LIBRI DI CHIARA GIACHINO

The speed of digital change in museums and art galleries soared with the advent of Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, engendering the rise of new solutions, trends, and opportunities. This book offers a structured perspective on how museums are evolving and reveals the effect that digital technologies have on the interaction between these institutions and customers and, above all, on younger generations. A digital mindset is the key to continuous improvement in the museum sector.

The rapid growth of Web 2.0 coupled with its unique capabilities has increasingly captured the attention of scholars and practitioners, and the list of benefits for companies of any age, size, and geography is continuously accrued by new evidences. This paper contributes to the literature in the field by investigating the potential impact of social media, and especially of social Word-of-Mouth (sWOM), in boosting start-ups growth. This study applies an original approach on the topic, by replicating the Small World Experiment of Milgram. An empirical experiment of information diffusion process in the ESCP Europe community - chosen as example of a determined and closed social network, composed by a lot of start uppers - enabled authors to demonstrate that interconnected communities can enhance the WOM effect and consequently can represent an effective tool to help people looking for opportunities, such as start uppers, to reach a specific target; in the dissemination process if super-connectors play a substantial role, and weak ties help in further diffuse the message, on the contrary monetary incentive are not important.

Social networks are used by companies in order to maintain contacts with existing customers and gain new clients. In the cultural sector these instruments have been adopted only recently. The contribution of new technologies is crucial specially in terms of the huge opportunities they offer to give and receive feedback as well as to create a direct relationship between institutions and audiences. For museums, being online is as important as knowing how to use Web 2.0 in an effective way. Over the last decade, museums have experienced a strong cultural shift from object-oriented towards audience-oriented strategic approaches. Measuring the engagement rate of museums on the main social networks (Facebook and Twitter) is a first indication of the ability of museums to engage audiences, regardless of their popularity or the number of annual visitors. However, considering the number of Likes or Tweets is not enough to evaluate the effectiveness of the social strategies of museums. Users must feel part of museums’ life and interact with it. This research analyzes the results obtained by four samples of museums (varyingly well-known) on their Facebook and Twitter page with the aim of evaluating their level of interaction with audiences.