Q&A with @MuseumModernArt (aka Victor Samra), part two

Continued from this morning...

MAN: I haven't run numbers on every museum, but MoMA has a pretty enormous social media footprint: Sixty thousand followers on Facebook, a YouTube channel, Twitter...

Victor Samra: Actually the first time 'we' were on Facebook it was an unofficial site. It was a student who is now a freshman at Northwestern. He started it literally a month before we did. I reached out to him at the end of the summer... and said I love what you're doing and can I send you some content - information about our exhibits and such. He said, 'Can I make you an admin because I'm a freshman in college now.' That's baout 100,000 people combined.

MAN: So how does all of your broadcasting play with all of your other broadcasting?

VS: The YouTube channel inter-meshes with all of them. On our Facebook page we host our YouTube videos. We also put YouTubes up on our site, moma.org. I tweet about them now and then. We are working on a redesigned site (to launch at the end of February) and I think there's potential to bringing it all together there.

MoMA communications director Kim Mitchell: Actually, through Victor's work we've initiated little changes in how we communicate, like in the emails we send out to people. We put functions at the bottom where people can share the email to Facebook and spread information virally. For projects we don't have a lot of money [to promote], we rely on the viral stuff. It's becoming more and more integrated into our campaigns.

MAN: This is a ridiculously simplistic question, but how do you decide what to Tweet? I mean, there's so much you could post but obviously you don't want to overwhelm people.

VS: I keep a list of things I find that would be interesting, that I think people would find interesting whether they're real patrons of MoMA or not. I don't try to promote or talk about MoMA too much because I think people can sniff out blatant marketing and Twitter's not a tool with which that works.

I just try to talk about general things that pertain to modern and contemporary art that I find or that someone has told me about, and to serve as a resource in that way. I'm trying to get more insight into getting quotes from visitor services and behind-the-scenes scoop on installations and the challenges behind that. Behind-the-scenes stuff is real interesting when it comes to museums.

MAN: Which museums do you think do the best job on Twitter?

VS: Brooklyn. The Getty. LACMA. The Heard in Arizona. The Honolulu Academy of Arts.