Let’s Get Real about Online Audience Engagement

Let's Get Real, Culture 24' Bristol conference, September 2011.

A guest post from Culture24’s Jane Finnis on their Let’s Get Real conference that took place on 20th 21st September at Watershed in Bristol.

I think it is about time that we get real about our online stuff. About what works and what doesn’t on our websites, social media channels and online services. In particular who is paying any attention to what we are doing and what is it that they really care about?

The Let’s Get Real conference set out an agenda to try and delve deeper into some of these questions and offer both strategic inspiration and practical advice. The idea for the conference came from a year long action research project that I have been leading (and learning lots from) involving 24 cultural organisation and agencies including British Museum, Tate, Watershed, British Library, Roundhouse, National Museums Scotland to name but a few.

Let's Get Real action research team.

The results, analysis and key findings from the research are all set out in a report that was launched at the conference over some extremely marvellous local beer, cheese, wine, bread and the like – all courtesy of Google (the event sponsor) and sourced in the South West.

You can download the full report from the new Culture24 company site: http://weareculture24.org.uk/projects/action-research/
Download and check out the work we did on website healthchecks and implement the shared Google Analytics Segments created: http://bit.ly/p0IwBK
Browse and consider the social media toolkit and pick‘n’mix offering a comparison of all the tools currently available: http://bit.ly/p0IwBK

Let's Get Real paper, front cover

The report is a good read and so I am told from the very positive feedback, easy to digest and full of useful things to know and do. I am aware that it doesn’t answer all of the questions that it asks by any means but it does lift the lid on some of the assumptions that exist about success online.

The main findings were:

Be clear ‘what’ you are trying to do and ‘who’ it is for online
It is not enough to see the web as a global machine, reaching out to everyone.
We need to segment our online audiences as we would for any exhibition, performance or workshop, remembering that our digital strategy should not be separate from our overall mission, but rather a tactical strategy, which sets goals, measurements and investment.

Focus your online investment
Search is still the single most important source of visits to most organisations’ websites. Mobile is growing many times faster than social media traffic, but the majority of cultural websites are not yet optimised for mobile platforms. If we wish to grow audiences to our websites we need to change the focus of our investment in our online platforms.

Recognise the value, and the limits, of social media
Social media needs to be far more tactical, even at the overall brand level. Remember that at the moment, in general, social media platforms have a negligible effect on driving traffic to organisational websites. Most of the activity within social networks stays ‘in’ the network. Social media engagement isn’t about spending money; it’s about what you do and say. It’s about having the right content in the right channels to engage the right audience in the right way.

Question whether the web is enabling you to reach new audiences
One of the closely held assumptions about cultural engagement online has been that it allows us to reach out to new audiences and extend the reach of public programmes beyond those who traditionally engage with the arts. The online Mosaic profiling exercise that was undertaken in partnership with Experian Hitwise challenges these assumptions and raises the question of whether we are actually reaching new audiences segments online, or just engaging with a larger number of the same type of people.

Standardise methods of reporting online metrics to external stakeholders
The question must be raised as to how useful the current reported metrics are for gauging success across organisations, particularly since they do not capture information about the social web and online activity relating to an organisation that occurs outside of that organisation’s main website.

My mission from the project and my hope from the report is that it will kick-start a dramatic shift in the way we plan, invest and collaborate on the development of both the current and next generation of digital cultural activities.

An ambitious hope perhaps but totally do-able fs we can find the willingness to get real.

Jane Finnis is Chief Executive of Culture24
Follow her on twitter @janefinnis
Blog: http://janefinnis.wordpress.com/

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