Basically, Insights will give you some demographic data (gender, age, country), as well as the number of people who “like” your page, tab views, and some other basic information.

When compared with Google Analytics, this level of detail is painfully vague. So, some clever folks figured out how to integrate Google Analytics, via FBML. This is still doable, if you’re looking to create custom pages using FBML (an interesting use, although at this stage, waiting for iFrames to develop may be the better option). For tracking visits to your main fan page, however, this method relied on an FBML box — a technique that is now obsolete, since Facebook no longer supports boxes on the main page. So, we’re basically out of luck here. At least until someone figures something else out.

There are some options for some interesting tracking nonetheless. You can track clicks to your “like” button, if you have one (directions to set them up), which can help you discover how many new fans on Facebook are coming from your website.  You can also link people to your Facebook page via custom links, either through Google Analytics tracking, or using a shortener that includes a tracking service (such as bit.ly or through Hootsuite). At this point, I don’t know of any way to get any other referrer information. Are there other tracking methods that I’m unaware of?

For the couple of organizations for whom I maintain Facebook pages, we haven’t yet made the decision to do any extensive tracking. We also have not yet made a concerted effort to drive traffic from our Facebook pages to our regular websites. In the future, we’ll be doing more of this (at least for one of the orgs!), as we add some exciting new content to the website. In the meantime, the Powerhouse Museum — a museum we can fairly call a leader in digital media for museums — has some interesting stats on their traffic that has been generated by social media.

7 Ways to Build Your Personal Brand Without Releasing a Sex Tape
Nicely sensationalist headline notwithstanding, I think most of us – techies or otherwise – could use some work on our own personal brands. Here are some tips to get you started.

Teaching with Omeka
Technology, digital history (or humanities – take your pick), and education. There’s plenty to glean from this Chronicle of Higher Education article.

Wave – Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool
Just what it says. Useful for identifying problems at a glance.

Accessibility Wizard
Another useful accessibility tool. Select your role in web content creation, and get targeted tips on improving accessibility.

Cultural Heritage Collaborators: A Manual for Community Documentation — a new book, making me think it’s time to up my book buying budget. I’ve been trying to make do with just the library, but I doubt this will make it into their collection anytime soon.

Public Humanities Clinic at Brown University
I’m loving this idea. Within much of a budget for things like this in my state museum association, I’m trying to think of ways we could do something similar.

ArtSocialMedia
A host of social media resources from Beth Kanter.

Tate Handheld Conference Reading List
My “to-read” list is already too long. This just makes it worse. Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited to find some of these resources. I just wish I could find more time to read. (Or magically have them converted to audio, so I can listen to them on the way to work.)

We’ve talked about Pachyderm before, along with other options. If the iPad (and its abhorrence of flash) take over completely, Pachyderm may quickly become an irrelevant option. On the other hand, I wonder if there’s any possibility it may one day work its magic in HTML5, instead of flash?

I haven’t had a chance to tinker with it yet (how can summer be so busy?), but hope to soon.

Download:

If you have gotten this message you have  emailed  *******.

(Or your virus affected computer may have… if so get a good service tech)
(Also if your mail server has problems and is infected YOU need to fix that I do not want to be involved!)

You Have  Contacted ****** –  THE MUSEUM!

If you have something  you wish to sell us for our Archive and displays here
at **** Please follow up  your Email with a phone call as we  get a
high volume of message into the in box and may not respond right away (***-***-****)

If  we are busy and ask you to call back please do so. Chances are we are running though the halls here
on the cordless and are not sitting at a desk to take a message  down on a pad!

Note We are a museum,  we do not have human resources files for  ***** and such things people
through google  request from us.

If any of your relatives were involved in any of the activities we document  here DO NOT
throw any thing away before you check with us.

Thanks for joining in the crusade to save history.

Thanks,

*****, Archivist for ******

See the Museum’s Web Site at ****

We are always looking for items to add to the museum’s display and ref. library – please advise if you have anything we can use.

(***ADDRRESS)

CONFIDENZIALE: Questo messaggio e gli eventuali allegati sono confidenziali
e riservati. Se vi è stato recapitato per errore e non siete fra i
destinatari elencati, siete pregati di darne immediatamente avviso al
mittente. Le informazioni contenute non devono essere mostrate ad altri, né
utilizzate, memorizzate o copiate in qualsiasi forma.

CONFIDENTIAL: This e-mail and any attachments are confidential and may
contain reserved information. If you are not one of the named recipients,
please notify the sender immediately. Moreover, you should not disclose the
contents to any other persons, nor should the information contained be used
for any purpose or stored or copied in any form.

(The weird text formatting is original.)

This is such a perfect example of what not to do that I couldn’t resist.

And why the “Confidential” warnings? The email address is simply for the archivist at this organization. They’re not a doctor or a lawyer.  And why in heaven’s name is one of the warnings in Italian? Spanish in this area I could see, but Italian?

How many possible donors or friends get this auto-response, and not knowing much about computers, suddenly fear they have a virus?

Ouch.

In more general terms, this highlights the importance of checking all of your communications with someone who will give you honest feedback, but isn’t too close to the organization to see the problems. Can you try out a new auto-response reply on a neighbor, friend, business associate, or member before releasing it into the wild? When you make changes to your website, can you assign this same person to execute a specific task, while you watch them to see if there are any problems?

If you’re getting a lot of spam, or lots of messages seemingly sent from virus-infected computers, what can you do resolve that? There are several options — add a contact form with captcha to your website (to prevent (future) Bots from scraping your email address), change your email address (beware of this one, but sometimes extreme measures are necessary), heighten your spam protection (such as by routing your email through Google Apps/Gmail or something like Spam Assassin), etc.

Click over to The Oatmeal for the full series.

<Trying to decide if my boss would think it funny if I forwarded it to her.>

Current (old) MAA Logo

Museum Association of Arizona Logo Design Competition

1. Eligibility
This competition is open to everyone! If you are under 18, you are welcome to enter, but please note that you’ll need a parent/legal guardian’s permission.

2. Theme
Entries should reflect the flavor of Arizona or the West, and be fresh, modern, and progressive. They should also reflect the mission of the Museum Association of Arizona (MAA). (See http://www.azmuseums.org/about.htm)

3. General Specs

• CMYK
• 300 dpi
• Vector graphic (submit design as .svg, in addition to a .pdf)
• Should look good in color, and black and white (submission should include both)
• No architectural columns!

4. How to Enter

1. Create your design following the guidelines
2. Name the file(s) to correspond with your name (example:john_smith_01.pdf, john_smith_01.svg, etc.)
3. When your file is ready, enter online here or mail your entry, with images on a cd, to Museum Association of Arizona, P.O. Box 63902, Phoenix, Arizona 85082
4. You will receive a confirmation email that we received your entry.
5. All entries must be received by 5pm on January 4, 2010.

5. Notification of Winning Entry, Prize
Contest winner will be notified Wednesday, January 13, 2010 via email. Winning entry will be used as the MAA logo. Some modifications may be required by MAA committee prior to awarding $200 prize.

6. Agreement
By signing the Entry Form, I acknowledge that I understand the contest guidelines accompanying this Entry Form and agree to abide by them. I represent that the attached work qualifies for submission to this contest. I further represent that I own all rights in the attached work and that the attached work does not infringe any copyright, trademark, trade name, service mark, or patent. The Museum Association of Arizona (MAA) and those whom it may authorize shall have the rights to reproduce, distribute, and display – publicly, including on the internet – images covered by this release, and to prepare derivative works. I understand that MAA is not responsible for unauthorized duplication/use by third parties on the Internet. Winner may be expected to make minor changes in accordance with prize committee specifications.
I hereby transfer all rights in the attached work, including copyright, to the Museum Association of Arizona. I further authorize MAA to use my name in publications regarding the logo design competition and use of the logo.

7. Questions?
For questions, contact MAA Communications Committee Chair, Kaia Landon, kaia@mesahistoricalmuseum.org

[tdomf_form1]

One new option is Open Museum. Right now, curating exhibits there is free, although that should change when they reach their beta phase.  (See the business faq.)  In the meantime, this seems like a nice option, particularly for small museums without the confidence to try some of the options with more technical requirements, or for those who like the idea of having a more social aspect to online collections.  While if it became a commonly-known portal for online museum exhibits, I think that might make it more valuable.  I’m not sure what Open Museum provides right now though that is not built into Flickr.

There may be some other options available, depending on where you are.  In Arizona, for instance, there is the Arizona Memory Project, which brings some similar online exhibits options, although with some of the same drawbacks of Flickr or Open Museum (i.e., few options for configuring into a more creative exhibit).

Before I talked about Pacyderm. The new release of Pacyderm (via Pachyforge) is “slated for release in Fall 2009.”  Granted, Fall 2009 hasn’t passed yet, but there seems to be very little going on.  That could be because they’re working hard on the new release, or because not much is going on.

Both Open Exhibits and Collection Space are still pending.  Open Exhibits has released some interesting survey results.  The numbers themselves are interesting, as are some of the responses to the open-ended questions.

Larry Cebula at Northwest History has recently posted about different Collections Management software options.  There are some good contenders, and some overlap with the ability to create online exhibits (for instance, CollectiveAccess seems like it does a great job of putting collections online, although perhaps not so much as “exhbits”).

Right now, I think CollectiveAccess and Omeka are my picks for the win – assuming a museum has someone who can install (and maintain) them.  I haven’t yet tried installing CollectiveAccess, but I have installed and configured Omeka, and, at least on Dreamhost, it was super fast and easy.

Are there online exhibits options I’ve missed?

A local children’s museum is using a service like Auto Retweet (or something similar) to automatically retweet just about everything posted to Twitter by anyone involving the words “children” and “museum.” Never mind the fact that most of these tweets are completely inane and totally irrelevant to the retweeting museum in particular (things like “I went to the [insert random children's museum here] today!”), but the situation is made worse by the fact that this came through today: “Museum was nice but too many kids and add all the stupid an rude old people who think they deserve special treatment at a children museum!”

Perhaps this is not exactly the kind of thing a children’s museum should be retweeting, but I’m willing to bet the museum doing so hasn’t even seen this.  They rarely post anything real. I’ve wound up in conversations with more than a couple local people who’ve unfollowed this museum for the random rewteeting.

End point is that I’m not sure this is a solid Twitter “strategy.” But then again, they do have more followers than the museum for which I tweet, so perhaps they’re onto something. Are there other non-profits who do this, and does it seem successful?

Other Thoughts From Around the Web

Is Auto-Tweet a Dirty Word? Interesting take on what value can come from automated tweets.

From Beth’s Blog, Best Practices for Micro Blogging in Museums (some great tips the museum referenced above might want to read).

10 Thoughts to Get You Started Using Social Media for your Non-Profit or Do-Good Project
100 Best Curator and Museum Blogs (via the Burke Museum Blog)

1. Music that plays automatically.  Double-plus negative points for being horribly twangy.
2. Navigational buttons that are in flash only.  Plus 1 for having text links of the same at the bottom, minus 1 for not repeating them on subsequent pages, minus 1 for the flash not doing anything cool (why bother?).
3. Having a nice design, but no content.  Seriously, not even a location.
4. Using a difficult to read font.  (Incidentally, has anyone ever noticed that a lot of history museum websites use the same font?) 
5. Using a speckled background.  Am I the only one that finds text difficult to read on such a background?
6. Asking for credit card information on a non-secure page.
7. Using pdfs where actual webpages would be best.
8. Having a badly designed/malfunctioning website, and including promo information for the company/individual who did it.
9. Using frames without a solid reason (I can’t think of what that reason could be, but I’m willing to keep an open mind).
10. Inconsistent navigation.  See #2, but it isn’t that hard to repeat your navigational element on all pages of the site.  And I do mean all.
11. Not creating a 301 redirect for a frequently-accessed page whose link has changed (yet Google still includes the old page on the site links).  If you’d go to the trouble of updating your sitemap, Google could significantly reduce the number of people trying to access the old page.
12. Linking to a page whose title is an acronym (for heaven knows what), and then simply saying “Page under construction” once we get there.  Couldn’t you at least tell me what the acronym stands for?
13. Having a newsletters page, and the most recent one is from 2006.  Are you still in existence?  What happened?  Do you not have a newsletter anymore?
14. Having a site/hit counter.  This, even more than the frames, is so 1997.  If you want to know how many visits you’re getting (and you should), there are lots of ways to do that, and none of them involve a hit counter on your front page.

Now, all of these things are easy to fix.  If whoever did the webpage in the first place was capable enough to cause one of the above problems, they can also fix it!  (And doing so is my sincere recommendation.)

If in doubt, here are two resources to help:

Web Site Usability Checklist

MIT Usability Guidelines

Photo credit, mafic

This method, of course, is not much fun.  It’s labor intensive, and you do have to be well versed in HTML to make it happen (or else cozy with your editor).  It’s also not very search engine friendly.

The good news is that there are easier ways that won’t break the bank.

Questions to Answer First?

Before we get to how, we have to tackle a number of other questions.  Presumably, your museum already has an actual shop at the museum, which can help you get started.

What do you sell at your actual store?  Books?  Shirts with your logos?  Rocks?  Old fashioned toys?

Which items are your best-selling?

What will you do about shipping? (Shipping gets expensive, very quickly.  Have you ever tried to mail something you paid 50 cents for?  Unless it fits in a regular envelope, you’ll likely pay more to ship it than you did for the purchase.)  (Note that some shopping carts will figure shipping automatically for you, or you can set your own rates based on whatever you want — with this method, you undoubtedly vacillate between coming out ahead or behind on any given order.  If you’ve picked an appropriate rate, you should come out about even over the course of the year.)

Who is going to process orders?

This part gets tricky

If your best selling item in the store costs less than $10, or is available for less money on Amazon, you may need to rethink the online store.  No one wants to pay $6 in shipping for something they paid $2 for, and if your primary stock consists of books that are readily available elsewhere, don’t count on many sales.

If, however, you have something unique (books printed by your museum/society, or locally handmade Indian jewelry, perhaps), it might be worth the time and effort to create an online store.

Requirements

To begin with, there are some musts for your store website, regardless of how you accomplish them:

• Restricted information must be passed through a secure, encrypted server (ssl — through the https: prefix, you’ll see the lock in your browser if this is the case)
• No login specific to your site should be required (login to the payment processor, if common (i.e., Google Checkout or Paypal in the U.S.), is okay)
• Don’t require information you don’t need (studies have shown that this will decrease your conversion rate)
• Buyers should be able to complete the sale in a minimum number of clicks (make “buy now” types of of buttons easy to find)
• Provide a list of Frequently Asked Questions, and your contact information (including phone number, email, and physical/mailing address)

How To

Options for building your online store include manually with HTML, manually using a database (although I really don’t recommend it — this may be a good way to learn a bit about PHP and MySQL, but it’s not going to be your best option), or through a shopping cart builder software. 

Your web host probably has a number of easy to install options for creating a store, either directly from your cpanel, or from something like Simple Scripts or Fantastico (if you are lucky enough to have the choice, use Simple Scripts!).

Simple Scripts

If you are considering a specific cart, check around the web for reviews, tutorials, and demos before you actually get started.  There are a lot to choose from, and many are either open source, or included with your web hosting.  If you do decide to use a shopping cart that you must first purchase, be sure you know what you’re purchasing, and why.

If you are already using Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, or practically any other common CMS, there’s a good chance there is a shopping cart module.  For Drupal, I’ve played with Drupal e-Commerce and Ubercart, and greatly prefer Ubercart.  Joomla seems to have more options than I’d care to count, and WordPress has quite a few as well, including WP E-Commerce.

The wonderful thing about using a shopping cart is that the whole process becomes very intuitive.  You click here to upload a photo, type in a description and price, set limits and shipping as appropriate, and you’re done!  You are responsible for the content, but not the coding.  It also makes it very simple to make updates.

Most carts integrate well with a variety of payment processors, so configuring the payment part of the cart is likely to require a little bit of set up when you first build the store, and then you can pretty much forget about it (whereas if you’re building from scratch in HTML, you’ll be spending a lot of time logged in to Paypal building buttons).

Testing!

One important final thing to remember is to check your site in mulitple browsers – both to see how it looks, and how it acts.  Microsoft has anti-phishing capabilities built in to Internet Explorer, and I once found out one of my sites was producing a message telling visitors using IE (and paying attention) that it could be a phishing site.  I had to correct Microsoft on this a couple of times, so make sure you periodically check this.