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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.

In one of my previous posts I made a star appeal matrix for creating blockbuster exhibitions. While making this matrix I was contemplating what defines a blockbuster exhibition. With some googleing and some of my own brainpower I found that a blockbuster exhibition has the following characteristics:

Quantitative characteristics in order of importance are:

1. The number of visitors the exhibitions attracts
2. The revenue it generates
3. The public relations value
4. The appreciation of the visitors

All those quantitative characteristics has to be positive deviations of the what the normal/average numbers are. This means that when a museum, with an average of 100.000 visitors a year, has that one special exhibition which attracts 350.000 visitors, this museum has created a Blockbuster. Apart form that a museum should also compare his numbers with other museums.

There are also content related characteristics (in random order):

• The blockbuster exhibition has a popular theme. (sex, sport)
• The content of the exhibition matches the zeitgeist.
• The exhibition has celebrity appeal or some other well known icons. (Picasso, King Tut)
• The exhibition has several content layers: the superficial visitor is being entertained but also the more profound visitor can fulfill his needs.
• It appeals to an international audience.
• One or two clear defined target groups.

And finally there are are also some organizational characteristics:

• Is the museum organization or a PR agency able to create a hype/buzz?
• Can the museum organization create/get enough content?

When your museum wants to create a blockbuster exhibition, you should first look into the content characteristics. Brianstorm with each other and see if your ideas at least partially match those characteristics. Then when the best ideas are chosen look at your organization and see if it is able to pull it off. Finally what defines a blockbuster for a small museum is different then for a big one.

Here are some of the resources I used. Some focus on the negative side of blockbuster exhibition:

• The temple of vrooom
• Are blockbuster exhibitions killing art?
• Blockbuster Shows And Prices to Match
• Blockbuster Exhibitions - Why?

A colleague of mine once told me that, at school, his children had to pretend they were running a museum. The end result of their assignment was….regulatory signs with things that were not allowed.

I was thinking of this story while I was on a short holiday in Brugge (Bruges) Belgium. I visited there the Groeninge museum. This nice small museum has some art works from from great Belgian artists ranging from the 15th century (f.e. Jan van Eyck) to the 20th century (like Rene Margritte).

Upon entering the museum I stumbled upon all the things that are not allowed in this museum. See the picture below.

In a certain way most of these signs really offend me. It is like they think that I don’t know how to behave in a museum.

So what’s not allowed, starting top left:

• Smoking
• Mobile Phones (I think they mean calling with a mobile phone, not the phone itself)
• Photography
• Dogs (and other livestock I presume)
• Backpacks
• Suitcases?
• Icecreams? (probably food)
• Cups? (probably drinking)
• Umbrella’s

To top it of this museum have a guards in uniform watching over the different galleries. Welcome to the museum Police state. A very hospitable environment.

To be honest I know there are people who really don’t know how to behave. But are signs the way to let people behave themselves? In one of my favorite books “the design of everyday things” the writer Donald Norman explains what bad design is. One of the main features of bad design is explaining in words or symbols what you can or can not do. Good designs speaks for itself, it is intuitive.

An example from another branch is Traffic Engineering. This article in Wired explains why dutch Traffic Engineer Hans Monderman hates traffic signs.

“Monderman considers most signs to be not only annoying but downright dangerous. To him, they are an admission of failure, a sign - literally - that a road designer somewhere hasn’t done his job. “The trouble with traffic engineers is that when there’s a problem with a road, they always try to add something,” Monderman says. “To my mind, it’s much better to remove things.”"

How should this work for a museum? Should we remove all the signs and trust people that they will behave themselves? I am not a designer but why not start to remove all the signs and see what happens? Will the crowd go wild and start smoking and walking their dogs in the galleries? I don’t think so.

But how about those annoying backpacks…or suitcases? Maybe when you enter the museum you should pass a cloakroom where museum hosts will kindly ask you if you don’t want to leave your stuff at this guarded cloakroom for your convenience.

If someone really has the guts to talk on a Mobile phone when it is totally silent you can just ask him to talk quietly or stop calling at all. If you have a noisy museum (kids running etc) does it matter that someone is calling?

Photography…I can write a whole post about it. But I really don’t see why you don’t want people to take pictures of your museum or collection. Most of the time pictures enhance the memory of visitors. The nice experience they had being in your museum can be relived more vividly by watching the pictures. They can share the pictures with your friends on Flickr or other social websites. These are all good things for your museum.

Food/Drinking…Tricky one, I don’t have a nice solution yet to prevent that. But maybe some waste bins at the entrance with a sign (yes a sign) “drop your food here”. There are probably better design solutions.

I think that some smart design choices can make the experience of visiting a museum a lot more pleasant.

One tip: To prevent discussion with antisocial visitors print on the entrance ticket in the smallest font possible that you have house rules which can be viewed upon request.

NB: Does anybody know the right English word for Gallery Guard/usher/sentry (suppoost in Dutch)?

The cultural season is starting with mini exhibition in cargo container.

In Amsterdam every year at the last weekend of August the cultural Season opens with the Uitmarkt festival. The Uitmarkt is held from August 29 - 31 at the Eastern Harbour area in Amsterdam. Three days with over 400 previews of different artists, performing on 34 stages. And of course the Tropenmuseum is also present. This year our great cultural sponsor the BankGiro Loterij made a so called castle of cargo containers where a a lot of museums could present themselves. We decided to give a preview of our next exhibition called ‘Vodou, art & mysticism from Haiti’. We were showing a real Dutch Vodou priest, a Vodou altar and pictures of the objects that will be on display. To enhance the(marketing) experience people can send a vodou postcard for free to anybody they want.

A lot of people pass by on these days so this is a big chance to present ourselves to the public. But to be frank I really hate these kind of trade fair/market stall things. Why? I always wonder if it has any effectiveness at all. Since I am working, every year or so, some boss asks me to present his company on a trade fair or some market stall. In my experience selling your organization on these kinds of events is a different way of communicating. It requires a lot of effort/money to do this the right way. And money and time is always lacking. So what questions do you have to ask before you are going to present yourself on a trade fair:

1. What goals do you have?
What is the purpose of being on a trade fair? is it awareness(brrr) or a clear goal like collecting email addresses, selling tickets etc.

2. Who is the targetgroup?

3. What are you selling?
The Tropenmuseum has 7 exhibitions a year, 60 events, 20 educational programs, etc, etc. The best thing is to focus on one or a few of them.

4. Any way to give a follow up?
Maybe you can collect email addresses and send people an email when a specific exhibitions starts.

5. How can you stand out between other booths?
Maybe some great design will help…

6. Is your staff ready and knowledgeable?
Staff is very important to make a good impression on your potential visitors. A lot of time on trade fairs I see staff talking with each other, blocking the entrance of a booth, eating, badly dressed and being very rude.

Most of the time (in my experience) the only focus is on the design of the exhibition and all other questions are just forgotten or skipped.

And here some pictures of the Tropenmuseum at the Uitmarkt.

Some extra information:
Tips on attending a trade fair

The famous artwork ‘for the love of God’, made by Damien Hirst, starts it world tour in Amsterdam at the Rijksmuseum at the 1st of November. This artwork is a skull which is cast from platinum, encrusted with 8,601 diamonds and has its original teeth. An investment group bought the skull a few years ago for an estimated $100 million dollars. The whole Dutch press is all over it. So great PR for the Rijksmuseum. The new director in chief of the Rijksmuseum Wim Pijbes is showing off his new talents. But this skull is actually accompanying the exhibition Hirst has made for the Rijksmuseum. Hirst has chosen a personal selection from the Rijksmuseum’s collection of 17th-century art. So that PR message is a bit lost.

But a little secret is that the ‘real’ thing can be found at the Tropenmuseum. But the PR value of this magnificent piece is actually not the same.

Note on the Tropenmuseum skull: This skull is from New Guinea. It is probably an ancestor because there is no hole in the skull to remove the brains. The line between life and death was not strongly drawn in most Papuan cultures.For example, the dead could still be present as spirits among the living. They had a great influence on a person’s daily existence and it was essential to ensure that the spirits remained well disposed.