‘The World Beach Project’ Going Viral: Measuring Online Influence—Case Study of the Victoria and Albert Online Museum Project

Introduction

Social media and digital technologies have provided museums with new avenues for outreach, community development as well as educational, entertainment and marketing opportunities. These digital tools open museums up to new media channels, allowing them to reach out beyond geographical or cultural borders. Furthermore, social media has created new and exciting ways of interacting with museums’ content by facilitating dialogical communication opportunities around cultural and artistic ideas, conveyed through texts, images, video, audio and multimedia applications. These new participatory activities around museum collections offer museum audiences new cultural experiences and appeal to diverse online users, coming from various social, educational and cultural backgrounds.

The active use of social media by museums in recent decades is not a surprising phenomenon. The rapid advance of social media increased the demands of the networked society and re-posed sharply the questions for museums that have been critical for them since the emergence of the new museology movement in the 1970s. Over the past decades, the museum communication system has been transforming from the modernist information transmission model to a social constructivist model focusing on the experiences of the audiences who are treated as active meaning-makers (Hein 1998; Hooper-Greenhill 2000; Macdonald 2006; Vergo 1997). The issues that social media has accentuated include: sharing authority with audiences and allowing them to become active meaning-making creators in the exhibition narrations; providing participatory opportunities for visitors that enhance learning in the museum and connect visitors to the collections; and the creation of interactive community around museum content that brings together people from disperse cultural groups for collaborative activities.

A new model of a museum as an inclusive social ‘forum’ aiming to address current social–cultural issues and get outside physical walls to communicate with diverse audiences is discussed in a great number of publications (Anderson 2004; Hooper-Greenhill 2006; Lang et al. 2006; Vergo 1997). The advocates for a new museum model stress that providing museum audiences with participative activities and involving them in dialogue-based communication is required to make museum relevant to the demands of contemporary society.

Potentially, in the digital realm, where social media provides dialogical tools for communication, museums acquire more powerful interactive capacities that are not always achievable in physical exhibition spaces, where a complete reorganization and restructuring of the museum experience is required to enable a dialogue between audiences and a museum. Therefore, an online participatory museum, where visitors are able to share, comment and contribute to the collections and discourse with their own objects, observations, comments, experiences and stories, could become a powerful multicultural ‘forum’ that can bring people together in a virtual social media space for creation, sharing and exchange.

Though social media presents an opportunity to target new audiences and to create inclusive multicultural communities on a global scale, it is not clear how instrumental they can be in truly engaging audiences from beyond communal, regional or national boundaries. Many museums around the world indeed have experimented (successfully and not so successfully) with the new participative culture of society by developing a variety of programmes online and on-site that involve visitors in interactive participative learning through games, discussion forums, interactive exhibits and many other educational outreach activities (Anderson 2004; Hooper-Greenhill 2006). Drawing on the Castells’ (2004) and Stalder’s (2006) theories of a new cultural paradigm of a contemporary network society, the present article is an attempt to demonstrate, through a specific case study, that social media employed in a museum context can become a very powerful communication instrument engaging much wider and more diverse audiences on a global scale.

The cultural paradigmatic change, described in the works of Castells (2004) and Stalder (2005), is based on the significant transformations of culture, from object oriented to exchange oriented, as a result of development of new media communication technologies, which accentuated ‘dialogue’ and ‘participation’ as the main factors in audience interaction with the cultural content. In the framework of the network society, both of the theorists understand culture as a ‘continuous process’ (Stalder 2006), where it consists not so much of content, but of activities; and where the Internet is ‘an open-ended network of cultural meanings that can not only coexist, but also interact and modify each other on the basis of this exchange’ (Castells 2004, p. 40).

In this regard, the participatory opportunities provided by museums for their online visitors from dispersed cultural communities could serve as a powerful communication tool in engaging different types of audiences on the basis of sharing the value of communication as a process. This process-oriented type of communication (‘participation for the sake of participation’, ‘creativity for the sake of creativity’; Castells 2004, p. 40) does not focus on the end results. Consequently, it could provide a means for participants from diverse cultural backgrounds to enjoy the contemporary pleasures of networked society, simultaneously creating deeper connections to the cultural content, while learning from museum recourses.

Within this theoretical framework, it is possible to suggest that the online participants’ genuine interest in museum content and a desire to share their own creativity and communicate with individuals who have similar interests and passions can potentially bring new leverage powers to museums. These powers can enhance the museum capacities in targeting much larger populations and facilitating a wider scope of contact between people from various countries, thus making a museum a more influential cultural institution operating not only in a physical but also in a virtual reality. In this study, the concept of online influence is understood as a ‘soft’ power of international communication employed by museums in a shared space of the Internet that could potentially reach larger and more diverse audiences worldwide. Therefore, online influence is defined in this work in terms of audience engagement with museum content in online interactive environments. Museum influence, exercised through the Internet, can be operationalized through representational and story-telling power of online collections to promote national cultural resources to the outside world; it can also be described as an educational power targeting at museum goers from remote geographic locations who, due to financial, political or personal restrictions, might never get a chance to see the collections in a real life world.

The main objective of such outreach is to engage people from different countries in a productive and meaningful online interaction in order to promote the museum and advance its position in the international cultural arena. The promotional and educational activities targeting foreign audiences usually serve to open up new opportunities in other countries by establishing collaborative relationships with foreign institutions.

This study aims to explore the influence of social media platforms employed by the internationally recognized museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London, in the development and implementation of its famous online participatory project—the World Beach Project (V&A 2007b). The museum defines it as a ‘global art project open to anybody, anywhere, of any age, building on the experience many of us have had on holiday of making patterns on beaches and shorelines’ (V&A 2007b). Nadia Abrach, who works on the web team of the V&A, stresses that the World Beach Project has become one of the most successful online participatory programmes developed by the museum (N. Abrach, personal communication, 15 November 2010). A famous museum consultant, Nina Simon, also emphasizes ‘the World Beach Project is one of very few online museum projects that has truly “gone viral”, enjoying press attention and growing participation from people all over the world’ (Simon 2009). To date, the project has almost 1,500 contributions, submitted by people from five continents, including Antarctica.

The choice of this museum as a case study was not random. First, the V&A is a world-famous museum with a reputation as a leading international, cultural institution for art. Its famous collections of unique artifacts originating not only in Europe but also in Africa and Asia ensure it a vast global outreach. The museum also emphasizes that it reaches ‘worldwide audiences through diverse activities in the UK and in other countries via the internet’ (V&A 2010). In 2010 and 2011, around 43 per cent of visits to the V&A were made by international visitors, which constitutes approximately 1.16 million people. The same year, more than one-and-a-half million people attended V&A international touring exhibitions at 16 different venues around the globe. As for the online audiences, around 40 per cent of visits to the V&A online portal each year are made by overseas users, which reflects the international nature of the museum’s core collections (V&A 2011).

Moreover, the V&A’s mission is to increase ‘the use of displays, collections and expertise as resources for learning, creativity and enjoyment by audiences within and beyond the United Kingdom’. The museum positions itself as the world’s leading international ‘resource[s] for research…and creativity—a force in society and in the lives of many millions of people worldwide’ (V&A 2010). To implement this vision, the museum aims to make its collections and services available to all interested individuals across the globe, ‘…so that (for example) a Japanese researcher on arts and crafts can find useful distinctive material on the website, without having to rely on a trip to London’ (V&A 2010).

Second, the V&A has allocated resources and developed institutional policies as well as the necessary infrastructure to support the active use of social media for educational, communication and marketing purposes. Social media is an essential part of the audience’s engagement, used specifically to facilitate active participation and direct involvement with the collections. Among the museum’s key strategic objectives is to provide maximum access to collections through the use of digital technologies and audience’s engagement. The V&A sees itself at the forefront of digital innovations by using multimedia and mobile devices in innovative ways to reach wider audiences; as such, it claims to have ‘the best website in the world’ (V&A 2010).

Social media has been used by the museum for many years and it is an important part of the digital team’s work, hosted by the Learning & Interpretation Division of the museum. The main activities of the department include showcasing different events on YouTube and Flickr. In cooperation with the marketing department, they also manage V&A’s Twitter and Facebook profiles to publicize and promote their programming as well as link people to YouTube and Flickr sites. Relying on his extensive experience, the digital programme manager points out that the use of social media does help the museum ‘to get information out faster and target larger audiences’ (N. Abrach, personal communication, 15 November 2010).

The main objective of this article is to evaluate the online influence of the V&A by exploring the international outreach of the social media-based project—the World Beach Project. The study consists of two major parts. The first section, ‘Research Design and Methodology’, proposes and explains a theoretical model of online influence—understood in this project as international audience’s engagement with and in the social media spaces of the museum. Drawing on traditional museum visitor studies research and emerging methodological approaches utilized in the online world, this part of the article tries to identify and explain the main metric components of the online audience’s engagement. The second part, ‘Case Study: The World Beach Project of the V&A’, tests this model and provides detailed analysis of the online project explored in this study through its online outreach across different social media platforms.

Research Design and Methodology

The research looks at the behaviour, size and geographic distribution of international audiences present in various social media spaces of the V&A, particularly in relation to the World Beach Project. The research aims to assess the influence of social media on the global audience by evaluating online audience engagement with the project through quantitative research, behavioural study and qualitative enquiry. All three levels of enquiry are important within the museum ‘visitor studies’ framework, which has strong relevance in its application to the online audience research and can be successfully utilized for evaluating online museum visitors’ experiences. The following three sections lay out the theoretical foundations of the three levels of analysis employed in the empirical case study of the project.

Case Study: The World Beach Project of the V&A

The World Beach Project was started in October 2007 by the artist-in-residence, Sue Lawty. Upon the closure of her three-month exhibition at the V&A, Lawty decided to take a lead in developing a public engagement project, based on her famous collection of art stone patterns (M. Hook, personal communication, 15 November 2010). The idea of the project emerged when a family from New Zealand sent Lawty some photographs of their own art piece, created with stones on a beach, inspired by her exhibition at the V&A. Lawty became fascinated not only by the creativity of this family art experience but by the very act of sharing it with other people via online communication. She discussed her ideas with the V&A web team and together they decided to create a social media platform that would display pictures of individual art pieces, based on stone patterns created on a beach, submitted by ordinary people from around the world (M. Hook, personal communication, 15 November 2010).

According to the rules of participation in the World Beach Project (V&A 2007b), it really aims at broadest possible audiences without any demographic, professional, social, cultural or geographic limitations. For each of the participants, the project happens in two stages and in two locations. First, participants make patterns of stones on a beach, photograph their work-in-progress and eventually, capture the final product. Later, they upload the pictures to the V&A online portal based on the interactive map platform (see Figure 1). The goal of the project is to build a global map of art pieces created with stones on beaches. Mark Hook, the V&A Web Production Manager, explains that the main objective of the project is related directly to the mission of the museum, which is to inspire people’s creativity by showing the best designs. The project aims to encourage people to develop their creative abilities, to experience a unique act of art creation and to share it with the rest of the world by uploading the pictures to the V&A site (M. Hook, personal communication, 15 November 2010). The key point of the project is to provide ideas for meaningful experiences, yet not to make people compete for creation of the best samples of the stone art.

OPEN IN VIEWER Figure 1.

The World Beach Project Online Portal

Nadia Abrach, the V&A Digital Manager, points out that social media can result in far more meaningful use when people are asked to share their own creative work:

This is why the World Beach Project was such a success—it had people create art and then share it with others, and since people put time and effort into the art, they were more likely to share interesting and creative submissions and post more meaningful comments on the social media sites. (N. Abrach, personal communication, 15 November 2010)

She suggests that success of this project is rooted in the creative activity itself: ‘If the project receives submissions longer than six month, this clearly indicates that the idea is alive and people are interested to carry on the project’ (N. Abrach, personal communication, 15 November 2010).

Quantitative analysis of the World Beach Project was a challenging task within the framework of this study. Though in its institutional policies the museum does emphasize the importance of attracting and engaging wider and more diverse overseas audiences, neither marketing nor online teams monitor international audiences’ scope, growth over time or geographic distribution of international users on the social web (M. Hook, personal communication, 15 November 2010). During the interview with the web production manager, it was confirmed that the museum is not particularly interested in monitoring where their audiences are coming from, since the Internet and the social web are global in nature and have global outreach capacities (M. Hook, personal communication, 15 November 2010). That implies that programming and activities created for online users already have an international appeal and it does not particularly matter to the V&A which geographic areas are more or less targeted.

Nevertheless, it was possible to obtain data of the V&A website statistics. This data indicates that the majority of the V&A online audience is located outside of the United Kingdom (UK); only 33 per cent of all site visits are made by domestic online users. The distribution of international audiences is spread mainly among the English-speaking countries, such as the United States (US), Australia and neighbouring European countries. Among the total online visits, the US audience share almost equals the UK percentage, and is about 35 per cent.

The overall level of participation in the project is very high, and in six years of the project duration, 1,456 people or groups from around the world have contributed art pieces to the global interactive map. However, it is difficult, if not impossible, to identify the exact share of the international audiences among the participants. The complication of measuring the international audience’s participation in the project is caused by two factors. First, the museum does not collect statistics of the geographic distribution, neither from the interactive map portal nor of the actual participants of the project. As the web team representative shared, the interactive map itself shows the level of participation on the global scale, so there is no particular need to identify where the audience is coming from:

We know that around twenty million people visit our Web site annually, and this is what we really care about. We do not monitor the statistics of the audience’s visits or participation, as well as the time people spend online for a specific activity or project. The main concern is only the overall number of people who actually take part in the project because this is the indicator that the project is interesting and people enjoy it. (M. Hook, personal communication, 15 November 2010)

The interactive map of the project does provide the statistics for the number of art piece submissions according to the geographic areas where the participants created them. But the map doesn’t indicate the country of origin of the participants. Thus, for example, a participant from the UK could create an art piece while being on a vacation in New Zealand. As a result, such a project contribution would add counts to the New Zealand area on the map rather to the UK region.

The geographic distribution of the project submissions reveals that the 56 per cent of the stone art patterns were created on beaches around Europe, with the majority of submissions contributed from the UK and Ireland. The most represented continent after the European region is North America, with 35 per cent art works created mostly in the US. The rest of the stone patterns were created on the beaches of Oceania and Asia, followed by very few contributions (1–2 per cent) from Africa, South America and Antarctica. Top six represented countries according to the number of art pieces submitted were the UK, the US, Australia, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand (see Figure 2). All of them are English-speaking countries with the exception of Ireland, which is the closest neighbour country to the UK.

OPEN IN VIEWER Figure 2.

Top Six Countries: Geographic Distribution of Project’s Submissions

Considering the social media-based nature of the World Beach interactive map, the project was not widely promoted or presented on various social channels, like Facebook or Twitter. Though the V&A does have a very successful presence on both of these channels (around 250,000 fans on Facebook and 1,124 followers on Twitter), the first announcements about this project were posted on Facebook and Twitter to celebrate its success after reaching a thousand submissions. These few cases of using social networks do indicate that social media was very instrumental in inspiring more participation among native and international audiences. The project managers indicate that each time they shared the information about the project on the social web, it really helped to boost the participation numbers, drawing more online visitors to the portal itself as well as to the V&A’s website (M. Hook, personal communication, 15 November 2010). The web production manager shared that Twitter was extremely helpful in finding a participant of the project from Antarctica. He was amazed how fast the entry was submitted after they started their Antarctica appeal on Twitter. Furthermore, it really increased the frequency and the overall number of submissions to the project’s interactive global map.

Analysis of Facebook activity around the project indicates that a single wall post about the project received 102 ‘likes’ and around 19 comments in two days. Most of the comments either requested more information about the procedures of the project or shared future plans to take part in it. Majority of the actions around this wall post were performed by audiences from the US and the UK, and indicate that the audience was very active and eager to engage more.

The video of the project posted on YouTube in September 2009 was viewed 3,784 times and received eight comments. As the geographic distribution map of the views indicates, the UK-based online visitors constitute the majority of the video audience with much smaller numbers coming from the US, Australia and Europe. The navigation path to the video reveals that people were directed to the video mostly from the V&A website or from Facebook.

The online interaction measurement appeared to be irrelevant for this study. In fact, the project did not aim to create an online community around it and does not encourage interaction among participants. There were no commenting or rating features on the project platform because the creators of the project believe that it was not relevant and it might have discouraged participants from contributing. Moreover, there was no visible interaction around the project among the participants in any of the social media channels of the museum.

Nevertheless, the interview with the web production manager revealed that the project indeed connected people in very meaningful ways and established deep and long-lasting relationships. Mark Hook (personal communication, 15 November 2010) shared at least three amusing anecdotes, which perfectly illustrate how the project was ‘influential’ in terms of connecting people to each other and inspiring interaction among the participants. First, two project participants who were located in different places met online through the World Beach Project, started dating and eventually got married. As a symbol of their love, they submitted a new art piece, which they created together to celebrate their relationship and to share their happiness expressed in creative art practice (V&A 2009a).

Another story is about an online artistic community that got connected in a real physical world through the World Beach Project. The online group leader decided to use the project idea to invite everybody to meet in real life to create an art piece in a joint collaborative activity (V&A 2009b). This case also demonstrates that the project was very successful in bringing people together for creative experiences, which they were eager to share with others through the online portal.

Another example is the story of a family that took part in the project as a commemorative ritual after the funeral of their grand relative. Creating an art pattern of stones on a beach and sharing it with the global community is an interesting example of how people use their intimate experiences of art creation to connect not only to each other, but to the whole world (V&A 2009c).

The database exploration of the World Beach Project’s participants’ submissions actually revealed that the examples shared by Mark Hook are not single cases of interactive and engaging experiences among people, groups and communities who became connected in a real-life world through this project. A quick search of the online database of the project’s contributions using such key words as ‘community’, ‘group’, ‘family’, ‘friends’, ‘together’ and ‘joint activity’ resulted in discovering a great number of interesting examples, which illustrate that the World Beach Project became an important platform for people that helped them to engage in meaningful experiences not only in a virtual but also in a physical reality. For example, the online platform contains a plethora of contributions from families who celebrated their personal events and significant dates through a collaborative experience of getting together at a beach for a stone art creation. Many schools, communities, artists also actively participated in this project to involve themselves in joint outdoors activities for artistic practices, environmental projects and many other relevant events on local, national and even international levels. Some of the interesting examples of such projects include the John Muir Award project, organized by the St Mary’s Cathedral community from Glasgow and dedicated to discovering, exploring and conserving wild nature (V&A 2008) and the International Community School project at Bawdsey beach (UK) in 2009, which connected children from different countries in a cross-cultural practice of stone art creation (V&A 2009d).

There are several online submissions to the online portal of the project which can serve as excellent illustrations of the remarkable cultural, geographic and ethnic diversity of people who actively participated in this artistic practice. For example, a colourful stone piece creation, submitted by a group of women, who enjoyed and shared their differences through joint participation in the World Beach project in Turkey (V&A 2007a). Their stone art piece, showing seven human figures of different colours, is an interesting representation of the biological and cultural diversity of our planet and demonstrates the power of the World Beach Project to connect people from various backgrounds on a personal level through cooperative artistic activities.

On the qualitative level, the comment analysis of international audience’s engagement with the project reveals that social media was instrumental in helping the project participants to express their positive attitudes towards the museum and towards the project. Content analysis of the comments posted by people on the project’s blog, Facebook and YouTube indicates that it received very positive emotional feedback from the native and international audiences. Because the project aimed at facilitating participation, consequently appealing more to ‘active’ users, content analysis indicates a high frequency of messages which describe, motivate or reflect on concrete actions or activities around the project. As mentioned earlier, in their comments people actively shared their plans to take part in the project. For example, ‘I’ll be in touch with my work!’ one of the YouTube users promised in the comment stream of the World Beach Project (V&A, 2009e). Another project follower on YouTube also exclaimed: ‘Brilliant and inspiring! Also love the pattern you guys made on the day! Can’t wait to have a go myself.’ Some social media activists even reported on the successful completion of the project submission, like a YouTube follower who shared: ‘Just gave this a go, awesome idea’ (V&A, 2009e); or a Facebook project fan who even shared a link of his online contribution to the project: ‘And here us my own project just added to World Beach Project. Enjoy http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections *********’ (V&A, 2009f). The online audience also expressed its strong interest in the project by requesting additional information about the World Beach initiative, thus, signaling the importance of the project for people. ‘Is there a deadline for taking part in it?’ or ‘How much time do we have???’ many Facebook users asked (V&A, 2009f). Finally, a lot of people were very excited about the project to the degree when they eagerly involved themselves in further promotion of the project among their online circles. Thus, one of the Facebook followers assured ‘What a brilliant idea! - I’ll be posting this on my wall!’, while another user reported: ‘Just posted on my wall! A lot of people have already joined the project, nice pictures!’ (V&A, 2009f).

All these comments as well as the large number of participants clearly indicate that the project appeared to be very ‘influential’, inspiring people for immediate action. The comments throughout the social media channels, based on the action-oriented feedback, go beyond a simple admiration of or interest in the project, and thus provide additional evidence to the influential power of the World Beach Project. These influential powers stimulated ordinary people to become art creators. The project gave people a chance not only to experiment with their artistic abilities but also to contribute to the museum’s online collections and to promote their contributions globally.

According to the V&A’s established digital communication practices, there was minimum or almost zero moderation of the online audiences’ comments in various social media spaces of the World Beach Project. The V&A Web Production Manager, Mark Hook, confirmed that the feedback from audiences to this project was overwhelmingly positive and in their monitoring of the online visitors’ comments, they never came across a single note or reference to this project with a negative sentiment (M. Hook, personal communication, 15 November 2010). Such positive feedback throughout the project’s social media encouraged several individuals to promote the project to wider audiences and engage more people. First, Facebook proved to be a social media space that encouraged people to share the project with wider communities. As mentioned earlier, personal excitement about individual participation led to sharing of the project’s information on personal Facebook walls, ultimately reaching further networks and friends. Furthermore, one of the project participants created a group on Facebook to connect people who are interested in the project or who already took part in it (Facebook 2009). The group was created by Becky Rendell, a Welsh artist who worked for Sue Lawty for a short time. As Becky shares:

…the group was created as a quick favor to help promote the project, but I realize now that these things take continuous promotion to keep the group alive and active. I felt it was important to have something on Facebook as a point of contact for WBP, it’s such a vital communication tool that I felt we could attract more participants by making a group. (B. Rendell, personal communication, 15 November 2010)

The group had 54 members, with the majority of people from the US, the UK and Australia. Much lower number of participants joined the group from Canada, Italy, Germany, Czech Republic, Switzerland, France and other countries.

The analysis of the audience’s engagement in this online activity indicates that social media helped the V&A to increase international audiences’ interest in the museum and, in particular, the World Beach project. Though the use of social media was very modest throughout the project, a few cases of connecting to online communities through Facebook and Twitter significantly increased the project’s outreach and encouraged more active contribution and participation from an international audience. The main social media platform that was utilized in the project was the global interactive map portal itself. This platform appeared to be very instrumental in appealing to the international audience. First of all, a simple visual representation of the project’s geography, aspiring to global outreach and participation, became a very stimulating ‘catch’ strategy that really motivated people from around the world to map their artistic pieces onto the project’s portal. Furthermore, the display of participation statistics on the map (V&A 2007b) (see Figure 1) can be interpreted as stimulating visual appeal inviting more participation from less represented geographic locations. By utilizing these visually demonstrative online strategies, the map portal managed to successfully target quite large and diverse audiences across various continents and countries.

The success of the project, according to the measurement system employed by the museum, is evaluated through the level of online participation. However, the analysis indicates that there is even more evidence of the project’s success beyond a mere number of participants: positive feedback tracked on social networks as well as the high level of activism around the project. Social media appeared to be an additional space for active participants to share their creations by providing links to their project contributions and to demonstrate their interest, passion and emotional appeal to the project. Hypothetically, the project could have received even more positive feedback in online environments if the managers of the project employed social media more consistently and frequently.

However, considering the limited human resources of the digital department of the V&A and the social component of the online portal of the World Beach Project itself, the use of the social web in the promotion of this online activity was rather sporadic, but indeed powerful, significantly contributing to an increased level of audiences’ participation in the project and stimulating audiences’ interest and activism. For example, through Facebook, some active individuals were able to express their enthusiasm about the project by promoting it to wider audiences and inviting new participants. Creating a Facebook group with international members is a good illustration of how social media inspired participants for further promotion of the museum to wider audiences.

Conclusion

Though social media helped the V&A to engage international participants in the World Beach Project, the geographic distribution analysis reveals that, in fact, the global audience’s distribution was quite limited. The majority of the audience came from the UK and the US, followed by a smaller number of participants from Australia and several European countries. South American, African, Asian and Eastern European countries are represented in a low percentage in the total distribution. In this regard, it is important to note that such a significant share of the UK, the US and Australian audiences can be explained, first, by the lack of language barriers and second, by the considerable advancement of these countries in the use of new technologies and access to the Internet of broader populations.

The share of online users who can potentially be targeted through social media is still higher in the circle of countries with strong economies and higher Internet penetration rate; in many less economically developed countries, the Internet and social media usage is significantly lower. However, a report from the Pew Research Center (2010) points out that increasing online participation of people from less economically developed countries is only a matter of time. Research reveals that the low level of online engagement in these countries is mainly due to the fact that they have a limited access to the Internet rather than a disinterest in online social networking (Pew Research Center 2010).

According to the evaluation system of success, understood within the framework of this study in terms of quantity, quality and geographic distribution of audiences’ participation, interaction and influence within the project, the World Beach Project was extremely successful in targeting, engaging and influencing global audiences. Though the project was more oriented towards English-speaking participants, it still managed to attract people from other linguistic backgrounds, though in considerably lower numbers. Nevertheless, the creative component of this online project appeared to be a very ‘influential’ motivator, which inspired many people to take part in this online programme. Understanding and evaluating ‘influence’ in the world of social web is a very complicated and challenging task for researchers. This article is a modest contribution to uncovering the mechanisms of the complex phenomenon of influence through the prism of online museum communities.

The article demonstrates that in a world of fast-paced Internet communication geared towards competition for public attention, the V&A did succeed in engaging audiences from various countries in an interesting artistic activity. The main reason for this success or ‘influence’ over the minds of potential museums audiences is rooted in the institutional ability and courage to share authority in creating and representing culture by allowing ordinary people to contribute their artistic creations to the repository of cultural heritage. This project is based on the idea that anybody can produce a meaningful and inspiring piece of art that can be a part of the museum’s online collection. This appeals not only to the artistic and creative abilities of people, who get a chance to experiment with their talents, but also to their social needs and demands conditioned by the growing participatory culture of our society (Castells 2004; Stalder 2005). By letting people produce culture rather than just consume it, social media platforms acquire unlimited potential to influence online audiences.

As this case study analysis illustrates, people from all over the world are keen to engage in online projects, which inspire active artistic participation. Within a museum context, this influential power has a much greater resonance because, traditionally, museums have been considered as the most trusted and respected authorities in defining various trajectories of cultural development. Inviting people from different countries to add to the contemporary cultural development framework definitely plays an important role in accumulating influential power in a multilateral and hypertextual environment of online communication. Social media was designed for advancing dialogical forms of human communication, and a strategic and wise usage of these dialogical capacities can help museums and other institutions advance their global outreach and attract much larger and more diverse audiences, whether to the museum itself or its online manifestation.