Why creating good social media content in large organisations is hard

There’s a slide in Adam Koszary*’s social media bootcamp that I’ve been thinking about lately.

*of Absolute Unit/Museum of English Rural Life fame

In the world of museum social media, it’s become the most succinct mental sense-check I’ve come across when reviewing content (whether my own or others’), asking:

Is this actually any good though?

It’s easy to be fine. You work in digital media and want an easy life in a big institution, you write ok social copy, you copy and paste organisational ‘announcements’ and don’t rock the boat. It’s a little bit dull, but it makes life easy, it means you can work manageable hours, can maintain your ‘nice, helpful person’ image, and stand a reasonable chance of actually being able to put work to bed come 5pm.

The trouble is… if your copy makes sense in the context of your boss’s boss’s inbox, it probably doesn’t make sense in the realm of internet culture.

And ‘fine’ social media is becoming increasingly anachronistic. The gap between content that senior management understand and how internet cultures operate — with their own self-referential logics and languages — is widening. Which means we have a problem that is getting bigger, and senior management aren’t — by and large — aware the problem was significant in the first place.

This year I turned 30 and I’m one of the youngest people in my directorate. Museum jobs reward those who know the rubric of application processes, and they see much less turnover than the private sector, which means it becomes increasingly difficult for young people, and/or people coming to the sector from non traditional routes, to enter it. (Despite the fact that they’re an increasingly necessary part of the solution to the how we use the internet to engage new audiences).

There’s also the question of whether people under 30, and/or those from non traditional backgrounds, want to work for museums. Those in their early 20's have grown up with the big issues staring them in the face, they’ve seen older generations mess things up: from their job prospects, the environment, their exam results, their access to safe/online university education. By the time they’re 20, is it any wonder that the way they communicate, and the platforms they do that on, is a world removed from the generations that were in their 30’s before the internet took off? Are museums on most students’ radar in 2020? My guess would be no.

Museums are facing a potential crisis. The visitors who are returning are the familiar groups: Members, families, those who have visited before, those who have time and/or need a nice space to meet. Reduced capacity has also reduced the proportion of new, non traditional audiences and young audiences. But we can’t rely on our current physical audiences alone. 30 years from now, if we have done nothing more to engage new audiences than we are currently doing — what is our audience profile going to look like? Are museums saying anything relevant to 18–25s in 2020?

Reduced physical capacity means we need to invest in digital. We need to think about how we can increase access while in gallery capacity remains a fraction of what it was pre-COVID. We need to not be crap at thinking about how to translate the value the museum holds (why we have these collections, what they can tell us about contemporary debates, how we can connect museum professionals with the public) into formats that make sense for different online platforms.

For me, ‘good’ online content:

• Makes sense in terms of the organisational brand (why are we specifically running this bit of content, what is unique to us that we own in the digital space)
• Is created with specific audiences in mind (be that structuring web content by user needs, or writing with the right tone on social)
• Is guided by the data we get back from audiences (if we know from past experiments a certain piece of content will deliver poorly, we probably shouldn’t run it)
• Is appropriate for an online medium (digital technologies afford many new, evolving and inventive ways of communicating with audiences and storytelling. Being good is about knowing what the capabilities of the different platforms are, but not being led by that, and meeting audience needs inventively through that)
• Has a high ‘resonance’ value / is clear on ‘what do I want this content to make people do/feel?’ It’s not always possible to measure the more meaningful impacts online content might have. Sure we can measure link clicks, likes, retweets. But if you’ve changed someone’s perspective on an issue that matters to them, if you’ve connected them with a professional that shapes their future career, if a teacher is now reusing your content in their future lesson plans — there’s no digital footprint. Being good is also having faith in your judgement that a particular bit of content matters in its own terms.*

And sometimes… not being afraid to be silly /not just running the safe stuff, but doing it well. Most stuff that takes off on the internet takes a bit of a leap in order to make historic collections relate to the modern world. And doing this kind content well means it can matter too, in so far as it generates broad scale empathy/engagement with an organisation, in a way that no other medium most museums have access to is capable of right now.

*This one is fully stolen from David Weinczok, Digital Media Content Producer at National Museums Scotland, and has a blue tick on Twitter and everything