The culture sector has begun to make a shift from using social media with a purely marketing focus, to sharing processes and insights. It's a step in the right direction for creating community engagement, but it's also a work in progress – and in the absence of standards and precedence it can be pretty daunting to figure out where to make a start.
Things are further complicated by the fact that most of us distribute our digital lives across several social networks as well as different devices and screens. Our notions of conversation are also constantly challenged.
Figuring out how to create engagement in the midst of all this chaos raises several questions: can we share this responsibility across an arts organisation? And how do we start to make this shift?
Model your digital space as a communal playground
Engineering and forcing conversations with online communities should be abandoned altogether – it creates pressure to be constantly switched on, and often results in a resistance from the community to be engaged. Everyone has something better to do than perform (what is perceived as) the role of a salesperson.
Consider the alternative. Think of the digital space as a playground: different groups will form over time, across multiple social websites or within one network. The trick is to moderate activity across these groups and encourage cross-connections, not control this space in its entirety. The added advantage is that when the occasional argument breaks out, it can be easily contained.
Conversations in this space can be based on an approach that works quite well in conferences – using social media for collective note taking. In addition to producing great insights and thoughtful commentary, it also creates room for everyone to participate without the need for role play.
From an organisational perspective, it's important to find a suitable context to put this idea into action. For example, this survey of 4,000 museum visitors shows that a connection to content creates meaningful experiences in museums. Curators and members of the public can exist alongside each other, talking about their individual experiences. It creates multiple threads of conversations, making it possible for curators to speak to their peers, to members of the public, or for museum visitors to talk to each other.
Encourage a culture of prototyping ideas
With a squeeze on resources, everyone is expected to do more with less. This pressure can be alleviated by inviting contributions from online communities, which is great, but we often persist only in sharing end results and outcomes – talking about how an exhibition was conceived after it has gone live is very different from sharing developmental processes in real time.
Prototyping ideas on the other hand is a great approach to co-production that can create shared ownership among a range of stakeholders. This format is already used in the tech industry to encourage different groups to collaborate and find sustainable solutions. Implementing this approach isn't the same as a crowd-sourcing activity where it can be difficult to manage the volume of information that's generated. A more pragmatic approach would be to find a niche platform, and define the core values of the community you want to create.
ArtStack is a great example of a niche social network. Galleries can share their collections online to prototype exhibitions based on discussions with a well-informed community. The advantage is that you can create a potential audience and grow your virtual network, while creating a physical event.
Impact vs metrics
It's easy to be seduced by the volume of likes on Facebook and RTs on Twitter, but these metrics don't necessarily benefit the approach of engagement based on creating authentic voices. The need to engage communities will continue to grow, and while technology makes it very easy to create and share content, we are constantly adding to the pool of transient data. What tends to stick in this fast moving landscape are ideas.
The people behind these ideas need to be able to use digital to drive meaningful change. For example, by encouraging intellectual consumption of digital archives, or by creating a culture of sharing emotional responses as metadata.
The problem behind implementing this vision is that individual practitioners often consider the idea of getting online communities to participate in specific tasks as manipulation, which is a result of the perception that engagement is about sales and marketing.
For the culture sector to thrive we need to enable practitioners to communicate both ideas and intention with clarity online. And this begins by finding a unique voice.
Creating a unique voice online will be the subject of two digital seminars Abhay is facilitating for the Guardian Culture Professionals Network – find out more here and don't forget there is a 20% discount for network members (sign up for free here)
Abhay Adhikari is a digital strategist for the arts, education and voluntary sectors – follow him on Twitter @gopaldass