The Met

Elyse Topalian presented this case study at the Malaga conference but we spoke a lot more about it yesterday and the changes that are happening in marketing as a result of social media.  I’ll get to that in a second, I really want to share the It’s Time We Met campaign. Now, I am paraphrasing here and  just giving you a snapshot of the campaign.

In February of this year the Met launched a photo sharing competition through Flikr.  They were looking to create a new marketing campaign and wanted to include real people in the ads so they looked on Flikr.  And lo and behold people were already taking photos of themselves in the galleries and loading them onto Flikr.

The Met decided to build on this and created a group on Flikr where people could load their photos up and be judged by Met staff and possibly be featured in the new marketing campaign.

The response was overwhelming and they received some hilarious and wonderful photos from their fans.

They chose a number of photos to be included and sought permission from the photographers and the people in the photos to use them.  They also paid the photographers a fee even though under the Creative Commons license they didn’t have to.

The ads were turned into billboards, subway ads, newspaper ads as well as used throughout the Met site.  It gained great publicity and wide coverage of the campaign.

But some of the community were not happy with the campaign.  The Met did not tell people that they paid the photographers  and many community members thought they were ripping the photographers off.  Professional photographers were also upset that a professional job was given to “amateurs” to do.

And the online chatter started.  Elyse tells the story of sitting at home watching it unfold and thinking she should get involved and say something to correct the community.  But she didn’t.

Eventually one of the people in the photo corrected the community and the issue sorted itself out.  Perhaps this could have been avoided if the Met stated upfront what they were doing in terms of payment and permission, but we are all learning in the online space so it’s an interesting case study on transparency and being upfront with your community.

From the Met’s point of view the campaign has been a hugely successful – I really like the idea of it as well and you can check out some of the winning entries on Flikr.

So yesterday we talked a lot about the changing face of marketing and that social media has really shaken us up on how we look at our audiences, our community and look for innovative ways to communicate but most importantly to listen.

We agree that traditional marketing channels still have a place in the scheme of attracting people to our organisations and exhibitions as people are digesting media in so many different ways and that social media is not a marketing tool but a way to start a conversation with the audience.

But the conversation needs to start internally.  The Met has a marketing taskforce that meet on a regular basis to discuss their audiences and how they can attract and retain them.  Staff of all levels are encouraged to discuss new ideas and initiatives to communicate and converse with the community and it has been the more junior staff who are coming up with new and interesting ways to interact with their audiences in the social media sphere.

Advertisement

---