Hello and welcome to the Digital Snapshot, bringing you all the latest digital news, inspiration, tips and guidance for the arts, culture, museums and heritage world.
Season's greetings! As this will be the last Snapshot of 2024, I wanted to take the opportunity to wish you a happy New Year and to say that I hope you enjoy the festive break. It's always a pleasure putting these together, sharing all of the exciting and excellent work of the people working in this wonderful arts and culture sector. So here's to 2024 and to the year to come.
And finally, if you're stuck for what to ask Mr Clause to get you for Christmas this year, how about a Let's Get Real conference ticket?
Latest news 📰
- There's still time to book your Let's Get Real conference tickets before the Christmas break and maybe even snap up a cheaper deal, with Early Bird Special Tickets on sale until 31 December.
- There has been a mass exodus from Twitter over the last few months, most recently including The Guardian. My thoughts around leaving or staying on any platform are always the same. Is your audience still there? Does the platform align with your and your organisation's values? Is your content achieving your measures of success? Is your time better spent elsewhere? If you need help tackling those questions, do get in touch.
- And just in case you're stockpiling reasons to leave Twitter, they will now be using your Tweets to help train their AI. You can opt out, for now.
- Google has been advised to sell Chrome by the US Department of Justice. It's in an effort to end their monopoly. Will it happen? Maybe but probably not.
Useful / shareable 🤓
- Ofcom have published their 2024 Online Nation report. Lots of interesting (and mostly unsurprising) findings in it, from the dominance of YouTube and Meta to the necessity of TikTok for engaging younger audiences.
- Is Bluesky a viable alternative to Twitter? The same questions outlined in my top bullet point still apply.
- Here's a new report on unlocking the potential of digital collections, which presents the policy recommendations of Towards a National Collection.
- Some useful research from Storythings, back in July, looking into B2B content and their finding that '78% of your audience is bored by your content'.
- Here are some useful insights from One Further's recent 'Discovering Online Collections' report.
Distracting / entertaining / inspiring 💥
- The National Gallery, in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture, have launched 'Mixtape' which lets you create a personalised soundtrack inspired by the paintings at the Gallery with the help of Google AI.
- This is a great think piece by Ash Mann, looking at content expertise and a lack of user-centred thinking within digital engagement practices in the cultural sector.
- The Digital Culture Network has just launched a new podcast. The first episode is on social media, including a summary of the support available for professionals in the sector, changes in socials over the last 12 months and some top tips!
- Have shared a fair bit of Trish Thomas' long-form LinkedIn posts in this newsletter (for good reason, because they're great) so here's another! 'What do atoms, molecules and Anthony Joshua have to do with long tail SEO strategy?'.
Something good 👍
- When I was at the AMA's Digital Marketing Day the other week, Pheobi from OutdoorArtsUK recommended that I watch '24 hours in Aldi', which I did. It was super interesting, particularly the parts around marketing / brand and how they get away with ripping off IP all over the place (poor Colin the Caterpillar). It's on Netflix.
And that’s all for this edition.
Don't forget we're here to support you with training, research and consultancy, so please do get in touch.
You can find all past editions of the Digital Snapshot here.
