Cultural Content with guest Meg Jones
The Museums n'That podcast star talks us through launching the new series...
A very merry morning to you all,
Today I’m absolutely delighted to have this guest post from Meg Jones (who previously did a fab Q&A for cultural content). Meg’s Digital Engagement Officer at Leeds Museums and Galleries and you might well know her for Museums n’That - the irreverent and chatty podcast that is now entering its third year and sixth series. She also does freelance consultancy for museums and cultural orgs wanting to get their own podcasts off the ground. Contact meganjonesfreelance@gmail.com for more info.
And on Museums n’That; listen, subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and all the usual podcast suspects.
Making the Museums n’That podcast
Museums n’what?
Museums n’That is the podcast for people who don’t like museums. Each episode, my colleague Sara and I interview someone who works in the sector about a topic that they work closely with – be that hip hop history, or human remains, or the history of enslavement in Liverpool. An episode lasts around 45 minutes, and is sandwiched by an intro/outro with the hosts. We’re just about to release our 6th series, and have peppered special episodes throughout the last 3 years – including one released today, all about Tudor Christmases:
So what though, Meg. What’s so different about it?
Well - it’s all about the tone. Museums n’That dispels the idea that institutions are stuffy, or boring, by keeping conversation light and informal. In one episode, I tell Sara about the time I took a urine sample to my GP in the same Tupperware I used for my overnight oats. 10 minutes later, we’re discussing the Magna Carta and medieval archives.
Why?
3 years ago, we sat and thought about what we were doing well online. Our social media personality was top of the list – all signs pointed to us having established a persona that was warm, welcoming, and a little bit irreverent. We wanted to grow that, and reach new audiences on a platform we’d not explored before.
When we thought about who we wanted this to be for, we pictured my Mum (hello, Lynn!) who isn’t really interested in museums or galleries, and wouldn’t visit one on her own. What questions does she have about historic clothing? What does she want to know about how a body decomposes? What will it take for her to engage with us?
Turns out it really was my urine sample debacle.
On social media, we have a thumb scroll at best to convey all that we are to our Lynn. With a podcast episode, we have her little ears for 45 minutes. The majority of podcast listeners will see an episode through to the end – even if they aren’t that into it. So even if we had only 20 listeners, the quality of engagement with those 20 would make this worth our time.
The ‘we’
The ‘we’ I’ve been using throughout this is the Audience Development team at Leeds Museums and Galleries, by the way – which is a lovely thing really, because so often it can seem like the creativity of people in marketing is channeled into promoting the creativity of others: curator led exhibitions, learning officers’ workshops, community teams’ youth groups. It’s a nice change to work in marketing and market your own projects.
And the benefit of keeping it in-house, being hosted and produced and edited by ol’ Meg over here, is that I’m the person behind the Twitter account, crafting the personality on there that we’re aiming to replicate. Our team led the development of the brand that we want to reinforce on the podcast, so we’re the ones best placed to host it.
Cracking on
Enter Hannah Hethmon’s ‘Your Museum Needs a Podcast’ book, which is the bible really for anyone flirting with the idea of a pod. We posted a picture of us reading it across our channels, to see what followers would say – Audience research! The crowd goes wild – and the resounding response, especially on Twitter, was ‘yes please’. So we were away.
It’s a hard sell to say that your format is just an interview, so we had to have some confidence that for a museum podcast, our informal tone of voice was enough to be our USP. Sara and I both listen to the Off Menu podcast and All Killa No Filla, which we used to suss out our hosting style. There was no point using other museum podcasts, when we were trying to reach people who don’t like museums.
I taught myself how to audio edit and bought some equipment, which came to around £400. We relied really heavily on our colleagues and their time to start with, so that we could ask them to re-record bits if we needed to. Thank you colleagues! By the second series we were more confident that we knew what we were doing, and branched out to guests outside of Leeds Museums & Galleries.
The informality of the pod has been gold, because it means that I can leave in imperfections and interview fluff ups. When we recorded with Ian Murphy, Head of the Merseyside Maritime Museum, I forgot a piece of equipment and the mics started interfering with the AV equipment in the gallery. My back has never been sweatier. We were really honest and a bit self-effacing about that in the intro, to make sure you’ve forgiven and forgotten us before you even hear the interview. Ian still smashed it, by the way.
Heavy podcast users listen away from home, so we schedule our episodes to release early in the morning for their commute. To date, we’ve had over 20,000 downloads, and the real surprise has been our international reach – 15% of our listeners are in North America. We’ve had a really high uptake in written reviews too, which is an important KPI for us.
There have been lots of challenges too. I hate when you only hear the positive sides of projects, and I’m really happy to share the harder bits whenever I’m asked. But it’s Christmas, and I’m already over the word count, and Georgina may kill me. When we’re doing too much waffling in a recording, I shut it down by shooting quickfire questions at our guests. So in the spirit of the pod, here’s a quick list of things I’ve learned along the way.
Things I’ve learned
- Choose your guests wisely to start with. Once your interviewing skills get better, you’ll be able to work out how best to make your guests feel comfortable, and get out of them what you really want.
- If you don’t have guests, well done, because organising interviews can be a nightmare. If you do, give yourself so, so much more time than you think to release a series.
- Make sure you have ¾ of your episodes behind you before you launch a series. Unless it’s your first, in which case, get it all done.
- Think about promo before you start recording, because you might need to take videos or photos of your interview set up. How do you promote audio on social media, and make it interesting and engaging for your followers, in a way that embodies everything about your podcast? Like this.
- Hindenberg pro is much better for editing than Audacity. The audacity.
- Zoom interviews don’t work if your content is unscripted. You can’t cut-in on one another, so it sounds stunted and unnatural. I love the cut-ins! Give me all of them.
- You get used to listening to your own voice when you edit, until you hear a bad joke you made land terribly again, and again, as you try and edit it out. It is the freshest hell.
- But it’s also fun when you laugh at something or make a connection as you’re editing, that you then hear yourself say on the recording seconds later. Brains are magic.
- What podcasts do you listen to and love? Use those when developing your format.
- Just… do it. Don’t faff around forever, perfecting and editing all the little ums and ahs out. Just get it out there and embrace the imperfect, otherwise you’ll be sat on a goldmine forever.
…And that’s it for 2022!
Happy Christmas One and All 🎄