ideas about communication
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A couple of months or so before the current Museum and Library cuts in the US kicked in, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by my friend and former collaborator Justin Hoenke for Information Today. I enjoyed the questions and the extremely kind write-up - thank you Justin! You can download the interview here [PDF].
We talk about my job, writing a book, running training and workshops, and amazing library experiences that stay with you.
I found out yesterday that the Special Libraries Association is dissolving, citing "shifting industry dynamics, changing professional needs, and financial realities." I've always found the SLA to be an engaged, supporting, uplifting organisation and I'll be really sad to see it go.
I was involved in the SLA Leadership & Management division, and SLA Europe, for several years in the 2010s, serving on a couple of committees and attending / presenting at events. It started with winning one of the 2011 Early Career Conference Awards - I know a whole cluster of people who won an ECCA in that era and we all talk about in the same tones of mild wonder...
The prize is an all expenses paid trip to the SLA Annual Conference in North America - to attend any event as a new professional is great, but for those of us in the UK the scale of US library conferences is just epic, which added another layer of excitement.
There were 3,500 people at SLA2011 in Philadelphia, and there were so many highlights for me. The conference venue was bigger than most airports I've been in. There were usually 5 or 6 sessions of interest running simultaneously. Being in a gang with the other three ECCA winners (Samuel Wiggins, Natalia Madjarevic + Chris Cooper) who were affiliated with different divisions was such a lot of fun: the pic in the header of this blogpost is taken from a visit to the ‘Rocky montage steps’ with them all. I saw a Mary Ellen Bates presentation I still cite a line from in my marketing workshops to this day...
The thing that really struck me though was how welcoming everyone was, and how they treated us all as equals. I was in the Leadership & Management Division, but I was 5 years into librarianship and was neither a leader nor a manager. All these high-powered boss level librarians simply treated me like one of their own, and my mentor Dee Magnoni was just so, so encouraging. It's such a big deal when you're young and new to the profession to have senior people believe in you.
The whole conference, and the SLA and SLA-Europe in general, were incredibly energising and felt like a real privilege to be a part of. I had to pull out of doing a TED-talk style presentation as part of the closing session at SLA2014 in Vancouver because my daughter was ill, and I wish I'd been able to take that opportunity, not least just to get to another SLA conference!
Sincere thanks to all the SLAers I've met along the way (loads of whom I'm glad to say I'm still in touch with), and I hope the community can continue or be reinvented elsewhere.
I had one of my favourite professional conversations ever the other day, and as it happens it was recorded! I was honoured to be a guest on the Keeper & Curator podcast, run by my colleagues at York Helena Cox and Gary Brannan, which despite being new has already been fantastically successful (number 1 in the Visual Arts UK podcast chart, wooop). I’ve loved long-form conversation podcasts for so long, so to be actually in one and have a really great discussion was properly fun. We talked a lot about social media, about what works and what doesn’t, about exploring art abroad, and about the University of York’s sculpture trail.
I know it’s a big swing to expect anyone reading this to want to listen to me on a podcast about Art, so I thought I’d provide some shownotes with time-codes that tell you what we talk about and when, in case any of it is of interest or relevance to you. A large portion of the chat is relevant to anyone interested in using social media to engage audiences, across libraries, HE, and the Arts more generally.
First things first, you can find the episode Social Media and Unfinished Business here on Spotify, or you can find it on Apple Podcasts if you prefer, and probably a bunch of other places besides. Here’s the Apple version embedded:
The welcomes and hellos happen in this bit.
We recorded in the Library’s Podcast Studio - it’s one of our most popular services and I’ve spent some time marketing it, but never used it before. It was pretty nice, extremely high quality mics where you feel like you can hear the blood in your veins they’re so sensitive… Here we all are, in a post-record selfie.
From left-to-right: Gary (the Keeper), me (the guest), and Helena (the Curator)
In this section we talk a little about the personality-driven social media that Helena does via the Art@York profiles, which I think is absolutely brilliant. You can find Art@York on Facebook here (the former Library account, as you’ll hear if you listen to this bit!), or Art@York on Insta here, or Art@York on Bluesky here.
We talk a lot about why art collections work on Instagram etc, and I found it really interesting to explore this. I do think the overwhelming availability of everything means curation of any kind is more important than ever, and I do think we’ve all become so good at using imagery in our social media that it just becomes white noise - so meaningful imagery on social media really makes a difference.
An interesting question from Gary prompts a discussion about whether social media can be taught. It absolutely can be (please get in touch and book a workshop!) but certain approaches do rely on an intuitive grasp. Either way though, putting personality into your comms is what builds relationship and engagement - if it’s fully corporate, people just do not respond.
I have over time become massively against using for example AI-generated imagery on professional social media, and this section covers why. You basically alienate a large part of your potential audience if you continue to use AI slop.
One of the traps institutions often fall into when doing social media is treating all the platforms the same, and cross-posting content. I get why this happens, with time-pressures being primarily to blame, but the issue is that the platforms work completely differently, and have quite different demographics.
The Queen Mother, by Peter Walbourn
I hail from generations of artists, and I cannot draw a line or a circle or indeed absolutely anything at all, with any skill. My Mum is an incredible artist (our house is filled with things she’s made for us) and so was her Dad, Peter Walbourn. He once painted the Queen Mum and was struggling to get the detail of her brooch down in time for the end of the sitting. Why don’t you take it home with you, Her Maj suggested! Is it insured, my Grandpa asked? Oh, we couldn’t possibly afford to insure it, she replied… (He took it home anyway and my Gran slept with it under her pillow to keep it safe.)
My Great Grandfather was the painter Ernest Walbourn, and we discuss the many unfinished paintings of his we have in our house during this section of the podcast. Here’s the main himself at work - one of the things I like about this picture is he’s literally doing the thing we discuss in the episode: 70% of the painting is done to completion, but the sky is entirely untouched, a literal blank canvas.
Ernest Walbourn at work, probably in the early 1920s
The other part of Ernest lineage which did NOT reach me is sporting prowess: he was in fact invited to join the Olympic shooting team, and my parents have a letter from an Olympic committee member reassuring colleagues that Ernest was a gentleman, despite being an artist…
In particular we talk about one painting on my wall, of a tree, unfinished, which I absolutely loved Helena’s expert take on. Here’s the pic.
The unfinished tree painting, left
After listening to the podcast my Mum got in touch to say this was the very tree under which my grandparents got engaged! Lovely stuff.
If you only take one thing… Steal my Te Papa techniques as described in this section! Some more on the New Zealand Lianza experience, including images of the museum in its glorious emptyness, here. Plus more on the Latvian children’s art / library strategy here.
We also discuss UX methodologies, and the benefits of having a curated art collection on campus.
I insisted they ask me this question - what is my favourite art on campus? I talked about two pieces. First of all Beyond and Within by Joanna Mowbray.
Pic via the Art@York - click to see the original on Facebook
The piece I picked as my favourite was the Singing Stone by Gordon Young. I mentioned in the podcast the Alumni post on Insta of Helena describing the piece, and the YouTube shorts version is embedded below:
If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading! I absolutely loved being on the podcast, so thank you Helena and Gary for having me.
When we’re presenting we can easily get caught up in worrying about what we shouldn’t be doing. That white noise of ‘I’m doing X too much’ or ‘I’m pretty sure I read that Y is bad’ gets in the way of our ability to relax, find our words and communicate. And in fact a quick Google tells us there are loads of posts from presentation skills / public speaking experts, warning us how important it is not to use ‘fillers’.
A small selection of articles on the evils of fillers
Filler words - um, erm, like, sort-of, basically - are all words we use often in conversation, but we worry about using them when presenting at an event, addressing a meeting or doing any other sort of public speaking. The interesting thing (to me!) is that filler words are not all bad, and I disagree with the perceived wisdom here.
I believe that outside of the ‘corporate pitch’ world a lot of public speaking advice seems to centre on, it is actually possible to be TOO slick as a presenter. Rough edges have their merits. We don’t want to sound polished to the point of being corporate or blandly robotic, and fillers can make us sound more human - but the key thing is, some of them are more problematic than others. I divide filler words into two groups: sounds, and meanings.
Sounds (um, ah, er, erm etc) serve two important purposes when we're presenting:
they give us time to gather our thoughts and construct the next part of our sentence into articulate prose
they signal to the listener that the current thought is still in progress and there's more to come
In conversation, these sounds prevent interruptions, and in presentations, they help keep the audience and speaker in sync - this is no small thing. If you find yourself umming and ahing don't worry too much about it! There's value to it, as long as it's not happening several times a sentence.
Words & phrases such as 'like', 'sort of', and 'basically' are more concerning because they convey specific concepts, which subtly weaken our message.
'like' and 'sort' of make statements sound uncertain
overusing 'basically' can make everything seem overly simplified or reductive
while 'you know what I mean' can be genuinely useful for encouraging the audience to reflect and look for more nuance in whatever you just said, 'you know' loses any value when overused.
The best way to identify your own filler words is to record yourself public speaking. I use the voice-record feature on my phone to record my conference presentation: I give myself a complete free pass at the time (no self-critiquing during the talk!), and listen back to it on the way home from the event to find ways to improve. You quickly find out which fillers you overuse, and then can work out whether they're relatively harmless 'sounds' words, or potentially undermining 'meaning' words...
There's also some fascinating research on the role body language plays in all this, which deserves a whole future post of its own - I’ve got lost down a bit of a rabbit-hole reading up on this! So for now I'll just address a question I often get asked in Presentation Skills workshops: is it okay if I gesture a lot? And the answer is yes: gesturing is a good thing! If you need to wave your arms about, wave your arms about. It helps you form thoughts and can help the audience interpret your words correctly.
That being said, body-language isn't nearly as important as is often believed. Please be reassured that the idea that '90% of communication is non-verbal' is a complete myth, based on misinterpretations of a 1960s study.
It's your words that really matter.
I organised a video creating / editing workshop for my team this week, delivered by my excellent colleagues Sam Hazeldine and Siobhan Dunlop who run sessions in our Creativity Lab. One of the standout pieces of advice they shared was this: if your subject is moving, keep the camera still. If your subject is stationary, move the camera.
I realise while I tend to follow this principle instinctively, I’d never articulated it or heard it expressed so clearly before—and it’s brilliant advice. Simple, but incredibly effective. They also shared a few other tips I often include in my own workshops on video marketing, which got me thinking: are there universal tips for shooting and editing videos, regardless of format or platform? Creating a YouTube video is vastly different from making vertical content for Instagram or TikTok, yet some principles apply across the board. Here’s a brief list of those tips—feel free to add your own in the comments.
Whatever phone you’ve got is good enough quality to shoot good video. You don’t need specialist equipment. But the most common reason videos don’t work is poor sound - in short if you don’t have an external microphone, make sure whoever is speaking is close to the phone, or the audio will simply be too quiet. As a bonus, close-shot interviews or talking heads are a good thing anyway, because you can clearly see the subject when you’re watching it on a phone - and the vast majority of your views will be on mobile devices, so do keep that in mind while shooting.
If you’re recording a voice-over in your own kitchen and it sounds echoey, put a duvet over your head. You can also add compression in Audacity (it’s free, open-source and easy to use) which helps by reducing the distance between your quietest and loudest words. If you work in a large organisation, check if your AV department has radio mics you can borrow for recording multiple speakers or capturing voices from farther away.
If you’re making a video with a voice-over, trust me; it’s easier this way around. It’s not really acceptable to speak really fast to fit more in, or add superfluous narration to slow things down, to match the visuals - record the audio first (again I like to use Audacity) and then fit the video to that.
This links directly to the above. Not having enough video to fit the audio is a nightmare - you end up using slow-motion or repeating shots, which reduces the impact of the video. Recording a few extra seconds before and after each scene, and filming additional “b-roll” (background footage of the setting or activity) will allow you to fill any gaps later. Future-you will thank you during the editing process.
This is one of the best pieces of advice Sam and Siobhan shared, and yet it’s something I still forget to do. Adding a pause at the start and end of a clip prevents abrupt transitions: while a sense of urgency is good, pauses allow viewers to process what they’ve just watched. This is especially important if you (or your subject) need to retake a line—leave a pause before resuming. Without it, you’ll end up editing around moments where someone launches into their line right after laughing or apologising for a mistake. It causes such a headache. And talking of the edit…
The subject of whether to make videos horizontal (YouTube, Facebook) or vertical (Insta, TikTok) is too complicated to explore in detail in this post, but suffice to say sometimes you’ll want a multipurpose video that can be edited and posted to both old-school and new-school video platforms.
If you need a multipurpose video, always shoot landscape. Cropping landscape footage to portrait is manageable as long as the subject stays centered. However, editing a vertical video to work in landscape is next to impossible.
Here’s an example of a video I shot multipurpose: the YouTube version is the ‘official’ virtual tour we have embedded on our website:
…but of course Instagram is where the real reach is, so here’s the vertical version which has 14k more views:
Editing video is often a long and finicky process, and you end up seeing your film so many times you become too close to it. As the editor, you’ll naturally read on-screen text faster than your audience, who are seeing it for the first time. Let text linger longer than you think is necessary. This gives viewers enough time to read and process it.
If possible, show your video to someone else before posting—they don’t need to be a video expert to provide helpful feedback on pacing, text timing, and audio clarity.
Almost every great video is simple. Video editors allow you to do all kinds of fancy stuff, and it is essential you resist temptation here… Those transitions between sections where the picture falls over backwards or rotates or folds up and flys off? They have novelty value, but NO OTHER VALUE! Your audience are not helped by these gimmicks.
In fact, most of the tools and techniques available in video editors shouldn't be used in a typical video. They just get in the way, and the clutter detracts from the story and the message. If you’re going to use animations or visual effects, do so with intent - in other words because they serve the intended audience.
Finally, remember that video isn’t always the right medium! This is easy to forget because we live in the age of video content, but sometimes a piece of explanatory text on a website, or a caption on an Insta photo, can be more useful for users - as always with any kind of marketing, put yourself in your users’ shoes and ask what you’d find easiest…
If you’d like to book a video marketing course for your organisation, get in touch!
