The client
The Economist Live events are large scale, high visibility events positioned at the premium end of the international conference market. Gong works alongside the internal marketing team to develop best practice media and social media campaigns in support of the business objectives.
The Economist Emerging Markets Summit, (September 2010)
and the ##Innovation Awards and Summit, (October 2010). www.economistconferences.co.uk
Social Media Strategy
Our strategy recommended promoting the use of blogs, online opinion pieces, Twitter and LinkedIn by speakers and delegates at these events to complement a broadcast media strategy.
To make it easy for speakers and panellists to promote their own involvement in the event, we created a social media briefing sheet with researched examples of their peer group’s activity (for example, writing event reports for company blogs, ‘Tweeting’ or starting discussions on relevant LinkedIn groups).
To kick-start the activity, we also created many of the opportunities and matched these to the appropriate people, managing the entire process and drafting copy to build the case for the effectiveness of this comprehensive on and offline media strategy.
The Highlights
Gong built dedicated Twitter communities for each event by choosing relevant experts to follow, Tweeting interesting nuggets daily in the month prior to each event. The Innovation Twitter site (@Economist_Innov) grew from 100 followers to over 500 in the 3 week run up to the event. In addition to using Twitter to create targeted awareness and encourage ‘Retweeting’ of messages (where followers pass on Tweets to their own networks), we also used the channel to communicate with journalists (who prefer it to email) to pitch them story ideas and invite them to the events.
Twitter feeds have been incorporated into events now as standard on the day of each conference, informing the audience of the hashtag (eg: #ECEM) by projecting it onto screens and inviting questions, which are then put to the panel by the chair. The hashtag also means that any Tweets they originate can be monitored.
Innovation Award winners Huawei Technologies (@HuaweiPress) agreed to a ‘Twinterview’ where they answered questions posed via Twitter by The Economist’s online followers. The interview transcript was published on the Innovation web site.
Blogs
We secured opportunities for Innovation Award judges to contribute guest blog posts to Reuters ‘The Great Debate’ and CNN.com’s Business 360° blog.
Video
We arranged for The Economist’s chief forecaster and conference host to be videoed talking about the emerging markets and used this to generate broadcast media interest in the subject as well as placing the transcript on the UKTI’s web site.
We targeted the most relevant and popular specialist LinkedIn groups and developed comments for our spokespeople to post to generate discussions around the conferences.
Broadcast coverage which appeared on CNN was seeded on Facebook by those with an interest of Manchester United’s overseas strategy.