Conversation at http://museum30.ning.com/forum/topics/twitter-as-a-business-tool

That being said, there’s no good reason for it to disappear. It’s the baby steps of voice that every museum first learned as it came forth into this world and it’s what it knows best.

The real issue here isn’t voice, but rather fear of losing authority. That an uncomfortable informality in some way cheapens the brand of the museum and leads to a lowering of standards. But while museums sit and ponder what their new voice or voices should be (and obviously the latter is eventually the answer for many), they miss the golden moment of being relevant.

We’ve all personally struggled with the idea of our multiple selves and how we engage with the rest of the world. Koven, I’d make the guess that you engage a little differently with your music friends than you do with your museum friends than you do with your museum professionals. At some point it gets hard being multiple selves and you stop worrying about it and you’re just you. Sure, you may tailor yourself a bit for different experiences, but at the end of the day, you’re probably true to yourself without even overthinking it.

In twitter’s case, we’re talking about 140 characters. It seems like such a small threshhold that we’re hesitating to cross. And, more importantly, we often learn best by simply doing. I’d argue that in twitter’s instance, just start posting things. As people respond to some things and not to others — or even as someone reads backs through a twitter stream — it will begin to appear what seems or feels right for a given museum.

There’s not a single answer of what this best new voice is, but instead of listening, trying to figure out how to be best like the others, just start talking. Ultimately, you’ll find your voice and you’ll be part of the conversation. Even better, by being relevant, you even better ensure that your identity remains whole and you’ll be an authority in the new space. Given the two possibilities — you occasionally misspeak or that the conversation ends before you ever had a chance to contribute — which is the worse outcome?

I think it’s really interesting that museums are struggling so with the issue of voice(s) in the Web 2.0 space. All of our institutions are comfortable with multiple voices in the ‘real world’. Staff go to meetings, seminars, conferences etc and speak in an ambiguous social location that’s both ‘as ourselves’ and ‘for our institutions’ – and there’s no drama (or not much anyway).

Why is it so different when it’s in Web 2.0? It seems to me that one issue is the almost but not quite ephemeral nature of the Web 2.0. In practice a tweet or a blog post is (nearly) as ephemeral as speaking. On the other hand all of our posts lurk, linger and circulate indefinitely as published text (or whatever, but mostly as text).

Maybe also it’s an issue of social context? Meetings, conferences etc are defined, specific social contexts that have unstated but taken for granted social rules that have been developing for hundreds of years. Each of the Web 2.0 spaces is also a social context but they are new and rapidly changing and we really don’t (yet?) know where we are or who we are.

Real world meetings also tend to be quite focused and specific – people with specific expertise or interest become voices on behalf of their institutions. As you point out, this is also true in Web 2.0 spaces – the posts that work best have fairly well defined communities of interest in which the tweeter/blogger belongs.

Some organisational angst might be because the people who become voices in Web 2.0 spaces are not necessarily the people who become voices in real world spaces. In fact it’s highly likely to be younger and more junior staff who want to blog or tweet – people who would not represent their museum at conferences. Vetting is therefore more explicit, more visible and less taken for granted.

Lastly, voice may be a more general issue for museums. As a social history museum, we’ve always had a commitment to multiple voices within exhibitions. More recently we’ve been exploring multiple curatorial voices as well – can we enable different curators to have different ‘museum’ voices within an exhibition space? Will this confuse visitors? Will it make exhibitions incoherent? I wonder if this is partly driven by a new, emerging general Web 2.0 culture of individual as opposed to institutional voice?

Museums have to recognize that they no longer have a single “public.” They now have to deal with multiple communities, and a given community may be defined not by a common interest, but rather by a (possibly ephemeral) platform like Twitter or Facebook. And in that situation, it is often the early adopters that define how the community operates.

Twitter might be gone in three years and replaced by something else, but by sitting those years out we will have missed so many chances to connect with people who we otherwise might not have. And maybe the thing that replaces Twitter will itself last only three years. That’s six years of not participating, not connecting, and not learning. The days of waiting to see what pervasive technology “wins” are probably over, because the days of overly dominant technology platforms are themselves over. We have to be ready and willing to play where our community is already playing.

It reminds me of 1994 or so, when we started to see how much the Web was going to change (shopping, anyone?). Maybe we’re not even to that stage with Twitter–how much will they, and even Facebook, have to change when they’re forced to become part of a profit-making operation?

So I think it’s premature to argue that the institutional voice is dead. Rather we might see that the institutional voice, even in its last throes, kills Twitter first .