The online presence of organizations is long gone from being just a
web page. Social media have enabled easy and inexpensive interaction between
millions of individuals and communities. This has not gone unnoticed by cultural
heritage institutes. The question is what all these social media activities
bring. Even if an institute knows what it tries to achieve online, the metrics often
consist of confusing accumulation of statistics, across several systems and
reveal little about online user behaviour, engagement and satisfaction. In the research
project Museum Compass a prototype of a social media monitor is developed,
which will contain data of current and historic online activities on Facebook,
Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare and Flickr of all registered Dutch museums.
The first version of this monitor has been developed, and we believe that
this is a good moment to discuss – mostly in a practical sense – our general approach
and preliminary results.