Mattia Marasco is a digital strategist / MUS.E of Florence
1. What is your museum about and what are its challenges?
Our Association is responsible for promoting and enhancing all the Civic Museums of Florence: it is a museum circuit of different types under the direct responsibility of the Municipality. For example, we are concerned with promoting museums such as Palazzo Vecchio, a true symbol of the city’s cultural history, and museums such as the Museo Novecento, an important demonstration of how even an ancient and Renaissance city such as Florence can and should expand the own look at more recent times.
Our challenge is to tell the places of culture in a new and alternative way to more traditional tools or activities, for this reason we offer a wide choice of workshops for families and children, guided tours in the company of actors who play historical characters, campus summer and winter for kids, temporary exhibitions. And it is always for this reason that we strongly believe in communication and digital innovation, we are witnessing an era of change and it is therefore important to adapt also the means by which we decide to tell the treasures of our past.
2. What kind of remarkable digital innovation would you like to share with us? It can be online and/or in your physical space.
A strategy that we have been carrying out for about a year and which we are very satisfied with is the launch of a collaboration project with local micro-influencers. A year ago we selected a group of digital ambassadors, each with a significant audience for our sector, to assist us in telling MUS.E, our activities and obviously the cultural heritage of Florence.
Each of them supports us with its own peculiarity, so there are those who are more suited for photos, those for writing and so on but all together they provide us with a structured and fundamental support to introduce ourselves and tell us about the city, amplify our story thanks to their skills and experience. Given the results achieved by this first experimental year, this is a unique case in Italy of long-term cultural influencer marketing, we have decided to extend the project throughout 2020 and also to expand the team involving new personalities.
3. What are the social media platforms that your museum chose for its digital presence and who are your primary target audiences?
In digital communication we have chosen to devote time and energy to the widest possible number of channels since each has its own specific identity and allows us to reach a different audience. For our Association and the Museo Novecento, for example, we have decided to open various social profiles: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, TripAdvisor, Youtube.
MUS.E also has an official blog that tells about our activities, the most human side of the association and often offers articles dedicated to cultural communication and digital innovation.
The most important challenge for us is to be able to get in touch with both the inhabitants of Florence and foreign travelers choose it as their holiday destination; we think that both audiences deserve the chance to discover the cultural heritage that makes our city unique all over the world.
4. If you had to keep one social media platform to reach youngsters, which one would you pick?
Surely today Tik Tok is the platform on which to make an accurate reflection, however it has a language and dynamics that it is not easy to decline on a sector such as the museum. We are also waiting to understand how Instagram, the main competitor on a range of under35 users, will decide to react to the exponential growth of this new platform.
Today, therefore, I believe that Instagram is still the platform in which it is worth investing to reach a young audience but with a careful and constant observation of the development of Tik Tok because in a very short time a sudden change of direction may prove necessary.
5. Do you have a professional alter-ego somewhere in the world to whom you would like to ask a professional question? Not in your country.
I would like to be able to ask the Social Media Manager of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam what do you think could be the appropriate number of professionals to be used to design and then implement an always original and creative digital communication strategy?
The comparison with other people with the same skills is fundamental within a creative process, I would like to know (or according to them) what is the ideal number for a team dedicated to the digital world and in particular social.
Interview by Fabio Pariante, journalist
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MUS.E association of Florence on social networks: Twitter – Instagram – Facebook
Mattia Marasco takes care of choosing and designing the digital strategies to be put into practice in order to achieve the objectives of MUS.E, alongside this is also a daily operational activity of updating profiles, community management and social management advertising.
