Mobile Social Media

Editor's Notes

• #2: How many people have taken an audio or multimedia tour? Did they enjoy their experience?
• #6: But in fact, I think of the Smithsonian like this: a multinodal and multimodal network - a distributed network, in fact. My aim is to build content, experiences, and services that reach visitors wherever and whenever they happen to be on this network.
• #9: Some are now predicting that mobile devices will be our primary means of accessing the Internet by 2020. If that sounds like a dotcom boom kind of prediction, that’s probably a fair way to characterize the hype. In comparison to fixed web’s development history, mobile is somewhere between 1995 and 1998: a wild, wild west boom town where fortunes are going to be made and lost probably even faster than in the 20 th century. But don’t get me wrong: I’m a believer!
• #11: Yet all too often, visitors complain that audio tours give them this sort of experience: http://geschiedenis.vpro.nl/themasites/mediaplayer/index.jsp?media=19799217&refernr=19265092&portalnr=4158511&hostname=geschiedenis&mediatype=video&portalid=geschiedenis Although this video shows an example of one of the earliest tour technologies from the 1960s, excavated by Loic Tallon, the perception of audio tours is that they are not terribly different today in terms of inspiring a herd mentality among users, producing crowding around exhibits and a sort of dumbed-down, one-size-fits-all experience. All the issues that have plagued audio tours throughout their history are visible here: The linearity of the tour lead to a herd-mentality among visitors and crowding around exhibits In addition the challenges of: Hygiene: led to one of the earliest audio tour technology debates: headphones vs wands? Distribution issues always a challenge, but complexity also driven by technology choices, including the headphones or wand choice Very homogenous audience
• #18: Another way to represent this is as a multi-tiered architecture with up to three kinds of content: 1. -+-+-+-+-+ The Soundtrack 2. o o o o o The Soundbites 3. / | / | / Links
• #22: In the museum as agora, our audiences access our content through a wide range of platforms beyond the museum’s walls and website
• #23: Like museums, mobile lends itself both to the extreme personalization of niche activities, and to connecting disparate, passionate subject specialists and longtail markets. There is a powerful network effect of connecting lots and lots of people who are passionate about the same niches. So I have been asking myself of late: can mobile help museums conceive of new business models, products and practices that play to museums’ strengths in the longtail and niche markets, rather than perpetuate often futile attempts to compete in mass markets?
• #25: As Chris Anderson noted in his talk at SI 2.0, it is our hobbies – often niche activities and content - that inspires the most passion in individuals. And the niche is the space that museums know best. They’re staffed to a large extent by people who have been lucky enough to turn their passions into professions: specialists who understand subjects in the greatest depth and finest nuances, working with rare content and collections. And yet for over 50 years, the blockbuster has been the engine that drives the mobile interpretation industry. I want to ask if there are business models – and interpretive solutions – that play to our natural strengths with niche content and niche audiences?
• #27: Mobile is an ideal vehicle for niche content, experiences & audiences because both personal – intimate, even - and social. The highly personal nature of the mobile experience also makes mobile a great vehicle for the kind of niche content and experiences that museums excel at. + How many people do you let whisper in your ear? Or put content onto your personal, mobile device that is always with you, and usually carried very close to your body? Although it’s arguably the social applications that make mobile products revolutionary, it may just be the intimate, personal nature of the mobile experience that ‘makes them stick(y)’! ;-)
• #41: And if you think SI Guide was the only time the Institution aimed for the moon in its mobile program and fell a bit short, think again: Extra points to anyone who remembers this, or can guess what year it is from: iGo on the Apple Newton from 1994 It even had a feedback function! A product clearly ahead of its time.
• #42: So where do we start? Well, fortunately, my creative and innovative colleagues have already started building the Mobile Smithsonion. In fact, they started some time ago. Does anyone recognize this? SIGuide: the Institution’s first multimedia tour in 2005, and a great learning moment, teaching us not only hard lessons like: run before you can walk when dealing with new technology; Make sure your deals are win-win if you want your vendor to stay in business and therefore be able to support your product in the long term… But most importantly, SI Guide continues to be a lesson in how to take risks and learn from our mis-steps along the way – above all we should be encouraging intelligent risk taking in our mobile program for that is the only way we can take up the leadership position that so many, like Bruce Wyman, expect of us and which I agree is the responsibility of large public institutions like ours.
• #43: Other lessons learned: just a sampling: Podcasts, some of our earliest mobile publications, seem to be popular: at least with us How are our audiences using them?
• #44: Cellphones are also popular with museums, but probably better for interactive services than traditional audio tour experiences But new ‘all you can eat’ models help!
• #45: And there’s plenty more that has been going on in mobile at Smithsonian since (going to fly through these slides…)
• #47: Mobile web is standard By 2013/2020 most of our web visitors will be from mobile devices
• #48: Learning about mobile websites for delivering video now at CH; this was the first multimedia tour on the iPod platform, great sampling of a wide range of content
• #49: Pick your target audience and evaluate their experience
• #50: Learning how to create an exhibition guide that works both for on-site and remote audiences
• #54: And many more learning opportunities in the pipeline
• #55: So this is a thumbnail sketch of what I think SI Mobile might look like: not just one big umbrella app, but a set of tools and resources…