BrandingFire Blog

Downtown St. Joseph, MO

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StJoeNews.net published an interetsing story on Sunday, June 29th titled “Museums look to the future“, noting that St. Joseph, Missouri has a number of good museums (including the Patee House Museum and Jesse James House Museum), which is both a blessing and a curse. Culturally, it’s great for the city, but the museums are having to compete with each other for limited visitor dollars. Many are starting to look harder at the possibility of getting government tax support. One museum director said museums will need to receive 28% of their income from government support. That’s a staggering number. Nearly a third? Other people the reporter interviewed wouldn’t give numbers like that, but they generally all agreed that government support is needed.

And the thing is, this isn’t just in St. Joseph. It’s like this all over the country. Museums are generally struggling to make ends meet and the task is getting harder as the economy staggers along and gas prices skyrocket. But is the answer government tax support? Raising admission prices? Corporate sponsorship? A combination of these tactics? Or some other solution? I think all history-related organizations are going to have to start getting creative with ways to bring in money. I also think they’re going to have to reevaluate their organization from the top down. Are you telling a good story? Are you telling a cohesive story? Are you working to personalize the story so that it engages your audience? Are you approaching your finances from a business standpoint (even if you’re a non-profit)? Notice in the St. Joe story, this quote:

“If they (the museums) are going to last, you have to operate them as a business.”

Terry Oldham, director of the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art.’

Another good point made in the story is that one of the most costly expenses for many museums is simply finding good help. Volunteers are extremely helpful, but they’re hard to find and not always available, the way paid employees are. Good help is not only hard to find, but it can be expensive.

So, is your organization looking to the future and wondering how to handle rising costs and dwindling customers? Have you found any ways to start dealing with the money crunch? What is your organization doing to bring in more dollars or protect the dollars you already have?

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Over the past two weeks I’ve witnessed two product rollouts (from the consumer side) and learned a lot from them - especially how many things can go wrong. The most unfortunate part of it is that a lot, if not most, of the problems could have been avoided… or at least contained. You may be wondering what this has to do with history. Every day, across the globe, people are rolling out new history books, movies, music and artwork. Historic houses, museum and organizations are rolling out plans for events and products. Maybe these experiences will help you prepare for a more successful rollout.

Firefox is a popular web browser and users across the globe have been anticipating the release of version 3 of the software. Someone came up with the great idea of feeding & building that passionate community. They set a goal to enter the Guinness Book of World Records for the most downloads in a 24 hour period. They declared June 17th as Download Day. A nice website was built that hosted community forums, featured event promoters who were the most active, collected commitments for downloads from hundreds of thousands of people and featured a world map that showed how many people had committed to the download from each country. People around the world were planning download parties and the Spread Firefox site was the central planning place. This was great work on their part and when midnight came and June 16th slid into June 17th, the Firefox world was full of… really ticked off people. And lots of them.

You see, the globe has time zones and while the Download Day folks did announce the time it would start (10am Pacific Time), they didn’t do it very prominently. Most people just saw the date, June 17th, which was featured and promoted heavily. And June 17th in Tokyo, Japan and June 17th in Mountain View, California, USA are not the same. Potential downloaders stayed up till all hours of the night and early morning waiting for the promised Download Day and then trying to figure out what went wrong when it didn’t materialize. To make matters worse, when 10am Central time came, the Firefox download page changed to “Download Firefox 3 Now” buttons. But when you clicked the button, it took you to a page to download the old version of Firefox 2. In fact, this error wasn’t corrected for at least a couple of hours. Downloaders were mad all over again. At last, the problems were ironed out, download links were corrected and more than 8 million downloads of Firefox took place in that 24 hour period. But how many angry people just decided to download the software another day?

The second rollout was Verizon’s introduction of the new LG Dare. It’s a strong contender against Apple’s iPHone (Verizon’s strongest yet) and Verizon customers were already excited about it, even though Verizon didn’t appear to be and kept it hush-hush. In my opinion, Verizon had already made a mistake by not organizing and feeding the growing community of people looking forward to the phone. Despite LG and Verizon being very mum on the subject, photos and reports on the Dare leaked out and each lead ratcheted up the excitement. Verizon could have done a lot to really build this excitement, but they pretty much ignored it, only releasing (as far as I could find) one vague press release about the phone. In fact, it’s on sale date wasn’t even announced until June 25th, the day before the phone went on sale in Verizon’s online store. It won’t be in physical stores until early July. To complicate things, Verizon didn’t even inform their own staff very well about the phone. The answers customers got on when the phone would be released and the price varied wildly from Verizon employee to Verizon employee.

Figuring the online store would add the phone around 12:01 am on June 26th, hundreds, if not thousands, of Verizon customers stayed up hitting refresh on their computers to make sure they got their order in. I was one of those people. 11:30 - refresh (just in case they were early). 12:00 - refresh. 12:01 - refresh. 12:05 - refresh. 12:10 - Refresh! 12:15 - REFRESH!! 12:30 - Argh! It still wasn’t showing up in my phone upgrade options online. I went to a forum dedicated to the LG Dare and, to my horror, I was a post that said the Dare was available online… and had been for nearly an hour! What?!?! I completely logged otu and then back into the store. There it was. I went to the upgrade page and… no Dare. I attempted to call customer service, but they had closed an hour before the phone went online and wouldn’t open again until 6am. (Note that the website doesn’t tell you what time zone. And they have offices across the US.) I tried the online sales consultant, only to receive a terse stock notice that said the live online sales area had closed for the day and I would need to try back tomorrow. About 1:30 am I finally gave up and resolved to call customer service the next day.

The next morning, too early and grumpy from the lack of sleep, I called customer service only to be told that their system hadn’t updated yet and the phone wasn’t actually for sale yet online (despite my having seen it). They told me I would have to try again later or go to a store. (Huh?! A store? This customer service rep told me the phones woud be in store this same day.) Eureka! I decided to just go to my local Verizon store and buy one. Too bad that info was wrong. Good thing I checked before hopping in the car and wasting my lunch hour chasing down the phone. I called customer service again and was told that they were updating their system now and I should be able to buy the phone soon. This was crazy. I then contacted their online live customer service. They told me that they were having technical problems that were preventing exisitng Verizon customers from buying this phone and they hoped to have them resolved soon. How soon? We don’t know. I was so frustrated. This had now been going on for more than 12 hours. As a last desperate attempt, I connected with the online customer service again and got someone else. I asked if they were having technical difficulty with people upgrading their phone online. (I wasn’t sure I believed the story.) I finally got someone with a brain who said, yes, there was a problem. But if I would call telesales, they would process my upgrade order right away, with full online discounts. Thank goodness. Someone was finally implementing a work around solution! I finally got my phone ordered, but I know from online communities that many others were still stymied throughout the day.

So, what is there to learn?

1. Plan for things to go wrong. They will.
2. Pay attention to the details, like time and date. They matter.
3. Communicate with your audience! A lot of the frustration and anger experienced by Firefox and Verizon customers could have been alleviated by posting simple situational updates and solutions.
4. Make sure a problem-solver is around. Verizon closing customer service an hour before the rollout was a really, REALLY bad idea.
5. Find a solution or workaround for the problem as quickly as possible. Verizon should have had the alternative ordering method going within an hour, if not minutes, of the problem coming up. It was a simple workaround until the problem was resolved. If you have a problem, fix it. If you customer has a problem, fix it FAST!

Here’s some intersting data I found by accident. Last week I was perusing one of Google Labs‘ projects, Google Trends. They compile search data from the last 4 1/2 years and reveal trends based on search terms. For instance, you can see trends for the search term “american history”, which is what I did. And after checking a few search terms, I came to realize that american history is taking a hit in the public consciousness - or at least in their searches. Keep in mind that this is in no way a scientific study and public interest in subjects is cyclical. Interests come and go in cycles. But overall, online interest in US history seems to be slipping away.

As a quick side note, the graphs included in this post are from Google Trends. The top blue line reflect the number of searches for a particular term from the beginning of 2004 until today. (The bottom blue line reflects news items reflecting the search term and aren’t really considered in this post.) The letters you see along the top blue line reflect the interest generated by certain online news stories.

Take for instance the search for american history (chart at beginning of post). As with all searches, you’ll see spikes in searches for this term (especially when some news event occured surrounding the subject, but the overall trend is down.

Likewise, here is a search for “United States history”. The trends is remarkably downward!

So, what if you search for specific places or events? Here’s one for Gettysburg.

And Antietam.

How about the Wright Brothers?

So, is the prognosis for history bleak? Not really. As I’ve said, interest in history is often cyclical and frequently spurred on by notable news, entertainment evens (such as Roots, Gettysburg and Cold Mountain). We’re just three years from the sesquicentennial of the Civil War (two if you start with secession in 1860). Furthermore, travel to historic sites is down due to economic woes, but that will turn around. Good historic site marketers should even be able to take advantage of this downturn and fuel pricing woes to lure in local visitors for “backyard vacations” that could save them travel dollars.

What are you doing to gin up interest in your site? Add a comment or drop us a line and tell us about it.

If you are into history and marketing historic sites, you really should check out Heidi Glatfelter’s blog Marketing Early America. Heidi has more than a decade of marketing experience working with non-profits and she’s really connecting that experience with her passion for history and pumping out some good information for anyone involved with history-related organizations.

I didn’t know Heidi until I ran across her blog a short while ago, but I’m happy to find someone out there who shares my passions for history and marketing and is trying to be a beacon to help guide these worthy groups.

Now, GO, READ, COMMENT!! Be heard!

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I wrote in an earlier post that when it comes to marketing, remember that it’s not about you, it’s about your audience. That was driven home for me again today. This evening I went to Best Buy to test out the new iPod Touch (a product which, by the way, really engages its audience). I really, really want one. Here’s the problem I encountered: half of the applications are web-based. In fact, testing the browser was a big part of what I wanted to check out. But Best Buy doesn’t have a wireless network so you can try them out. I sort of understand why they wouldn’t want an open network in the store, but trying out something like the Touch is a big part of the customer experience.

Likewise, my son and I were looking at the video game consoles. There was the XBox 360 which, as far as I could see, only showed demo movies of their games. Next to it was a Playstation 3, with a fun racing game with killer graphics. We had a blast playing that game. If I was seriously in the market for a gaming system, guess which one I would have walked out with?

This reminds me of the times I’ve taken my son to Toys R Us, where they have several cool toys on display… behind Plexiglas. That’s just cruel. It’s also one of the reasons I usually take my son to Main Street Toys here in town. They put the toys out where kids can reach them and play with them. That’s what their audience really wants!

So, are you engaging your audience or are you locking everything up behind glass?

I ran across a nice site called Cultural Heritage Tourism run by (again) The National Trust for Historic Preservation. On their site, they list the Five Principles for Successful and Sustainable Cultural Heritage Tourism. It’s worth a read. The third principle - Make Sites and Programs Come Alive - really hit a cord for me.

Image via WikipediaThe National Trust for Historic Preservation has a really good blog and last Friday they posted about how important it is for historic sites to create a business plan. They also published a nice, concise list of resources to help you get started.

You might be wondering how important a business plan is - especially if you’re a not-for-profit. The answer is simple… VERY! But it’s not just the plan itself that’s important, but the process you go through in creating the plan. It really makes you study your market and think about your mission and audience. For that reason alone, I also encourage organizations to create their own plan. You can get outside help, but I don’t recommend you outsource the whole process. No one understands your organization and it’s mission quite like you do and the process of “getting your hands dirty” (so to speak) is very important.

I encourage you to head over and take a look at their resource listing!