (it´s worth watching the video How to engage with new audiences in the gallery). The impact of a post is totally different when it is a museum director, an artistic director, an orchestra conductor, a director, an artist, talking about the event, inviting us, telling us why we cannot miss it, revealing secrets, sharing his/her inspirations, emotions, concerns. Afterwards, this is the voice that will be ‘shared’  and taken further and further by our ‘friends’ (those who are ‘friends’ with Jorge Silva Melo on Facebook know what I am talking about).

Image taken from Rijkmuseum´s page on Facebook.

Having said this, I believe there are a few more points we should be paying attention to:

- Conversing means abandoning our dry, institutional language and use a more human, direct, everyday tone, with a sense of humour. The best example among the institutions I follow is Rijksmuseum (it is worth watching the video Rembrandt´s timeline, the objective of which was to increase the number of fans of the museum´s Facebook page, or to follow the monthly voting for the Misses that will be part of a calendar the museum will produce)

- Conversing means talking, but also listening. And answering. Quite often, questions and comments by ‘friends’ and fans (mainly on the pages of known personalities, run by them or by their agents) remain unasnwered, putting an end to ‘communication’ (very good examples of portuguese artists conversing with their fans on personal pages are those of Mísia and Aldina Duarte). It is equally important to know how to deal with controversial or unpleasant comments. On of the best examples I´ve seen recently is the way Woolly Mammoth theatre dealt with the controversy around the re-staging of Mike Daisey´s monologue The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs (read here  and here). The theatre answered all comments on Facebook and did not hesitate to post on its page articles that severely criticised the option to re-stage the play, proving to be totally open to dialogue and encouraging more and more conversation... about itself (those posts are no longer available on the theatre´s timeline, but it´s worth becoming a fan of Woolly Mammoth, one learns a lot).

Answer of the Editor of Multimedia of the newspaper Expresso to a reader´s comment. More on the blog PiaR.

Finally, some common practices I think should be revised:

- It seems to me that it does make sense to consider the number of daily posts, should we really wish to keep our ‘friends´s´ attention (there are institutions that really overdo it, without having anything special to add to the conversation);

- Although posts containing photos generate more ‘conversation’ (likes, shares and comments), it doesn´t seem to make sense to post photos of a specific event one by one, in consecutive posts, instead of organized in an album; as it doesn´t make sense to post photos which our out of focus, badly taken, various shots of the same scene or of the same moment in a conference or debate;

- Posts with calendar information are not interesting at all, they have little or nothing to do with Facebook´s nature, they don´t stimulate conversation (much less sell tickets). They actually give you the feeling that a seller is trying to impose something on you, something that... doesn´t sell (with or without a good reason).

So, in the end, what do we expect to get out of all this? A conversation. A good conversation. Moments of wonder, of laughing, of surprise, of discovery, of pleasure, of complicity, which make our ‘friends´seek our company more and more, both virtual and... real company.

More

Devon Smith´s blog

Devon Smith, Case studiesof theatres using social media (presentation)