Museum Social Media Stars Announced for Digital Marketing Summit

We’re pleased to announce four more speakers for next month’s MuseumNext Digital Marketing Summit.

Millie Carroll is the Digital Communications Officer at York Museums Trust in England. She’ll be talking about their hugely successful #CuratorBattle which ran on Twitter over 19 weeks to allow the museum to engage with audiences while in lockdown.

The idea was simple – to challenge other museums and museum visitors to share objects under a given theme. The result was a huge online thread of hundreds of museums from around the world contributing to this online experience, which benefited audiences and organisations alike.

The impact Curator Battle was incredible, from international press coverage, enhancing other organisations online engagement to most importantly, improving wellbeing of  audiences throughout the challenging time of lockdown.

Also speaking at the MuseumNext Digital Marketing Summit will be Seth Spillman, Chief Marketing Officer at The National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. Seth will be talking about what happened when the museums Head of Security “took over social media” whilst the museum was closed.

This became a viral hit, with international news coverage, accelerating follower numbers and broadening the museums reach. It was also incredibly entertaining!

Seth will be sharing the story behind #HashtagTheCowboy and bring us up to date on what happened next.

Also speaking at the MuseumNext Digital Marketing Summit will be Adam Koszary. Now Head of Digital at The Audience Agency, he started his social media journey at the Museum of English Rural Life creating the infamous ‘Absolute Unit’ tweet which grew the museum’s social media following and ended up with him working at Telsa.

Adam will share how he “used duct tape, data and determination to make social media work for museums, how to have fun doing it, as well as all the advice I ever ignored and all the advice I *really* wish I’d listened to”.

Also speaking at the MuseumNext Digital Marketing Summit will be Australian TikToker Mary McGillivray.

Mary has built a sizeable following of TikTok with her accessible art history ‘lessons’ made for a generation of people who are much more used to receiving information about popular culture through memes, short video explainers and Instagram posts than they are formal educational settings or long lectures.

“Many people think that TikTok is only for memes and silly dances,” McGillivray says. “However, there are many amazing sub-cultures on the app, too.” As McGillivray explains, art history is just one of these cultural scenes but it is a side of TikTok that rarely gets the attention it deserves because pop culture is so dominant.

In less than a year, the trained art historian has built up this sub-culture into something few would have expected and now she is the leading light in online art history. Cleverly using hashtags such as #ArtTok and #ArtHistoryTok, McGillivray has attracted a global audience of art lovers who want to understand more about the pieces they view and to see them in a wider social and historical context.

Mary will be sharing her advice on how to reach Gen Z with TikTok.

The MuseumNext Digital Marketing Summit takes place 22 – 24 November 2021 as a virtual event, with all the content available to watch live and on-demand until the end of the year. Tickets for the conference are £120 for an individual and £240 for an entire organisation.