I was at the Social Media in Arts & Heritage conference yesterday oversharing on a panel about burnout. Obviously burnout affects everyone but people doing social media are particularly old friends with it, so here are the notes I wrote on the train into London:

• The way to know when you’re burning out is when you start googling ‘what are the symptoms of burnout’.

• The root cause for me is always clarity. Onboarding is critical. A direction is critical. Reasonable expectations are critical. We need a constant and we need a safety net because of how transitory and temporary a lot of social media can be.

• Part of it's on me too. Took me over a decade to understand how I like to work, to meet others halfway and know when I need to take a break or make a change.

• Middle child with midlands dad who never hugged him growing up so I was primed for burnout lol.

• Constantly thinking a better version of you could deal with the challenges you’re facing but you have to accept who you actually are, how you work best and taking control.

• The perfect role, salary, colleagues and organisation don’t exist, but there is a spectrum. Know when you’re working in a place that’s a lost cause and focus on what you can control.

• If all else fails, quit your job.

Content of this week

• If you need a medieval halloween costume then I’m obsessed by the greedy peasant, who mixes costume design with art history. I particularly like the entrails one.

• Libraries continue to corner the market in making content from nothing but vibes Part I.

• Libraries continue to corner the market in making content from nothing but vibes Part II.

• This is the most horrifying pumpkin I’ve ever seen.

• Witnessing the success of the new generation of social media managers continues to make me feel this.

• I’ve seen too much good stuff this last week. Marie Antoinette’s boobie. Weird storeroom shit. Mr Darcy library robot memes. Things not to ask tour guides.

The bullet point bit

• Still the most basic and best advice for how to structure posts.

• What can arts/heritage organisations learn from creative brands, and vice versa? A very good interview with Tim Woodall on Georgina Brooke’s Cultural Content with good advice like: think about how you distribute content rather than just create it, steal ideas, solve audience problems and create for audiences, not stakeholders.

• Lauren Pope’s done an article on how to translate content impact for business leaders. I felt the header ‘Conversion attribution modelling can be painful for content’ in my bones and not in a good way.

• I don’t have a link for this but I would love one of the high-performing TikTok accounts (i.e. Historic Royal Palaces) to do an overview of how they strategise, plan, execute and report on their content.

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

🎮📖 what I’m consuming as a consumer

Started reading Liu Cixin’s The Wandering Earth, where the sun is turning into a red dwarf ahead of schedule so they attach massive rockets to the Earth and blast it off to Alpha Centauri. I always admire the ambition of Cixin’s books but the man cannot help himself with the misogny. In this one everyone’s polyamorous because why not, the sun’s exploding, but it still feels like he’s saying ‘I wish I could be polyamorous’. (not that there’s anything wrong with polyamory, but I just get the impression he wants to shag loads of women without any repurcussions)

Farthest Frontier also came out of early access. If you enjoy medieval city builders where you obsess over the clay/soil ratio and crop rotation of fields then boy is this the game for you.

🐕 Keith

Here he is