'Ask a Curator' Twitter Experiment Hijacked by Viagra?

(Sept. 1) -- Can Twitter, the oft-superficial, 140-character-limited microblog, help to bring the rich, lengthy history of some of the world's finest museums into the 21st century?

That was, at least, the goal of "Ask a curator," the global, virtual Q-and-A going on right now in which Twitter users are able to shoot off their museum-related queries to curators of 343 different institutions worldwide, including the Guggenheim in New York City and more specific sites like the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

The exercise is supposed to work like this:

1. Visit Askacurator.com
2. Click on "Ask a curator around the world"
3. Select the appropriate country out of the list of 23 countries participating
4. Click the desired museum name to be connected to the museum curator's Twitter account.
5. Send the question to the curator by posting it as a tweet, including the "@" symbol followed by the username of the curator's Twitter account and the "#askacurator" hashtag (that's Twitter lingo for marking a post as part of a larger series on a single subject).

Already, however, some users have been less than orderly, tweeting insults, e.g.:




And it looks as though someone peddling the popular erectile-dysfunction drug Viagra has managed to hijack the event, at least in part, as well, with thousands of variations on these messages appearing in the tweet stream:




Forcing participating Twitter users to resort to extraordinary means to keep the event going:





Of course, that was never the goal.

"My hope is that we'll plant a seed in both the curators and the public, and change their expectations to see this kind of digital interaction as part of how a museum or gallery interacts with the public," Jim Richardson, managing director of Sumo Design -- which organized the event -- said in an interview with Fast Company on Tuesday. "It would certainly be better then a bunch of bland marketing messages."

That is, after all, what Twitter has been accused of being largely dominated by at various points since its launch in 2006, despite the fact that there is still very little evidence of such marketing messages working. Meanwhile, museums have been seen as slow to embrace new "Web 2.0" and social media outreach, so the new effort is "good for both worlds," in the words of Dewey Blanton, spokesman for the American Association of Museums.

"Our field may have come late to social media," Blanton said, in an exclusive interview with AOL News Surge Desk, "But we're making many strides."

He pointed out that many museums now offer self-curated tours using iPods and have interactive websites, and several have released their own mobile apps, including the American Museum of Natural History and the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). However, both of those are in New York, whereas the "Ask a Curator" Twitter event is designed to spur museum interest worldwide. For Blanton,it's more about engaging with younger users rather than raising museum attendance, which has actually increased despite (or because of) the recession.

If all goes well today, Blanton said that more ongoing Q-and-A's and other Twitter events will certainly be considered in the near future. But so far, it looks as though the Twitter marketing spammers may have won this round.