Digital Works Podcast
Talking about all the different things that 'digital' means in the arts, culture and heritage sectors. Tales of success and failure, interrogating the shiny new things and looking at what works (or not) and why, Interviews with digital folks working across the sector and beyond, in-house, consultants, funders, and more.
Join us at the first Digital Works Conference in Leeds, UK on the 24th-25th April 2024.
Digital Works Podcast
Episode 041 - Haydn Corrodus on unleashing Social Media's potential for cultural organisations, the value of story-telling, understanding your audience, and being thoughtful about how you're showing up on social platforms
Our last episode of 2023 is a conversation with Haydn Corrodus. Haydn is a social media and digital marketing consultant who was previously an Arts Council England Tech Champion as part of the Digital Culture Network
Haydn brings rich insights into the fragmented and ever-evolving world of social media, and its potential for storytelling, connecting and engaging with audiences in the cultural sector.
Hello and welcome to the Digital Works podcast, the podcast about digital stuff in the cultural sector. My name's Ash and in today's episode episode 41, I chat with Hayden Coridus. Hayden is a digital marketing consultant and was previously part of Arts Council England's Digital Culture Network. He was their tech champion, focused on social media. Before that, he worked in both agencies and client side with brands like Unilever, super Drug, coca-cola and more. Hayden and I discussed the fragmentation of social platforms, understanding your audience, being thoughtful about the value that you can offer to that audience, the value of storytelling and loads more. Let's enjoy it. Hi, hayden, thanks for joining us, thanks for having me. So I want to start a bit with your background, your career. I know you through your work with the Digital Culture Network, but I know you've worked in agencies and freelance and your freelance again. Now, where does your story start.
Speaker 2:So ultimately, I used to be a musician. So I worked in a nine to five, a normal job, worked in retail etc, etc. I wanted to do music. I was lucky enough to tour the UK and perform a glass, to bring all those kind of cool things. But when I hit 30, I was like, okay, I'm 30 years old now I haven't quite broke that ceiling. What am I doing in my life? So I decided that I couldn't be an intern at 30.
Speaker 2:I used to watch Friends a lot I don't know if people know Friends, but I used to watch Friends and Chandler decided to be an intern at 13. I was like that's not going to work for me. So I very randomly just started working with all my old music colleagues and people I knew, even in the music industry, doing social and digital for them. I used to manage all the social accounts for my band and stuff that I was in. That then led to me working an agency.
Speaker 2:I had a friend at an agency that said I can come and do your socials Again. Ironically she said, oh, we've just hired somebody. A few of them came to me Like a week earlier you'd have been like, okay, literally three months later she came back to me and said oh, this person wasn't the greatest, can you come in? And literally that was my agency journey. I started working in agencies, working commercially. So I worked with Coca-Cola, we did a project with Dior there. I then moved from there to another agency where I was working with Superdrag Enterprise, unilever. And then I went into the Arts Council working with the Digital Culture Network, which I was one of the founding members. So we started to kind of set up the Digital Culture Network and went from there.
Speaker 1:What sort of time are we talking about here? It sounds like probably early 2010s, late 2000s.
Speaker 2:For me, my whole career, yeah, so yeah, yeah, probably about something in and around that time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you've sort of ridden the wave of social as it's become a really central part of how brands reach and engage with audiences.
Speaker 2:Exactly that. I've got a degree in marketing, advertising, but when I went to school, I went to university Social wasn't even a flat, it wasn't even on the people's imagination, let alone a thing that was really happening. So it's been a really interesting to see how it's evolved, where it's taking it, how much the mobile phone has evolved social media, because even before smartphones, there's an argument that it might not even take enough to the way it did if there wasn't a smartphone. So even the way things have perfectly aligned has made it interesting.
Speaker 1:And I think we're at quite an interesting moment as we sit here in autumn 2023. Twitter is on fire and falling apart. X, sorry, x. New things are being launched to wildly varying degrees of success all the time. It feels like the social landscape, which for years was moving towards sort of consolidation and actually there were probably only two or three platforms that you really needed to be on and you could service most of your audience. It feels like that's completely gone into reverse and things have fragmented quite significantly. What's your perspective on where we are right now? Where do you think the direction of travel is? It feels like a lot of people are grappling with how they use social now, because you can't just be on one platform and know that that will mean you reach 75, 80% of your audience.
Speaker 2:I think the term social and, as platforms, it's evolving. So now people, for example, for many years I've heard people say Spotify is a social media platform as an example. Now people are starting Slack channels and seeing that as a platform for social interaction. So now it's more about you thinking about where do I want to build a community, when do I want to build an audience and what's the best way for me to engage with them on whatever platform that may be for you. So if that's a WhatsApp channel, if that's what you want to do. If that's a Slack channel, that's what you want to do.
Speaker 2:If that's Instagram, people now are getting wiser and smarter to understand it's more about how you connect with an audience or build an audience, and then you can decide what platform works best for you. I always say when people say you need to build every single platform there's 4.7 billion people on social media or something like that every single platform, I guarantee you will have your audience. It's just dependent on how you want to use it. Even with the idea of Facebook, there's no kids on there. I guarantee you there are. But it's just about how you, what platforms work best for you, what stories you're trying to tell ultimately and where your primary audience are, so that it reaches an objective, because a lot of cultural organizations are on social just to be on social, without they're having an objective behind it. So that's what? Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I think that that shift that you're describing is really exciting for the sector that we both work in, for cultural organizations, because it sounds like if organizations can be thoughtful about where they are active, actually the opportunity is probably bigger than when everyone was on Facebook, twitter, instagram, but that it's maybe going to take more thought, more analysis, more work to identify where you need to be and how you need to engage with your audience.
Speaker 2:So now it comes to a point where now, hopefully, in the culture and it's in the, the irony of it. So I went back into the commercial sector for about eight months to a year and brands are not that much further ahead. There's some incredible digital creatives in the art sector who are doing some incredible work. It's just that it's not profiled. In the same way. I've worked with a brand and I won't say the brand name, but I worked with a brand this year and their team had very little understanding of digital, had very little understanding of social, but they're a global brand and you'll think how does this even work? How does it happen? How do you get into this position? And the conversations we're having were similar to the conversations I've been having with art and culture organizations. So I say all that to say that art and culture organizations, when they see themselves and they feel like, oh, we're so far behind, you're actually in similar positions. So the playing field is level. It's about you now raising your skill set.
Speaker 1:You've touched a bit there on the work that you've done in the cultural sector and I know you're a freelancer now working with cultural clients. But you worked, as you said earlier, as one of the founding members of the digital culture network and I'm interested to talk a bit about that part of your career because the DCN, for someone like me, was a really good move by the Arts Council putting money into creating a team of experts that could serve the whole sector, and I'm interested in your reflections on that time. What did you take away from that experience? What were some of the insights, the learnings, the observations you had Through your perspective? We're working with tens, if not hundreds, of cultural organizations and how they're using digital and social in particular.
Speaker 2:The main issue and again, I'm talking to the crowd so they understand that the issues that you've ultimately came across when I was working at the Digital Culture Network were capacity and the understanding of leadership. So I understand that how leadership would put restraints on what could be done digitally, would be done socially, and that just came down to understanding and that learning piece being able to talk to a team and showcase. So this is why you need to maybe consider doing things like this. Another thing that I found very surprising in one of my colleagues, emma. She's now a smart fire.
Speaker 2:There was a real big pushback to e-commerce, which that took us by surprise. It was almost you could feel it. It was that forceful and Emma worked with some really good and she did some great work. But just really trying to educate the sector and educate organizations about the power of e-commerce and although, yes, we live in the UK, which has a funding system, there's so many great opportunities to build finances or build revenue from digital which they seem to frown upon, but I think some organizations will get. Obviously, you know the Tank Museum are cleaning up on that sector, but some organizations are really starting to get it. You touched on something.
Speaker 1:I think important there this idea of leadership of sort of executive teams in the sector, understanding the value of digital activity, you know, and digital activity manifests in many different ways and it was interesting that you said it felt like there was a pushback to revenue generating activities, because my assumption would have been that those would be the ones that would be easiest to make the case for. But I think social definitely falls into the category of maybe hard to explain sometimes If your leadership team is maybe not super digitally literate and they're not maybe active on social platforms anecdotally. I've heard that it can be a real challenge to explain why it's important to spend time and effort, as you said, building your communities, engaging with those communities 100%, and again this is big and small again, so it goes across the spectrum of the organizations.
Speaker 2:Where they struggle is, I think people have an association with what social media as a platform is, so they see the negative sides of it. They see dancing videos going viral, they see stuff like that and they assume the virality of hits and the things will go viral. They don't associate with themselves. So they then think, well, what's the purpose of what we're doing this? I always try to tell people. Again, going back to the 4.7 billion having people on social media, there's what a billion or post a day. If you see a hundred things in your feed that have gone viral that day, that's not even 1% of the post that's gone. So people need to kind of really think about social media as a. I call it like the shop window, the shop window for your organization. How are you enticing people to want to know more? How are you enticing people to find out more about your story? How are you educating people? How are you providing entertainment?
Speaker 2:One thing that used to drive me bar me when people used to talk about doing hybrid events and doing a collaboration and they would see the digital side of it mean, okay, we're going to stream it live, but that's not what hybrid means.
Speaker 2:There's so many different avenues and ways you can bring that campaign to life. You can showcase okay, maybe we're going to do a Q&A with the cast at this moment, or maybe a museum curator is going to speak, or maybe there's going to be an element where there can be a call to action and people can share posts with the organization back and forth from being at the event. Just thinking about different ways you can engage with your audience digitally is what seems to be the missing part, where there's a complete blindness to how do we use these platforms, use these tools To engage with people, to tell stories, and it's more case of we've got this tool and it's a platform to just sell, and we don't even going to sell in a clever way. We're just going to sell and to say come to this event, that's it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that broadcast mindset does seem like it's still quite prevalent, despite people like you and others explaining how that is maybe not the most effective way to be active on these platforms.
Speaker 2:I always compare it to. You know, when you've got that friend or family member who only comes to you when they want something, that's what's literally what's literally what it's like. So we're only going to our audiences when we want to buy something. When they want them to buy nothing, we don't talk to them. Normally, we don't generate engagement. I did a talk for Museum Next about fundraising and talked about the fact that communities are expecting you to be online. They expect organizations to tell their stories. They're expecting to be able to go and get that social proof and see that, yeah, you're active online and there's active conversations and they're seeing that you're providing value in some way, shape or form. Social media now competes. Tiktok is said to be a competitor to Netflix. So when you're seeing social media platforms in that kind of guys, ultimately just your own TV channel and then you can dictate the content what's happening, what shows are happening and it's just up to you to use it in that way and then really build out your stories.
Speaker 1:And we've talked there about some of the challenges that the sector has around social activity. But let's put our positive hats on for a moment. You know, I think there is a lot of really great, entertaining, engaging, impactful social activity from organizations large and small. What do you think, or where do you think, the sector is getting it right when it comes to being active on social platforms there?
Speaker 2:are some great examples. I think the Sacra Mentor History Museum are killing on TikTok and they focus on one specific element of their museum, which is their printer press and they tell stories and they've got a clear strategy about how they go about doing that. So they make every single day a post about something, so they add in value. They tell stories around the print and around the history of what things are happening that are trending as well. So something's happening in the world that's relevant to them. They will tell a story about that that relates to their print. So I think they're doing really great things.
Speaker 2:The Vagina Museum would bring it on X. They're really good at using threads to tell stories about the history of female anatomy and things like that. Those are the two that come to mind straight away on different platforms. To give you an example of what that looks like Smartify, brilliant on Instagram. Google Arts and Culture Brilliant online. They're really good at showcasing stories. You've got organizations like American Ballet Society they're brilliant or American Ballet Fair I think they're called Sydney Opera House again, they're brilliant. They really understand how to showcase their programming while also talking about the events and making people want to come to their organization. The Barbican are doing some really cool stuff. So there's so many organizations now from across the world who are really championing it, but what I find is they're few and far between. So if there's a million social media accounts from, also culture organizations, maybe there's a hundred of them that are really thinking about what they do on the platforms, which is the biggest issue for me.
Speaker 1:And it sounds like the thread that runs through all of those is the organization having a really clear understanding of their perspective and their sort of tone of voice, but also linking it to something that is of value to their audience.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and not just that understanding the platform features. Those are for three different platforms, but they understand what works really well on those platforms and the features of the platform.
Speaker 1:So yeah, yeah, because you can't just post the same thing on every platform regardless.
Speaker 2:Exactly yeah.
Speaker 1:And do you think there are commonalities between the organizations that are doing a good job? You know that other people can look to and learn from and take influence from.
Speaker 2:A hundred percent the people who are doing. I've just been consistent. If I'm being honest with you, they've been consistent and they've looked to your insight. Social media doesn't have to be rocket science. It's literally look at your insights and be consistent, and then how you add in value to your audience. So if you were trying to build a strategy, those would just be the three, even if it's the top layer strategy. How can we be consistent? What do our insights tell us and how do we add value to our audience? That's it, and then do that. And if you're consistent across those three metrics, those three spaces, then you will eventually come across some success.
Speaker 2:Again, another issue you'll find with it is that there's an idea that it's an overnight thing and again, you're telling a story. It will take time, you're going to have to dabble with things. Another kind of bad thing that we do is that we put young people in a place and say, oh, you're young, you can do social media go. And yes, they probably understand social media from a personal standpoint, but from an organizational standpoint, from a okay, we've got objectives to reach, I've yet to come across one who understands that concept. So you're setting yourself up to fail.
Speaker 1:And I think also that dynamic that you just described there of social roles often being held by younger or more junior members of staff. And actually Social role is an emotionally demanding, intellectually demanding role. You know you're carrying the way the organization exactly, and it through the pandemic you saw.
Speaker 1:Institutions were suddenly reduced as maybe the wrong word, but the only way that their institution existed in the minds and eyes of their audience was their social presence, and those are often being mad by quite junior members of the team and probably didn't get the support that they needed no strategies in place how to do escalation issues like exactly that.
Speaker 2:The vagina museum is a really good example because it is just one person and she's brilliant at being up to this. Ok, I understand what my audience wants where the woods gonna be. She's really good at telling stories via their guys and via the tone of voice and it's work to cross multiple platforms. Because of that and that just come down to again that's not a big team. So you suppose on time there's this illusion that there's a has to be a big team. It's more just about saying, okay, what story are we trying to tell? How does it resonate with what we're trying to achieve? And then, how do you tell the story and add value? And from them adding value, that when they did the fundraiser, they raise so much money in two weeks like and I know there was a few issues trying to raise the money and they still every time it got to one level that up again and up to again and they did really well and because the audience were engaged with the doing, the audience bought into the story telling and that's just one example of how you can start to build these communities that will really support what you're trying to do.
Speaker 2:We spoke about the museum of English for a life before we started the podcast and Again, although they're pretty well known now, where ultimately came down to is the fact that, because they had built this community, people were interested in going to find out more.
Speaker 2:The tank museum is another example and although I've heard nick talk about the time you many says they've got totally different audience from what they have that come to the tank museum On the online, which is totally from the people who come to the organization, they've been able to say, okay, what do I want? Audience one, and then how do you get to the benefit of the organization? So again, they think it from is from a strategic point of view. How do we Understand what audience wants and how does that then play into what we're trying to achieve as organization? And then they've married that beautifully. I think they said they made a million dollars from ads or something over the last couple years. That that's insane. You're making a million from ads like that's insane. And then partnerships, and it's just another great example of when you use it correctly, what you can do with it.
Speaker 1:It's interesting you've touched on a number of times the idea that your focus with your social activity shouldn't Primarily be rich. You know, it's not about how many people you reach, it's about how you engage those those individuals, yes and no with that.
Speaker 2:So Another organization work with, again massive organization that had a million followers there's. Really, just think about okay, well, we got a million followers, but we don't get much engagement on the platform. Is there much point in doing it? They were going back and forth, going back and forth, and then we worked out what they engage with. The engagement was like 0.001. It was something ridiculous. That was the year and yeah, so it worked out. You're engaging with about 900 people On average, like what's the point?
Speaker 2:Like, but you got a million followers, so we have to be well. If you're engaging with less than a thousand people, like there's better times of resources of your time, just so I mean. So it's again going back to the inside, something to understand what your day is telling you. We say it's a vanity metric that the following number is a vanity metric to the extent that if you got a million followers but they're not engaging, if you, it means it literally means nothing. If you got 10 thousand followers and you got a thousand, two thousand, three thousand, then You're killing the game something given that you know and talking about understanding your audience and delivering value to your audience.
Speaker 1:Maybe this is not the choice of people being asked to make, but would you say it's about people being active on fewer platforms? Be more intentional and specific about the activity, rather than trying to have a profile on every platform and just basically posting the same stuff for having a bot that's replicating at your post I say it's better to be great on one, then we go to important cross five or six.
Speaker 2:If there is a demand for you to be on every platform, then be clear what your strategy is for that specific platform. So let's say, for example, you want to be on the normal big one, so facebook, instagram, x, tiktok, as an example, you may say x is going to be literally a strategy, for x is only gonna post Our events, so we're not trying to engage the time about audience, but it's gonna post our events. Instagram and tiktok as well. We're gonna try and create communities, as an example. So that's gonna be focused with those platforms. And in facebook might be we might have a facebook group where we can delve into building more close.
Speaker 2:Brand. Ambassador is all driving people to the website. So having a clear purpose for each platform makes it easier for you to then say these are why we're here, be on every platform, just been every platform and stress about your post. Social media manager saying we have to have content across all these things and they don't mean nothing, can nobody think agent of them is Recipe for disaster and probably why organization leadership looks at and says nothing's happening and suppose the other side of the question I asked earlier.
Speaker 1:Where do you think the big Mist opportunities are for the cultural sector around? Social, you know what's the things that you wish you saw people doing more of?
Speaker 2:I think it is just the story telling a side of things like. So one of the beautiful things about working in digital culture network is we worked with all types of organizations so libraries of museums, theaters, music, etc. And libraries used to come to us and be like we don't know how to tell the story. I'm like you're a library, how can you not know have stories to tell? That used to blow my mind like that. That makes no sense. How can you have no stories to tell as a library, like You've got a story to tell for every single day of the week you can tell a different story, you can theme up, you can die up and down. There's so many things that you can do as a library and that's the thing.
Speaker 2:I think it's really sad that we don't buy into the fact that there's an audience out there for everybody. I used to say jokingly when I should do talks. I still do, but one of the my like quips were that there's an audience, everybody, even people who like to tissue and the nice search start. There was a instagram page that had like sixty thousand followers just toilet paper, and if the pictures of the toilet paper Like literally doesn't all, just every single thing out, that it might be a hundred, thousand hundred, but there was, like said with so many people on social media, I guarantee you doesn't all just few. It's just about you dialing up what you want to tell the story about.
Speaker 1:And I think it's interesting that almost every example that you have been enthusiastic about got excited about that we've talked about over the last half an hour. So have been where organizations have been using social platform, social activity, to engage with audiences, to build community, to tell stories. It hasn't been about directly driving revenue or, you know, promoting a one-off thing. It's about that sort of long-term relationship building and, from your perspective, do you think that should be the primary focus of social activity?
Speaker 2:I think yes, because I think ultimately it does tell us to every cause. So if you're first of mine, when someone comes to London and says, okay, I want to go to the South Bank Centre because I've seen all this great content and these great stories that come from, that's where you're going to go. If, when you think, okay, I want to go to a theatre show and you know there's one Pacific theatre, there's always got this great content, that's the first place you're going to look up to see have they got anything on that I want to see. There's also a conversation that there's a different way to tell stories now, and so there's a really good TED talk by an Australian doctor about social media, and she talks about the role of museums or also cultural organisations to socially capture history as it happens and how things have evolved. An example she gives is of Anne Frank, so she's an event in Anne Frank's time, her the way she documented what's happening in history was through an old book.
Speaker 2:There's a Ukrainian teenager who use TikTok and she said, ultimately it was the same thing and we're just totally missing that. We're not amplifying those stories. We're not seeing social media as a way to capture social and cultural moments and historical moments and then to add value to that because of the fact that we work in arts and we know the history behind these things, we know the stories, but the stories that have maybe led to that, to add value to that, and to me, that's where the opportunities are being missed. And if you're an organisation that says, oh, we can't be funny or we can't be nice, then find that educational moment where you can add value to something. Find that historical moment that relates to something. There's a great instagram page called art, but make it sports and literally they get famous paintings and they'll compare to a sport event. And again, hundred thousand followers. Nothing to do with culture, sexual, but this is what this counts doing things that we could be doing so easily. Did you send me?
Speaker 1:and I think that last point is the opportunity. Right, you know Cultural organisations, whether that's performing arts, galleries, museums, wherever they are experts in, whatever it is they are expert in, and ultimately there is a degree of storytelling in their core. That's the yeah and it feels like the missed opportunity is that that expertise and that storytelling muscle isn't exercised outside of.
Speaker 2:Often, bringing people into a building feels like what you're describing is the opportunity for social to be another way to extend that mission and just extend that storytelling activity and the thing we have to remember it's scary as it is I've got an F you who's eight years old, but from the three or four he's had a mobile phone or tablet in his hand. That next generation of audience go is online. Roblox, I believe I don't want to call it because I might get the numbers from Roblox made more money in 2020, then every fashion house in the world and stuff like that is insane. When you think it's a digital platform because people would just buying digital clothes in Roblox like that's crazy.
Speaker 2:Some of those kind of stats that you look at and you see how I think between 70% of the kids 4 to 10 year olds in America are using Roblox. So you think of those kind of age groups who are coming through digitally savvy. They're going to expect to be connecting and find the stories and find the communities online. That's how their world works and faster than say we're just gonna ignore it and we're gonna deal with an age group which is aging out and then even Age group of millennials. We live on communities as well online. So the idea that we're just gonna literally ignore it Is almost ludicrous. Almost. It's almost a death call to ourselves, like we're saying we don't care what's gonna, you know, it's just be ordering some time.
Speaker 1:I agree because, alongside that behavior shift to everything being or having some sort of digital touch point, you know there's been a reduction in formal arts education as part of the curriculum and actually, as you say, if cultural sector doesn't respond to how people Are engaging with the world, and also there's a reduction in how people are exposed to sort of traditional forms of cultures. You know that there is a pie is getting smaller for everyone. Exactly and as well as you said. You know, you and I are not that young and we are millennials. You know, and I think that assumption that digital or social automatically equals teenagers Was true 25 years ago but is no longer the case. And again, I think, through the pandemic, because everyone was having to access products and services digitally, that behavior shift now runs right through, demographically, the traditional cultural audiences as well. So to ignore the opportunity to engage with these audience through these tools and platforms?
Speaker 2:because everybody else is. So it's not like the world is saying, okay, you're not doing it, on why everybody else is doing it. And going back to what we said about tick to be in a competitor to Netflix, arts and culture, realistically, you're competing with movies, you're competing with concert, competing with TV, and so it's the same thing you got to think about. How do we tell stories? How do we get people into the spaces? In the UK were lucky to have funding. A lot of other countries don't have funding, so if they don't have funding, it's even more like that. You need to compete to get eyeballs and so that you can actually have revenue, have people coming through the door.
Speaker 2:So it really is a critical touch point. And it's not just social cause. When I talk about storytelling, it's about the whole digital experience. So how you drive people to your website, what stories on your website, how are you telling people things about your information via newsletters? Have a connection there. If you got a payment system, how simplified is that? If you're telling stories about your donations and how people can support you, how simplified is that connection? It's the whole digital ecosystem that you need to be really thinking about and having a synergy across so that people can really buy into what you're doing.
Speaker 1:And it sounds like, and I'm definitely putting words in your mouth to tell me if this is wrong but it sounds like you're saying that the most effective use of social activity is as a brand awareness play. You know, as you say, explaining who you are and what you do, be keeping yourself top of mind. Yeah, see, not doing a hard sell, but allowing people to come to you, and it's a storytelling piece, it's a brand piece brand awareness thing.
Speaker 2:But again, cold color has been around for so long because of the fact power of the brand. So brand awareness almost don't say trivialize it, but it makes it feel like that. That's not gonna amplify everything else that you do. It's gonna play into the revenue that you create because people know who you are. Because of the power of your brand, you're gonna have more people who are saying have you heard about the show? You should really check out because people are aware of you and they're telling their friends.
Speaker 2:That word of mouth moment happens, real social. They do quite freaking close and there's one for June and it said again word of mouth. I said comments people were finding brand to find organizations through common and that was across age groups, like 24, 25% across age groups. These are all factors that people happy to find out, find out who you are. So, yes, it's a brand awareness piece, education and a story telling piece so that you've got your, your turning people into fans and advocates for what you're doing and people advocating different ways. So that might be if they don't come to the show, but they love you, do so much. They said I think you love this event. You should go check out. Did you know this new event happening at this such and such museum? You should check out the love that you start to see them, to their life and to their into their mindset. So, yes, it's a brand awareness piece, but it's so much bigger than that because it ties into everything.
Speaker 1:And for people that are in the process of making that shift, or they're listening to this and think, okay, we need to shift from a selling mindset, more cost mindset, more of an engagement. Where would you recommend people start? What's step one to working in a more effective way? And sort of where you've described.
Speaker 2:I think step one is being honest about your resource level. So being honest about what your resources are from a financial standpoint, from a skill set, internally standpoint, what the team makeup looks like, because what you'll find is, if you just add social as an add-on to someone else's job and it's not their main role, they will do it for a month, two months, and then it'll be my main role, takes over and it will fall off. So, really being honest about what that looks like. Once you've done that, you can then say okay, how do we start to build out benchmarks of success for ourself? And I think everybody does it across art sector brand.
Speaker 2:I think it's a human thing where we judge our success based on others without really saying, okay, but what's got into that success? So what are our benchmarks? What do our insights look like? So for me, it would be look at your internal resources first, see what that looks like, then look at your results to start saying, okay, how can we start framing some benchmarks for ourselves? And then, three, you're gonna wanna say this might have come first, but it's fine. Three, you're gonna say, okay, what do we want to do? Why are we here in the first place? What are we trying to achieve? Like I said, even if you're just doing those three things, add the consistency to that, you will build something and you'll start to enjoy it. You'll start to see successes and then you'll be able to go from there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think that third step, or maybe first step, about really being, I guess, having a really frank conversation about why do we exist, what is the thing that we can say or the value that we can add that no one else can. It feels like that's the conversation that lots of organizations aren't having, or maybe had 10 years ago and haven't revisited. And if you're working in a digital team or leading a digital team and maybe you feel like your organization needs to have that sort of conversation, do you have any tips of sort of how you catalyze that conversation, because that's a conversation that feels like it needs to happen on an organization-wide level?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I always say you wanna try and get the people in the room who are gonna make the decisions to have those conversations. So I'm working. I think that'd be fine for me. I'm working with a lot of guys called Piper at the moment and we had a really good meeting where we got their board members in, we got the senior team members and we got in there, like the junior members and the overall digital team.
Speaker 2:We had a whole day session where we went through what do we expect, what do you wanna see from our digital communications, what do you wanna see from our social media output?
Speaker 2:And just for having everybody in the room, we could see there were different opinions and different viewpoints, but we could come to an agreement of what made sense for us as an organization. So even if that means you get somebody to facilitate that session for you where you've got an outsider who can say, well, this is what we're trying to achieve and this is how you can go about doing that and just staring it, rather than having kind of people at loggerheads against what they wanna get from the different channels. But for me that is a really great step because once everybody's aligned of what the reason they're doing it. It makes it easier and it also helps the social media person or digital person, because you won't get this, you gotta do this, you gotta do this. Well, no, we've agreed, this is our strategy. So we've got kind of, you've got a kind of a leg to stand on to say, well, this is our strategy, based on what we've all agreed and I think everything we've described today demonstrates that this is a specific strand of activity.
Speaker 1:It requires specific skills, it requires a thoughtful approach, it requires a plan. It cannot, as you said earlier, just be a bolt on digital marketing and also we'll post some stuff on Twitter. Actually, it needs to be a longitudinal strategic approach because otherwise, as you say, either it's gonna fall down the list of priorities or you're just gonna be screaming into the void and getting nothing back.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and then it really is a waste of your time at that point when you slide that I couldn't have summarized it better, and that's why you're got the podcast.
Speaker 1:And you know before again we press record. You were talking about some work you're doing in the States, working with museums over there. Listenership to this is international. I'm intrigued if you see a difference in approach because you've worked with lots of UK-based organizations and now some North American organizations. Is there a difference to help people approach social?
Speaker 2:I think the bigger American organizations get it a bit more, but I also think that comes down to the idea that they understand that they need to have a story out there to get funding, to get donations, et cetera, et cetera. I think the larger UK organizations a lot of them get by on the fact that they're a big organization, so there's recognition on their name, more so than them actually being good at digital or social, and I think that's something I know. There's some organizations who are trying to change that philosophy and change the way they approach it. I think ultimately, though as much as I always harp on about it, it does come down to you owning your story. I'm giving an example. So the South Bank Center, for example.
Speaker 2:The South Bank Center is a center, but what story do they want to tell? It doesn't have to be about all the million different events that happen. Is what's the core story we want to tell? And we've said here that we don't talk about sales. It's not about that. You don't talk about sales. You just find other ways to tell stories through sales.
Speaker 2:So if you're doing an event say you're doing, they're doing a book launch you can talk about the layers, about what that book launches, and you can talk about that on your social fees, and then the ads that you run could be pushing for it, so you can do dark ads that are pushing towards oh, by the way, comes this event. So it's not that we're saying that you don't use social for sales. You definitely do, but it's not the beat on end of why you're using the platform and you connect it to other elements of the story. So yeah, ultimately, I think around the world, there's similarities between all of them, because I think arts and culture organizations are very focused on the arts and the culture and the business side of it can be frowned upon. I think that seems to be a universal mandate.
Speaker 1:So yeah, At the beginning we talked about the fragmentation of sort of the social media landscape and my colleague Katie and I talked about newsletter we sent out recently where one of the things we shared was that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation has come off X, come off Twitter because it was more hassle than it was worth. Basically, you know, I also had conversations with colleagues in cultural organizations where they're Looking at the relative toxicity of a platform and asking questions about actually, should we even be active here? I suppose this relates to the conversation we're having earlier about Be more thoughtful about where you are active. But do you think, as part of that conversation, what should organizations should also be thinking about where they should not be active?
Speaker 2:so again I got to say earlier about it being a strategic point of view. I think there's a couple things to consider. What do you stand for as an organization, so does that platform go against that? Now, for me, when you start to take those kind of start is, though, there has to be consistency across it, so it can become quite tricky to say, okay, we're gonna leave this because of this and go to here, because then someone else will definitely especially if you're a larger organization will find that the same issue when you go to the other platform.
Speaker 2:I tend to tell people to really look at it from an audience standpoint. So the ex scenario as an example although, yes, there is a lot of noise around the only and how the platform is, there's also a lot of people on it who don't care either way, who are still on the platform, so it's more about you thinking, okay, what do we stand for organization? We're gonna take that start. Are we doing it just because it seems to be the cool thing to do all the thing that's done? Are we doing it because this is what we don't believe in? And if that is what you don't believe in, are we gonna have that same kind of energy across the board to everything that we do going forward. If you are gonna have that, then be prepared to face criticism for that and be okay with it. Second of all, like I said, then think about your audience. If your audience is ultimately on this platform and that's what you generally believe, then you have to contemplate how do we reach these people otherwise. So the vagina music, for example, they've got a really active on twitter. I know they've moved out of a platform, but they've got a really active orders and so For me would it would make sense to me to say something don't be on twitter anymore, or excellent, that would make sense for that because they've got an active audience which helps them get out their messaging. So I think this is a bit more complicated than the same. When you're gonna leave, because we don't agree with the management style of the owners of the platform.
Speaker 2:Jim from museum next put a really great post out about. These are some tips on linked in the page about. This is why I left the page and he made it and it works for him because he's given clear reason. This is why we're gonna leave it. This is what I'm gonna try find out. Market engagement. I used to get off it All of that. So it goes back to saying always have a plan.
Speaker 1:There's a reason for you doing it, not just doing it as a knee-jerk reaction and once again, it seems like the core of what you were saying there is Understanding your audience. Yes, because that should be the reason why you're on these platforms in the first place, and it feels like still there are lots of organizations that maybe aren't fully understanding or Analyzing where their audience is. Again, if you're in an organization where that's maybe Partly or fully the case, what sort of tool should people be using? Is it about using the, the in-built analytics tools on these platforms? Is it about doing research activities outside of that, focus group surveys, etc. How do you build the understanding of where your audience?
Speaker 2:I think, yeah, this is when you're approaching it. From what you do, it comes down to now, what your objectives is. Literally, done that. Who are you trying to reach? Why are you trying to reach them? What impact they can have on your what you're trying to do? How did you go into? That is then up to you. So, yeah, then do you do workshops, do you do Surveys? Do you do focus groups of people to find out what that perfect audience looks like for you to start looking at this and I love all that stuff. So, yes, that's what I ideally want to do.
Speaker 2:Most are, if we're gonna be honest, most awesome culture organizations are gonna do all that. So it's then comes out to say, okay, we want to achieve xyz, we believe our audience looks like this. Ultimately, those people can be found here, and then you started play with it and build just right from that. If you can go in a lot more depth than a hundred percent, that's the way to go. But why do you believe is and again, this is probably for my time working digital culture network is, the more they start to see the things that work in, the more they start to understand. Okay, we need to add a layer of detail to this and then they start to get better, bigger and better and better, and that's when you get the winners, more so than people try to go in Super heavy with.
Speaker 2:Okay, understand the data, and then it's not their world. So you're doing things that the alien to them. So therefore it becomes a bit much of a woman and then end up just leaving it. So just start small. I would say, start small, but be really clear this objective. We think audience looks like this, or who we see coming to our shows or events, what have you?
Speaker 1:Where those people that ultimately, yet the last question is everything you've described and you said this specifically is that actually you should look at this. Your timeline horizon over which you're measuring success needs to be realistic. Realistic longer term. Actually, a slow burn is probably going to be more impactful for your organization than one thing going viral once.
Speaker 1:Hundred percent and actually virality is almost impossible to predict. You can't legislate for it. If it happens, great. But the focus should be on the slow burn over months or years with a really specific focus on a really specific audience.
Speaker 2:Even when we think about the organizations who discussed, who have done really well. All of them are the ones fit for years, even the mail, although it had a quote, unquote, overnight success. They've really thought about how they build that and how they build on that and they've really Delve into the data and look to the inside to say, okay, this is what works for us, this type of copy works for us, this tone of voice works for us. They've had to really get strategic with it. So that's what is that? That's what you're thinking about. Think about what is the long picture? How do we make sure we're telling stories that are relevant to watch, relevant to audience, at value, and we're not just putting cap means up that have no, have no relevance to anything we're doing, but it's getting lots of views.
Speaker 1:That is pointless and Social media can be a dark place at times, but overall, are you still optimistic and enthusiastic about it being part of the mix for cultural organizations to as much as the cliche people.
Speaker 2:So it's a tool. Everything's a tool. If you understand social media what it is, you can legislate for that and you can build off it from there. Yes, it can be dark and it can be cruel, but it can also be a place of joy, place of education, place of light the math things I've learned from social media, from how you create your feed, the kind of energy you put out yourself as an organization. So what do you stand for? Your value should be seen through the content you put out. Your value should be seen for the copy and the positive things you talk about, and people will gravitate to that. Again, that there's an idea that everything that social media slides very negative and it is very negative, but then you'll see Every single positive post. Allow all this does instagram pages about positivity with 50 million followers and like. So people still, they want to find this good information about you. Show on in and find a way to tell your story in a positive way that reflects you.
Speaker 1:You can find all episodes of the podcast. Sign up for the newsletter and find out about our events on our website, the digital dot works. You can also find us on linkedin. Now that Twitter is a total garbage fire, our theme tune is Vienna beat by blue dot sessions. And, last but not least, thanks to Mark cotton for his editing support on this episode. See you again soon.
