Once again, the great team from the previous #MuseSocial was at it again on Thursday.  I’ve archived all the tweets here but wanted to add a few thoughts as someone looking in from the outside.

This week’s theme was TalkBack Thursday: A conversation about museums, audiences and social media. [For the breakdown of all questions, see the wiki.]

Q1: What do museum audiences really want via social media?
Q2: Who do museum audiences want to interact with via social media?
Q3: What do/can audiences learn from museums via social media?
Q4: What do museums really know about social media audiences, and how can we learn more?

Back in December, I mentioned collaboration was going to be key for cultural venues in 2012, which isn’t wrong.  However, it looks like transparency is also key.

What do I mean?

Although #MuseSocial was set to gain diverse answers to provocative questions, I’ve noticed that it has morphed into a common ground for people in the industry to ask their own conundrums.  How to handle social media as related to visitors versus non-visitors is an example.  Whilst a question like this has been asked before at networking meetings, it was nice to have a forum in which social media personnel in cultural venues felt free to ask questions so publicly and to hear the feedback from diverse and international respondents.

Maybe #MuseSocial is something cultural people should do once a month to use as a sounding board to help social media gurus keep their finger on the pulse of the public.

Just a thought.

All tweets from March 29th #musesocial can be found here.