5 Principles for Owning Social Share-of-Voice at an Event

This post was originally published on Ogilvy.com.

Whatever your business, there’s an event or conference each year that everyone has circled on the calendar. SXSW, Disrupt, Mobile World Congress, ComicCon — industry happenings like these have grown from niche networking events to massive global media circuses.

As a brand, it’s not enough to just show up at an industry conference or event. Being on the ground is great, but the audience for industry events has grown to include those from around the world, following from afar. For a brand or influencer, winning social share-of-voice at an event, conference, etc. has become an imperative.

For the advertising industry, Cannes Lions is our Academy Awards and World Cup all rolled into one. It’s grown from an awards show to a full-out trade show/conference that attracts the biggest names in marketing, entertainment, technology and more. This isn’t necessarily breaking news for people who have been attending for years.

For six years in a row, Ogilvy has dominated social share-of-voice at #CannesLions. We use Cannes as our testing ground for new social offerings and proprietary tools that then get rolled out to clients. Unlike the previous five iterations, this year the Ogilvy social team handled Cannes remote in real-time from New York, which meant we needed to listen deeper and move even faster in real-time. Thankfully, over years of covering Cannes and other events and working with clients in their social efforts, we’ve developed a number of strategies and guidelines to own share-of-voice.

Regardless of what industry you’re in and what event you’re attending, you too can dominate the social conversation. Here are five things you should know about how Ogilvy owned #CannesLions on social, and the takeaways you can apply from our success to own your next big event on social.

1. Influencers are right under your nose. You can either pay influencers, pray for their organic involvement, or you can take control and create your own influencers. It’s not a new tactic, but making your executives your brand influencers is a powerful tool. Like everything in life, making an executive into an influential voice on social doesn’t happen overnight. So make sure to plan ahead—if you’re trying to turn an executive into an influencer just weeks before a big event, you’re too late.

2. Always-on community building: 365 days, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Community building and scaling an event is similar to a heavy-weight boxing fight. Building the community, whether it be on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, is the ‘training.’ The event is the ‘fight.’ If you don’t train for the fight and make it your life, there’s a high probability that you’ll find yourself down for the count. Every meal matters. Comparably speaking, every social notification matters, too. The training is just as important as the fight itself.

3. Plan to toss out some of your plans. Having a social plan for an event—from content strategy to a paid strategy—is key. However, we all know that things in social don’t always go according to plan, even if you run different patterns of behavior of your audience. It takes strategic courage to deviate. This is crucial with paid social dollars. Every piece of content is not equal, but it’s the audience that decides which piece(s) are superior.

4. Shares and retweets are the North Star. Shares and retweets may not be a true KPI, however, they’re among the most critical diagnostic metrics in achieving share-of-voice success. At Ogilvy, we built a proprietary platform called SCALE that optimizes paid social performance by analyzing the depth of each earned and paid share. When assessing your top performing content, weigh shares and retweets more than ER%.

5. Don’t play Roulette with your content and paid social budget, be a venture capitalist. Think of using your paid social budget like a venture capitalist. You spread a little seed money into all of your investments—in this case your content—you see which ones get results, and then you add more capital to the ones that are working and concentrate on the successful outliers. And, of course, discontinue the ones that aren’t performing.

Additional notes highlighting how Ogilvy achieved top share-of-voice:

#OgilvyCannes was the most used hashtag outside of the official #CannesLions hashtag. 

Looking at the North Star—retweets:

1. Four days before #CannesLions, Ogilvy began its 'content pre-game' by publishing tweets around previous Cannes Lions award-winning work that had a proven track-record for resonating and earning high engagement on social. The two tweets below, which were Threaded together on Twitter, highlights our LEGO client work from Ogilvy Bangkok. The first tweet in the Threaded series of tweets earned 1,010 retweets. The second tweet in the Threaded series earned over 2,350 retweets. Both tweets helped build strong momentum going into #CannesLions.

Caution: Pre-event content does not always perform great prior to an event and your paid social can easily get wasted. Be very cautious with how much of your paid social budget and design + copywriting time is allocated to the pre-event portion of your content calendar.

2. The most retweeted brand tweet compared to all tweets using hashtag #CannesLions during the event was Ogilvy's tweet about our client work from Ogilvy Hong Kong for KFC. The tweet earned over 10,500 retweets. 

3. The second most retweeted brand tweet compared to all tweets using hashtag #CannesLions during the event was Ogilvy's tweet about our client work from Ogilvy Bangkok for LEGO. The tweet earned over 3,300 retweets. 

4. The following tweet did not make the top ten most retweeted tweet list, however, it's worth sharing for two reasons: 1. The tweet earned 920 retweets and wasn't a top performing tweet; this in part displays the amount of engagement that tweets were receiving from all participants during #CannesLions. 2. People engage with social content that they find valuable. Value can be found in content that provides entertainment, information, etc. Bringing value to one's life is key for engagement. This isn't a new principle. It is one that needs to be said over and over to ensure it's baked into all strategies. 

Other tweets and posts worth highlighting that played a role in Ogilvy's #CannesLions success:

1. Each diagnostic metric (e.g., retweets, replies, etc.) was hyper-optimized against during #CannesLions depending on the purpose of the tweet. Our emoji poll tweets performed quite well when comparing to some other best-in-class poll tweets (based on a post from HubSpot). 

2. Celebrity, entrepreneur, and marketer, will.i.am, talks about our Co-Chief Creative Officer of Ogilvy USA, Joe Sciarrotta: 

3. Ogilvy's #WomenOfCannes hashtag content series was the most used hashtag around gender inequality during #CannesLions. The #WomenOfCannes content featured quotes from over 40 different women speakers at Cannes. Examples of those tweets are shown below.