Our management of social media strategy, content, and creative helped our client, Mercer, to win every social category against its competitors at the 2018 World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. Mercer was recognized as the winner of best event promotion with PR Daily’s Digital PR & Social Media Award, and they won a Platinum MarCom Award for their 2018 Davos Squad campaign, the highest honor, in the category of best Twitter Engagement.
As the world’s largest human resources consulting firm in talent, health, retirement, and investments,Mercer is the best at what they do. They have HR covered, but they needed help with making their expertise know.
The Problem
Mercer’s goal was to increase their social presence and performance during WEF – and beyond – to make themselves #1 among their peer group and position the brand as an innovative, trusted industry leader. However, their social results from previous years were not what they expected. Their social media team lacked experience in planning and successfully managing a global social media campaign for a major event.
Large campaigns and event campaigns take time and involve a lot of planning. When we were approached, there were less than four months before the event, so planning time was very limited, and there wasn’t a budget to have a social team on site.
It was also challenging to get executive and marketing team buy-in. In addition, Mercer’s previous social media agency wasn’t able to deliver or prove results, so there was a level of skepticism from many departments in the organization. Employees who weren’t active on social media needed to be energized, ramped up, and trained quickly, not necessarily in that order.
The Prospect
Tamara McCleary, our CEO, first caught Mercer’s attention due to her exceptional Thought Leadership and performance on her social media channels on a personal level and as an influencer at events for other companies such as IBM, DELL EMC, SAP.
When Mercer looked closer, they realized it would be a great idea to partner with Thulium because of our proven track record of driving exceptional event campaign results. After all, similar work we did for Verizon Enterprise events resulted in outstanding engagement, channel performance, and Share of Voice (SOV).
The Plan
We helped by creating and implementing a social media strategy along with managing l Mercer’s global social feeds leading up to and during the event (around the clock), assigning dedicated team members (on both our team and Mercer’s) to manage channels and provide engagement during the event for 24/7 coverage in all time zones.
We created custom images, messaging, a hashtag strategy, a cadence for publishing and real-time engagement (all while working remotely off-site). We produced daily event recap Q&A videos between Tamara and Mercer’s Global CMO and provided event reporting (daily, week-over-week, and a year-over-year comparison).
The open and ongoing communication we encouraged helped both teams and their executives gel. Thulium engaged and excited both leadership and employees to participate in social media conversations leading up to and during the event on the hashtag #DavosSquad.
We were also able to leverage Tamara’s influence to further amplify the conversation to her network and reach.
Most importantly, we held true to project timelines and deliverables, doing whatever it took through long hours and multiple rounds of revisions to prove our dedication to Mercer’s success.
The Payoff
Simply, Mercer has improved exponentially across all social metrics. In the course of just 13 months, Thulium has helped Mercer take their social media strategy to the next level by:
- Building a data-informed approach to campaigns
- Activating Mercer colleagues through advocacy
- Initiating first steps in establishing a strong external community across all social platforms
- Growth in brand awareness, thought leadership reach, demand generation and ultimately, revenue
- Realigned approach to content and channel management
- Launching the start of Mercer’s employee advocacy and influencer programs.
- Significant and quantifiable increases in revenue, share of voice, audience growth, and overall brand awareness.
The Promotion
Do you want these kinds of results? To see how Thulium and its team of influencers and planners can up your organization’s social game contact us now.