Handling Controversy at the Brooklyn Museum with Social Media
“The Atlantic” published a not-so-flattering article on the Brooklyn Museum’s handling the deasscesioning and storage of it’s architectural fragments collection. Terry Carbone, a curator at Brooklyn Museum, posted the Brooklyn Museum’s response on their blog. They then solicited comments from the public on their Twitter and Facebook social media channels to post their questions and comments on the blog.
The blog post is overly formal and comes across as if PR wrote the post rather than the curator as it does not fit the writing style of the rest of her posts so it lacks a bit of genuineness and risks sounding condescending and dismissive. However, otherwise I think it was handled well and given the controversial nature of the subject it was probably better to be conservative in the writing style.
Some observations… It was an interesting preemptive tactic to invite the public on their social media channels to post comments on their blog.
- Having comments on their blog directs any attacks and comments way from other Brooklyn Museum accounts. The blog post functions as a proverbial blast wall that is helping to direct the blast.
- While the comments may be negative it is still on their forum. The dialog will happen, but it is better to be part of the dialog helping direct the discussion rather than outside of it.
- The blog post is highly specific to traffic and less public than a Facebook wall or twitter feed.
I am curious what other people’s observations are on this.
Hi Joe,
Thanks for your thoughts – I think, for us, the main reason to do this on the blog is the curator in question has easy access to that forum. She’s not on Facebook or Twitter directly, so it makes it a little easier for her to have a one-on-one discussion. That said we do feel it’s important that the dialog around the issue stay public on the other channels as well, so we will be tweeting again to both point out the current discussion and remind folks they can contribute there.
In the past, we have used twitter with a hashtag for other controversial matters where we wanted visitor response (the budget cuts and suggested admission hikes of last summer come to mind). That works well when we want to see incoming response, but for dialog we find the blog tends to work better – especially around complicated issues that require more than 140 characters. We did something similar for issues around the costume collection and found, as a place for dialogue, it worked pretty well all around.