These are my notes, paired with some of the images I used on my slides, that I used to give my presentation as a panel member at the Library Collections Care Discussion Group during the 2015 AIC Annual Meeting.
This talk will be a balance of “how to” and “why”. There are many other resources about how to get started using social media, and I have a list of those provided online, but I’m going to focus more on the “why” part of it because I still think many institutions, conservators, and allied professionals don’t understand just how powerful and important of a tool this is for outreach.
It’s important because, for once, WE get to direct the conversation! We get to tell our stories directly to our audience, rather than through an interpreter. Think of how often journalists and others call us “conservationists”, or misinterpret the things we say. With social media, the story is in our control. We can share our feelings and aspirations directly with our audience, and avoid having the heart of our work stripped out of a story written by a stranger.
There is minimum investment to start, and depending on how big you want to scale it, not a lot of resource commitment other than staff time. If you have a smart phone, or a digital camera and a computer with an internet connection, you can start doing this RIGHT NOW. You don’t need an entire IT department, or even someone with specialized computer knowledge. Social media sites were designed to be easy to use!
So okay, it’s easy to use, it’s important to do, but does anyone really care about conservation besides conservators?
YES!!
You. Have. An. Audience!
They may not be the audience you’re used to, or expecting, but trust me, they’re out there. But the important thing is that they are curious about conservation, once they discover that it exists!
Because, for many of them, they may never even have HEARD about conservation or preservation. But that’s the beauty of these platforms, because they allow you to reach an audience that may have never heard of it, and hence would not go looking for information about it on their own. We are coming to THEM, finally!
And not only can we get their attention with intriguing pictures, GIFs or videos, but if you already have a blog or website about conservation, you can use social media to bring those people to your site. We can use these social networks as a way to cross pollinate with more established ways of communicating online, such as blogs, online journals, or list-servs, by bringing in a fresh new audience.
So I encourage you to get to know your audience: do some research about what kind of content is most popular on the platform of your choice. Observe what others do, and what’s successful and what’s not. I started by following the big and famous museums, libraries and archives that have their own social media teams and were doing amazing things. I saw what seemed to work well for them, and then I copied those techniques using my own content, and saw my audience grow.
Alright, so maybe I’ve convinced you to believe that there are people out there who are going to listen to you. Well, next comes the other important part…the COMMUNITY.
I want to impress that these platforms are more than just an audience; they are also a community that we can engage with and become a part of. They are interactive. The most influential users of social media are those who realize it as a place to have conversations, not just as a place to make a statement.
These sites are full of people who will answer your questions and ask questions back of you. They will comment on your photos, your work, your lab…your labcoat! They will express curiosity, and delight, and even confusion. Sometimes those moments of confusion provide some of the best educational moments, so be on the look-out!
Therefore I encourage you and your institution to be a part of the community! Make it easy for others to interact with you – encourage them to reach out, ask questions. There’s a variety of ways to do this, and some platforms are more effective than others for certain types of interactions. Across all of them the general key is to be responsive and graciously acknowledge those who take the time to engage with you.
Overall though, what seems to work best and get the most engagement is to speak the vernacular. Keep posts short, entertaining, and approachable. Use humor! Believe it or not, you CAN use memes as a teaching tool, and certainly use them to get your audience’s attention!
And understand also that part of what we’re doing on these sites is changing perceptions of just who is a conservator. We’re bringing out the fact that conservators are just people too, that we are approachable, and that we’re not inscrutable.
These sites are a place to be both serious and silly; it is where you can be a professional as well as a flawed human who makes mistakes at the same time, all the while sharing our enthusiasm about our work.
Lastly, think about community also in an internal way: Use your own institutional community to help boost your outreach efforts. Does your institution already have social media accounts? Go make friends with those people (or at least send them an email), and start giving them conservation related content!
Conservation is very photogenic!
Speaking of photogenic…maybe you’re still asking yourself what social media has going for it that exhibits or posters or press releases don’t have. Well, I have two words in response to that: NEW MEDIA.
New media is, most simply, content on the internet that is interactive, sharable, manipulatable, remixable, and focused on encouraging dialogue. Social media sites – Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram – are part of the new media. Blogs are part of new media. Youtube or Vimeo videos that you can comment on, GIFs that you make yourself and others share, video games, augmented reality, et cetera. All of that is part of the new media. And it is a powerful tool that we have at our disposal. With it we can more accurately portray our important work as conservators and preservation professionals, and make it easy for our audience to discover us and engage us about our work.
One of the more specific examples of how the new media way of showing our work can improve our outreach and educational efforts is the ability of GIFs, memes, sound bites, and video clips to vibrantly allow you to show things that a mere picture or paragraph of text could never do. The smallest things can be fascinating to your audience – don’t ignore the “small picture” and the small details. Think of how you can portray our work, ourselves as professionals, and the spaces we work in…but in living sound and color.
Seriously, think about what your lab sounds like during the day, what our repair materials feel like, what they smell like. We can use these new media formats to make our work come alive for our audience by sharing these feelings.
And the best thing is that there are a variety of free tools that allow you to easily create these types of things. They’re so popular because, again the technology required to make them has been made easy to use and cheap.
So when you’re thinking about what sorts of things you want to share as part of your outreach efforts, think about how to share the feeling of doing conservation and the meaning of it to you – and be on the lookout for the next fun technology thing- don’t be afraid to try it out and play with it! Who knows what may be coming down the pipe next, and how amazing of a storytelling tool it might turn out to be!
I will conclude by giving you a mission, and it is this:
Take that first step if you haven’t already: just go out and try it!
You can start just by following others, observing them and learn about the work of other conservators and preservation professionals.
You can start small, boost the signal by reblogging or reposting other’s posts/tweets. Throw in your own photos or posts once in a while. Or you can start entirely with your own original content. Rinse, repeat, and scale it up over time. You can start doing one thing, and switch to another – it’s okay to change your focus, or try new things but not commit to them.
Be prepared to get discouraged at first – it takes a bit of time and concentrated effort to get the ball rolling and people’s attention, but don’t compare your results to those of institutions with a dedicated 3-person social media team. Be proud of even small results! Even if you’ve just gotten the interest of only two people, you’ve done something good because you’ve made them aware about conservation and got them thinking about it. They might be the next donors to your institution, or will mention the need for more conservation funding at your next library board meeting, or maybe they’re a college student who will go on to join a conservation training program.
Keep doing it if you find it fun or thrilling, but don’t force yourself to do it if you don’t like it. Even if it’s not your cup of tea, please recognize that it’s a valuable way to reach out to the public, and support those who are doing outreach this way in your institution or in your peer group.
And if you haven’t gotten on one of these sites yet, but you’re curious…come join us! We’re having a great time telling the world about the awesomeness and the importance of our work as conservators!