Lowering the tone: doing social media at Bodleian Libraries

Social media fulfills a main aim of museums: to spread knowledge and understanding.

Social media can also make museums more human.

For me, that is the lesson learnt after spending a year and a bit doing social media at Bodleian Libraries, the University of Oxford’s research libraries. It is a conclusion every person who does social media in the heritage sector needs to be prepared to use when they are inevitably asked ‘What is the point of us being on social media?’

When I have been asked that question, it is usually to solicit a justification for spending time and money on it. The onus is on those who do social media to prove that the worth of doing something online is as valid as doing something in real life.

The point of museums, galleries and libraries is to spread knowledge and understanding. If you are doing social media right, you are working to this aim on social media too. You are talking directly to people, you are exploring your collections and you are making connections. We have to prove that social media is an extension of an institution’s work.

We also, however, have to communicate on the internet’s terms. Which means being human. Which often means being stupid.

At the Bodleian I was lucky enough to work within a team that understood this.

I followed in Liz McCarthy’s footsteps, who put the Bodleian on a sound digital footing, won the arguments for the worth of social media, wrote Strategies, trained staff and made a name online for the Bodleian.

The social media role I inherited sits within digital communications, but had spread its tentacles throughout the institution. It is a role that gives guidance to those in the wider libraries on social media, both through an email list and a private Facebook group, but also through training sessions and one-to-ones. It is a role that aims to post daily on Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram and Twitter on the Bodleian’s research, acquisitions, history, collections, events and opening hours. It is a role that has to keep pace with the fast-moving digital world and cement the Bodleian’s place as one of the best library groups in the world. It is a part-time role that has to do this on 0.5 FTE, and also involves writing the fortnightly staff newsletter for the Bodleian’s 800 or so staff.

But despite the challenges, some of the usual barriers to doing social media are not present at the Bodleian. All new staff have a social media induction. Bodley’s Librarian is on Twitter. The job is based in a team that sees social media as integral to the Bodleian’s mission, and I was trusted to be the voice of the Bodleian without an authorisation process for my posts (although my common refrain in the office was ‘Is this inappropriate?’ before I tweeted anything…).

And, of course, the Bodleian has one of the best collections in the world, much of it digitised. It has been around for 414 years, has hosted Parliament and Kings, serviced scholars and authors such as Tolkien and Alan Bennett. There is no shortage of content to be adapted at the Bodleian.

Yet, attracting and keeping people’s interest in the loud, busy marketplace of social media is no easy feat. Your graphics, copy-writing and conversation have to be as slick as companies who have more staff and bigger budgets than you will ever have in the public sector.

This means you need to know how to use Photoshop, how to write for web, how to make animations, how to size images properly, how to plan and run campaigns, how to train colleagues, how to take photographs, how to analyse data and, of course, how to work the various social media platforms. You also need to be ready to adapt to the needs and expectations of your audiences, such as live streaming on Facebook Live or Snapchat. And you will usually have to teach yourself.

But even when you have all these skills and you begin tweeting, facebooking, instagraming and tumblring, you often hit a wall of indifference. No one but the already interested give a toss about your medieval manuscript if all you say is ‘This is a manuscript’. Adding value and making things interesting was the biggest challenge of being at the Bodleian. Adding value by finding hooks involved taking risks in how we used our collections, mining our curators for interesting stories and embracing the culture of the internet. It is not enough to know the technical skills behind social media, you need the creative skills with which you can convey your stories.

While many enjoy simply accessing our historic material, we found that many also wanted to be entertained. There is a reason everyone follows @MedievalReacts, and a reason almost everyone doesn’t care that they never cite their sources. There is an appetite for wry uses of historic material, but nobody other than a few particularly care where the material comes from (because they just want to be entertained). It is our job to play the game of social media, but to educate as well as entertain.

To do so meant curating the best of the Bodleian for social media.

And I don’t use the term ‘curating’ lightly. This is not curation in the sense of curating a sandwich, but old school curation for the digital age. An issue with much museum social media is that it is done by marketers. We need marketers who are also interpreters. We need them exploring collections, telling stories and interacting with people. What museums do on social media should reflect what museums aspire to be in person: affecting, personal, relevant and educational.

I worked just as hard on what I shared on social media as I did for my other part-time job interpreting the countryside for the new galleries at the Museum of English Rural Life. I approached my Bodleian posts much as I would for a museum display: I considered our audiences, I delved into the collections, I interviewed curators, I did desk and library research, I went and took photographs and ultimately I drafted and re-drafted the simplest of Facebook posts and tweets. I spent hours trawling the Bodleian’s digitised collections to find the most interesting, attractive and significant pieces to be used online.

And, sometimes, I used them to try and make people laugh. I did my bit to erode the ivory tower of heritage institutions, and for my efforts increased our engagements by over 300%. This was done simply by talking to people and using our collections in a way that other, more successful accounts already were.

The successes at the Bodleian were not instantaneous, though. It took about a year of meeting people, exploring the collections and talking to our followers to get a confident grip on what we should be doing. The process of lowering the tone of the Bodleian was the result of dozens of small experiments in tone and content, pushing the boundaries and trying new things until I settled on the sassy, sarcastic and warm persona of @bodleianlibs.

That my managers let me make these experiments is a credit to them, but it was also a data-driven approach. Data on our posts was collected monthly, crunched into graphs and percentages, then circulated among the Communications team with an accompanying blurb that explained the successes, failures and lessons of that month’s social media. Gradually, these lessons multiplied the successes and reduced the failures.

Doing social media for the Bodleian was the best time I’ve had getting paid. Exploring the Bodleian’s collections, buildings and staff was nothing short of shockingly fun, and then being able to find new ways of sharing these things directly with our audiences was a huge privilege.

Museums should spread knowledge and understanding online. But what I learnt was that to do so requires being human, and when it comes to the internet and social media, museums should be unafraid of embracing its culture, talking to people and taking risks.