#HashtagTheCowboy

A clever marketing campaign has led to staggering social media numbers for the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

When life gave the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum lemons—museum closures around the country for months—the marketing team was ready to make some lemonade with the help of the museum’s head security guard.

Beginning March 17, with the Oklahoma City museum closed to the public, Tim Tiller, the director of security and operations services, started using social media to document his rounds through the empty galleries. His observations, all done in a folksy wholesomeness, were then posted on “the Twitter, the Facebook, and the Instagram.”

Security guard Tim Tiller starts his morning at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in front of Frank Tenney Johnson’s 1936 work Night Herd.

Viewers were treated to shots within the museum, and also of glimpses of someone learning social media on the fly. “Hashtag John Wayne. Lucas, my grandson, told me to use hashtags,” he wrote of a True Grit costume. A few days later, a revelation: “Realize I have been doing the hashtags wrong. I need to use that pound sign from the phone. I’m learning!” In another post, Tiller wanted to show off the museum’s selfie stations so he took a picture of the sticker on the floor marked “selfie station.” Later, realizing his mistake, took another photo of the sticker, this time as a selfie.

Tim Tiller, the director of security and operations services at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

In addition to these funny little episodes, Tiller also showed the art, often holding up his coffee mug in front of a Martin Grelle painting or a Frederic Remington bronze as he started his day. His posts were signed—“Thanks, Tim”—and eventually a hashtag was discovered: #HashtagTheCowboy. Tiller’s posts quickly went viral on a number of local and national sites, including the Wall Street Journal and NPR, whose Morning Edition host David Greene called Tiller a “social media sensation.”

Tim Tiller with actor Sam Elliott at a previous event at the museum.

While Tiller was largely posting in his own voice, the social media campaign was helped along by Seth Spillman, the museum’s chief marketing and communications officer, who reported a 74 percent increase on Facebook, a 500 percent increase on Instagram and 3,000 percent increase on Twitter, from nearly 10,000 users in March to more than 300,000 in May. “We’ve had messages from people all over the world saying they’d never heard of us before but now they couldn’t wait to visit the museum,” Spillman says. “To receive that kind of attention and interest at a time when our doors were closed was wonderful.”

Because of the attention, Tiller has become the unofficial mascot of the museum. When the museum opened on May 18, guests were greeted by a life-size cut-out of the director of security. Spillman adds: “We like to say [Tim] is now a deputy member of the marketing team.”