feature interview What advice would you offer to botanic gardens wishing to develop a social media strategy? Take a risk. Most botanic gardens are, with good reason, usually risk averse. Our governments and governing bodies often demand it. But try to test the envelope a little. Add a little personality to media releases and social media posts, testing out some quick responses on relatively safe topics. While our authority and accuracy are important that will mean nothing if nobody is listening. One way to get started is to hand pick a few individuals who have a good command of the English language and who have the nous to know when to comment and when to not. Don’t see social media as separate to mainstream media – blend the two together so that stories bleed from one medium to another. And finally, make it fun.
What’s the best app/use of social media you’ve encountered in a museum or botanic garden? I know this isn’t what you mean but at the moment I’m keen on Pl@ntNet and similar plant identification apps, even with their many faults. The future is a good algorithm! More in line with your question, I think MONA in Hobart does a great job with its non-app form of audio interpretation. And Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain Trust in Sydney is doing very well with the pretty plant porn on Twitter and Facebook. The Chicago Botanic Garden app looks good, but I haven’t tested it. The Disney app to find fairies in the botanic gardens in Melbourne and Sydney was a big success even though we got a little bit of flack in Melbourne. While I know anti-US-commercialisation sentiment is about, it’s odd how something that is actually popular in the community (Disney fairies) is somehow seen as intrinsically at odds with what we do in a botanic garden. Similarly, there was a view that using screens/devices in the botanic garden is also intrinsically a bad thing (on the flip side, one mother told me her child was allowed a maximum of two hours screen time, and she was thrilled that one of those hours could be in the botanic garden).
There’s a lot of decent botanic gardens’ social media buzzing around but it’s hard to get heard above the noise.
the botanic gardener | ISS 48 July 2017
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