Looking for ways to form a deeper connection with its target audience, the Brooklyn Museum in New York (http://www.brooklynmuseum.org), started a blog so visitors could have a dialogue with curators and share opinions. Now to further the connection, the Museum is enabling visitors to its website to tag (apply keywords) to objects in its collections that appear on its website.

Now you might say, doesn’t the museum staff tag its own collections?
In fact it does.

But the point is that curators and museum visitors see art in  different ways.
According to  Shelly Bernstein, the museum’s manager of information systems:

The way curators and museum professionals see an object isn’t necessarily the same as the way a student or the general public would think to describe it.

When visitors click on the object, they are encouraged to apply any keywords that come to mind (vulgarity not included).The museum then adds the tags to its online database.

The museum also uses tagging to encourage visitors to register online. Registrants can participate in a game of  tag to see how many tags they can come up with, object by object.

I applaud the museum for using an effective, easy way to employ social media tools to increase engagement with its target audience.

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