Tate Museum’s Kirstie Beaven wonders whether museums are using social media creatively enough. She listed some recent activity by Tate: a Twitter discussion around the hashtag #artfilmtitle, a video dialogue with Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, and a Flickr collaboration. However, complained Beaven, “all of these things are basically one-offs [and] perhaps that’s the nature of social media – essentially ephemeral.” She continued that “most of our initiatives […] have really been about finding creativity in our audiences, rather than pushing the creative boundaries of the social networking site as a medium.”
Personally I think Tate is much more innovative than most organizations with social media, but it does raise a broader question for all organizations: is social media being used in a truly creative way? Or is it mostly about self-promotion and – that magic word – “engagement”? Let us know your thoughts, including any good examples of social media creativity.
Here at ReadWriteWeb, we have an active presence on all of the main social networks; including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Our Community Manager, Robyn Tippens, does a fantastic job keeping our community thinking and talking about web technology. Plus of course, many of the RWW team are active on various social media channels – including Google Plus (which doesn’t yet have brand pages).
Still, I often wonder whether there’s more that we as an organization can do to foster creativity amongst our community. Although I can give one example, which I’m quite proud of, from RWW. Robyn does a regular ‘Big Question’ post, where she asks our community something about a hot tech topic and then uses Storify to collate the responses from RWW comments, Twitter and Facebook. An example is this recent Big Question: Would You Buy an Inferior Tablet, Over an iPad, If It Was Priced at Less Than $200?
Is your organization using social media creatively? If so, we’d love to hear about it in the comments.
Image credit: Twitter Art Project 2011 (via Simon Lewis)
