Cultural Content #7
Ukraine 🇺🇦, ft English National Opera, RijksMuseum and The Peace Museum. Also pancakes 🥞.
Over the past fortnight it’s been difficult to see any content except through the lens of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Having worked at the coal face of managing social media accounts for cultural organisations, I know how difficult it is firstly to say anything meaningful in the event of a global crisis like this, but also to adapt existing scheduled messaging to reflect the prevailing mood. This edition looks at some examples of organisations that have done this.
(Scroll to the end for pancakes 🥞).
English National Opera: Ukrainian National Anthem
This post gave me goosebumps. The content went out on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, but got the most engagement on Facebook. This may partly be due to the format of the video (landscape and 2mins20). I expected responses to Ukraine to be most prevalent on Twitter, but it’s to ENO’s credit that this content has done so well with a broader, less overtly political, audience on Facebook.
Peace Museum: What to say?
This thread was thoughtful and quite human in being frank about not knowing what to meaningfully say/do in the situation.
RijksMuseum: 💙💛
Quite a simple and visual post, with the colours of the RijksMuseum’s iconic Milkmaid echoing the Ukrainian flag. It’s a nice visual metaphor; the emojis make the link with Ukraine (although the country’s name is not mentioned). The hashtags read: #Rijksmuseum #Amsterdam #StopWar #Vermeer #Milkmaid
On Facebook, the mix of commercial and humanitarian messaging was a bit more jarring.
…And now for something a bit lighter; here’s Orkney Library’s Peter Pancake
And associated tweets in the thread:
That’s it for this fortnight.
As ever, do add comments /suggestions in the comment box below. Or if you’d like to be a content contributor / guest editor of Cultural Content, do get in touch; georgina@onefurther.com 👍