Luke Portess is Head of Online Communications at the Glasnevin Cemetery Museum, Dublin, Ireland.
1. How did you live the #MuseumWeek experience? Did you notice any new dynamic in your institution since then ?
#MuseumWeek was a great opportunity to showcase the Museum, I knew once the week got going I would need to be organised in order to get across our themed tweets. I’m constantly looking for opportunities to engage with our online audiences. We have so much interesting content, #MuseumWeek was a perfect platform to work with. I’m sure it has helped create awareness to potential visitors to Dublin/Ireland plus engage with institutions globally.
2. During the event, was the opportunity to invite specific audiences like fans, Instagrammers, artists, influencers acted upon…?
I always welcome the opportunity for the Museum’s online audiences to engage, either with sharing photos and their stories. I guess most people wouldn’t assume they can take a ‘selfie’ whilst visiting a cemetery but I’m hopefully helping change perception so we can encourage our audiences to do such things (in the best possible taste of course). We are a unique site, the cemetery is home to over 1 million stories, I even bought some of it’s more famous residents to life for #poseMW !
3. What is the benefit for your institution to be on Twitter?
Since bringing the Twitter account ‘live’ when I started working @GlasnevinMuseum just over 3 year’s ago it has helped engage a wide audience. The cross section of engagement from News desks picking up direct from the feed, running live tweets from events at the Museum, selling Tickets/Online Shop products, telling the stories of the famous people buried in the cemetery and of course, illustrating the wealth of history and beauty via images.
I’d like to think I might have helped other institutions with how to use Twitter. I, for sure think it important to see what other institutions are doing and learn from that. #MuseumWeek helped with this plus hopefully opened up the chance to engage with different audiences.
