"It's hard to be a diamond...
in a rhinestone world." Dolly Parton
From memes to bizarre social media captions, museums, like the most basic of us, are well known to jump on the band wagon and guiltlessly go for the likes. But can you really blame them? If you're able to get a massive response and put your name out there for even just a day, you would probably take it, right?
While the US National Parks Service has an absolutely amazing PR team who can draw an instagram crowd with a terrible dad joke, most museums decide on different methods.
Enter the most recent trend. On January 21st, Dolly Parton posted the meme to end all memes. The divided format leaves room for challengers to post photos of themselves that match four different social media platforms: LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Tinder.
It's pretty clear the images are fairly standard among the challenges. LinkedIn is a professional photo; Facebook is a casual one, perhaps one with family or friends; Instagram is fun and/or pretty; and tinder is, well, you get the point. The question is, how have museums been answering #dollypartonchallenge?
They answered en-masse. As soon as Parton's post began to gain traction, mimic post's came from The National Gallery of Art, Williamsburg, NPS, even up here in Canada, the Royal Ontario Museum did their own version. Any museum worth their weight in Insta hearts and Facebook likes used the moment to make themselves look like any normal social media page.
We frequently talk about the stereotype of museums being stuffy, private places that are only meant for the upper crust (especially art museums). Like any good stereotype though, that really isn't the case, but trying to break it is the hard part.
Social media allows museums to put on a different face. Maybe it's showing a bizarre painting from their collection or putting out humorous videos, but whatever it is, we can admit that anyone, whether they've been to a hundred museums or ten, might feel a little more welcome when they see the staff having fun and dancing in the great museum dance off every year.
From top left clockwise: Museum of the American Revolution, Colonial
Williamsburg, Mütter Museum, George Washington's Mount Vernon
From memes to bizarre social media captions, museums, like the most basic of us, are well known to jump on the band wagon and guiltlessly go for the likes. But can you really blame them? If you're able to get a massive response and put your name out there for even just a day, you would probably take it, right?
While the US National Parks Service has an absolutely amazing PR team who can draw an instagram crowd with a terrible dad joke, most museums decide on different methods.
Enter the most recent trend. On January 21st, Dolly Parton posted the meme to end all memes. The divided format leaves room for challengers to post photos of themselves that match four different social media platforms: LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Tinder. It's pretty clear the images are fairly standard among the challenges. LinkedIn is a professional photo; Facebook is a casual one, perhaps one with family or friends; Instagram is fun and/or pretty; and tinder is, well, you get the point. The question is, how have museums been answering #dollypartonchallenge?
They answered en-masse. As soon as Parton's post began to gain traction, mimic post's came from The National Gallery of Art, Williamsburg, NPS, even up here in Canada, the Royal Ontario Museum did their own version. Any museum worth their weight in Insta hearts and Facebook likes used the moment to make themselves look like any normal social media page.
We frequently talk about the stereotype of museums being stuffy, private places that are only meant for the upper crust (especially art museums). Like any good stereotype though, that really isn't the case, but trying to break it is the hard part.
Social media allows museums to put on a different face. Maybe it's showing a bizarre painting from their collection or putting out humorous videos, but whatever it is, we can admit that anyone, whether they've been to a hundred museums or ten, might feel a little more welcome when they see the staff having fun and dancing in the great museum dance off every year.
From top left clockwise: Museum of the American Revolution, Colonial
Williamsburg, Mütter Museum, George Washington's Mount Vernon
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