Nope, not what I’m saying. Community is community, not marketing and that’s the way we think of it. Unfortunately, Facebook just does not give institutions the tools to really work with community well on their site (see lots of reasons in rant above). I just think if you are going to criticize MoMA for their effort, you’ve got to look at why the tool may or may not work well too and that’s what I was getting at in my comment. I’d love to see FB put in some effort to make pages and groups more community oriented, but they are not doing it which makes our jobs pretty difficult if we are there for the community, not there to market (and that is what the BkM is there for-community).

Shelley´s last blog post..The 2009 Mut Expedition – back in the field

Ruth Seeley´s last blog post..Why communicating with your stakeholders doesn’t constitute spin

Inclusion of your name in your Twitter profile is a contentious issue these days, but I support it wholeheartedly. You’re a brand, and I like to know there’s a person behind the brand. Not unlike posting a comment as “Victor” and not “Museum.”

Shelley, I’d enjoy chatting more with you about the connections between marketing, communication, and community. It sounds like you’re distinguishing them, e.g. Facebook for marketing. I’d argue marketing and communication are the same from the consumer’s perspective.

Judy, what do you think? Is your relationship with a museum, such as MoMA on Twitter, one of marketing, communication, or something else?

Victor – thanks for the shout out. It’s nice to see someone noticing what we do. We copied that bio idea from @jetblue and it’s helping a lot – people need to know who’s tweeting (I get questions about that via Twitter, so it seems like people are noticing that little tidbit and that’s good). This is even more important when I see a comment like the one above from Judy Rey – it’s vital the people we interact with know not only *who* we are but *what* we do at the museum. In the case of both of us, we are not curators and that needs to be clear. We’ve got a few more changes coming in next few days which will help clarify even more so be on the lookout – I’ll be tweeting that update.

Both – ah, yes, Facebook. FB pages are nice because you can easily encapsulate what is going on at the museum in a single page, but they are a total disaster when it comes to actually reaching out and communicating with people. If people post to the wall, there’s no auto-notification when you post back and our experience, like Victor’s, is that people don’t check back. I just went into our page settings and disabled the wall and enabled the discussion forum (why, we didn’t have this enabled before I just don’t know) to see if that changes the interaction – I’m hoping there’s a chance for more meaningful dialog since there is reply notification in the forum feature (note, however, there is no notification to admins when a thread is started and that’s the silliest thing I’ve ever seen). Generally, FB pages were designed as a “marketing feature” to be tied into FB advertising – they just were not developed with interaction in mind. IMHO, FB pages are a total community void, but a marketers dream and that’s why community does not work in that structure (community is not marketing, darn it). FB groups have a better structure for interaction, but since you can’t install apps onto group pages they are somewhat less fun for users. I’d love to see FB put some effort into both pages and groups. A lot of work could be done, but it doesn’t seen like a priority over there – especially on the group front (w/o a tie into their ads structure, there’s no revenue for them in making those changes, so why bother). FB frustrates the heck out of me.

Sorry, I know this was long-winded

Interesting discussion regarding institutional “brands” on Twitter and the identity of person behind it [link to post] What do you think?

– http://twitter.com/marialgilbert/statuses/1085535023

– Posted using Chat Catcher