A museum takes advantage of everything the Internet has to offer
In my travels around the Internet I have noticed that a lot of art museums are beginning to embrace social media and use it to their advantage.  The best example I have seen of this comes from the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

IMA has it all right there on their Web site’s homepage.  If you click on the Interact link it brings up:

• Links to Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and iTunes
• the IMA blog
• the IMA collection of tags
• and their videos

The museum’s videos are really the best.  They have everything from artist interviews to a curator’s blog to employee profiles.  They make videos that “trailer” their upcoming exhibits and even show viewers how to make origami.  Not only that, but because the videos are on YouTube viewers can comment on them and the museum gets all that great two-way communication going.

Check out this video about the PR person at the museum.

It’s pretty wonderful when social media and art come together like that.  I wish more museums were taking IMA’s example.  A lot of museums have blogs and some even have videos but not to the extent of IMA.  I also really love how all the videos are connected with the museum’s logo, It’s My Art.  Everyone who works at the museum is part of their social media so it’s not all sophisticated curators but even the groundskeeper gets to be part of it.  This really lets the public in on every aspect of the museum creating that great transparency we all strive for.  Seriously, check out their YouTube channel to see how it’s done.

A scene from "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" shot at the Art Institute of Chicago.

This quote from John Donne’s “Meditation XVII” explains no person is isolated and we are all interconnected.  Even though Donne wrote this poem a very long time ago it still rings true today (pardon the pun).  In our personal lives it is important to remember what Donne was trying to tell us, the actions of one person can affect us all.  This lesson is also important for businesses to be successful.

Businesses and art museums would do well to remember Donne’s lesson.  It is important for any business to remember it is interconnected with the community it resides in, and it is a good practice to keep your community engaged.  This is especially true for art museums because they can only thrive if they have a strong connection with their community. 

Creating connections
Museums stay connected with their community in a mulitude of ways.  Public programming, working with area schools and guest lectures are all common ways that art museums stay connected. 

For example
One of the reasons to visit an art museum is to learn, so having experts give lectures is a great way to share knowledge with the public.  Earlier this year, Kent State’s own Albert Reischuck, assistant professor, gave a series of lectures at the Akron Art Musuem that converged art and modern culture.  According to the article in the Daily Kent Stater, Reischuck was asked to lecture because the Akron Art Museum was closed for renovations but they still wanted to keep their audience engaged with the museum’s collection.  I had Reischuck one semester for a 20th century European art history class.  He had a way of keeping the class involved with his lecture that was really great.  I always wanted to go and I never felt like falling asleep.

Another example
The Cincinnati Art Museum is creating connections early on with their community. 

Children at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The museum hosts a monthly program titled “Wee Wednesdays” that allows children ages 2-5 to tour the museum through story sessions and scavenger hunts with objects the children can touch.  This program gets parents involved and instills a love of art early on so hopefully the children will want to keep coming back as they get older.  

One more example
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City started something extraordinary last year that will no doubt connect the museum with people across the country.  The Met is making high-resolution digital images of the museum’s collection available to scholars for free.  This is so amazing because it will provide very high quality images to art history students.  I know that the grainy and discolored slides I have to look at pale in comparison to digital images.  It is impossible for most students to see all these important works in person so having a digital image is the next best thing.  For the Met it means increasing their mission to educate people about art.  It also generates a lot of good feelings from one of their most important publics, art historians.

Final thoughts
Engaging audiences and creating connections are among the most important things a public relations practitioner does.  Therefore, Donne’s poem, written hundreds of years ago, is still relevant today.  Public relations grew out of this idea of mankind being interconnected.  Businesses need these connections to thrive and it is the job of public relations practitioners to come up with innovative ways to create connections.

How do you create connections?

What goes into an art exhibit?
When a person goes to an exhibit, especially one like Artistic Luxury, he or she is seeing the end product of a lot of hard work.  Artistic Luxury borrowed art from museums in seven countries, which takes a lot of negotiations, not to mention shipping.  Once all the art is actually in the museum the curator has to figure

Women's Committee of the Carnegie Museum of Art hanging art

out where it all should go and then it has to be put in place very carefully.  Let’s not forget about all the public relations efforts that get attention for the show.  I’m sure there are lots more elements in curating an art exhibit I’m leaving out.  The fact remains, the general public never sees this side of the museum.  What they see is beautiful objects in a tranquil setting, not all the stress and endless hours of work that got it all there.

Why should an art museum be transparent?
Because there are so many behind-the-scenes elements to curating an art exhibit, it’s a really good idea for the curator or the museum to have a blog about it.  This gives the museum transparency, which is important because so many things happen behind-the-scenes that the public doesn’t see. 

What is transparency?
Elizabeth Albrycht, writer of Corporate PR, describes transparency as providing information to the public instead of hording it.  She says transparency helps people to understand the company and shows the public justification for decisions.  This way the public can make better decisions about the company.  In corporate PR, this is important because you don’t want to look like the corporation is hiding things.  People can become distrustful of companies that don’t let the public inside, which leads to bigger problems later on down the road.

How does a company become transparent?
With all the social media and new technologies it is very easy for a company to become transparent.  Twitter, blogs and e-newsletters can all be utilized to provide the public with important information.  The curator of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Museum has a great blog that lets people into his reasoning for choosing art exhibits and it even has interviews with artists.  It’s really interesting to get this behind-the-scenes look at what goes into an art museum, not just for an art-nerd like me but for everyone else too.  People who go to museums a lot would be interested in knowing why and how an art museum does what it does. 

Transparency can be a incredibly useful PR tactic.  Allowing curators or CEOs to share their personal voice with the public can generate a lot of goodwill from your audience.  It helps you reach out with your message even more than just traditional mediums.