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, “can’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.

If you’re looking for effective ways to use social media (or other marketing tools) to deepen the interaction between your target audience and your products or services, click consulting services.

One of the decisions in spreading the word through social bookmarking is which sites to use. They each have their own strengths. I’ll tell you some preliminary results that I had about two of the big bookmarking sites..

From an article posted on my blog, I quickly received about 100 visitors, evenly divided between Digg and StumbleUpon as the source of the visitors. The real eyeopening statistic was time spent on the page. StumbleUpon visitors: 10 seconds, Digg visitors: 2 minutes and 30 seconds. Now that is a huge difference. People who spend more time on the page have more time to engage with the site.

What accounts for the difference? My instinct is that people using Stumbleupon have a browser’s mindset. They are willing to take a few seconds to view a page in the course of browsing through websites.

Digg users arrive with a reader’s mentality. Digg was  conceived as a site to post and vote for  news items that you think others might want to read.

So while these results are very preliminary, as of now I’d say if you had to choose between Digg and StumbleUpon to  spread the word, choose Digg.