Cultural Content – transitioning from content editing to managing
Chatting to National Gallery's Senior Content Manager; Beks Leary
I’ve been following Beks’s career with interest.
Long-time subscribers of Cultural Content may remember a Q&A with Beks when she was Social Media and Content Manager at the National Theatre, generally winning awards, setting records and bringing theatre-sass on TikTok 👇
She’s now Senior Content Manager at the National Gallery. Her role leads a team working across video, audio and web content, social media management, and online events production.
One thing I know lots of content editors struggle with is how to make the transition from ‘editor’ to ‘manager’, so I was eager to pick Beks’s brain on progression, her plans and how she’s finding National Gallery.
Over to Beks…
What advice would you give to someone working in content who is struggling to advance to a manager level?
Different organisations mean different things by ‘manager’. Social Media Manager doesn’t necessarily denote management of a team (though in anything bigger than a small organisation it should). If you’re interested in advancing to higher levels of management, have a look at some job descriptions for those types of roles, and work out where you’ve got gaps in your experience.
The main thing I’d be looking for when hiring more senior content roles is confidence in writing, applying, and evaluating an organisational social media and content strategy. If you don’t have the opportunity to do that in your role, find ways to ask for applicable opportunities. Could you write a strategy for one campaign, for example? Or could you be in charge of writing monthly reports that refer back to KPIs in your organisation’s strategy? Getting experience presenting to more senior colleagues – as well as bringing a team along with you – is essential for demonstrating leadership experience.
I’m also a big advocate of a side-step for career growth. Sometimes, you might want to go into a less desired industry to gain experience you need and then side-step back to the industry you want to be in. Or go into a similar level of role in a different company, that helps you fill the gaps in your experience.
A great example of behind-the-scenes conservation of this “very weird” portrait (shorter version on Instagram)
How have you found moving from mainly doing the work to managing teams?
I’m used to working with lots of different parts of an organisation, but this has only increased now there’s a larger scope to my role. I’m context switching all the time and have to be even more deliberate about how I prioritise my time. I’ve really focussed on understanding how the people in our team like to work, getting them together to be creative and feeding in ideas, and carefully sharing our team goals to make sure we’re all on the same page. We’re investing in finding helpful new ways of working and fresh ideas collaboratively. This is all takes time but is well worth it!
Another aspect of managing a team has been working more closely with people in HR, on recruitment, and legal, on new contracts and agreements. You might assume, in a creative job, that this work would be less rewarding – but the time that goes into team building, and starting those external relationships well, is something I’m loving doing.
What skills do you think you need as a manager that are different to being a producer?
The level of multi-tasking steps up. You need to be able to trust your team with the day-to-day because you can’t be across the detail in the same way. You’re not just across all the projects and campaigns, but the activity that everyone in your team is doing.
Where next? Do you have a sense of where you want to be in 3-5 years' time?
I’ve got loads I want to pursue at the National Gallery, so I don’t expect to be going anywhere in this timeframe. By God’s grace, I’d love to be a Head of Content and Communities eventually. I love seeing digital content teams where all the roles are together under digital – rather than, for example, social media being siloed away in marketing. We have that at the National Gallery and it’s really brilliant.
Longer term, there are few TV roles out there that are super cool – Executive Producers for social media content production teams, Digital Commissioners who act as intermediaries between digital channels and commissioning execs, and Heads of Digital Programming who look at digital strategy and commercial opportunities. But who knows where God will take me! My career is totally in his hands.
What are some of the new challenges you've come across working in galleries as opposed to theatres?
Ah, the joys of image licensing. In theatre and telly there are still licensing agreements, with their own challenges, but artists and the image licensing agencies are a whole other kettle of fish. There isn’t the understanding of digital usage there and the whole system is really antiquated.
What's a challenge/ goal that's absorbing a lot of your work-related thinking, at the moment?
We’re building towards the National Gallery’s 200th birthday on 10 May 2024. We’re going out across the nation, bringing people and paintings together. The content team has two huge projects, as well as our BAU being reorientated towards the Bicentenary. We’ll be filming a behind-the-scenes mini documentary series over two years, capturing the work that goes on at the Gallery, and building a network of 200 digital creators (see Instagram post below for one example). Our amazing Social Media and Community Manager, Ellie Wyant, is steering these projects. And the BAU is looking at what digital content ‘gaps’ we need to fill to tell the story of the major paintings in our collection. I’m very excited about all of this!!
If you were gifted £50k to spend howsoever you'd like at work, how would you spend it?
I would invest in TikTok/Reels/Shorts content production with a specialist agency. This is an area that is particularly difficult to do well because the trends are so mercurial and the humour so chaotic. It takes deep understanding of TikTok (read: scrolling obsession) to make high-performing content and that’s so hard to find the time to do when your social media team must also be a specialist across Threads, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
If you had to set up a new content team with four roles, how would you fill it and why?
Senior Content Manager: for team leadership, strategy, stakeholder management, editorial sign off, producer for more complex projects, content production scheduling
Digital Producer: a self-shooting producer to create and/or produce film content
Content Editor: a copywriter, web editor, proofreader, who can also assist with film production via external companies
Social Media and Communities Manager/Executive: to manage the communities and channels, and be the socials expert
That’s all we’ve got time with Beks this week. You can follow her on Twitter/X and LinkedIn, and National Gallery’s social output on Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Threads.
Attention Content Professionals 📣
We’re beginning work on research looking into online collections cross-institution benchmarking.
We’re looking at online collections usage from across multiple museums and galleries to get a better understanding of how they’re found and used. We’re tracking:
What role online collections play in bringing people to the website
The extent to which usage is driven by the most popular objects/artworks
How they’re accessed
We’re pulling the data together in an anonymised form so we can show the aggregate for these reports on online collections. All participants should come away with a good sense of how their account differs from the aggregate and so get a sense of ways that your online collections are over and under performing, relative to the mean.
We’ve begun work already and have a good number of small, medium and large organisations signed up. If you’d be interested in finding out more, or taking part in this *free* research, drop your name in the survey below
Merci pour ce numéro!