I’m doing an all-day workshop for the Arts Marketing Association next week with the stupidly ambitious title ‘Content that works’.

Ambitious because content that works depends, obviously, on what works for you. I met a weaver a couple of weeks ago who pretty much only needs an Instagram presence to drive people to their online shop. A regional museum may need a presence everywhere because their strategies keep saying that their audience is ‘everyone’.

Whatever the circumstance, the foundation of content that works is understanding who you’re talking to, why and how you do it. Then, the fundamentals of the content itself is still asking yourself: ‘who cares’? And then making them care.

There’s a bit more in the workshop though because it’s four hours long.

Content of this week

• I’m not usually one for Valentines Day videos but this one from Audley End House is very well done. I’d marry Chris in a heartbeat.

• The Burrell Collection are continuing to smash it and this video about opening your venue like it’s a reality TV show deserved way more engagement.

• You still can’t beat interviewing a person about something interesting (pargetting).

• Indeed job adverts for historical figures are so hot right now.

• I don’t feature enough Facebook stuff here, but Shakespeare’s Globe have bucked the trend by putting on about 60k new followers over the past year (and now has more followers than its Instagram). Apart from ‘people love Shakespeare’, it looks like posting daily (sometimes more), being reactive and sticking to formats (people love Shakespeare quotes) is doing the job.

The bullet point bit

• The Vagina Museum have always had trouble being censored by social media platforms for saying words like ‘vulva’ and ‘fanny’, so their workaround is to have a placeholder preview image complaining about it.

• There was a study in Science last year which showed that algorithms alter your political attitudes comparable to several years’ worth of polarisation. No big surprise there, but nothing will change unless governments force a change.

• The V&A has acquired an early page of YouTube and its first ever video, ‘Me at the zoo’, uploaded in April 2005. It includes the front-end code, the flash player (now a relic, so they had to use an emulator), the video itself and the accompanying adverts. Very cool.

• There’s been some juicy discovery of internal emails within Meta about how they targeted tweens and teens in the USA social media addiction trial.

Personal stuff I do for me and you can just skip this if you like

🎮📖 what I’m consuming as a consumer

I haven’t been consuming much but found time to watch a film I last saw probably over a decade ago: The Royal Tenenbaums. It’s in that sweet spot before Wes Anderson flanderised himself and made me want to take my child to a dog fight. I also watched my comfort film The Big Lebowski for probably the fifteenth time and I can’t think of many films where I wouldn’t change a single thing about it. Makes me want to drink a white russian in a bathrobe.

🐕 Keith

Here he is (he had a haircut)