Expanding the digital reach of Indian Science Museums in Social Media Space through crowd sourcing: Role of Popular Vloggers

Abstract

Young museum visitors belong to a generation eager to experience cultural artifacts and museum exhibits through a new lens, one where the experience is enhanced, filtered and shared through personal online social networks. Here, we have scrutinised the case of the social-media impact of the National Council of Science Museums (NCSM), India, and the single largest governmental science museum network in the world. We found that the social media footprint of the Council is very moderate. In our study, we also found that despite our nationwide network and following certain standard rituals of social media broadcasts, our engagement is moderate to poor. We examined the possibility of taking the influencers and vloggers on board to enhance our digital engagement and found it to be a propitious prospect to explore. Through an evidence-based study, the possibility of crowd sourcing is explored so that the digital outreach strategy of the Science Museums in India may be better oriented. A comparison is made between the digital reach of ‘museum content’ shared directly through the museum’s own channels vs the digital reach of similar content presented through most popular crowd sourcing methods like vlogs. We also made an attempt to analyse the likelihood of augmenting the museum content for the audience of digital space over any other content of different cultural connotations.