museum science communication using twitter

Many institutions have embraced social media as a means of branding, marketing and redirecting traffic to main websites. These are perfectly legitimate goals of any institution, but the strength of social media goes beyond that. A lot of technology-savvy university professionals have realized the potential of using Twitter in their daily work as well as their personal life. At conferences even more use Twitter to access the backchannel and behind-the-scenes discussion. These are often the people who work in the departments where social media already reside. This session explores the professional use of Twitter by the entire staff in a small university museum and research department. The staff encompasses a variety of different roles. There are curators, docents, researchers, conservators, collection managers, etc. All of whom contribute to the workings of the museum. Some of these do not necessarily have a public face, as their work mainly goes on behind the scenes. For the staff Twitter provides an excellent channel for sharing, discussing, and engaging audiences that might not be reached otherwise. For the museum this contributes to making the profile of the institution more personal and alive. And on the whole Twitter allows for new forms of interaction between scientists, professionals, journalists and the public.