A Happy New Year to all our friends, fans and followers! We’re starting the new year with over 120 fans on Facebook and just short of 1,100 followers on Twitter – considering we only started Museum140 last March, we think that is pretty fantastic.
Here are some other highlights from our fantastic first year:
Museum Memories Day on 17 May, which invited people to share their most memorable museum moments on Twitter via the hashtag #MusMem, was a global success. It trended in 12 different countries and kept going right through International Museum Day on 18 May.
At the beginning of July we launched our Adopt-a-Museum project, which aims to put some of the unsung heroes of the museum world in to the spotlight. Each week, the blog features a new museum to discover, introduced by a different person enthusiastic about museums. We’re always still on the lookout for new adopters, so if you’re interested please get in touch - perhaps the stylish stickeryou get will tempt you?
At Museum140 we love numbers, and 11/11/11 was just too good a date to let pass without doing something to mark the occasion. That something was Museum Exposure, a photography project asking people to help capture museum activity around the world on that one day in time. Almost 200 people from over ten different countries took part.
In December we decided to take a break from our Adopt-a-Museum main features and instead had an Advent Calendar with daily micro recommendations from the Museum140 team and previous adopters who were so keen they wanted to adopt another museum. All the museums featured in the calendar are still eligible for full adoption on the main blog, so if you know any of them and would like to do the honours, please get in touch. The Advent Calendar plug-in we used will get reset again at some point for next Christmas, but all the entries are archived on our Tumblr blog under the tag #adventcalendar2011.
Two weeks before Christmas we received an early Christmas present, when we reached 1000 followers on Twitter. We sent a small thank you parcel off to follower no. 1000, but we wish we could have sent you all something to say thank you.
As well as the Advent Calendar, we went a bit Christmas crazy with our crowdsourced Christmas tree, for which we received 15 baubles in total, and Secret Santa 2.0 in which 38 people from 9 different countries took part. It’s already in the Museum140 diary again for this year, by popular demand.
Other things we have planned for 2012 include celebrating our first birthday in March, International Museums Day in May, more Adopt-a-Museum features throughout the year, and something for 12/12/12. We don’t want to spoilt it by giving away too many details in advance, but we hope that when the time comes you’ll continue your fantastic support and participation from last year. It’s you that helps to make Museum140 what it is, so from us a great big THANK YOU!
