Expanding the digital reach of Indian Science Museums in Social Media Space through crowdsourcing Role of Popular Vloggers

Abstract

Young museum visitors belong to a generation eager to experience cultural artifacts and museum exhibits through a new lens, one where the experience is enhanced, filtered and shared through personal online social networks [Russo,Watkins and Groundwater-Smith, 2009][2]. Kylie Budge [2017][1] writes that museums have much to gain from “observing and ‘listening to’ their audiences” and that “Instagram, as a highly visual social media, stands centre stage as a platform in which visitors are sharing [their museum] experiences” (p. 70). Audiences today demand from organizations, including museums, greater levels of interaction and engagement, which social media can facilitate [Mangold and Faulds, 2009; Lovejoy and Saxton, 2012]. It has been claimed in the works of Paige Brown Jarreau et.al[3], 2019] that Science Museums are largely missing out on the opportunity to promote informal education, scientific literacy, public engagement and public visibility of scientists outside of museum walls via Instagram. We wanted to scrutinize the case of the National Council of Science Museums (NCSM), India, the single largest governmental science museum network of the world. We found that the social media footprint for the Council is very moderate. In our study then we also found that despite our nation-wide network and following certain standard rituals of social media broadcasts, our engagement is moderate to poor. We examined the possibility of taking the influencers and vloggers on board to enhance our digital engagement and found it to be a real prospect to explore. Through an evidence-based study, the possibility of crowdsourcing is explored so that digital outreach of the Science Museums in India may be significantly enhanced. A comparison is made with major focus on the digital reach of museum content shared directly through the museum’s own channels vs the digital reach of similar content presented through most popular crowdsourcing methods like vlogs. We also made an attempt to analyse the likelihood to uptick the museum content for the audience of digital space over any other content of different cultural connotation.