This one hit home for me, and I’ve always considered Tone of Voice guidelines as just that - a guide. I can write formally, I can write plain English, I can write for a specialist or a general audience.

But day-to-day posting is always heftily influenced by your own style. And it’s essential for authenticity.

Content of this week

• This is a perfect example of Funny, But To What End? What does a viral video do for an indoor ski slope in Tamworth? It’s the same criticism I see of similar GLAM videos, but the point is that some of the thousands of people who see this will live near Tamworth and a seed of ‘maybe I should try skiing’ will be planted. And that seed wouldn’t be planted by a traditional ad seen by 50 people.

• If you run any kind of podcast or have audio content then it’s worth doing this.

• I sometimes browse Facebook to see if there’s anything interesting, and the algorithm without fail fills my feed with old 20th century film footage and before-and-after pictures. If you have either, you should be spamming it (like the Imperial War Museum).

• I think the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) should have way more followers than they do. They’re suprising, they’re visible in the city and they go beyond just posting orchestra videos.

• Seeing a lot of these ‘why editing is important’ videos. The key is to film something completely boring in the first place.

• This TikTok template has been around a little while but is an easy win.

The bullet point bit

• The MERL and Reading Museum are advertising for a Digital Content Producer (£31.2-35.6k), in a continuing trend of content roles focusing specifically on shortform video. There’s so much potential here (I should know) and Reading’s a fantastic place to live (don’t believe the hate).

• The guy who has spearheaded the controversial memes-led approach for Trump’s White House social media has written about his strategy here (beware, a Fox News link). While I think their content is disgusting, this quote does ring true: “We did not build a cautious, government-style account. We built a fast, culturally fluent content machine designed to cut through the noise and win online. And it worked.”

• Jitters about an AI bubble are continuing as Softbank threatens to withold $10bn of funding for OpenAI as it negotiates a restructure with Microsoft. Like I said last week, even if OpenAI folds it doesn’t mean AI is dead - it just means it might actually focus on the use-cases which make money.

• You can now link Instagram Reels as a series, which is useful if you’re doing a load of videos on one topic.

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

🎮📖 what I’m consuming as a consumer

I’m reading Babel by RF Kuang which is fun, but they do have a tendency to make their villains black-and-white evil (in this case: the British), but as it’s set at the height of Empire it’s fair enough because it’s exactly how imperial writers characterised everyone else.

I’m also still watching Alien: Earth and every Wednesday feels like my birthday. The characters act rationally rather than trying to win the Darwin Award a-la Alien Covenant, and the sub-theme of child exploitation is very disturbingly and effectively well done.

🐕 Keith

Here he is barking at the Gruffalo