Swimming in the Groundswell: A Closer look at Brooklyn Museum’s Gold Medal Success.
By: Jenny Meyer
Overview
Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, two Forrester analysts wrote Groundswell: winning in a world transformed by social technologies, a book that teaches companies how to utilize social networking to benefit their corporations. (2008, Groundswell website) Groundswell means people are not content with information from corporations; instead, they create communities and obtain what they need from each other through social networking sites, such as Facebook, Myspace and YouTube. The Forrester Groundswell group hosted a competition with seven categories and hundred and fifty companies submitted their own social networking sites. The Brooklyn Museum won the award in the Social Impact category for their efforts to create communities through social networks: ArtShare Facebook, Application, Brooklyn Museum's Click Exhibition and Brooklyn Museum Posse. (2008, Groundswell website) The Brooklyn Museum has immersed itself into the Groundswell by using social technologies to expand their museums interaction with the public. Groundswell emphasizes three concepts on how executives can use the Groundswell to benefit their business (pg. xiii). The first, understand that people use social networking sites as a new way to connect to each other. Secondly, people are able to shift power from corporations to the people and third, offer social networking sites as an opportunity for partnership between people and businesses (Li and Bernoff, 2008, 37).
Analysis
People Connect in a New Way (pg. 37)
Social technologies allow people to connect with each other in new and unique ways, such as Facebook, Myspace, YouTube and Twitter. The people that participate in the networking sites participate in six different user roles:
1. Creators (publish/create blogs, websites, videos, music and upload, post)
2. Critics (post reviews, leave comments and contribute to forums)
3. Collectors (use rss feeds and tags)
4. Joiners (maintain profile on a social networking sites)
5. Spectators (read blogs, watch reviews from other users listen to podcast and read online forums)
6. Inactive (have no participation)(pg. 41)
The Brooklyn Museum has created new on-line ways to attract each type of user and offer ways for them to participate in their museum. The Brooklyn Museum participates in different social networking sites, which give potential museum visitors, visitors and museum members a chance to participate in the museums community. The Brooklyn Museum created an application on Facebook called ArtShare that allows users to select works of art from the Brooklyn Museum’s collection, as well as several other museum’s art collections, providing them the ability to display the art on their Facebook profile page (Bernoff, 2008, Groundswell website). Brooklyn Museum also offered people the opportunity to share photos and comments with each other about art they enjoyed from the museum’s collection. (Bernoff, 2008, Groundswell webpage)
Through the Brooklyn Museum’s application on Facebook and dedicated Facebook page, they are able to involve five of the six types of networking participants.
1. Creators post comments and upload videos on the Brooklyn Museum’s Facebook page.
2. Critics post reviews about art as well as leave comments on the Brooklyn Museum’s Facebook page.
3. Collectors collect pieces of art from Art Share application and post images of the art on their personal Facebook page.
4. Joiners join the Brooklyn Museum’s Facebook group community.
5. Spectators have access to read/watch/listen to the comments, videos and iPod feeds on the Brooklyn Museum’s Facebook page.
(Brooklyn Museum, 2008, Facebook Page)
Once people are connected in new ways, it gives people a platform to shift the power of information to the public and away from corporations.
Visitors shift power away from an institution to the people. (pg. 36)
Social networks allow people to shift power away from corporations to the public. This act shifts authority of knowledge from a single few to a mass of people. The list below expresses how the shift of power to the people benefits a corporation, allowing them to harness the power of the groundswell in a positive way:
1. Listening: The groundswell provides access to data for research and better understanding customers.
2. Talking: Use the groundswell to spread messages about your company.
3. Energizing: Find your enthusiastic customers.
4. Supporting: Set up a groundswell tool to help your customers support each other.
5. Embracing: Interface your customers into the way your business works.
(pg. 68-69)
The Brooklyn Museum created an on-line photography exhibit called
Click! A-Crowd Curated Exhibition that invited the public to participate in an exhibit. The inspiration for the exhibit came from the book The Wisdom of Crowds by, James Surowiecki. Surowocki believes that crowds of people are wiser at making decisions than a few experts. Click! was broken into three parts, First, artists were invited to submit a work of photography on the exhibition’s theme, "Changing Faces of Brooklyn”. The second part was an online forum that judged the works of art submitted. Visitors who judged the art were asked a series of questions about their knowledge of art. The Third part of Click! took the form of a physical exhibit at the Museum, with the artworks installed at the Brooklyn Museum. Online, visitors were able to view the evaluations of the artwork. (Bernoff, Groundswell Webpage, 2008) “ The results were analyzed and discussed in the Brooklyn Museum’s blog, podcast series by experts in the fields of art, online communities, and crowd theory (Groundswell Webpage, 2008).” The Brooklyn Museum created an online network that shifted the power of knowledge from the museum and effectively used the shift of power to their benefit with the exhibit Click! in the following ways.
1. Listening: The Brooklyn Museum was able to listen to what the public wanted because they were able to vote on which art goes into the exhibit.
2. Talking: The Brooklyn Museum was able to talk about Click! with the public and spread the message of the exhibition by utilizing an online network.
3. Energizing: The forum allowed the Brooklyn museum to discover their energized supporters.
4. Supporting: The on-line network, Click! allows the Brooklyn Museum’s to allow the public to share their own knowledge of art.
5. Embracing: The Brooklyn Museums on-line discussion with what experts said about the art, brought insight to the people of how the museum works. (Groundswell webpage, 2008)
Opportunity for partnership. (pg.37)
Shifting power to the people from a corporation creates an opportunity for a partnership between the corporation and the public.
Partnership can be obtained by: Developing relationships with targeted audiences, having patience with the social networking process and staying humble towards the public. (pg. 241)
The Brooklyn Museum placed their collection online and launched the project, Brooklyn Museum Posses (BMP). The BMP asked people to contribute to the museum’s collection by tagging the online collection with terms that might be potential search terms as well as share the tags they created publicly on their personalized Posse account. BMP created a partnership with the public over the collection. BPM gave the Brooklyn museum the opportunity to know more about the people who are partnering with the museum. The Brooklyn Museum used the BMP to: develop relationships with the Brooklyn Museum audience by having patience through the process of waiting for BMP to become popular with their audience and stayed humble with the audience that contributed to BMP. (Groundswell website, 2008)
Conclusion
Social technologies are places where the public creates communities to support each other by sharing passion and information. Social Networks are becoming more popular each year and offer great platforms for corporations to reach out to the masses. “MySpace’s membership has ballooned from 20 million people in 2005 to 225 million today, and average annual growth rate of 513 percent. Rival Facebook grew 550 percent a year during the same period (Kelleher, 2008).” These sites are tools that give the public population power over high-powered corporations. However, instead of companies feeling threatened by the power shift, Li and Bernoff suggest that companies join the Groundswell. The Groundswell creates a partnership with the public.
References
Li, Charlene, and Bernoff, Josh. Groundswell: winning in a world transformed by social technologies. 2008 Forrester Research Group, Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston Massachusetts. (Pgs. xxi, 9, 36, 37, 41, 68-69, 241).
Li, Charlene and Bernoff, Josh, Webpage:” Groundswell: winning in a world transformed by social technologies”
http://www.forrester.com/Groundswell, Forrester, 2008
Bernoff, Josh Groundswell blog, October 2008
http://blogs.forrester.com/groundswell/2008/10/2008-forrester.html
Kelleher Kevin, Upside of the downturn wired business trends 2008, #2 Social networks grow up Wired, April 2008. (pg. 123)
Facebook, Brooklyn Museum
http://www.new.facebook.com/pages/Brooklyn-NY/Brooklyn-Museum/
