I’ve mentioned this idea in a few talks and a few rants but never get around to putting it on down on paper. It’s an idea which has come from working in arts, culture and heritage for about ten years now. It’s primarily an idea that comes out of frustration…

The urge to log off is the social media manager’s version of the call of the wild, or maybe the abyss. As the world pivoted to digital during the pandemic it only put more pressure on a workforce which has a low shelf-life to begin with and who spend their…

From The MERL to Tesla to the Royal Academy of Arts — To save you the effort, this will be the only thing I’ll say about Tesla: it’s full of intelligent people who’ll change the world, it was an opportunity I couldn’t refuse, and it was the right personal and professional decision to let them find someone else to achieve their vital…

Why did he become a sheep — Imagine: it’s 10pm, you’re in bed watching Game of Thrones, and multi-billionaire Elon Musk changes his profile picture to a sheep. Your sheep. It was in response to MIT Technology Review describing the largest plane in the world as an absolute unit. And when someone then dared him to…

I’m not even a Social Media Manager. I’ve talked in other blogs about what the hell happened with The MERL’s Twitter, what we think works and how we’ve built on previous projects to come up with The MERL’s tone and style. Because my 2018 has essentially been a year of stupid tweets, this blog is just a collection of my favourites. It was a lot of fun writing them and too much fun talking to followers off the back of them.

But it depends on your specific context and struggles — A thicc sheep and a chicken in trousers catapulted The Museum of English Rural Life to viral fame on Twitter in 2018. We’ve gone from 9.7K followers to 69K, from thousands to millions of engagements, featured in The Times and the Guardian and were followed by J.K. Rowling. And we…

Thoughts from Communicating the Museum: Chicago — The theme of Communicating The Museum in Chicago was ‘Dare to be Fun’. It reminds me of ‘say something funny’. They’re both commands which make you feel impotent, because fun and humour are organic things which cannot be forced. Instead, fun needs to be a fundamental part of your museum…

Thoughts from the Cardiff One By One Digital Literacy Lab — Each museum is going to have a reckoning with digital literacy. Unfortunately, this reckoning will not be in the face of a single violent event which can be tackled decisively. Instead, it will be a slow decline in relevance and sustainability that requires a strategic and thought-through remedy. If you’re…

In a further boost to Reading’s cultural renaissance, the Museum of English Rural Life and Reading Museum will be working together as Museums Partnership Reading until 2022. The partnership is funded by Arts Council England’s (ACE) National Portfolio Organisation scheme, and will see the two museums using £250,000 per year…