A growing number of arts organizations are capitalizing on e-mailing, text messaging, and online social networking as a way of building new audiences. The Brooklyn Museum has installed kiosks in its galleries where visitors can post their musings on the art directly to the museum’s Web site. Lincoln Center has started a text messaging club for fans of its Midsummer Nights Swing program. And while Broadway producers have used interactive online advertising for several years, nonprofit theaters are now improving their Web sites with features such as Web logs and videos.

It’s too soon to tell whether a YouTube video can really lure a 20-year-old to the theater. But just like other advertisers, arts groups hope that becoming more tech-savvy will help them speak more effectively to young audiences.

The Brooklyn Museum has long kept guestbooks, in which visitors can respond to the exhibitions and the museum experience. In March, the museum made the guest books digital, installing kiosks in the fourth and fifth floor galleries, where its Asher B. Durand and “Global Feminisms” exhibitions are currently installed.

The manager of information systems at the museum, Shelley Bernstein, said the decision was made both for internal reasons — so that museum employees would be able to read the comments more easily — and to add to visitors’ active engagement with exhibits. “We have [a comment section] on MySpace, on Flickr, on Facebook, and on our blog,” Ms. Bernstein said, referring to some of the sites where the museum has a presence. “We’re really encouraging the visitor to talk back to us.”

Visitors can also make comments via cell phone; currently these only go to the museum staff, but eventually they will be linked to Web site, too.

Meanwhile, a European company is marketing a technology that allows museums to take advantage of viral marketing. With VideoMail — the invention of a Dutch company called Bitmove — museum visitors can make short videos of themselves enthusing about an exhibition and then e-mail these to their friends. Current clients include Amsterdam museums such as the Rijksmuseum (home of Rembrandt’s “The Nightwatch”), the Van Gogh Museum, and the Anne Frank House, along with several corporate museums and visitor centers, like Heineken Experience in Amsterdam, the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin, and Casa Bacardi in Puerto Rico. While venues that serve alcohol may be particularly conducive to the activity of making goofy movies to send to your friends, representatives of the art museums said VideoMail was also effective in increasing traffic to their Web sites and helping them build email databases.

Here’s how it works: A visitor to the Rijskmuseum — let’s call her Anneka — goes up to a VideoMail kiosk, and using the touch screen, makes a short video of herself. Then she enters her e-mail and those of two or three friends. She is asked whether she would like to receive future e-mails from the museum, with information about exhibitions, events, special offers, etc. When her friends receive her e-mail, they click on a link that sends them to the museum’s Web site, where they watch the video. And Anneka also receives an email with the link, which she can forward to as many people as she wants.

The founder of Bitmove, Klaas van der Veur, is hoping to expand his client base to New York. Last month, he made pitches to the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum Store. An employee of the Met Store declined to comment, and a spokesman for the Museum of Natural History said no decision had been made about purchasing VideoMail.

Bitmove charges a start-up fee of between $5,000 and $7,500 a kiosk, which includes installation and customization of the software. Bitmove then charges a monthly fee, starting at $850.

The manager of the Van Gogh Museum’s online store, Laurine van de Wiel, said the Web site gets 500 visitors a day through Bitmove. Each kiosk also generates 10,000 e-mail addresses a year, which the shop uses to send out special promotions and publicize new products, including exhibition catalogs.

The Rijksmuseum has one kiosk in the museum, another at a satellite museum in Maastricht, and two more at the airport, from which tourists can send a last-minute video postcard about their trip to Amsterdam and to the museum. “It’s a very easy way to gather e-mail addresses,” an employee in the marketing department, Marijke Smallegange, said.

It’s easy to imagine adapting VideoMail for the performing arts. A staple of Broadway television advertising is the on-the-street interview with audience members, gushing about how much they loved “Phantom of the Opera.” Why not offer a way for young people leaving the theater to make a video rave and then email it to their friends, along with a discount offer?

Broadway uses the Internet these days to reach out-of-towners and for yield management—to fill seats at discounted prices during typically slow periods. Last week, for example, the advertising agency Serino Coyne, promoted by e-mail a 50% discount for most of the shows it represents.

The nonprofit theater world is looking closely at the possibilities the Web offers, too. The director of marketing at Lincoln Center Theater, Linda Mason Ross, said that to attract young audiences to Christopher Shinn’s “Dying City,” which played in the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater earlier this year, LCT experimented with advertising on Web sites such as theonion.com, thelmagazine.com, and hopstop.com. LCT also created a custom Web site for Tom Stoppard’s “Coast of Utopia,” which included a blog by a theater critic. Ms. Ross said the company would also be redeveloping its main site in the coming year, in order to offer more information about its productions, with video and other multimedia features.