Going Digital: The Met’s Efforts to Modernize its Image

By Blaire Townshend

March has already been a busy month for The Metropolitan Museum of Art—and we’re only two days in. Yesterday, the museum officially launched its freshly-minted new logo, a bold and modern design created by the London-based firm Wolff Olins that has met harsh criticism from the arts community and even been described as a “typographic bush crash” (Davidson 2.17.16). However, The Met has not only changed its logo—it has done a comprehensive overhaul of its digital image, in an effort to make itself “more visually consistent and navigable” (Rhodes 2.19.16). Undoubtedly this overhaul is intended to complement the launch of The Met’s newest venture, The Met Breuer—a new branch opening later this month.

In keeping with its new brand identity, The Met has revealed a “wholly redesigned, simplified website” that ties in to the new logo, presents a straightforward interface, and focuses on being mobile-friendly (Titlow 2.29.16). This move not only contributes to The Met’s new image, but also directly caters to the astounding 91% of visitors who bring mobile devices with them to the museum (Titlow). The website syncs to the mobile apps that the museum has already created to enhance users’ digital experience of their collection.

The Met has previously made moves to utilize social media, as well, such as Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, and SoundCloud, and has even looked to YouTube and Periscope to broadcast its events and increase exposure. It seems to do well on these platforms, boasting 1.1 million followers on Instagram and 7 million views on YouTube. It will be interesting to see how these social media platforms interact with the new website, and how—or if—The Met’s digital marketing managers integrate these elements into a cohesive brand identity.

According to Wolff Olins strategy director Amy Lee, “The Met’s incredible breadth and depth is its biggest asset, but also its biggest challenge” (Rhodes). The next month will certainly be a test of The Met’s ability to grapple with this disparity, as well as its effectiveness in navigating the complexities of a 21^st century digital market as a 19^th century institution. Will it succeed? Or, in the words of Jennifer Bostic, will it become the “Meh-tropolitan Museum of Art” (Bostic 2.23.16)? Only time will tell.

Bostic, Jennifer. "The Meh-tropolitan Museum of Art’s Rebranding." Hyperallergic. 23 Feb. 2016. Web. 2 Mar. 2016.

Davidson, Justin. "The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s New Logo Is a Typographic Bus Crash." Vulture Devouring Culture. New York Media, 17 Feb. 2016. Web. 2 Mar. 2016.

Rhodes, Margaret. "The Met Explains Its Controversial New Logo." Wired. 19 Feb. 2016. Web. 2 Mar. 2016.

Titlow, John Paul. "How A 145-Year-Old Art Museum Stays Relevant In The Smartphone Age." Fast Company. 29 Feb. 2016. Web. 2 Mar. 2016.

Peer Promoting: The Benefits of Social Media Engagement for the Entertainment Industry

By Blaire Townshend

Though I am a member of the oft-mentioned Millennial generation, I am new to the world of social media. Unlike many of my peers, I don’t find that hashtags, retweets, and Instagram posts come naturally to me. However, in a quest to make myself less antediluvian, I have been attempting to understand the complexities of these vast online communities and their implications both for my field of interest (arts and entertainment) and for society in general. What I have gathered quite quickly is that social media not only has the potential to revolutionize marketing tactics, but has already done so. In the interests of time I will speak to this revolution as it pertains to digital arts marketing, but as I am sure you are well aware, no market is unaffected.  

What is truly incredible about these mediums is their capacity to encourage consumer driven marketing. A perfect example of this is live tweeting; the phenomenon of responding to events in real time on Twitter using predetermined hashtags pertaining to the subject material at hand. While I was observing arts events and bemoaning declining audiences and lack of widespread support, my peers were busy beaming relevant discussion topics to a global audience of millions and thus bringing exposure to the art. And this without any urging from the producers of these events! In essence, they were marketing arts events for these producers. On their own time. For free. In marketing parlance, these tweeters exemplify the ideal of the net promoter; an enthusiastic supporter of a good or event who takes it upon themselves to recommend that good or event to their peers. This is an incredibly cost-effective marketing base for organizations to tap into.    

In fact, a Forbes article from 2014 speaks specifically to the effects that live tweeting has on platform engagement (Bercovici). It claims that “programs whose cast members live-tweet when the show is airing generate 64% more discussion” (Bercovici). I can certainly attest to the fact that this is still the case two years later—when Grease Live aired this past week, and stars such as Julianne Hough and Aaron Tveit took to Twitter and Instagram to share their experiences backstage, express their excitement, and just generally check in, my social media feeds exploded. People could not seem to get enough of the up-to-the-minute, intimate feel of these posts. They responded in kind, and as a result, Grease Live was the main topic of conversation on Twitter and Facebook for hours that night.

The beauty of these scenarios is that the marketing personnel of these productions can do relatively little and reap fantastic rewards. Encourage your stars to engage in light commentary, promote a few backstage Instagram posts, and your fans will do the rest of the work for you. Obviously, this is an oversimplification of the marketing process. However, the fact remains that the resulting online conversations generate the very organic word of mouth that marketers lust after. And it is important to note that word of mouth is overwhelmingly what this generation responds to. The statistics say it: the Broadway League demographics report found that word of mouth and personal recommendations were the most popular methods for gathering information and making choices about arts events (Demographics). The experts say it: Chris Anderson reminds us that “fundamentally social media is a peer-to-peer medium”—in other words, the online generation values and trusts the recommendations of their peers (Anderson 242).

When marketers understand this and take advantage of this, they encourage the use of social media as a platform for “peer-production”, where “users happily do for free what companies would otherwise have to pay employees to do”—recommend these events to each other (Anderson 219). Anderson flippantly describes this as a transition from “outsourcing” to “crowdsourcing”, but I feel that his description is wonderfully apropos (Anderson 219). In a market such as the arts, where paying for wages and advertising campaigns is at a premium, who in their right mind would refuse the assistance of that crowd? I may be slow on the uptake, but even I can see that encouraging such collaboration is #ontrend.

Anderson, Chris. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. New York: Hyperion, 2008.

Bercovici, Jeff. “Twitter Quantifies Impact of Live-Tweeting on TV Engagement.” Forbes Tech. Forbes. 18 Sept 2014. Web. 4 Feb 2016.

“The Demographics of the Broadway Audience 2013-2014.” The Broadway League. The Broadway League. 2014. Web. 6 Dec 2015.

Saatchi Art Gallery and its new mobile presence

http://news.artnet.com/in-brief/saatchi-arts-mobile-app-virtually-hangs-artworks-in-users-living-room-196036

Saatchi Art Gallery's mobile app virtually hangs artworks in user's living room. I'm telling you - if this cracks through social media platforms, the art world will transform! Already, Instagram is taking the role of catalogues in auction houses and galleries, and the art connoisseurs are discussing how to regulate this. In the midst of all this rapid transformation, this new application exemplifies an unprecedented way to engage audience in the art world via digital marketing.

The art world before the mobile app and digital marketing is outdated now; we must now pay attention to the innovative methods of targeting and engaging audience in the art world.

Twitting at the Philharmonic

We haven't talked much in class about Digital Marketing and the Arts, but it seems that more and more cultural organization are turning to methods of engaging audiences via the web or allowing the to interact online while experiencing the cultural events.

A great article in today's LA Times "Classical Music Waltzes with Digital Media" discusses the digital marketing initiative of the LA Philharmonic. For an arts organization specializing in classical music, the is not likely to attract young audiences, the LA Phil developed Facebook, Twitter and iPhone apps to try and engage and new kind of audience. It is also important to remember that today in the LA Philharmonic the average concertgoer is in her or his "high 50s". The orchestra is using these new media techniques in hope of changing that. Although it could be interesting to see what happens if the orchestra decides to approach her main audience and encourage them to also engage and participate on Facebook. As some studies show, more and more retirees are using these social networks, therefore it could be an interesting tool for them to also use to further engage their current audience.

Shoppergirl26 - who are you really?

A recent article published by MarketingMagazine.co.uk revelead that 37% of Internet users are not willing to provide personal data online and 31% will not provide real information about themselves to brands online.
As we have discussed in class, much of online advertising today is heavily influenced by the information users share online. Thus, ads are segmented and targeted at specific users. The results of this study are sure to reshape the way advertisers build their online marketing strategieis.
For example, some studies have shown that on average there are more women online than men. Perhaps we could conclude that women are less trusting than men? If this is the case, advertisers should seek to create incentives for women and online users in general to provide their REAL personal information.

On the Do’s and Don’ts of Social Networking for Arts Institutions

I recently came across an interesting article on the Do’s and Don’ts of social networking for Arts institutions on the Founder of Art Journal, Don McLennan’s, blog Diacritical entitled “10 Ways to Think About Social Networking And The Arts (the zen of "free" as a strategy. ”  (Available from:  http://www.artsjournal.com/diacritical/2009/05/power-in-numbers-there-ought.html)

In his post, McLennan begins by outlining some of the most compelling reasons for Arts institutions to adopt Social Networking tools such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter such as the need to replace aging core art audiences with younger audiences and the need to build strong brand connections in an increasingly competitive arts landscape. After establishing the context, he then proposes a list of the 10 most important things for Arts institutions to remember when they are about to get involved with social networking. This list includes: avoiding an “Institutional voice” in communication; providing incentives to membership such as discounted or last minute tickets to shows/events, or special applications; and resisting the urge to use social media exclusively as a tool to sell tickets by supplementing your sites with interesting links, feedback from the institution, video, photographs, etc.

As someone interning this summer in the marketing department of a museum, I found this article interesting because it tied back the issues we have been reading/discussing in class to Arts industry. I was also excited to see an article on social networking featured in a widespread Arts Journal because it demonstrates that Arts institutions are starting to become savvier about their marketing campaigns.  In my opinion, social networking is a very worthwhile tool that cash-strapped Arts institutions such as museums can leverage to promote their brands and connect to new audiences and that institutions that do not capitalize on this tool in the next couple of years will ultimately miss the boat.

Before signing off on this post, I wanted to just mention as an aside that McLennan just posted a really interesting post on the current Facebook Fanpage fueled battle between New York Magazine art critic Jerry Saltz and the staff at MoMA over the MoMA’s relative lack of artwork by female artists in its permanent collection entitled “When The Mob Turns Angry, What’s a Museum to Do?” (Available from: http://www.artsjournal.com/diacritical/2009/06/when-the-mob-turns-angry-whats.html ). This post really highlights how viral Facebook posts can really damage an institutions reputation if not handled properly.

Social Tagging and Museums

I’d like to talk about an interesting example of “Folksonomy” (social tagging) from the arts and cultural sector called Steve Museum. Originally conceived by independent museum specialist, Susan Chun, in 2005, the Steve Museum is a collaborative project between museums, independent museum professionals, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (ILMS) that uses social tagging of artwork as a way to connect with new audiences, improve public access to a museum’s collections and improve indexing of artwork by allowing visitor to add their own tags to a work of art.

In a nutshell here's how Steve Museum works: Member institutions can upload pictures and make sets of their collections using  “Steve Tagger”, an open-sourced software that was developed by the Steve Museum. Once the works of art are uploaded, the public can view the works of art, tag them, and share them with their friends, much in the same way as they would in Flickr. It should be noted that membership to the Steve Museum and access to all the software and technical support is free of charge and available to any museum that is interested in joining this project.

Although at present only a handful of art museums such as the Guggenheim Museum (New York), The Indianapolis Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art are members, this project is currently receiving a lot of press from professional museum service organizations such as AAM (American Association of Museums), and ILMS. Accordingly, I predict that many more museums will also become members within the next couple years.

I predict that this project has several possible benefits to museums in the long run :

1) By allowing the public to add social tags to works of art, “Steve Tagger” can improve a museum’s ability to come up with categories or tags that are relevant to the average musem-goer. Current museum categories (which are for the most part based on the curator’s definitions) are in some cases very different from the categories or descriptors that a museum-goer might associate with a picture. For example if we take the Mona Lisa, the curator’s tags might describe the artist (Leonardo da Vinci), the period it was painted in (The Italian Renaissance) and other technical facts about the painting. By contrast, the viewer might use the tags that have less to do about the technical aspects about how the painting was produced such as “Louvre”, “Women”, and famous painting. In the future other viewers might find the Mona Lisa through one of these user generated tags because it is more relevant to them than something that the museum had though of.

Thus, by allowing museum-goers to add their own tags, museums could benefit from discovering relevant tags that would help improve the searchability of their collections.  Moreover, by allowing social tagging, museums are likely to encourage an increased sense of ownership and engagement with the museum. This in turn could help drive increased ticket or membership sales to the museum.

2) Once more museums join, “Steve Tagger” has the potential to be a tool museums could use to mine valuable information on audiences such as the age, taste, demographics and so forth. Thus, in the long run member institutions could improve their marketing initiatives through collaboration with this initiative.

3) In the future, Steve Tagger could become a popular social media site amongst museum-goers.  Thus, membership in Steve Museum could  help a museum successfully reach out to new audiences. Moreover, membership could also help encourage a deeper relationship with visitors.

For further information about this project please visit: http://www.steve.museum./