Time To Tweet The Art: Museum-Analytics.org Keeps Tabs On Curatorial Social Media

To paraphrase Cracker, I suspect what the world needs now is another method to assess the social metrics of various museums around the world like I need a hole in the head, but presumably this information is important to someone out there, so here goes.

Museum-Analytics.org is a site with a simple mission: to calculate the social reach of various museums. The service uses various and sundry sources as well as Twitter and Facebook to find news and information about almost 3000 museums around the world.

For example, you can see trends at the Van Gogh Museum (Motto: “It doesn’t cost an ear and a leg to get in!”) including new Facebook likes, Tweets, comments mentioning the museum, and engaging content created for and about the museum. I could see this as a boon to curators and directors alike and valuable to museum fans who are trying to push these staid organizations into, at the very least, the 20th century.

It is up and running in beta right now. From the about page:

Museum Analytics has been initiated by INTK in the Netherlands. INTK researches and develops online strategies primarily for cultural organizations and creates critical interventions that reflect on art, technology and society.

It could be a great source to learn about upcoming events and interesting exhibits, which makes it great for tourists. I could definitely see a mash-up between this site and a city tourism site (here’s New York, for example), bringing the high and the low together at last.