Attended a very interesting session at the Association of Children's Museums conference in Denver...Rick Winefield, Exec. Director at the Bay Area Discovery Museum in Sausalito and Tim Olson, who heads the interactive technology team at PBS station KQED in San Francisco, gave an overview of technologies they believe museums can be exploring to more effectively connect with their audiences.
Some of these technology tools included:
- Yelp (see how your museum is reviewed locally)
- Youtube Nonprofit Channel (walking tour of your exhibits, etc)
- Blogs (behind the scenes info about museum)
- Eventful/Upcoming/Helios and other calendar and event sites
- Discussions (Yahoo Groups, Public Action, etc)
- Flickr (embed a "badge" of latest photos of museum on your site)
I also thought it was interesting that the title of the session focused on parents (rather than kids) as the audience. This reinforces a point I made in my recent article for Hand to Hand that we should think of our primary children's museum Web audience as parents, who can be active participants in a Web 2.0 environment...
