Miscellaneous
My guests today are Meredith Duncan, Social Media Manager at the Museum of the City of New York, and Claire Lanier, Social Media and Content Manager at the New-York Historical Society. A few weeks ago, I noticed that a duo of museum professionals had won an AAM Media & Technology MUSE Award for the #MuseumSnowballFight Twitter campaign. My first thought was, I remember that! Back in January, during the infamous “Bomb Cyclone” storm, museums all over the country and around the world used the hashtag to hurl virtual snowballs at each other in the form snow-related images from their collections. As a content strategist who works with museums, I’m always looking for innovative ways that museum professionals use technology to tell lesser-known objects’ stories. Not only did #MuseumSnowballFight accomplish this goal, it also showed that museums, and the people who work at them, can have fun. But then, I noticed something else. The co-recipients of the award were both from different institutions. How did they pull off such a successful collaboration from opposite sides of Central Park? I reached out to the initiators of #MuseumSnowballFight to find out. *FULL TRANSCRIPT* NICK: Hi, and welcome to What’s On, the Cuberis Podcast. I’m Nick Faber. Do you remember the blizzard of January 2018 dubbed “The Bomb Cyclone?” For a full week, that ominous term about the snowstorm that shut down airports and entire cities seemed to be everywhere. And if you were on social media, chances are you saw, or maybe even used the #bombcyclone hashtag. At the same time, there was another hashtag taking the museum world by storm, #MuseumSnowballFight. This hashtag, which originated at two historical institutions in New York, encouraged museums to share snow-related images from their collections on Twitter. And it was a huge success. Well-known institutions from around the world, from the Smithsonian and the V&A to more obscure ones like my own alma mater’s Special Collections Library at James Madison University, all had a chance to share their objects, and their missions, with a global audience. By the time the Bomb Cyclone dissipated, posts with the #MuseumSnowballFight hashtag had been viewed over 20 million times worldwide. So, who started the Museum Snowball Fight? My guests today are Meredith Duncan, Social Media Manager at the Museum of the City of New York, and Claire Lanier, Social Media and Content Manager at the New-York Historical Society. In May of this year, they were the co-recipients of a Media and Technology Silver MUSE Award for the #MuseumSnowballFight Twitter campaign. When I first saw the American Alliance of Museums had given the award to both of them, I wondered how two people from two different institutions on opposite sides of Central Park could have collaborated on something so successfully? Well, I asked them. And that’s where we’ll pick up the conversation. First, here’s Meredith. She and Claire joined me over Skype. MEREDITH: Yeah, let's see. What's the Museum Snowball Fight origin story? I'm at Museum of the City of New York on the East side of Central Park, and Claire's at the New York Historical Society on the Westside. We've been talking for a little while about how we could work together, maybe. How we could do something that was maybe playful, maybe a little competitive. How could we get our institutions to talk to each other online? So we'd sort of been just thinking about that for a while, and then, on that very snowy day, it kind of just seemed like the right moment to try something. CLAIRE: So what was cool about it, it was totally organic. Meredith just called me on the phone and said, "Oh, you're at work, too," and I said, "Yeah, I'm at work," and we're both here at work in the middle of this big snowstorm. So we're like, oh, if we had to trudge all the way into work, let's just do something fun today. So it was really an organic, informal type of idea.