Archive for the ‘Your stories’ Category

I’ve been reading about peer-to-peer marketing strategies. Although I’ve struggled to find a definition, I think that peer-to-peer marketing is about capitalising on your audience’s willingness (or rather, a segment of your audience) to market your product on your behalf. 

Methods for influencing people’s decisions have changed radically. If we can provide the tools (largely web-based) that help our audiences organise and socialise, they will influence the decisions of others, ultimately helping to build audiences at events. 

Strategies might include posting reviews or testimonials or pictures on your website from people attending your events, allowing visitors to email events information from your website to friends, through to creating quirky ‘viral advertising’ that gets posted on YouTube or other content-sharing sites or passed from one person to another via email. 

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I’ve just been reading about NaumaiPlace.com, a new website which links marae with their whanau worldwide. Launched in May, the website aims to connect marae with the 85 percent of Maori who live away from their local rohe, due to employment, education and other whanau interests.

Ten Te Arawa marae are involved in the pilot. On the website, each marae can provide their own history, video footage, noticeboards, photo galleries, taonga detail, rangitahi section and online store. (Nice to see they are using existing tools such as YouTube and Slide to host rich media, which also gets word out about the project through these networks.) NaumaiPlace.com may be extended to other marae in future.

With between 70 and 80 percent of Maori able to access the internet through work, tertiary institutions, cyber cafes or at home, I hope this is an idea whose time has come. Online communities take time to build, but the potential benefits will be the strengthening of both iwi Maori and local marae.

Here’s a video of the launch, featuring those involved and some shots of the site itself (on the website, the marae pages are only viewable if you register). If you have difficulties viewing this video in your browser, go to YouTube to view it.

Nicely done - the Christchurch Art Gallery has put its audio tours on the gallery’s website. You can listen to the guides on an iPod at the gallery for $5 or download and listen to them at home for free.

The narration is by actor Sam Neill and the audio tours feature some of the Gallery’s - and New Zealand’s - most significant works of art. The website includes an image of the painting under discussion, as well as a transcript if you can’t get the technology working. 

Worth having a listen even if you can’t get to the gallery. I heard somewhere the other day that the number of visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s virtual experience is greater by a third than the number of physical visitors. Virtual visits can be be relevant and measurable cultural experiences, as much as physical ones (and hopefully they sometimes initiate physical visits, too).

by Sarah Hughes, Whitireia Publishing student 

Puke Ariki, Taranaki cultural centre, has got a wiki! That’s right, as part of Puke Ariki’s digital strategy, 1 December 2006 saw the launch of what we believe is New Zealand’s only regional ‘wiki.’

‘But what is a wiki?’ I hear you ask. According to techweb, a wiki is ‘A Web site that can be quickly edited by its visitors with simple formatting rules.’ A wiki is used as an informal encyclopedia, and it’s a place where anybody can go online and add or subtract information.

In my discussion with Kate Roberts, Manager of Service Delivery for Puke Ariki, she stated that the purpose of the Taranaki Wiki was to ‘increase community engagement,’ both within the community and with Puke Ariki as a resource. As the site itself states, ‘This Wiki has been set up to allow the people of Taranaki, and elsewhere, to share their knowledge of all things Taranaki.’

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Did you know we have twice as many museums per head of population as Canada or the UK, and five times as many as France or Sweden? New Zealand has over 500 museums, galleries and related organisations – approximately one for every 8,000 New Zealanders.

 That means there’s plenty of opportunities to check out your local museum or gallery to celebrate International Museum Day - 18 May.

Here’s a sample of what’s available:

• Howick Historical Village has organised a Live Day on Sunday 20 May
• Canterbury Museum has organised behind-the-scenes tours
• Auckland Museum is taking bookings for visiting hidden collections in the botany, conservation and land vertebrates collections
• MOTAT in Auckland is celebrating the newly refurbished Cropper House.

It’s also timely to remind ourselves of the societal benefits - both economic and cultural - that the museum sector delivers. A recent survey by Museums Aotearoa shows that culture and heritage is a growing part of our identity and our economy. A few of our museums have been around for more than 100 years, but over a third have been established in the past 50 years, with more than one in 10 less than five years old.

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