Setting Up
Digital to Tell Stories to a Global Audience
As the first Chief Digital Officer for the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, Sree Sreenivasan leads the charge
in managing and producing digital content — which means storytelling for a
global audience. “My job is to tell a million-plus stories about a million-plus
pieces of art to a billion-plus people,” he says.
“The way we look at it at the Met is that if you
do such a great job with your online presence, people want to come and see you
in-person,” says Sree Sreenivasan, Chief Digital Officer for the Metropolitan
Museum of Art. “And if you do such a fabulous job in-person, they want to stay
in touch with you through social, digital and mobile.”
Sree Sreenivasan
has one of the plum jobs in the intersection of digital technology and the
creative arts: He is tasked with bringing the works of the world that are
housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City to a truly global
audience.
In the 2013 press release that introduced
Sreenivasan as the first Chief Digital Officer for the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, the museum’s director and CEO, Thomas P. Campbell, noted that
Sreenivasan’s “work in traditional journalism, his role as a commentator on
technology and media issues, and his expertise in websites and social media
will all be key to the Museum’s work in the digital space.” The big goal, said
Campbell: “Leverage mobile, in-gallery, and online platforms for the Met’s
collections.”
Sreenivasan came to the Met from a 21-year
career as professor of digital journalism at Columbia Graduate School of
Journalism. He also served as Columbia’s first Chief Digital Officer and as
Dean of Student Affairs. He is cofounder of the South Asian Journalists
Association, a networking and resource forum for journalists of South Asian
origin based in the U.S. and Canada.
In a conversation with Gerald C. (Jerry) Kane,
an associate professor of information systems at the Carroll School of
Management at Boston College and guest editor for MIT Sloan Management
Review’s Social Business Big Idea Initiative, Sreenivasan talked about the
ways that digital business and social business tools are disrupting the museum
industry, and what directions the Met is heading.
My first question is, why does
an art museum need a chief digital officer? What does your work look like?
It’s a very good question, and people ask me
that all the time. I look at my work in a couple of different ways. One is to
build what I call a virtual circle, connecting the physical and the digital,
the in-person and the online. In my mind, the future of all business is making
that physical and digital connection.
The way we look at it at the Met is that if you
do such a great job with your online presence, people want to come and see you
in person — and if you do such a fabulous job in person, they want to stay in
touch with you through social, digital, and mobile. That circle is what we’ve
got to keep going.
The Met is the largest tourist attraction in New
York. We have 22 million visitors in person and about 40 to 45 million people
who visit us online. We want to increase both those numbers. I tell people that
my job is to tell a million-plus stories about a million-plus pieces of art to
a billion-plus people. One danger in giving your boss metrics like that,
though, is that he can turn to me once a week and say, “Hey, where’s my billion
people?”
So it’s not just about online
or offline. It really sounds like what you’re trying to do is create an
interaction between the two.
That’s correct. Jeff Spar is the CTO here. He’s
been here for a long time and we are basically connected at the hip. We work
very closely together and are partners in this effort. He’s responsible for all
the infrastructure, the networking, all aspects of the bones of the place, if
you will.
What we do in digital media is to do all the
forward, audience-facing digital work. Anything digital that touches our
audience, we’re responsible for. That includes video, a media lab where we’re
looking at the future of the medium, social media. We send out 55 million
emails a year. We are building apps, we have a mobile program, we have an audio
guide. These are things that I’ve obsessed about for a long time.
Can you give me some specific
examples of how digital tools are changing the way the Met works?
Well, the first example is of the way people
plan their visit. People are going online to discover what’s on at the museum.
They do that on the web, as they do with many places, but they also do it on
our app. We launched The Met App
just last fall, and it was the result of a lot of serious work by many people
across the museum to understand what it could be and then really make it as
simple as possible.
I’ve worked on and built apps before, but this
particular app really showed me where business is going. We focused on this
idea that there are three principles for an app: It should be simple, useful,
and delightful.
Is The Met App changing the
way you understand your customers? Is it changing the way your customers are
interacting with you?
The answer to both is yes. We are now able to
see what they like, what they favor, what they’re sharing, what they’re putting
on their calendars. The data that’s coming back is very important. We’re also
learning things through our audio guide data. Now we know when people walk into
the museum, where did they go? What are the top places they visit?
We did audience research in the past and we
continue to do it, but these kinds of digital metrics are bringing the details
into focus in such a strong way. We are in the process of hiring our first
digital media analyst at the Met, and she’s going to help change the culture of
the place.
Let’s talk about what you’re
seeing through the data.
The biggest insight for us is really what we
need to do with some of our programs. For example, I can tell you that we
benchmark against the Louvre and the British Museum. The British Museum has about
200 audio messages on their audio guide, of which 80% have been translated into
multiple languages. The Louvre has 800 audio messages translated 100% into
multiple languages. The Met has 2,600 audio messages and less than 1% are
translated into multiple languages.
So what does that tell you? We don’t need more
messages. We need more translation of those messages and that’s immediately. We
have started to work on that, to have more multiple-language audio messages.
We know what our long-term goals are: Diversifying
our audience and changing the demographics of museum-goers generally, and
getting more donors and more support. What we’re looking for are simple,
actionable insights.
You talked about changing the
culture. What are the challenges you’ve faced trying to digitize a
100-plus-year-old organization?
I tell people that I run a 70-person startup
inside a 145-year-old company. Most people are shocked that there are 70 people
doing digital media at the Met. The scale at the Met is continually fascinating
to me, and that’s why it’s a job I love.
Whatever the challenges are, I also believe that
the Met has been so enormously successful for the last 145 years. So it’s not
that someone comes in and then changes everything. I do very little grumbling
about things the way most people in my position do at most companies today
because I have very little to grumble about. We have enormous experience in
digital projects and we’ve been doing it long before I came. But I did dare to
say that not everyone understands or has even thought about the digital
possibilities. Changing while you’re in motion is difficult, as you know. That
means not alienating the people who love us already, who already made us one of
the great museums in the world.
There are so many opportunities for us to
enhance the visitor experience. For example, just going back to the audio
guide. It turns out that most people don’t take an audio guide. Even at those
museums that give them away for free, it’s hard to get more than 10% pickup
rate because people don’t want it. They’re not interested and instead they just
try to wing it.
What we have learned from surveys is that in
fact, when people do take an audio guide, they have a better experience. What
that means is we need to get this audio content to them even if they don’t want
to take the guide. So, one of the biggest things we’ve done is that starting
this spring everybody and anybody who enters the Met Museum can get the audio
from their mobile phone and can listen to all 2,600 audio messages about our
collection for free.
That’s the kind of action that we can take
because the museum was, and is, willing to try new things. We have enormous
buy-in from our boss, Tom Campbell, and that has made all the difference.
How does your digital team of
70 compare with the overall size of the organization?
There are 2,200 people who work at the Met,
including 600 security staff and 1,100 union employees.
You said that there was a lot
of support. What does it take to convince an organization like the Met to make
that kind of investment?
A lot of this has happened before I came. I
wouldn't have gone to a place where there wasn’t this kind of support. So this
is a lot of careful work over many years, creating a digital media seed from
many different departments. But our director has understood that to be a
successful museum today, you have to be global in visitorship. That means you
have to be digital and global in your presentation, and that’s what we’re
doing.
Last year, for instance, we announced the launch
of 400,000 instantly downloadable images for non-commercial use. We’re very
active on social media. We have Twitter and Facebook, et cetera, but also we
hope to launch a Chinese social media account because we know that China is our
biggest market. Chinese visitors have replaced all other countries as the
number-one set of visitors to the museum. There’s a museum a week opening in
China and there are now something like 300 million Chinese with passports.
One of the things I say about chief digital
officers’ roles is that it should including being a chief listening officer —
listening for new ideas, listening for talent, listening for people who can
help us and working in partnership with other organizations. One of my proudest
things we’ve done is launch a partnership with Sal Khan from Khan
Academy. I consider Sal to be one of the 10 most important unelected people in
the world, and he has done some fabulous work in changing the world of
education. We’ve launched 100 videos on Sal’s platform. Everything doesn’t need
to be on our website, on our channels. We want to be out in the world where
people already are. Of course, we’d love to increase the number of people who
see our work on our website, but we’re much more interested in getting the word
out further and further on other platforms as well.
What do you think the Met is
going to look like in, say, three to five years as a result of the
transformation that you’re ushering in? If you could bring about some of these
changes, what would it look like?
I think it would be a much more multilingual
place than it is today. It would have many more visitors than it does today.
Five years ago, it was at a little over four million and now it’s over six
million, and we want to continue that upward direction.
We want many, many more people involved with the
museum. That’s a specific thing that is a challenge for us. The museum has been
very good at getting support from traditional wealth: Wall Street, real estate,
things like that. But we haven’t engaged the technology community as well as we
could. A lot of entrepreneurs haven’t necessarily thought about art and the
support for it. They prefer to support things that can be quantified, like you
give money for a mosquito net, you feel like you’re preventing malaria right
away. There’s a kind of metrics that they need, and that’s what we’re now able
to provide, some data. How people are engaged — those are the kinds of things
we’re thinking about.
In terms of talent, too, we’re competing with
Wall Street and with places that can give bonuses. Unlike the curators and
conservators who come here and whose life mission was to work at the Met, many,
many digital and technology people who should be working at the Met may never have
even been to the Met. They have never heard of the Met. So how do
you get them there? How do you energize them? I spend a lot of my time on
recruitment and retention of technology talent. It’s the thing I love to do,
but it is a challenge.
When you’re looking for
technology talent, what are the most important skills or traits you’re looking
for?
It depends on what the job is, the particular
role. But at the heart of it is, are you good at telling stories. It’s our job
to tell a million stories. What do you bring to the table? What can you put on
the table today that will help me tell my stories better, our stories better,
in a smarter way? That’s what we ask for.
Imagine you’re an executive at
a traditional company reading this interview. I hear you say storytelling and I
think, “Yeah, but does my organization need to be storytelling?” What would you
say?
The answer is absolutely. Whatever your
business, people are interested in stories and even if you’re not
consumer-facing, you need to be telling stories.
The biggest battle we’re in for now is the
battle for attention. You want to stand out in different ways. You want to
intrigue people so that they listen to whatever your pitch is, even when your
salesman walks in the door selling something that’s not consumer-facing. And
even when your customer is just one person, you’ve got to get his or her
attention over everything else that’s happening in their lives. That’s where
storytelling can help.
I’ll just mention a company that you can look up
called Contently. My former student Shane Snow
raised $2 million for this startup that does help companies sell stories.
Within three or four years now, he has 50,000 freelancers working for him,
telling stories of businesses. GE will hire one of his people to go interview
the AirBus mechanic who’s been there for 65 years, whatever, and then write a
story. That’s never going to go to the public, but it’s going to go to the one
guy or gal who might buy that particular plane order this year.
We’re hearing a lot from many
companies about the importance of storytelling. Everyone seems to start to
understand the importance of it, but nobody seems to know how to do it well,
and on a shoestring budget.
That’s where I think a company like Contently
can help you for much cheaper than hiring a production team. Shane has really
got it down to a science so quickly and it works.
But I would also think about how you empower
your own people. Authenticity is big online. Transparency is big online. For instance,
the Met has a video series online called Connections, where our
staff talk about their own reactions to various works in the museum. One of our
most popular stories in Connections was by one of our security guards talking
about his day.
We put our boss, Tom Campbell, on Instagram (@ThomasPCampbell) and he
is doing unbelievable work there. I believe there’s less drama on Instagram
than on Twitter — I believe no boss, no CEO, should be on Twitter unless you
are like a Mark Cuban because you can do a lot more damage on Twitter than you
can on Instagram. I think that what Tom is doing on Instagram is an example of
how you tell stories as a CEO. I believe this will be a case study in the
months and years ahead. He’s going groundbreaking work.
Now, everybody comes back to me saying, “Oh, of
course. He’s at a museum. He’s got all these beautiful things,” but I believe
that you can tell stories from the most dull-sounding companies because at the
heart of it, it’s about your product and it’s about your people. There are
stories to tell about them. What it requires is being smart about finding those
kinds of ideas.
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About the Author
Gerald C. (Jerry)
Kane is an Associate Professor of Information Systems at the Carroll School of
Management at Boston College. He has been researching and teaching social media
and social networks since 2005.
