I love the honesty and soul-searching in this profile of the Met and Brooklyn Museum’s social media work.
On the tagging game, the museum found that fully 52 percent of its players were museum professionals, and a clear majority of those were on the Brooklyn Museum staff. (emphasis mine)
Ms. Bernstein said that this data shook up her team. For her, the whole idea of these tools was to break the old pattern of museums catering too much to an educated elite. But the digital sphere was, in her museum’s case, simply replicating (if not amplifying) the elitism of physical visit patterns. “The farther away you were, the less deeply engaged you were in scale and scope,” she said. “The closer you are, the more engaged you were. It has caused us as an institution to completely rethink what we do in terms of digital engagement.”
As part of that rethinking, the museum has publicly shuttered many of its digital platforms in recent months: Flickr, History Pin, iTunesU, its branded Foursquare page and its tagging games. Mr. Sreenivasan said the closings got the whole museum world talking, and wondering about their own online presences.
A recent blog post by Ms. Bernstein explained the changes: “As part of a social media strategic plan, we are changing gears a bit to deploy an engagement strategy which focuses on our in-building audience.”
The lesson Ms. Bernstein takes away from the pivot is this: “Not letting the tech community drive what you’re doing, because it may not be right.” Digital “is not the holy grail,” she contends. “It’s a layer.”