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Yesterday the Tropenmuseum launched it’s Youtube channel. At last we do something web 2.0. We are alive on the web!!!! But as you can see at this moment their is only one movie on it. At the Tropenmuseum we had a lot of discussion lately about using movies to spice up our website and/or to place it on Youtube. We looked into several youtube museum channels. What we discovered is that almost all the museum channels are barely watched. On a first glance the MoMA YouTube channel has an average of 10.000 viewers per movie, the Rijksmuseum channel has an average of 2.000 viewers per movie and the indianapolis museum of art channel has an average of 1.000 viewers per movie. While seeing this movie viewers we wondered if it is worth the effort to produce movies for the web only.

A very low budget, mediocre quality movie clip of about 30 seconds costs about 1.000-1.500 euro’s to produce. This includes scriptwriting, shooting the movie and editing. When we want to make a short documentary style clip of about 5 minutes the cost easily double or triple. I think there are more effective ways to spend your (marketing) Euro’s in communicating your museum.

What our NoTube strategy is at this moment is not to produce clips solely for the web. What we will do is make agreements with media who want to shoot at our premises that we can use their movies for our purposes. Within a few weeks for example the local Dutch multi cultural broadcasting company MTNL wil broadcast a documentary series about the Tropenmuseum. Those documentaries will also be placed on our youtube channel. Another example is our new commercial that is being made for our upcomming exhibition about Vodou.

This doesn’t mean that we won’t produce movies or movie clips in the future. But we will always try to use the clips with traditional media to stretch out the reach of the movies made.

I have found this lecture on marketing blog in the Netherlands. I was rather curious because I work for an ethnographic museum which employs a lot of anthropologists.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPAO-lZ4_hU&hl=en&fs=1]

This lecture watches as a documentary because of the many movie clips it contains. Because I am not an anthropologists I don’t know what so special on this research in comparison to any other social sciences. But I really liked this lecture. Why? and what is the use for the museum marketing professional?

First of all I think the main message of this lecture is:

‘You tube is a way of expressing yourself to a (un)defined community’

Or to put it another way social websites like Youtube are a part of your identity. And it is very interesting to see how some home made videos are being picked up by large communities. But there are also small communities discussing certain topics ranging from God to Gardening. And that’s where the museum comes in. People are expressing themselves in all kinds of websites like Youtube, Flickr, Facebook etc and they are talking about your museum. And the interesting thing is that I think there are a lot of visitors who really would like to talk about the museum but also with the museum. Social websites are tools of knowing what you customer want but also a way to give them influence or even better let them be a part of your museum community. There are many ways to facilitate these kind of customer/visitor participation. There is so much to say about you could even write a blog about it. A very good blog about this subject is Museum 2.0 by Nina Simon.

Here are the Youtube results of my museum: Tropenmuseum youtube
Here are the Flickr results of my museum: Tropenmuseum flickr