Linkedin may be a cringefest but occasionally there’s a gem in the dungheap, like this graph shared by Kat Ober.

Are you driven by trends or what’s important to your specific community? Do you react fast or stick to a long-term content plan?

A lot of people assume you have to react to every social trend to be successful, but that doesn’t always fit your culture, resources or values.

This kind of matrix is useful for figuring out what approach feels best for what you want to achieve, and I think it could also work for how you use particular channels (i.e. YouTube vs. Facebook vs. TikTok).

Content of this week

I couldn’t be arsed to write a whole blog this week so instead here’s a list of some good stuff I’ve seen:

• The British Library used a book of British royalty to illustrate the Horrible Histories’s The Monarchs Song. 30k likes, minimal effort.

• Because I have a baby I’m contractually obliged to also watch Bluey, and I love their BTS videos of how they designed the show, the story behind the stories and all the little easter eggs. It’s good content in and of itself, but it reminded me that the content is popular because the product it’s based on is already popular.

• This woman works at a library and just goes through what people did at the library this week, like a woman asking if the librarians could take pictures of her feet. Easily replicable because visitors everywhere are weird.

• If you do a lot of graphs then do I have the content for you.

The bullet point bit

• Arts Council England have done a report on how they’ve been developing and embedding an AI strategy, as well as a toolkit for figuring out your own. In the words of Oonagh Murphy, who worked on it, “The toolkit is for everyone -regardless of technical background - because domain expertise (knowing your own job!) is just as vital as technical knowledge in digital transformation.”

• Speaking of AI, there was a discussion on the MCG List recently about AI crawlers causing massive spikes in traffic, costing £££. Cloudfare have just rolled out an “easy button” to automatically block AI crawlers, and there are plans to make it easier to charge AI companies for the privilege of scraping.

• I don’t have a link for this, just vibes, but I think we’re already in the late bell curve of how useful it is for brand accounts leaving comments on other people’s Reels. It’s kind of always been annoying but now it’s at saturation point. I think cultural orgs should still comment on each other’s stuff, as that’s authentic, but less of the commenting on viral videos for clout.

• In another round of Why It Is Bad That Social Media Companies Have So Much Unaccountable Power Over Our Lives, there’s this BBC article on Meta banning random accounts for no reason. I’ve never encountered as terrible customer service from a multi-billion dollar company as I have with Meta. And that’s coming from someone who’s had to ring up HMRC.

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

🎮 what I’m playing

I caved and bought Civilization VII—a strategy game where you lead a civilisation through the ages to win (or lose) either an economic, cultural, military or scientific victory. They changed it so you change civilisations in each age, rather than have weird anomalies like the USA exisiting in the second century BC. It’s good but still weirdly euro-centric—as someone on Reddit pointed out, resources like spices are classed as exotic even if you play a civilisation that historically always had them.

👂 what I’m listening to

A friend got me onto the podcast called What Went Wrong as I was about to see 28 Years Later. It’s a show all about what went wrong in the planning and creation of specific movies, and reinforced again that a lot of cultural podcasts are too broad. There’s a reason why This Guy Sucked works, because it’s a hook that draws more people in than Generic History Podcast Name.

🐕 Keith

Here he is

^{(our dog is named after Cheggers)}