Most Creative People: A Q&A With The Met's Chief Digital Officer, Sree Sreenivasan
Join Fast Company senior editor Erin Schulte for a Q&A live from the Metropolitan Museum of Art with its chief digital officer, Sree Sreenivasan. The event begins at 11 a.m. ET Thursday, June 4th.
Sree Sreenivasan
Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
When the Metropolitan Museum of Art was seeking its first chief digital officer in 2013, it "wanted someone not from the museum world and not from the art world," says Sree Sreenivasan. "So I am superbly qualified." A journalist who was a dean and chief digital officer at Columbia University, Sreenivasan put all 2,600 segments of the Met’s audio guide on SoundCloud, teamed with Khan Academy to offer art tutorials, and partnered with Facebook on a pilot project that delivers relevant info, photos, and posts based on a user’s location.
He uses the Met as a social media schoolhouse, teaching Instagram classes and, outside the museum’s regular hours, leading Instagram-friendly #EmptyMet tours. In 2014, 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.
Sreenivasan, who oversees a digital media team of 70 that he runs like a startup inside a 145-year-old institution, on Thursday, June 4th, will join Fast Company senior editor Erin Schulte at 11 a.m. for a live chat about the innovative ways he's worked with the Met to get it in front of the public on all mediums, and ideas for replicating their success for your own business and brand.
Please join our live chat with Sreenivasan live from the Met on Thursday, and send us your questions now using the "make a comment" box below.
In the meantime, make sure to check out Fast Company's post on Sreenivasan as part of its Most Creative People 2015 list.
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Here's a look at the recent feature on Sree Sreenivasan and his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, from our June issue featuring the Most Creative People in Business.
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Hi Fast Company readers! I'm excited to be chatting today in New York with Sree Sreenivasan, the first chief digital officer of the Metropolitan Museum, which has been named the most influential museum in the world on Twitter. Sree, thanks for having us in your office at the Met (some pics to come). Since this was a new role, what was your philosophy as you approached getting the Metropolitan Museum active on social media?
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Our goal is to connect the physical and the digital, the online and the in-person.
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We want to build a virtuous circle: Have you so impressed by our digital offerings that you want to visit us in person. Then, have such a wonderful time in person that you want to stay in touch with us via social, mobile, digital and more.
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Speaking of social, we are @metmuseum on all platforms.
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This chart shows you our main social channels. The numbers are impressive, but not the most important part. These are done by our two-person social media team, led by @taylorcnewby. In fact, he is hiring a second person right now as his deputy got hired away by another museum. All our listings are on the Met's LinkedIn jobs page.
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And this chart shows you our other channels including Weibo, the big Chinese social network. China represents our biggest country for international visitors (BTW, 300 million Chinese have passports and they're opening a museum for a week in China), so we have to be active on that platform as well.
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We don't think we need to be on every platform right away--we wait to see if it makes sense for our audience--are they ready? Are we?
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thanks for doing this live tweet session @sree, more proof of your drive and expertise in adopting tech and being innovative for the @metmuseum
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What have been some of the most successful campaigns you have launched?
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Our biggest social media hits are always with #metgala, the biggest annual party outside the Oscars - a benefit run by Anna Wintour for our Costume Institute. This year we had more than 28 million impressions just on our own platforms, let alone all the posts by some of the biggest celebrities around the world.
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But every day, we are posting on social through thoughtful, strategic social campaigns led by Taylor (mentioned above). Every exhibition now has a hashtag. Not because we are geniuses, but because our visitors were asking for them.
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@sree have you done any metrics to understand if your social efforts hv converted new @metmuseum members or visits?
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Thanks for the question, Mike. Analytics and metrics are absolutely key to the success of this business and any business. We decided to hire a digital media analyst and did a worldwide search before hiring Elena Villaespesa (@elenustika) from the Tata. She and her former boss there, John Stack (@stacker) helped invent the category of arts digital analytics and we are thrilled to have her here. She's only been with us for a few weeks, but is already helping us with insights to better execute our work.
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What would your advice be for a small museum with no dedicated digital initiatives staff? What's the top priority for digital engagement?
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Jody: This is something that I'm always thinking about. I am enormously grateful for the opportunity to work at a big institution with lots of resources, but am definitely aware that not all orgs have the same resources. I spend a lot of time talking to colleagues at orgs around the country and the world, trying to share lessons from what's working here and what's not working. Fact is that I learn a lot from others who can be more nimble than us...
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If you are in a situation where you have limited or no digital staff, the key is to train the existing staff to be more digital. It's something we have seen at some museums and cultural organizations. There are also lots of free and cheap tools that let you do more with less, to help you make your social media work more sustainable, for example. I'd encourage you to hold workshops and show staff that being more digital ENHANCES the existing work and doesn't take away from it.
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If you need to do more social media, I love these three FREE tools for making social images: Canva.com, Fotor.com and PicCollage.
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How did you win over resistant staff to embracing the digital & social media?
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Thanks, Megan. One of my favorite sayings: I am all for progress, it's change I cannot stand. :-)
What I know from working at Columbia University for 21 years (another big institution) is that people aren't resistant to digital and social - they are resistant to things that they feel might lessen the impact of their work or dumb down what they do. If you can show them the value of trying new things, people are open to it. -
Lots of innovative folks are always looking for home runs. If our international readers of this chat will forgive me, let me riff on that baseball analogy. Instead of home runs, let's think of doing more singles and doubles and fewer home runs. If we are able to show small successes, we get the confidence of the institution to try bigger and more important things.
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Here at the Met, the leadership at the top, including Director & CEO Tom Campbell and Deputy Director Carrie Barratt, have been fully invested in the digital and technology space. Therefore, it becomes a lot easier to get buy-in from others.
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What's the best way to engage teenagers who are not so into going to "museums' but are of course on social media?
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Thanks for your question, the_LP. The answer is in the tweet above with the event we're doing tomorrow night at the Met. We use social and digital and other media to make what is already an awesome teen event more relevant to them.
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Thomas Campbell, the CEO and director of the MET, is very active on Instagram. You've called this a "new kind of leadership." What do you mean by that?
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Tom's Instagram (@thomaspcampbell) is a model for leaders of any institution. People think he's on IG because we are a visual museum. Actually, he's on there because there's less drama than Twitter. He is able to share his view of the world and is demonstrating a new kind of leadership, a new way to engage with stakeholders, with customers and with employees. I know that a business news organization will one day profile his IG for its pioneering impact. In the meantime, he's been named, along with our @metphotostudio account, as one of the 23 best art Instagrams in the world:
23 Art World Instagrams That Every Art Lover Should Be Following
BuzzFeedArt lovers of the world unite! -
One thing I learned in our June feature about your work is that you have SEVENTY people working on the digital media team at the Met, and that you have a CDO and a CTO. It's a huge team--what's your approach to staying on message at the same time giving people creative freedom for content and how they innovate their approach to technology?
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One measure of the Met's commitment to technology is that our Digital Media team has 70 staffers. We work on everything from videos to apps to web to email to our MediaLab and more. We work very closely with our CTO, Jeff Spar, and his similarly-sized IT team. They are responsible for all the infrastructure, networking, wireless, etc. They make it possible for the digital team to do what we do: engage with the world.
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One way I like to think of the work of our Digital Media team is that we want to tell a million+ stories about our million+ pieces of art to a billion+ people. It's going to take a long time to get there, but we are going to have fun and learn a lot along the way. Anything that can help us reach the world is something I want to consider. Doesn't mean we can do it all, but we are all ears.
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Because so many startups and big companies want to partner with the Met, we created a Partnership Project Form for folks to pitch us ideas. http://bit.ly/partnershipproject
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How do you balance engaging (seemingly disparate) audiences of seasoned art connoisseurs and whatever the opposite of that is...plus everyone in between?
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Laura: Great question. We are trying to engage with folks who are scholars as well as those who know nothing about art. We are trying to increase access without dumbing down the scholarship in any way. That's not easy, but working with our curators, conservators and scientists, we are able to do more to get more people interested in the Met. Examples include two recent video series: "The Artist Project" (100 contemporary artists talking about how the Met inspires them) and "82nd & Fifth" (100 curators talking about their favorite work of art for two minutes.
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For those asking about Sree's personal social ecosystem, you can see more about that here:
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How To Build A Cutting-Edge Digital Strategy From World-Class Art
Fast CompanyThe Met's chief digital officer Sree Sreenivasan talks about his biggest sources of creativity and inspiration. -
Yes, we use the Agile methodology to do our work in Application Development, the team led by Jeff Strickland. Every morning, there's a standup scrum for his team of developers and it's a great way to do the kind of work they do.
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This reminds me that among the hardest things that folks like me have to do at nonprofits is identify, recruit and retain tech talent in a town where we compete with Wall Street, Google, FB, and startups - and can't offer equity or bonuses. What we have to do is make the work so compelling and the environment so interesting that all these talented, hardworking people want to work for us.
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In an org's telling of stories, how can social media be used for people to become co-creators of those narratives (and not just "listeners")?
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Marsha: The role of user-generated content is going to become even more important at the Met and at every cultural organization. We are looking at ways to be better listeners and not just broadcasters. Meanwhile, what makes Tom Campbell's IG so interesting are the responses from readers who tag each other and engage in discussions about the art around the word.
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what internal tools do you use for alerting and collaborating with staff members? It would seem that coordination would be very important in addition to the agile process.
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Mike: We are still mainly email, intranet and a little bit of Yammer. We haven't yet experimented with Slack, but I know the FC folks use it. What advice/tips would people have for a place with 2,200 employees with differing levels of tech comfort?
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Which platforms/formats do you find most exciting right now? e.g., "new" Spotify, the rebound of podcasting, etc.?
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I was interviewed by a journo about 2015 tech trends. I said it's 2006 all over again. Podcasting, email newsletters and blogging are hot.by sree sreenivasan via twitter 6/4/2015 3:55:03 PM
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An example of how the Met is engaging folks from the tech industry:
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Some charts and stats to show just how successful the Met's approach to social has been:
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Thanks everybody for the great questions for @Sree, it's been really enlightening.
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Dear @fastcompany readers: Thx for #fcmetchat. Really appreciate your interest. Come visit @metmuseum online or in-person! sree@sree.netby sree sreenivasan via twitter 6/4/2015 4:05:02 PM
