Be useful, simple and delightful
A journalist who was a dean and chief digital officer at Columbia University, Sree Sreenivasan is now Chief Digital Officer of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and best known for transforming one of the most famous institutions in the art world into a digital power house…
In 2013, Sree Sreenivasan already had a “30 year long one-way love affair with the Met” when the museum called him because it was seeking its first chief digital officer. “It wanted someone not from the museum world and not from the art world,” Sree is on record saying. "So I am superbly qualified."
The Met won a 2014 Webby Award for its social media efforts, and a study by the digital agency La Magnetica found it to be the world’s most influential museum on Twitter. This year, Fast Company magazine named Sree one of the most innovative people of the year for liberating the museum from its physical walls.
Sree will speak at the Digital Innovators’ Summit in 2016 (20 to 22 March in Berlin, Germany.
Ulrike Langer shares some of Sree’s thoughts on digital, reporting from a keynote Sree delivered at a 2015 Knight Foundation Media Learning Seminar (watch the video at: How Institutions Go Digital) and a few other sources (see the full list below, including link to Sree’s Tumblr).
… the role as Chief Digital Officer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Inside the Met I run what I call a 70-person-startup inside a 145-year-old-company. What we’re thinking about is the future of culture and how we can connect what’s inside the museum with the world. We have two physical locations in Manhattan and soon there will be three, but we have a fourth location and that is the web. We are spending as much time thinking about and appreciating our visitors who come in person as well as those who come online. That’s a big step for a physical space, especially since people have to pay when they visit us but online they don’t pay anything.
… on how to extend the in-person museum experience into digital
That’s something we think about all the time. We are trying to build a virtuous circle between our 6 million in-person visitors and our 20 million online visitors so that digital projects encourage more people to plan in-person visits, and the physical visits encourage more people to connect with the Met digitally through our apps and social media.
We want you to have such a fantastic experience online that you want to come to the museum, and then when you are here have such a fantastic time that you want to stay in touch. We need to give you a bunch of tools to do that. And connecting people in the right ways at the right time applies just as well to journalism.
… the importance of storytelling for the Met
I believe the future of all businesses is in storytelling and connecting the physical and the digital, the in-person and the online. With two million square feet of gallery space and tens of thousands of works on view, at any given time, we can ask, ‘What stories can you tell?’ about each item. We want to focus not just on blockbuster exhibitions, but also on the amazing permanent collection.
Think about the stories you can tell in your organizations. There are multiple ways to do that. We have done this in simple video. We did a series called “82nd & Fifth” that you can download as an app or find on the web for free. We got a hundred curators to talk for two minutes each about their favorite works of art. We and they learned that you can have increased accessibility without reducing the scholarship, And that’s incredibly important to us.
This year we’ve done the same with local artists. And here’s one thing we learned. Previously, we released the videos two at a time for 50 weeks. But in just the one and a half years between these sessions we watched enough “Orange is the New Black” and “House of Cards” to know that the right way to do this is in seasons. So we released season one with 20 episodes so you can watch them all together five times a year in binge watching ready mode.
… the app strategy of the Met
We have "Today's Events”, "Staff Picks", fun things like, all of the "Met-stashes" (the moustache tour), and we also have "For Members." A lot of things are free but we want people to sign up. We have 150,000 members, tens of thousands who don't even live in America who support us that way. Then “Upcoming Events”.
And we have the Met app. It’s not the app I thought we would have when I came to the Met. I thought we would have the entire museum that you can download and put in your pocket. But the apps we really love are useful, simple and delightful and mostly do one thing really well. Now my policy is useful, simple and delightful instead of really complicated, sort of useless and just a pain in the butt.
… how to manage culture change and digital transformation in a legacy institution like the Met
In the art department, it's very easy to hire people because they want to be here their whole lives. But here in technology it's a little different. People have not necessarily even spent much time in the Met.
How do I compete for developers with you guys? How do I compete with Wall Street, server farms, people who can give equity, all those startups? We tell our own story about the Met: what an exciting place it is, that it's looking ahead and looking back at the same time.
To survive, an institution has to be thinking ahead all the time but always thinking about our great scholarship, our great authority, and making it all accessible. If continue to crack that, we're going to do fine. All I need are people who want to do things, then others will come along.
… what he sees as a really big challenge
The scarcest resource in the 21st century is human attention. How do we get enough attention to what we’re doing? I did a TED X talk on this subject. I talked about why is attention is so hard to get. Just take photography. There will be one trillion photos taken in 2015, 80 percent of them by mobile phones. Where does our content fit into all of this?
YouTube is another example. It used to be 24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, today it’s 300 hours of video every minute. The safest place to hide your secret is on YouTube because nobody will see it. What you have to do is to use all your attention-grabbing and pointing tools to get people’s attention.
… how the Met tries to get people’s attention in the digital age
In a year in digital media we do a lot things: 500 blog posts, 26 cycles of updates on metmuseum.org, 100 new videos for the permanent art collections and special exhibitions, 2 new essays of scholarly work, 1,100 new Facebook posts, 450 Instagram posts, 3800 tweets and we send millions of emails out. The biggest trends of 2015 are email, newsletters, blogging and podcasts. They have all been around since 2006 but the technology has become easier.
But even in the world of Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, Meerkat and you know what scholarly information still counts. Expertise counts. We have 7000 scholarly articles on our Timeline of Art History and the history of the world told through articles on our objects. This is responsible for one third of our traffic.
… his biggest achievement
It’s tiny, it’s the hashtag. Every exhibition at the Met now has a hashtag. And it’s not because we’re so smart. It’s because our audience were standing in the exhibition and asking what is the hashtag? So I tell people to create a hashtag and then be semi-obnoxious about it. You have to tell people what the hashtag is and then make sure that people are using it.
Sources:
This feature was written from a keynote Sree Sreenivasan held at the 2015 Knight Foundation Media Learning Seminar. There are many more from him in this video How Institutions Go Digital with accompanying slides. Take a look!
Additional sources:
Digital transformation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (ZDNet)
So Many Stories to Tell for Met’s Digital Chief (New York Times)
Most Creative People 2015, Sree Sreenivasan (Fast Company)
Also worth reading:
Sree’s Social Media Tips (Sree’s constantly updated Tumblr)
