Concerning business models for museums, I've been reading two very useful articles by Max Anderson:
"Prescriptions for Art Museums in the Decade Ahead" (CURATOR: The Museum Journal, Volume 50, Number 1, January 2007) http://www.maxwellanderson.com/PrescriptionsforArtMuseums.htm
and
"The Metrics of Success in Art Museums" (Getty Leadership Institute, 2004) www.cgu.edu/pdffiles/gli/metrics.pdf

Does anyone have other favorite reads on the topic?

I'm also working with the metaphors of 'hub and spoke' versus 'distributed networks': see some earlier writings on this: http://www.museum-id.com/museum_articledetails.asp?newsID=154

Any thoughts?

And finally, does anyone have metrics or evaluations yet on use of social media in mobile programs? How many people are tweeting, posting, emailing and bookmarking in our handheld tours and apps?

Hi Nancy - Really agree with what you've written on the Museum ID site. I'm going to touch on some related themes in my trends presentation and try to round it out with some perspective from outside the museum space.

One of the things that I think is important to think about is how the distributed model helps to create a distributed brand experience for the museum (institution) and think about how to manage this - because it isn't easy. Organisations used to having alot of control (having worked at a massive broadcaster for the last 8.5 years, I know about this!) need to learn different rules for 'command and control' with these distributed audience and device models.

This sounds really interesting, Nancy--wish I could be there to see your keynote in person! Your notes provoked a few half-baked thoughts in my mind. In thinking about what you refer to as the "distributed" or "rhizome" model of content delivery, it seems to me that that model works only if the authorship/ownership of a given content node is fluid. If that is the case, it is possible for a "content experience" (retrieval, reading, processing, etc.) to transmogrify into a "social experience" (which, in my mind at least, implies discussion). Without that fluidity, however, almost the only "social" activity left to a person encountering a content node is sharing ("tweet this!").

The problem though, is that to museums, there's something fundamentally incompatible with scholarly content (at least as we in museums tend to think of it) and the fluidity of ownership that the "rhizome" approach demands. We saw this in the Wikipedia workshop at MW in April--Wikipedians wanted museum-y content on Wikipedia, but subject to Wikipedia's normal collaborative editing model, but museums wanted, in essence, to put content on Wikipedia while being exempt from that model. I don't know how this problem can be/will be solved--it seems almost impossible (or at least extremely difficult--maybe Jason has some hints for us ;) for an institution to maintain brand identity while encouraging a truly social engagement with its scholarly content. I hope somebody figures this out!

Maybe it's just that truly social experiences and museum content are not compatible partners; perhaps these should be silo-ed efforts (much as I know most IT people are required by law to be all about breaking down silos).

I really appreciate all this wonderful, thought-provoking feedback. Ed, I'm most surprised by what you say and would like to hear more. One articulation of my preference for distributed networks is in part inspired by Clay Shirky's Collaboration vs Institution talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_on_institutions_versus_collaboration.html

Another structure lying behind my thought process here is actually some pretty hardcore feminist and psychoanalytic theory, coming out of the Lacanian school. But that would take WAY too long to explain to people who didn't take my very esoteric academic route, so I'm using the computing metaphors as a sort of shorthand. The main point is that there is an ethical dimension here: in hub & spoke models, (institutional models in Shirky's formulation), a lot gets excluded. Maybe social media and the Internet give us ways of not having to exclude so much, and so many, of value, and actually allow us to derive a lot of benefit without having to exert so much control. I totally agree with Jason that managing a distributed brand experience is probably one of the most challenging things an organization can take on, perhaps especially if its brand is in any way built on 'quality' and specialist skills/knowledge. It will be interesting to see if museums and the BBC manage. I do think there's an interesting analogy there - which Cory Doctorow pointed out to me in fact - that the BBC is shooting itself in the foot every time it positions itself as a for-profit, commercial media company. Losing the license fees is the worst thing that could happen to it as an institution for the public good. Max Anderson says museums have talked themselves into a similar corner, and out of a lot of important government support, by trying to be more 'business like'. Maybe we don't need more businesses! (And then there's the fact, which I won't go into here, that there is no such thing as a free market on the national or international scale anyway, and there is no major profitable business in the world that hasn't benefited from significant gov't (i.e. public) support through tax breaks, free land, not to mention bailouts etc. - so why are public institutions aspiring to a model of financial independence that not even the 'real' businesses achieve?!)

And finally (can you believe this wiki restricts comments to 200 words?!) Koven, as always, you've challenged my thinking in an area I hadn't even begun to go yet. I'm going to have to chew over your comments a bit more as can see what you describe structurally, but don't understand the impact yet.

Thanks again to all! Can't wait to get into this further with you in person.

Koven: fluid or simulacrum? Not that that's an easier sell to museums either, but in fact simulacra are the stock-in-trade for a lot of museums. I'm in Gdansk now, where the Museum of Solidarity is just that, and in fact the whole town is after its post-war reconstruction... I don't want to get too literal about the idea of a 'copy without an original' but it's another way to shift our thinking away from concepts of original content. Maybe it intersects with your notion of fluidity in networks that become smarter the more they are used? Fun, heady stuff!!

Oh, where to begin. At heart, I agree with Koven's description of fluidity of ownership and distributed networks, and in our cases, we are most definitely not fluid. Our content is ours, we own it, we preserve it for posterity (whether posterity gives a hoot or not), and we create new knowledge using it. And many of our institutions make a lot of money of it. Shirky hits a lot of nails on the head when he compares institutional reaction to distributed networks with Kübler-Ross' stages of grief. I also see a lot of potential to jump on a bandwagon that will do us as little good in the long run as the "let's all pretend we're businesses now" mentality that is thankfully on the wane.

We exist as hubs already. Our incarnation is both a physical reality and the motivation for most of our visitation. We are exclusionary, full stop. The problem is that many of us like to pretend we're not. The opportunity I see in social media is that it's a way for us to develop more inclusive practices that will educate us and our colleagues, and cultivate the rising generations of visitors, employees, and supporters. It's an institutionally safe place to skip the denial, and anger phases of grief and get as least as far as bargaining, and hopefully to acceptance. This is happening in the physical realm as well. Look at the number of sessions at AAM that had the word "participatory" in the title or description, or the overflow crowd at Nina Simon's panel. Same issue, different realm. How do we engage more deeply with our audiences?

Boy that 200 word limit bites... Pardon the typos, too. I should be packing, not reading.

We have a quality that is in short supply, and that is longevity. It is entirely conceivable that my grandchildren will visit many of the same museums I have. I doubt Flickr or Facebook will be there. Go to any mobile vendor and ask them what their ten-year plan is. For people who operate in terms of quarters, or fiscal years, we must seem like Martians sometimes, with our worries about what's going to happen our content in years to come and what are going to do when their company or product is long gone. Same goes for all the businesses whose "success" we have been encouraged to emulate. We operate (or should operate) under a similar, but separate, set of rules and values. The kinds of relationships we could be cultivating with our audiences are lifelong, or even lives long ones, and I haven't found anybody talking in those terms.

The other thing I wouldn't overlook in this discussion, which I'm loving, btw, is that one of our audiences for any emerging business model is ourselves. I've run into this a number of times recently where it's been taken for granted that older generations of museum professionals just "won't get" SM, and that trying to educate or inspire them to change their practice is a lost cause. That's exclusionary in the worst way. It's lazy. And waiting for a generation to get out of your way and retire is boring.

Caveat Emptor - While working with museums on content creation and now apps, I just wanted to give group members & associates a 'heads up' in terms of dealing with 'app providers'. There are many companies, both large and small freelancers, who propose to build apps or provide Content Software. They would then put your content on iTunes et.al. app stores for you. But then, if you read the fine print of your agreement, they'll also send you monthly sales reports.
Many don't realize this, but this practice should be absolutely unacceptable - sine qua non.
Museums should have the right to receive DIRECTLY FROM THE APP STORE their own sales reports. Anyone who says this info cannot be provided is simply put, lying or fudging the numbers.
Museums are well advised to contract for an annual audit and to receive non-doctored sales figures. Anything less and your payout on downloads of your apps will most certainly fall short.