Each week I spend 10 minutes with someone from the cultural-sector-meets-digital and ask them about their career, opinions, and what’s on their radar.
This week I spoke with Adam Koszary, who went from writing sheep tweets at the Museum of English Rural Life to setting daily doodle challenges the Royal Academy of Arts.
Adam Koszary, Social Media & Editorial Content at the Royal Academy of Arts
There is no course out there for social media, but there are a lot of free resources to practice your creative skills.
☕ Tea or coffee?
I am currently having builder’s tea (I have a single coffee in the morning, I’m slightly addicted and don’t want to make it worse).
💼 About your career and where you are now: accidental or intentional?
A mixture of both: I wanted to work in a national museum in London, but how I pulled that off was semi accidental.
I came in at the bottom at The Museum of English Rural Life: I started as a Project Officer for a National Heritage Lottery Funded re-display of the museum, which then evolved to Project Manager, and there was a pattern of going from project funding pot to project funding pot. During my time there, my sheep tweets (along with other campaigns like the Absolute Unit, Chicken in Trousers and Museum Ducks) raised The MERL’s and my own personal profile. After that, I wasn’t afraid to apply to jobs in national museums (everyone shouldn’t be afraid to apply to national museums jobs either, don’t worry if you only match two thirds of the job description).
The accidental part comes from my brief job for Tesla (about 5 months) after I left The MERL: I had to turn the Royal Academy down to start at Tesla, but quickly realised it wasn’t for me. The Royal Academy actually took me back after I re-applied for the job there, which was a massive stroke of luck.
📚 Describe your current job
I am Social Media and Editorial Content Manager for the Royal Academy of Arts in London. That’s a mixture of day-to-day content and coordinating social media for the organisation, as well as setting up the strategy for our editorial content. I am part of a team which includes a website content manager, a head of content strategy, a part-time digital assistant and a couple vacant posts for video, website and social content.
🤩 What are you working on right now that you’re particularly enjoying?
The Royal Academy of Arts runs the Summer Exhibition every year, which is a beautiful thing because anyone can submit their artwork for it. The organisers this year and their vision for what they want to do with the Summer Exhibition is very exciting, and might involve commissioning many more outsider voices and bringing in different perspectives, different kinds of artists…
📣 What’s happening in the industry that’s on your radar?
TikTok! Social Media has settled a bit in the sense that everyone basically understands how the main ones work (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram), in that it’s a mixture of resources you can apply mixed with your imagination. TikTok is still the “Wild West” for a lot of people. What the Black Country Living Museum have been doing, as well as places like Carnegie Museum of Natural History, is absolutely fantastic. I’m aware it’s not a skillset I have (yet), and that we need new resources for that because it’s a new type of content for us.
📖 Anything you’d recommend to read/watch/listen to?
It’s not really culture-centric, but I’ve actually really enjoyed The Clone Wars (Star Wars cartoon), and I’m on the last season. In terms of reading, I’m still waiting to receive Dan Hicks’ The Brutish Museum in the post to start reading it.
💡 What advice would you give someone who would like to do what you do?
Always be working on your skills and creating things: there is no course out there for social media, but there are a lot of free resources to practice your graphic skills, photography and video skills, and particularly writing. It always helps for jobs when you can show that you have that kind of creativity, but it’s also not just for your CV, it’s for everything in your life.
Alix Geddes | DigitArt 