I just wanted to be a lurker. That’s all.
Maybe a year ago I joined Facebook. You have to join to see what is going on in there, so I signed up. I asked no one to be my friend. I was just lurking.
And then one of my husband’s friends, Aidan, found me. I know he was actually looking for Jeremy, but my husband is admittedly even less technologically hip than me, and is not on Facebook at all.
So Aidan became my first friend.
A couple of months later, leading a Generation Y session at a museum conference, I confessed I had only one friend on Facebook. Gen Y panelist Amanda Rosner felt sorry for me and said she would friend me. And so she did.
Slowly, a few others found me, and I had several Facebook friends, mostly from within the museum field. I was ok with that. I took ten minutes and threw something on my profile. I posted a picture of the incomparable Shadow instead of a picture of myself.
It all ended about a week ago. Kevin found me. I grew up with Kevin. I think we went to Kiddie Kollege together when we were about four. And we graduated from the same, small, rural, Georgia high school.
Kevin has always been an extremely nice, friendly guy. I had a crush on him all through fifth grade. But I really had lost touch with everyone from high school. Now we are friends on Facebook, and the floodgates have opened. He spread the word to other high school classmates that I had been “found,” and now, suddenly I am “friends” with a slew of people I have not seen since I was seventeen. They were all perfectly nice people in high school, and I am sure they are all perfectly nice people today, so I have no reason to rudely turn down their friend requests.
The other night, however, a sense of panic set in. Were my high school “friends,” who are, in reality, scarcely even acquaintances now, going to outnumber all my friends from my current life, both in and out of the museum field? Being, well, somewhat technically challenged, I scoured the friends of my museum friends to find people I know and like (I don’t really know how else to find people on the darn thing), and I sent out a flurry of friend requests (ok . . . four), feeling I needed to rebalance (thank you to those who accepted my invitation!).
This whole exercise, and my reaction to it, has made me think about my personal brand, and how branding is changing in this new, social-networking realm. I was pretty happy with my brand on Facebook. It was low-key, and I only had a few friends, but they were people I know and enjoy, and I was happy that, in a way, they represented me. When I felt that my personal “brand,” however, was becoming skewed by an influx of new friends who are perhaps not so representative of me today, I went into brand-recovery mode.
This has made me think about branding, and ultimately how much control we have over our brands. We set up Facebook pages and encourage people to become fans of our museums, but we really have no control over who chooses to become fans. Some may have uploaded pictures that are inappropriate, and now they appear on our pages because they are fans. Does that make them “undesirable” fans? Do our fans and, by extension, do our visitors create the identities of our museums? Do my Facebook friends define who I am?
We live in a world where identity morphs and changes quickly, and often without warning. We can manage it somewhat, and try to rebalance it (as I attempted to do the other night), but we now, more than ever, are putting the power of our brands in the hands of our visitors and members. They go to sites like Facebook and fan us, and thereby create a closer tie to our museums. Or they go to Yelp! and complain about us, though there again we can take steps to address those concerns, as our guest blogger Jennifer Caleshu shared a few weeks ago.
So yes, our visitors define who we are, and sometimes they do a better job of it than we do. But this is an opportunity for museums. Every fan represents an emotional connection, and those emotional connections go a long way towards sustaining and growing our museums.
It is a little bit scary to allow visitors to define our brands for us. Yet the power of word-of-mouth has meant they always have, and now our visitors have venues to spread the word much more efficiently and easily, and this is also incredibly exciting. More than ever, our social networking strategy has to fold into our web strategy, our traditional marketing strategy, and our public relations strategy. It is a lot to manage, but the payback ultimately leads to more engaged visitors and members. And don’t we all want that?
I have made peace with my friends list on Facebook. They do represent me . . . who I have been in the past and who I am now. If only I could figure out how to find people on the darn thing, and maybe I should fan some more museums I like . . . .
Do you have any stories about how social networking has helped your museum? Or trying to find your way through the multitude of sites trying to connect people? To share or ask questions, simply click on “comments” below. (If you are reading this from your e-mail subscription to the blog, please go to our blog's website to add a comment.)
- Susie
