I saw this post recently on LinkedIn where Rich Prowse said:

“Content problems are organisational problems wearing a disguise.”

That pretty much sums up my chat with Danyele Higgins, the National Trust’s Social Media Manager. I wanted to find out how they managed to make fun content within a large, complex organisation—with all the accompanying hurdles, relationships and risks that entails.

If I made a word cloud of our conversation the biggest word would be relationships. Getting people to trust you, finding out how to give them what they want while convincing them to let you do what works.

I’ve got the write-up of our chat up on my website. If you do content or social media then read it. If you don’t you can also read it. Read it:

Content of this week

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

• The BBC made 120+ bespoke social media templates (which is insane), and a lot of them feature text as part of images to tell a narrative, quote, call to action etc. I was a big fan of Florence Bell’s use of text posts on Instagram at the Young Vic (which I continued while holding the fort there earlier this year). It’s a way of scratching your Twitter itch without having to pay the Twitter Troll.

• I have no idea what you can learn from this but when I swiped in time to the music it was like the gates of heaven opened and god poured dopamine straight down my throat like it was Sunny-D.

• This guy will see your home layout and rip you apart publicly, showing you how to arrange things according to feng shui. We all have lots of experts in our organisations who can do these kind of reaction videos.

• Ozzy Osbourne died. Tara bab.

The bullet point bit

• London Museum has launched an AI chatbot called Clio (+ part 2 where Trish digs into the tech). This is a use of AI I don’t really have a problem with as I only see it taking the load off staff rather than replacing them, plus online catalogues are notoriously obtuse and difficult to use so this is a good entry point. It’s only trained on museum data and they’ve done a lot to reduce risk, so it didn’t tell me how to make a bomb and even when I tried to get it to tell me about the benefits of the British Empire it gave a very nuanced answer. I also appreciate Trish being upfront about the energy usage and how they’ve mitigated it. It does use American spelling though.

• The Audience Agency are running a survey on innovation and R&D for Arts Council England. Interpret that in a wide sense (they specifically say it’s not purely about technology), and fill it in.

• OpenAI have signed an agreement with the UK government to figure out how they could use AI which smacks, as many have said, of a solution in search of a problem.

• Websites have started verifying the age of UK users to view mature content either by scanning your face, guessing your age and then deleting the data after a few days, or by providing official ID (which will of course be super safe from data breaches). Who knows whether ‘mature content’ applies to the many titties and dongs in online museum collections. I’ll ask Clio.

• People were worried about YouTube’s ban on inauthentic content, assuming it meant you weren’t allowed to use a load of AI. Turns out they just don’t want you to upload carbon copies of other people’s content.

• Buffer did a big analysis of what formats to post on what channels. Includes shocking conclusions like ‘Reels do pretty well’ and ‘pictures do good on Facebook’. I am whelmed.

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

🎮📖 what I’m consuming as a consumer

The problem with doing these emails weekly is that a week isn’t long enough to finish anything before the next email. But I’m desparately trying to separate the art from the artist watching The Sandman, listening to a lot of The Chats ahead of Reading Festival (Friday day ticket, I’m not 16 years old) and trying not to spend my money on Death Stranding 2.

I was also up in Brum on the weekend and popped into Ikon to get this print of my hometown, but also really enjoyed Seulgi Lee’s Spun - mainly because of a gallery attendant who opened our eyes to all the clever intentions behind the artworks. It reminded me that I do actually like going to galleries actually.

🐕 Keith

Here he is