Cultural Content #1
Featuring Leeds Museum, English National Opera and TikTok's Mary McGillivray
Hello there,
and welcome to the VERY FIRST edition of Cultural Content.
Great content on a shoe-string
Great content doesn’t have to be highly polished. It has to have a good brand fit, make the most of the format/platform it’s working in, and land well with it’s audience (and sometimes find a clever way of building an audience within it). So, with that in mind…
Leeds Museums: Poking around owls’ barf
Meghan Jones is Leeds Museums and Galleries Digital Engagement Officer.
This is a two minute edited video of her not wanting to dissect owl pellets sent to her by a Natural History curator.
It’s the antithesis of a YouTube style unboxing video, to wit (TWOO!) most of the video is her building up to touching the goods. It’s also got a fab ending.
What I liked about this is it’s a great format for learning by stealth (about owl digestion in this case 🦉) all wrapped up in a pleasingly spontaneous/relatable wrapper of not-wanting-to-poke-icky-things, with a good dollop of museum oddity hot sauce.
Content big guns 💪
English National Opera: Valkyrie in 2 mins
So what if you’re not promoting owl barf, but your headline opera of the season?
Enter: English National Opera. It’s interesting (to me) how video for social has become so much more important on all the platforms, than it was five years ago when I started out in social media management 👵. I think that shift has made it easier for audio/visual visitor attractions (like operas, theatres, open air museums) to make the most of these mediums.
Case in point; this 2 min summary of The Valkyrie is delivered with panache, great graphics and cleverly humanises the lead performers.
Although, NGL found the owl vid easier to follow (twitter brain capacity; low).
A pair of useful things
Creator directory
TikTok’s @_theiconoclass released this Creator Directory after her first MuseumNext talk. Her channel brilliant delivers short snippets of Art history via all the barmy formats and functionality that the platform offers.
The Creator Directory looks like a great list of potential collaborators for arts organisations that know they want to be reaching audiences on a certain platform but don’t have the in house skills or audience to know that they’re doing it right. It’s also a nice way of bringing young creators into the sector and giving them a foot in the door.
GDS A-Z style guide
The Government Digital Service (GDS) turned is 10 years old this month 🎈 (which makes me feel old). It’s 10 years since a small, maverick team came up with a new structure and principles to move content off of DirectGov and onto gov.uk.
The GDS team have always been brilliant at working in the open. I love their A-Z style guide. Some of it’s government specific, but some of it’s just really handy reference point for how to write well for the web c.f. ‘W’; words to avoid.
That’s it folks.
I’d love to hear your thoughts/ suggestions / own examples. Email me if you have some: georgina@onefurther.com.