Has it really been a year? The Museu Picasso’s 2.0 progress

It really feels like just a few days ago that we started this blog and the museum’s active presence on social media, but — believe it or not! — we’ve just had our first anniversary! To celebrate, we opened the doors of the museum to the online community one Monday, which is the day of the week we are closed to the public, to give our visitors the special privilege of having the place to themselves. Read more »

Museums and Social Networks: an Encounter at the Louvre

The recent get-together in Paris as part of the ‘Rencontres Web Musées’, on 16 October, was in the purest spirit of 2.0: informal and participatory and with plenty of substance supplied not only by the panel but by many of the delegates. The setting, the Louvre. The subject: Museums and Web 2.0. The content: let me give you a brief overview, and you can check out the presentations on Slideshare.

I could see that as far as 2.0 is concerned the museums in France are more or less where we are here, just starting to explore and discover the immense possibilities of communication and content generation that the social networks make available to us all, but a few French museums are at the cutting edge: of note here are the 2.0 experiences of the Muséum and the Abattoirs, both in Toulouse – the first science, the second contemporary art – or the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon. In Paris itself it seems that the major museums haven’t really got started yet, but museums are already showing a lot of interest, and the very fact of holding the 2.0 encounter at the Louvre is a good sign. I have a hunch that within six months or a year at the outside action on the social networks will have been integrated into most centres’ communication strategy. Their potential is much too good to miss, and the breakneck speed at which they’re expanding means that you can’t just sit there open-mouthed in wonderment if you want to really get on board. It’s not at all about following a trend, it’s about being present wherever the users are, talking to people and exchanging views in a multi-directional way, with communication being not only from the museum to the public, as in the past, but from everyone to the museum and from everyone to everyone.

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