I’ve been thinking about career progression when it comes to content/social in arts and culture. These are the archetypes I can think of:

• The Firstborn. People who did digital and content things for the first time in their organisation, made a job for themselves and now sit protectively on the Senior Role nest egg.

• The Viral Agency Hopper. People who did an incredible job for an arts organisation, rapidly found out there was no way to progress internally or get paid a better salary, so joined an agency instead.

• The This’ll Do. People who do a good job and they’re happy to stick with the junior- and mid-level roles that already exist.

• The Fabled Private Sector Person. People who are brought in from the private sector who must be able to do things better because they’ve done it for places that have to make money. Surely.

• The Freelancer. Like the viral agency hopper but went freelance instead.

• This Isn’t Even My Job. The many many people who have to do social media (already 10 jobs in one) on top of their marketing jobs (20 jobs in one) because there’s no money to hire anyone else.

• I’m In A National. People who work for a national organisation who can afford a team of specialists and even someone in senior management (fewer than 50 of these positions exist in the whole country).

What ties them all together is a mixture of ‘There Is No Money’, and/or a lack of understanding/prioritisation of digital content. A sign of hope is that it tends to be the former more than the latter nowadays.

Anyway, let me know if you want me to do a talk for anyone looking for a career in arts/heritage content.

Content of this week

• I’ve seen a lot of live videos popping up on TikTok recently, including one where a laser shoots paper cups off a lazy susan with thousands of Likes for some reason. So stick that camera in front of anything. Have you got chickens? Animatronics? A fireplace? People - and I cannot stress this enough - will watch anything.

• Bodleian Libraries’ have been consistently killing it on TikTok, and this video is a good example of using a trend authentically. It’s not just the trending format that makes it work, it’s that it has clearly tapped into a very witchy online community (based on the comments).

• A nice little format for common mistakes/mispronunciations.

• This initial owes you a visit to the theatre/gallery/museum etc. etc.

The bullet point bit

• Lauren Pope’s written a very good guide on organising structures for content teams, which reminds me a lot of Dafyyd and Kati’s Structuring for Digital Success. Both are super useful for you to figure out how you want content to work or what model fits your organisation best, then how to achieve it.

• Google’s AI Overviews have the potential to kill traffic to your website, but it’s not all doom and gloom. OneFurther have done a report on what’s happening on their clients’ websites and how you can adapt.

• In their latest transparency report, Meta revealed that Instagram is growing 10x the rate of Facebook in the EU. I don’t think that’s saying much.

• Reddit does a list of key moments for the year, and they’ve just done 2026. It’s pretty US-centric and quite sporty, but as Reddit piles on new users it’s a good pointer for what events are being searched for and discussed online.

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

🎮📖 what I’m consuming as a consumer

I paid about £2 for this game called Digseum, in my growing collection of museum-themed videogames. In almost every one of them the core mechanic is to dig something up out of the ground, put it on display and charge visitors to look at it. Free entry is unheard of, and so are source communities and colonial legacies. I think you’d need a more narrative-driven game (a bit like Pentiment) to even start approaching those kind of issues.

Also if I don’t get Radiohead tickets I’m going to cry.

🐕 Keith

Here he is