I'm not trying to dredge up the old argument about using nicknames on this board. You are, as far as I can tell, using your real name, finer points of speeling it not withstanding. My point was that we really don't know that here, nor does anyone on Facebook. You could sign up with a fake name there, if you so choose, and as long as you're not impersonating somebody or harrassing folks, nobody will care.

Instagram is definitely the best option- even though it is picture-based, it does not allow a limit of characters in the description. It also has an option to display, very clearly, a website link on the profile's home page. This could be used effectively to direct visitors to a home website.

As for other social media sites, YouTube is an option. I have already seen several museums that use YouTube accounts to promote themselves by say, uploading videos of special events, or rare pieces of equipment operating. This might attract visitors by encouraging viewers to come and view it for themselves, not on a screen.

Blogs are considered social media. One blog many of us seem to know about is "Hicks Car Works" by Randall and Frank Hicks of IRM. It follows progress on restoration and other projects, and provides posts about upcoming events. Many people of all demographics follow blogs. A lot of museums already have blogs, but museums that don't could consider creating one.

These are just my ideas, and they very well could be terrible ones. This thread was intended for discussion about Facebook, and I don't intend to hijack the thread, or cause a thread drift. Facebook is certainly the best and most effective option overall right now. Other options, while less than ideal, are simply ways of expanding reach further. Of course, gaining a strong follower base on Facebook would probably be a good idea before expanding to other social media sites.

,

Actually, yes, I have seen it.

Dear Mr Lisowski

Suggesting that Facebook and Rypn operate in the same way is disturbing. My choice not to join Facebook is on principle and your suggesting makes it sound like perhaps the same should be said of Rypn?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrews ... eda5b93348

Robby Peartree

It's also accurate. They're both discussion forums that allow you to post information on the web where it is publicly accessible. Sure, one is far more popular than the other, but when you get right down to it, they operate in the same manner.

So where is my cut of the profits?
Something Peartree

So I tried to go to the article to which you linked.

Forbes demands I turn off my ad-blocker and "whitelist" Forbes.com, or log in with either my Facebook or Google account.

Meanwhile, on the page on which they want to run an ad before I see this article, there' the quote provided by Forbes:

You, sir, owe me a replacement Irony Meter to replace the one that exploded here.

Thank you Mr. Mitchell IV

I want to thank you for proving the point that the internet frustrations are different for different people. You want me to accept Facebook and how it uses its users to make money but you apparently will not change your computer settings for a Forbs magazine article that I could easily reach. In this case, You have the power to reach and say yes but you choose not to for certain reasons.

A list emailed to me of internet ways to reach people could include;
1. Website
2. Email
3. RSS feed
4. Twitter
5. Facebook
6. Instagram
7. Blogs

In the end choosing how we communicate to our members and visitors is critical. Choosing one where all members cannot reach the information they need hurts both parties.

? Peartree

A new example.

In my vocation at a regional non-profit theatre, I joined a Facebook Loop. The Loop includes the theatre at 7 other businesses (restaurants, hotels, etc.) in Rehoboth Beach. Facebookers have to like the theatre page and are then directed to the next stop on the Loop. I am offering passes to our Christmas show as the prize for our stop on the Loop. We have picked up 52 new likes so far.

I have already started planning for a Facebook Loop linking several history museums in vicinity of National Capital Trolley Museum. It is an easy promotional tool.

You can tour the Facebook Loop here.

Wesley

I never said that I didn't, or refused to. You, once again, are presuming things not in evidence.

The irony here is that, in complaining about having to provide information to a website in order to see the information within, you sent me to a website that requires watching an ad and my log-in (and presumably, a pre-existing Google or Facebook account) in order to view it. I've had enough experience with Forbes.com to expect that. If you're not seeing that, you presumably have an account/subscription with them--which, of course, entails giving them some name and address, and maybe money as well.

Having grown up in a newspaper office (literally) and still making money from writing and photography, I truly understand that content has to be paid for, and I tolerate the compromise between "free content" and the need to pay for it, just like we tolerate commercials on radio and TV. The problem is that, increasingly, we are training folks to expect better content for free.

Robby Peartree> "Why should I submit myself to the rules of Facebook when I find them obtrusive."
BigJim> "What do you need to sign up for Facebook? Let's see. First name, last name = ok, you could completely make those up. Email address = could be a random free email address... What will your PII (Personally Identifiable Information) be used for if you choose to post to Facebook?"
Bobharbison> "You only have to give Facebook two pieces of information."
Jeff Lisowski> "Robby, to sign up for FB requires about the same information that RYPN does..."
Robby Peartree> "Suggesting that Facebook and RyPN operate in the same way is disturbing."
Alexander D. Mitchell IV> "I'm hardly one to defend Facebook--which I, too, find intrusive and invasive at times, but much the same rants/criticisms, or ones similar in tone to them, have been and will be levied against almost any and every large corporation that attempts to produce something of value to a consumer."

No Sandy. It's far worse. Unlike anything that has existed. The reason is the unique intersection of being socially driven (like Twitter), being the ubiquitous preferred platform (like eBay) AND very broad reach with its tracking (like Doubleclick). This combination is extremely potent.

Here's why I disrecommend a Facebook account merely for a single purpose like advertising. Facebook has a strict "real names only" policy, so using a pseudonym is hazardous (though many do). However Facebook mostly connects people by email address.

The moment you sign up for Facebook, you get interactions from your actual, real friends. (That's because they previously let Facebook scan their email, and Facebook knows you are connected to them.) Or, some exigency will arrive where the easiest solution is to give them your Facebook pseudonym. These friends reasonably expect that having an account means you'll be active on Facebook. They expect you to "friend" them back, like their posts, respond to messages, pokes, callouts in posts, photo tags, discussion invites etc.

Try saying "this is just Facebook, an Internet service I'm simply not choosing to engage". But, these are real humans, who are your actual friends. When you don't interact, that itself sends a message. They'll ask, "is it because 90% of my postings are hateful rants about BLM and refugees?" Did I mention you'll get exposed to a side of your friends that you never knew existed?

You can say til you're blue in the face, "I'm just not that active on this thing". But everytime it will still hurt their feelings when you say "Did you see that thing I put on your wall?" You become the anomaly, because this thing is the primary way they interact with most of their friends.

You can also have private facts exposed simply by people talking about you. Call in sick to work and get tagged in a photo at Horseshoe Curve. "OMG, Al, Bob, Charlie, are guys all right???" (Link to news article about a fire at a microbrewery that's sort of a gay hotspot).

And it's soooo interesting. It's hard not to get sucked in a little, then a lot, and soon you forget you logged in to change the ads. Partly because Facebook shows you what it knows you like, hiding differing viewpoints. It doesn't have any sense of "quality of news source", though... so it will show you an agreeable article from UFOnews.com rather than a differing view from The Atlantic. This "echo chamber" effect feeds into politics being so divisive today.

Facebook definitely tracks your movements on the Web. When a web page has a "Like" button, your web browser fetches that button image from a facebook.com server. That means it interchanges the .facebook.com cookie that identifies you. It also narcs out the page you're actually browsing (via Referer) - so Facebook knows you're there. Companies who advertise on Facebook use the "Facebook Pixel" which does the same thing.

If you're not signed in, Facebook creates an anonymous cookie and tracks you as, say, "anon.2CB84C63AD41". The day you create a Facebook account, it merges that dossier with your identity. If you purge cookies and Facebook sees you don't have a cookie, it'll assign you a new anon. number and merge that with your identity when you log in. The only way to stop this is a) purge cookies, b) use Facebook, and c) purge cookies. Which is what I do.

(By the way, I first identified this in 1995 when I worked for Cisco; back then, Doubleclick was doing this, since they served almost all banner ads. Their goal was to serve you ads like ones you clicked... but I expected them to partner with retailers to connect your name/address/PII to your cookie-dossier, and sell that to cold-callers and door-to-door salesmen. Would have resulted in consumer revolt, of course, which I think is what stayed their hand until recently.)

You've heard the expression: "Facebook isn't the product, YOU are."



SteveHunter> "Facebook's habit of blocking public content behind a "sign in or register" for non- members is an extremely big turnoff for those people."
Dave> "I clicked on the link and found your museum consisted of a garbled bunch of letters disguised behind some blotchy lines."
BigJim> "I see what happened here. That's not Otto's doing - it's Facebook and Internet Explorer [specifically]."
Sandy> "and then I read an exchange from/about someone unwilling to take the minimal effort to decipher a "captcha"..... and I had to rethink my sarcasm a bit..."
Dave> Captcha can take more than "minimal effort" depending on your computer and your vision... I'll often say "screw it!"

Even so, Facebook always blocks content with a "Join Facebook" overlay. The CAPTCHA is not punishment for Internet Explorer users; it's to block things which harm Facebook, like automated scraping of Facebook content, or distributed denial-of-service attacks. During a global DDOS attack, they're likely to CAPTCHA everyone who's not logged in. Sharing an IP or IP-block with a lot of other people, or someone hitting FB servers hard, would also elicit a challenge. Google's search page does the same thing.

Those annoyances and intrusions certainly are the museum's fault if they choose web hosting at a place which does that, i.e. Facebook. Remember what their product is (not reliable secure web service). Sandy, we are critiquing sites here, so it's not about the reviewer's tolerance for CAPTCHA... but whether that's an experience we should be presenting the public. Pro tip: it's not.

Dave is right about ADA. Plain websites are perfectly accessible using disabled-access features built into browsers. To comply with ADA, just don't break them. That's an issue with CAPTCHAs and other interstitials. Or the gray-out ad with the X that doesn't work. Or disabling pinch-zoom so you can't read the text. Doesn't matter who you host with, ADA noncompliance is on you.

Not if you don't LET them. Call me paranoid, but I've managed to find several ways to do end runs around all the stuff you say is "mandatory." I "flush" my cookies and other trackers routinely. Facebook tries to find me on an address Juno (if it's still around) thinks died from inactivity years ago. "Real names"?!? "H.L. Mencken" is alive and well amongst my Facebook friends, as is a parody "Doctor Jill Stein" account (and, supposedly, several of the "personalities" of a certain now-banned past participant in this forum).

Just before writing this, I just fielded two research inquiries that came in to our Chapter through the Facebook page message function. In the past, those might have come in through the website--or not.

About two years ago, I managed to "save" an entire charity fundraiser festival when it lost its long-time venue by finding it a new venue, bigger and cheaper--the entire inquiry, negotiation, and transaction essentially happened in real time on Facebook Messenger, simply because the right principals were all right there on my screen at that moment. Now, ten years ago, that "discussion" might have happened on Yahoo Instant Messenger. In 2000, that would have happened on AOL IM. In 1990, phone. Hey, remember when AOLTimeWarnerBeatriceSaccoVanzettiWeOwnEverything was supposedly going to take over all of American commerce? MySpace? Remember "newsgroups" like alt.railroad?

Everything--Facebook, the Internet, power tools, electricity, cars, trains, mail, phone service, etc.--have their pluses, minuses, and compromises. Don't want the minuses? Skip the pluses.

You can get away with pseudonyms on Facebook... until you don't. They can and will cancel the account, which will cause problems with managing the Page.

Sandy> You apparently missed the several posts where others and I noted how we have to diversify our promotional reach.

BigJim> imagine trying to get them on a platform where you have "Tweets" and are limited to only 140 characters per posting.

Al Stangenberger> The point is that a museum which relies on Facebook without also having a standard web site is going to miss a significant portion of its potential audience.

Your Web Site needs to be the keystone of *all* your efforts. Because the web site is the universal solvent of all online media -- accessible to all social media from Livejournal to Instagram.

It gives you free-form format, unlimited space to communicate what you need, and can link to other Web pages. You also have unlimited choice of editing tools and content management systems.

It's also the "universal solvent" for special features. Online ticketing system, weather widget, multiple social media links, PayPal donate button, traffic analyzer, error detector, SEO... most of those don't work on social media platforms.

So given that...

... the purpose of social media is to steer people toward your web site.

Not least, because you really need online ticketing.


Sandy> When and after you set up a website and/or FB page, 1) keep it simple and basic unless you're a for-profit that can afford to add online sales/ticketing/etc.,"

Anyone can have online ticketing... and everyone should.
(who is event-based in any sense at all... perhaps, a static depot-museum might not need it, but it wouldn't hurt).

It's free to you, but it's cheaper than free since it makes other things cheaper.

It does two essential things for you:
1. Lock-in. People buy and commit.
2. Load balancing. People spread out among your various times rather than mobbing on the most popular ones. It's even more helpful if you have a publicity explosion, like newspaper editorial coverage, because the system spreads them out onto open dates instead of uselessly overwhelming the next weekend and disappointing most visitors. This alone makes publicity more efficient by easily 3:1.

It feeds into other useful things:
1. It satisfies 99% of credit card use, and people arrive prepaid, so there's little on-site sales (and even fewer tedious credit card sales). This makes boarding ridiculously fast.
2. If any of your runs have a propensity to sell out, it allows you to create a sense of "scarcity", causing a feeding frenzy for tickets. Now instead of people hemming and hawing right up to train time, they rush to buy tickets the moment you open sales. Frenzy sales cost no advertising, see chart below.
3. Prior to this, it was really hard to market if you don't run every weekend. Now it nudges them toward the weekends you do run. This eliminates those 2-3 parties who show up on work days expecting a train ride.
4. Far fewer volunteer hours spent answering phone and doing callbacks. I can't imagine going back to a manual system.

"Oh, we're too small" -- not anymore. EventBrite takes ultra-small businesses like a 4-person yoga class. If you want to "go pro", there's Whistletix. They are top shelf, with a telephone call center for the internet impaired, which reduces volunteer hours further.

"It must cost a fortune" -- nope. You get near face value. The ticketing house makes their money on the ticketing fee, which you can pass on to the consumer. The value for the consumer is the lock-in: the guaranteed seat. Fees are commonly $1/ticket + 5% of ticket value, and that's much lower than customers are used to from sports and concerts.

"We checked having a credit card merchant account, too many sneaky costs" -- TRUE, but you don't need or want one. Just use the ticket house's merchant account. I've run the numbers... the sneaky costs make merchant accounts a total lose until you're well into 6-digits, and even then you have PCI-DSS risks, which bankrupt 80% of companies that get hacked. I say no thanks, and so do million-dollar operations I know of.

"Expensive ticket scanners" -- You don't need to. Just hand-check them for correct date/time/car -- that's what many concert venues do for smaller acts with mellow clientele, Gregg Allman, Ringo Deathstarr, etc. Or print out a guest list and check them off.

"Excludes our traditional walk-up customers" -- Just steer most people to advance sales, hold back a percentage of your seats for walk-ups, and don't widely advertise the fact that you do this or you'll get mobbed.

"Some of our cars depend on good weather" - make those (only) refundable for weather, if they ask. We just did that this season and it ran beautifully with shockingly few refunds requested.

Online ticketing does not bring one single extra rider. But it makes your publicity much more effective, particularly in social media, where you direct people to your website and ticketing app.



Here's a day-by-day chart of sales (blue) vs ad spend (red). Most of the ticket sales were for an event that starts shortly after the chart ends. Note the ad spends (in red) don't correlate to sales. The first spike was the popular dates selling out. Later, we doubled the number of seats offered, and placed them on sale at a specific time. That's the huge spike. There's not a weird scale here, advertising in red really is that low, maybe 5% of sales. This is due to a mature (20 month old) email list and social media follower list.

Much of that activity on Facebook, to bring it back to OP.

The moment you sign up with the phone company, you get interactions from your actual, real friends. (That's because you're in the phone book) Or, some exigency will arrive where the easiest solution is to give them your phone number. These friends reasonably expect that having an account means you'll be active on the phone. They expect you to "call" them back, answer their calls, respond to messages, voicemails, callouts invites etc.

The moment you sign up with the post office, you get interactions from your actual, real friends.... (you get the idea.)



So maybe it's best not to lie to your boss?



May I suggest that you find some friends that:
1) Don't jump to conclusions based on insufficient facts?
2) Don't concern themselves with your sexual preferences?
3) Don't judge you based on what they think they might be?



What were we talking about again? TV? Radio? Baseball? Football? Gambling? Going to the bar? Reading? Being a railfan? The internet? Oh, yeah, FB. Right. That's the only place people waste time.




Unlike the fair and unbiased reporting on TV. FOX for example is well known for doing thorough research and never having an agenda. So maybe you should consider the source? And possibly use FB to talk to your friends, rather than choosing your next president based on memes from whackosRus.com?




And what does it do with this nefarious info? Report back to the mother ship? Tell the CIA? No, it uses it to show you ads you may be interested in. Yes, obviously the goal is to make money, nobody disputes that. But it can be beneficial to you as well. Imagine having all the ads you're not interested in filtered out. Wouldn't it be nice to see just a few ads, and ones that are of use to you. Granted, no ads at all would be nice, but somebody has to pay for all this. So, if they could, they'd show you as few ads as possible, highly targeted and generate revenue that way. I'm OK with that, and in fact prefer it to a constant barrage of the same crap over and over, like you get on the radio these days.