I flapped my mouth on the Digital Culture Network podcast with the lovely James Akers chatting:

• How finding your voice is more about setting out with an intention and finding it along the way

• Doing MERL’s social media relied on being immersed in the place and collection for over six years - if you want the same with a new hire, then you need at least a bit of strategy mapped out for them

• Doing your best social media usually relies on amplifying the best skills of the people you already have rather than forcing them into roles they’re uncomfortable with

• If we’re serious about reaching people who don’t think arts and culture is for them, then social media is the place to start

• Why I say things that other people are too polite to say

• And other bits, just listen to it

Content of this week

I mean, the content of the week was my chat with Danyele but I also saw some other things:

• Sometimes you can’t beat the classics.

• I spend a lot of time saying ‘put your enthusiastic tour guides on camera’ and now I finally have an example from the Met to back me up (but the key here is also some snazzy editing).

• Get the Derwent Pencil Museum on the phone.

• Most of our conferences are quite samey and boring. This post made me want to see competitive cataloguing on stage.

The bullet point bit

• Accounts stealing other people’s content for engagement is nothing new, and it’s something Meta is cracking down on. But it still gives me whiplash to see someone’s art being posted by a period tracker app just for clout.

• If you use Premiere Pro then this is a good timesaver for cutting down on keyframes - I had no idea motion tween existed.

• My algorithm has basically pushed me into a Premiere Pro editing niche I never knew existed. But I also never realised you can get it to automatically reframe footage into different ratios, which will save me so much time adapting landscape to portrait.

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

🎮📖 what I’m consuming as a consumer

We saw Obsession and it’s probably the best horror I’ve seen at the pictures since Hereditary, and we’re lined up for the Backrooms this weekend. It’s a good time to be a horror fan.

Otherwise I’m ploughing slowly through The Discovery of Heaven. I’m enjoying it but I love when there’s a hefty appendix because a book finishing earlier than you expect is like an early Christmas present. This book has no appendix. It’s so fucking long.

I also took my toddler to the London Transport Museum and it’s so freeing to not give a fuck about the labels and just have a great time sitting in old train carriages. I learned by osmosis that we used to use horses and now we have buses, and that’s good enough.

🐕 Keith

He yearns for the ham