A Conversation about Digital Media with the Met’s Chief Digital Officer
In June 2013, the Metropolitan Museum of Art named Sree Sreenivasan its first chief digital officer. For Sreenivasan that means bridging the online and physical worlds of the museum using various storytelling tools such as audio, video, blogging, and social media. His creative digital initiatives have been widely successful. In part for his work at the Met, he was named one of Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business last year. During his tenure, his colleagues’ work has earned two Webbys and the Met has been named the most influential museum on Twitter. I met Sree during an event at the Met this weekend where he comfortably moderated a Q&A session with audiences in the room as well as online on Facebook Live and Periscope. So I couldn’t think of anyone better to gain insights about digital media from than Sree Sreenivasan himself.
What does it mean to be the MET’s chief digital officer?
I run a 70-person startup inside a 145-year-old company. My job is to help tell a million-plus stories about our million-plus pieces of art to a billion-plus people. My job involves finding ways to connect the in-person and the online, the digital and the physical experience at the Met and we do that through finding the right project that can amplify the stories we are trying to tell. The Met is filled with stories and telling the right ones at the right time using the right tools is what we are trying to do.
How do you tell these stories?
We are using social, email, video and lots of other digital storytelling tools. We have this series called “The Artist Project,” in which more than 100 artists talk about what inspires them about the Met. We do about 1,100 Facebook posts, 3,800 Tweets, 400 Instagram posts in a year and send 10s of millions of emails. We also launched a Weibo platform, which is a big Chinese network, and this was in response to the fact that China is our #1 source of incoming international visitors to the museum.
How did you come to become so knowledgeable about digital media?
I was teaching at Columbia Journalism School for 21 years. I was teaching television and then digital media came along and I sat in on the first digital classes taught at Columbia by an alum named Josh Quittner. He now works for Flipboard but back in the day he was a digital pioneer at Time Inc. He taught a class in the fall of 1994 called “Cyberspace Reporting” and I sat in on that class. No one knew anything about digital stuff back then; you had to know one thing more than your students. Now of course it is much more complicated and much more interesting.
How is the work you do at the Met different from journalism?
I think in many ways, us and other nonprofits look at the work we do as being media and publishing houses ourselves. We do 500 blog posts a year so we are producing content. We are content creators, we are content providers. The difference is that our team is very specialized and in service of one topic.
So in that way, similar to journalism, our job is to get the word out. Of course, we are only producing our own content; journalism is about making content about other people’s stories. I use the tools and skills of a journalist every day in my work. I call working in digital at places like the Met, “good-guy advocacy.”
Another thing worth noting is that when I was teaching the first course of “Audience and Engagement” three years ago at Columbia Journalism School, we had an Audience and Engagement project at the Met. We’re thinking about audience and engagement and journalists are thinking about audience and engagement. There was a time when journalists were just producing content. Now you have to engage your audience. Before there was a whole mechanism in the news business that helped you take your story and amplify it. Today, you have to bring your own audience and that is why Audience and Engagement is now taught at Columbia Journalism School.
And museums for a long time would just put their content out there and anybody who wants to learn about art had to come here physically. Twenty-one years ago the Met started a website and started putting art on there. Now we actively work to amplify our content, track the analytics, learn from the analytics and pivot on our content, which is the same kind of skills that lots and lots of journalists need and are doing now.
How do you attract an audience to physically come to the Met when you are giving away so much content online?
Our director Tom Campbell has made the observation that we have four locations — three physical locations and one online location — and that visitors are of equal value whether they come in-person or online. This is partly because we have an educational mission and our job is to get things out there. In a world that is so digital these days, people crave in-person experiences. Digital helps get the word out about — and compliments — physical visits to the museum. We do want to do more behind the scenes stories, but the key is sharing the right content at the right time.
How do you gauge what success looks like?
We have different ways of measuring success. We have tools that can tell us what our reach is and how many people we are touching, which is our goal as an educational institution. We can also track in-person attendance, donations, memberships.
Is there such a thing as TMI when it comes to doing digital media for a museum?
We have to be careful on what we share and when we share it. The museum has huge security concerns. We never share cases in which our stuff comes because we don’t want somebody out there to know to look for this kind of case. We are careful about sharing our security staff’s schedules. We are very careful before an opening of a show because part of the show is the “Wow Factor” and we don’t want to share those things before time.
How many hours do you spend online?
I guess from the time I get up in the morning and I check my Flipboard, my Twitter, all that stuff, until the time I go to bed. Anytime when I am not in a meeting or not with my family. There is a chance that I am on my phone even when I am with my family so we have a no-technology rule at the dinner table. Today, the only time I know for sure I was not online was when I had the opportunity to have dinner with my daughter and we put our phones away and we spoke to each other and it was beautiful.
How do you stay so productive?
One of my favorite sayings is “make your own luck.” A lot of people say, “Oh, you are lucky. You get to do this or that.” But I made my own luck by understanding that I wanted to do social media and now I get to do social media for a living and I get paid for it. But the rule for journalists and anybody is: If you wouldn’t do something for free, you are not going to be able to do it for all the money in the world. That is what I tell people who want to be bloggers: do the blogging for no money for months and that is how you will know if you have a passion for it. If you are going to do it only if people pay you, you will never do it and you will fail.
What is your favorite app and why?
Of course, I love our flagship Met app, which we created two years ago, but I’ll tell you about three apps that inspire me to think about app best practices. The NYT Now app is an app that is only 30 percent of The New York Times but it is the right 30 percent and it’s a brilliant mobile experience. Another app I love is called TripIt which is an app that helps you organize your trip. And the third is an app called Dark Sky and it tells you whether it is raining or snowing where you are standing in the next hour and I think it is brilliant because it works and it looks really good and it delivers. And that is the key: we want apps to be simple, useful and delightful. And a lot of journalism is doing the opposite of those three things. They are not useful, not simple and not delightful.
What is your favorite book on digital media?
A book that I have recommended in the past is Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. It is about about how technology is reshaping the world — and us.
What advice would you give journalists on using digital media?
Understand the trends, read a whole bunch of smart blogs, understand where and how and why things are going where they are. I would invite everybody to join my free closed Facebook group Sree’s Advanced Social Media Course. If you join that you will get this amazing community of people around the world who are teaching each other how to use digital, social, mobile.
To hear more from Sree, watch this TEDx Talk he delivered in 2012 about bridging the physical and online world.
