SI Folklife Social Media Outreach ReportJosephine Hengjuan Qian

The Official Site http://www.folklife.si.edu/archives_resources/

• The Target Audience:– the employees of SI– the researchers who conduct searches about folk life and cultural

heritage– the people who want to know more information about SI

The Official SiteFinding 1:

• The classical background pictures and colors applied to the folklife’s site match the theme of Smithsonian Institution. The choices of color palette and font resources are consistent throughout the whole site.

The Official SiteRecommendation 1:

• Stick to the current classical theme and make some adjustments in terms of the font resources. The readability of the left side navigation could be improved if the font size could be enlarged for a little bit. The amount of font types should be five at most, in order to make the important information stands out over everything else.

The Official SiteFinding 2:

• The picture in each page looks nice and consistent, within the Archives & Resources.

Recommendation 2:

• It would be more attractive to users if more pictures could be demonstrated according to an appropriate layout, like what the home page and, education & exhibits do. In this way, the consistency of the whole site will be improved.

The Official Site

VS.

The Official SiteFinding 3:

• The navigation bar doesn’t give the clues about where the user is directed to.

Recommendation 3:

• Making use of the green line on the top of the page could be one of the approaches to show where the users are. The emphasis on one specific tab will inform the users about site mapping location.

The Official Site• Finding 4:

The hyperlinks of next and previous are not helpful enough, based on the fact that both of them will direct users to another unrelated page, which is already shown on the left side navigation. Specifically, the page of Moses and Frances Asch Collection doesn’t include the next and previous hyperlinks unfortunately.

• Recommendation 4:

The hyperlinks of next and previous could be included on the page which has huge contents only. Otherwise, they are not necessary as long as the left side navigation is shown on the page.

The Official SiteFinding 5:

• There is no searching bar available on the site, which make it harder for users to discover some specific information or knowledge about folk life and cultural heritage by themselves within the SI site.

Recommendation 5:

• Considering the target audience of SI official site is employees and researchers primarily, in order to satisfy their demand of searching for some specific information or knowledge, a searching bar could be included on the top of each page.

The Facebook Pageof National Anthropological Archives and Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives

• The target audience of the Facebook page is the people who are interested about national anthropological and folklife, and “liked” those Facebook pages. Currently there are 928 people who have already liked the page of National Anthropological Archives and 100 who liked the page of Folklife Archives. In some degree they can be considered the active users who will read the news feed frequently.

The Facebook PageRecommendation 1:

• The cover picture could be added and changed according to the seasons, festivals and activities happened around. The cover picture should not only represent the image of SI but also correlate with the profile picture.

The Facebook PageRecommendation 2:

• The contents of the Facebook page could be updated more frequently. It’s a good thing that there is a policy that gives the guidance about the times of posting. By following such policy, users are more likely to read the news feed because during those rush hours most of them are commuting on the metro or buses and it becomes very intuitive to read some interesting and educative articles randomly.

The Facebook PageRecommendation 3:

• If there are pictures or videos within the posts, users will be attracted when they browse their news feed. Therefore, when the new articles posted on the blog or official site are shared on the Facebook page, the users who have already liked the Facebook page will be more likely to read the entire contents of the articles. At the same time, there are more possibilities that people are directed to the official site and blog, which enlarge the population of those sites’ target audience.

The Facebook PageRecommendation 4:

• The timeline in Facebook is a good way to keep track of things that happened to the Smithsonian Center. What Smithsonian Garden does can be an excellent example of making use of the timeline.

- By simply scrolling down and down, the users are able to know details about when the center was founded and how it was developed during these years.

Other Social Networks

• Blog could be considered the elementary approach of making connections with people outside of SI. The role of blog is so crucial and cannot be replaced by other social networks easily because of the great amount of contents it provides for users. However, since people don’t usually check the blog as frequently as other social networks like Facebook, embedding the links of the blog while editing the posts on Facebook and Tumblr is necessary, in order to draw the attentions from more users.

Blog• Unlike other social networks like Facebook and Twitter, blog

is supposed to offer the easiest way for users to conduct search and discover some specific topics that they are interested. So the archives of the contents within the blog stand. The issue with the use of labels should not be neglected. Displaying the whole list of various labels followed by the referred times, albeit a good way to show the label uses, is not intuitive and elegant enough compared with the tag cloud because once the amount of labels become huge, it’s hard for users and even web content managers to keep track of all the posts in the long term.

Blog

VS.

TAG CLOUD

Pinterest• Pinterest is able to display images in a fancy way and the

use of different boards promotes the categorization and classification in an efficient and effective way. Users can browse and search for some specific boards. Additionally, they can follow some of the boards instead of all the images posted, according to their interests. So it is really easy for users to start a collection about folklife and festivals by simply following some of the boards of Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives.

Boards -- The method of classification on Pinterest

Tumblr• Tumblr can be used to combine the

text information and the images, in order to offer users more alternatives to take in knowledge. The text information can be very concise and compressed but it should give users more accesses to the entire articles such as the ones in the blog and official site. In this way, the blog and official site may attract more attention.

User Behavior• Nice images are preferred

• Recent activities’ news trigger the conversation among users

• The contents that can educate users do attract attention

• Some users tend to collect the useful information and knowledge for the future use by clicking on “like”

• Gaining ideas and having fun are the primary motivations of browsing the page

• The feature of recommendation could be an alternatives of social network marketing

User Behavior• E-Community feature: people can post things on others’

timeline, which facilitate the communication among the users.