By: Nik Honeysett

My second ever WMA Annual Meeting turned out to be as stimulating and rewarding as last year’s. I was skeptical that Palm Springs could hold a candle to Honolulu and then I spent an unreasonable amount of time on my way to give my keynote looking up Marilyn Monroe’s skirt and I was all at once, at one with the world and in particular, Palm Springs.

More seriously, the generosity, warmth and humour of attendees and local museum folks made for an extremely memorable conference, with its highs (literally and figuratively, in the presence of Marilyn) and the lows (Belle da Ball – despite the availability of beverages, I believe I did not look up her skirt).

I had a number of requests to share my presentation, which is essentially a lot of pictures, but includes some written nuggets of wisdom, none of which are mine... maybe one is. If you made it to the general session it should make sense, if you didn’t, you’re probably going to think I’m certifiable and will wonder what that tin of “Award Winning Shine” has to do with Content Management. You are not alone in this regard, as many people in the audience were thinking the same thing. There were actually a number of scatological references during the session, mostly made by Redmond if my memory serves me correctly – or at least he made as many as I did. There’s a link at the end of this post to my presentation created in Prezi – use the right arrow to advance through.

So if you didn’t make it to the session or were paying more attention to your iPhone than me (you know who you are), here are the cliff notes, with the caveat that “any crazy ideas are my own” – Miranda Rights for the digital native generation.

The thrust of my remarks was a call to be Audacious, to defy convention, under the assumption that if you or your museum have been doing the same thing for 5, 10, 15 or even 20 years, given how much has changed in that time, any reasonable person (particularly the man on the Clapham Omnibus, who is the legal definition of reasonable) would say that you should think about doing it differently. For every year you have been doing something the same, I urge you to spend 1 minute thinking about how to improve or change it.

This premise is based in part on the musings of a 15-year-old boy who had a number of rather unfortunate experiences at various museums in Los Angeles, including my own, but what saved us in his mind was our propensity for nudity in our collection – Why Museums Suck (http://www.layouth.com/why-museums-suck/)

My call to being Audacious was centered around the issues of Access and Sustainability, words that have only really come into our lexicon in recent years. Access is no longer about unlocking the front door and allowing visitors to roam our galleries, halls and exhibition spaces, it is about engaging with them whether they make it to our facility or not. Access in the 21^st century museum should be a self-less, sharing experience. Access is not about showing people our stuff, its about giving people our stuff – the concept of Frictionless Content, content that can travel unimpeded in the social and data-driven frameworks that the majority of us are engaged with and obsessed by.

Sustainability is about relevance. The key to remaining relevant in a constantly changing world is to embrace change as a constant. This is a simple-enough strategic concept but the execution requires that we do things differently, that we are audacious and defy convention. In the words of Albert Einstein, “we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them” or my version, “we cannot solve our digital problems using analogue thinking”.

One of our key challenges to remaining relevant is competing for the attention of our audiences and the emerging AO generation – Always Online. The challenge here is to rise above the “Content Static” – that milieu of constant content bombardment. In its simplest form, we should tweet often with engaging content, but more importantly we should put each visitor at the center of what we do and what we provide, most elegantly captured by Kathy Sierra as “the user as protagonist”.

If one looks at how this plays out on television, for example, look no further than American Idol, one of the highest rated shows: the user can participate as a contestant, control the plot through voting and ultimately control the outcome – it is the classic Hollywood storyline that a user engages with: protagonist introduction, rising challenges, ultimate resolution. The show is crowd-sourced, crowd-curated and participatory, the user is at the center and has a personal connection to the show. This personal connection is key, one sees its prevalence in Reality TV. Love it or hate it, Reality TV is immensely popular because it creates a personal connection to actual people, not actors.

Any institution that ignores the two concepts of protagonist and personal connection will be challenged to remain relevant, I think. There was a thread at the conference about where this kind of approach sits alongside curatorial authority. There is a clear difference between our expertise and that of our audiences, but our passion is where the connection is shared: share your passion, level the playing field with your audience.

I covered some broad trends that have occurred over the life of the internet – there’s a “trends” slide. If you’re making broad strategic decisions, make sure they align with the right-hand column in green. Actually, even if you’re making small strategic decisions, make sure they align with the right-hand column in green. The bottom trend is the most important, any strategic decisions you’re making about your user, should involve mobile. Mobile is not just about having a smartphone, it is how our users are engaging with the world – anytime, anywhere, in the words of Duff Stewart, “the mobile device [is] your remote control for the world around you”. It is the entré into our user’s experience and the key to creating a personal connection. People sleep with their smartphones and they accompany us to the toilet – it doesn’t get more personal than that.

I spent some time talking about innovation, it is key to remaining relevant in a constantly changing world, but it doesn’t have to be about implementing cutting- or bleeding-edge technologies, its more about doing something different or dealing with something you haven’t dealt with before – in the words of Apple’s 1984 PR campaign, “Think Different”. We need a culture of innovation in our museums across all programs and disciplines, and lose our current, curatorial-based approach to it – we like to categorise and pigeon-hole innovation: “Looking for innovation? Yes sir, third door on the left”. Everybody should be encouraged to innovate. Google does this to great effect with their 80/20 rule which applies to everyone, 80% of one’s time is spent doing one’s job, 20% of one’s time is spent doing something creative or innovative on the periphery of one’s job – institutionally-approved creativity and risk. That “20% time” is responsible for the most important, innovative and engaging products to come out of Google.

I covered other stuff, but these were the highlights, or lowlights depending on your viewpoint. I’ll re-iterate my apology to cat lovers and offer this Youtube video as recompense (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkOQw96cfyE). I’ll offer my thanks again to White Trash Repairs (www.whitetrashrepairs.com ) – a one-stop-shop for all your presentation graphics needs. I’ll apologise to David Hasselhoff for revealing his age and say that Audio Guides are (probably) not the retiring baby-boomers of museum technology.

I’ll end with a big thank you to the WMA board and program committee who were crazy enough or desperate enough to invite me to present - it was immense fun.

WMA Palm Springs. Keynote, Wednesday, October 24, 2012 - http://bit.ly/Z7VIVO

Nik Honeysett administrates the Getty’s two campuses in Brentwood and Malibu. Formerly, he managed the Getty’s Web Group and before moving to Los Angeles, he was Head of Production at Cogapp, a UK-based consultancy specializing in interactive and online multimedia for the cultural sector in Europe and the USA. He is a former chair of the American Association of Museum’s Media and Technology Standing Professional Committee and currently sits on AAM’s Board of Directors. His hobbies include writing short summary paragraphs about his career and referring to himself in the third person. Blog: musematic.net / midea.nmc.org / http://twitter.com/nhoneysett