It seems that BIMA Scotland’s annual celebration of World Social Media Day guarantees the sunshine. Last year closed with cold beers and ice lollies at Frontpage and this year opened again in Edinburgh with the sun gently beating down on Whitespace, while over in Glasgow Hydrogen were launching a special session focussing on SME’s and basking in the same sunshine.
This year BIMA NW have joined us in the social celebrations and a quick check on my app tells me it is pretty fabulous weather there too.
Hydrogen will be reporting on the morning SME event and here is a quick round up of insights shared in Edinburgh.
Iain Valentine, Managing Partner, Whitespace was once again our master of ceremonies for the morning, which kicked off with Seonaid Heeps, Social Media Manager, Brand Scotland, talking us through the Brand Scotland journey on social. Asking the room what they thought came to people’s mind when asked about Scotland the resounding response was “whisky” but in fact from Brand Scotland’s polls no clear identity emerged.
Therefore, the task was to create an identity for Scotland, one based on Scotland being an innovative, competitive and inclusive nation. The challenge was to change the narrative and manage the balance of messaging between Scotland as a place to visit, study, live & work. The strategy was to develop both a proactive and reactive social media campaign, being there to engage to talk about Scotland when people are talking about Scotland.
Seonaid referenced the incredibly successful message of love to Europe campaign sent on the 29 March to counter the Brexit negativity. It reached 79m people and the video had 52m views. The tone and timing for this campaign was spot on.
Is it strategy as a whole working? With an average of 926 mentions a day for #ScotlandIsNow (nearly half being from outside the UK), Seonaid thinks signs are positive. But she concedes there is still a way to go.
Next up, Jamie McAdam, Strategist, Cello Signal who shared with us CelloSignal’s journey with Famous Grouse to transform their social media structure to go from UK to Global. Referencing his content vs frequency matrix the strategy was to create a new framework and build story telling around a hero-hub-help pyramid. Social listening found that people like to have a dram of whisky at the top of hill and this was used for the video campaign. This resonated. The campaign was a perfect bringing together of strong thought out strategy, detailed social listening and partnered with beautiful creative work. The number of global markets using assets increased by 150% and individual asset increased by 545%.
Next up we had Martin Jordan, Director of Innovation, Equator who was covering AI in social, everything from “powerful positives” to “nightmare negatives”. With a huge amount of content on social now written by AI this leads to efficiencies but also job destruction, we also need to consider what is authentic. Martin invoked a fake Obama video created in real time – it really does beg the question, how do we know what is real? With 5G coming we will all be capable of creating this level of content. Pretty much every example Martin alluded too had the potential to be equally negative ad positive. Are we heading in Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror? But AI learns from us so ultimately this is a human not a tech problem. We need to know what it is good for and how and when to keep it at bay. We must be the Robot Masters.
Last up were Nick Jedrzejewski, Communications Manager & Danya Mackenzie, Digital Marketing Officer, SeeMe explaining how they launched a new campaign to help people talk about their feelings on social. Nick and Dee explained only 26% of people tell someone if they are not coping. Music ranks third as the coping method for dealing with this stress. After surveying they also learnt that you do want to ask people to talk about their “mental health” online, ask them instead to talk about their feelings. The right language and music was integral to their campaign and they created the emoji jukebox, enabling people to match the music to the emoji best depicting how they felt. It has been incredibly successful. Danya and Nick shared many tips and steps with the audience which provided an excellent check list for building strong social conversations – whatever the topic.
There followed a lively Q&A including questions around what will be the next big thing? How do you deal with the ROI conversation? How do you facilitate negative conversations.
That was a wrap for the morning. A huge thank you to our speakers, to Iain for moderating and Jodie and the team at Whitespace for hosting.