Category: Insights

It’s not just the TV and film industry that has been impacted by lockdown putting a pause on filming. Capturing content for corporate and social media has also been put on hold. Whilst there’s light at the end of the tunnel in terms of being able to resume filming, DTW Director Pete Whelan looks at some of the ways you can keep your content fresh in the meantime.

The world changed overnight when the lockdown was announced. In terms of communications, one of the biggest areas of impact was filming. We just had to stop overnight.

Even as we start to emerge from lockdown, challenges around filming aren’t going to disappear completely. We will need to take account of things like social distancing in everything we do.

As lockdown eases we’re making plans for filming over the summer months, but in the meantime, we haven’t stopped ‘doing stuff’. Here are just a few ways you can keep creating fresh content for your channels:

Mine the archives

If you’ve got old film on file, repost things which have worked well for you in the past. Don’t over-churn content and remember that videos you have posted previously may have a shorter shelf-life now than they did when they were fresh.

If you still have access to your raw files and footage for film content you created, consider creating new cuts from it. You can update things like graphics, colour grade and music to give this old content a fresh feel.

Don’t be afraid to self-shoot

Lockdown has resulted in is audiences being much more receptive to content being created in a “user-generated” style. Don’t be afraid to have a go at filming your own videos using a smartphone. It won’t be Academy award-winning production values, but sometimes speed is more important.

By investing in a couple of simple tools such as a tripod, microphone and it’s possible to capture a range of shots which you can turn into useable content for your channels.

You can edit this yourself using smartphone apps like Adobe Premier Rush, or have it edited professionally (as we have done for a number of our clients) to add extra polish to the end product.

Switch to animation

Animation and motion graphics can work just as well as film – sometimes even better. It also has the advantage of being an approach that can be delivered entirely remotely.

Since the start of lockdown, we’ve produced a range of animations for our clients, many of which were originally planned as film projects.

Animation also has the advantage of being flexible and easy to update. This will be increasingly important as we move beyond lockdown and into the world of living with Covid-19.

Pause and re-evaluate

Of course, in addition to the above, you can also use the pause in filming to take stock and put plans in place for the future.

The content plans and strategies you had in place prior to lockdown might need to be reviewed and updated. If that’s the case you can take a look at our recent post on this very topic.

We’re already planning for our filming schedule starting up again in July – all with appropriate social distancing and disinfection protocols in place – and we’re very much looking forward to getting back out and hitting record on some great content for our clients!

Covid-19 has changed the way businesses and organisations position and market themselves. DTW Strategist Hannah Cheetham takes time to draw breath and consider how organisations need to re-focus social media in a Covid-19 world.

The social media world was turned upside down by Covid-19. The landscape changed overnight and content that was appropriate suddenly became redundant and out of date.

When Covid-19 began to emerge as an issue in the UK during February and March, we reacted quickly for our clients to review plans and strategies. In many cases this meant quickly pivoting to remove or replace content and tailor messaging.

For clients like the Law Society, we re-planned the list of topics we were covering for our weekly Twitter chat, SolicitorChat, and developed new graphics focussed on Covid-19. For others, such as Road Safety GB North East, we updated our content schedule to focus messaging on the increased number of pedestrians and cyclists using the roads.

As we look ahead to the next 12-18 months it’s important to move beyond the react and pivot stage. Plans need to be made for the “new normal” where social and digital media will play an increasingly important role in communications.

If you’re wondering where to start with dealing with all of this, here are our top five tips for getting your digital and social strategy right in the new post-lockdown world:

1. Be clear on your goals

Before you start out, it’s critical you know what you’re setting out to achieve. Targets, goals and KPIs that you have set previously may no longer be relevant or may require revising. Depending on what your approach to digital and social has been over the last 10 weeks, take a look at the data and analytics you have available to help inform this process.

2. Know your audience

When was the last time you took the pulse of your audience’s online activity? Covid-19 has changed the way that people use and interact with their peers and brands online and what you knew in January could have changed massively now. Tools such as Sprout Social’s listening platform (paid) and Answer the Public (offers free and paid options) are great for getting snapshots of online behaviours which you can feed into your plans.

3. Be timely and be relevant

This was always important but is even more so now. Consider things like greater use of long form content such as featured articles and blogs which provide your audience with a more detailed insight into the topics you’re communicating than you might have done in the past. We’re all spending more time online now and as a result are more likely to engage with this detailed content.

4. Stop, evaluate and listen

Things are changing constantly, so consider breaking your campaign or activity into phased bursts with pauses built in to review what is working (and what isn’t). This allows you to tweak and amend your approach to take into account what’s generating the best results and any changes in the wider world which may have an impact on your work.

5. Don’t be afraid to be bold

We’ve already seen a number of big brands successfully change their approach to social and digital as a result of Covid-19. If the data and insights back up the idea of ripping up your carefully thought out plans from earlier in the year and setting out in a new direction, don’t be afraid to do this!

What’s certain, in addition to the above, is that things will continue to change and develop as we adapt to new ways of living and working – and I think that digital and social media will be right at the centre of this.

Thanks for reading.

Hannah

Filming – that’s easy these days – you just get the iPhone out and start recording, no need to plan anything. Not true…..

Whilst it’s tempting to think that capturing a long-term project on film is a case of just getting on with it, taking that approach could result in you running into headaches and problems as you get further down the line.

Having worked on a number of long-term filming projects for our clients, I thought it would be useful to share some of the key considerations we think about on day one.

Plan ahead

Planning is the key to any successful project, and this is especially true of film. Think about not only what you want to produce now, but also what you might want to produce in future and why it’s needed. Ensure that you factor your future content requirements into things like the questions you ask in interviews, the illustrative footage you capture and the points in time that you decide to film things.

When working with clients like the Law Society, we regularly capture a range of content in interviews that we can go back and reuse/repurpose for many months (or even years in some cases).

Having a robust structure in place so you can easily dip into your archive of footage to quickly access a specific series of shots or an interview on a particular topic will be a huge save on time and resources, especially in the case of large projects where you might have hours and hours of interview content on file.

This doesn’t have to be laborious – for some projects, it’s simply a case of setting up and organising your footage by date so that you can cross-reference with a document outlining who/what was filmed on a particular day. In other cases, it might involve taking advantage of advances in technology such as AI-based tools which can transcribe interviews and even recognise objects and context in illustrative footage to give you a searchable archive of your material.

This also extends to having a plan in place to backup and archive your content securely so that, in the case of the unthinkable happening and a hard drive failing, you’ve always got another copy of the files saved somewhere safely.

For our work on the Northern Spire project we took the approach of organising all of our footage into a series of projects based around the key milestones of the bridge’s construction, and then further organised by date, time and camera/footage type (as we were using a mix of ground-based and drone cameras). This meant that when it came to editing the Story of the Project video to wrap up and summarise the entire construction of the bridge from start to finish, we could quickly and efficiently find the specific interview quote or stunning drone shot we needed.

NORTHERN SPIRE | HOW THE BRIDGE CAME TO LIFE

Don’t forget about your audience

Often, the temptation when you have a mountain of fantastic content at your fingertips is to dive in and mine it for all its worth, producing and releasing tens or in some cases hundreds of outputs in one hit – it’s something we have all been guilty of at one time or another in the past.

The key question to remember – and this goes back to my first point about planning – is what you want to communicate to your audience and what action you want them to take as a result of that. Based on that, you map out what your content strategy is and how many outputs you need. This might involve producing the same 60 second video for use across multiple platforms or could take a bespoke approach with specific edits produced on a platform by platform basis.

You might just need one really good piece of film to make an impact – don’t over complicate the process or lose sight of the messaging and purpose by switching focus on too many different outputs.

For our work with the Solicitors Regulation Authority on their campaign to launch their new Clickable Logo, we produced specific pieces of animated content for each of the channels we were using as part of the campaign based on a single core narrative – you can see some examples of these below.

Of course, each individual project will have its own quirks and idiosyncrasies which is why working with a supplier who is used to planning ahead and spotting issues before they become a problem is so important. If you want to find out more about how DTW can help you plan and deliver your next film project, whether it be long or short term, drop me an email at pete@dtw.co.uk.

Today’s announcement that Ofcom will have more powers to force social media firms to act over harmful content is no surprise, but what does it mean in reality in terms of social media regulation?

DTW Director Pete Whelan takes a look at the new proposal and gives four top tips for harassed and harangued social media managers in the brave new world.

1) We’re already responsible for our content

Say a million content creators throughout the UK are reading the news today! Of course, no-one managing any social channels spends any time checking and re-checking their content and carefully crafting posts to make sure they’re on message and don’t have any unfortunate typos…

The reality is that the Ofcom proposal is grabbing the headlines. However, it is likely to have much more impact on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat than any of us responsible content creators. That said, it’s a great time to review social media regulation and what we’re doing to make sure we are absolutely bang on.

• Be clear in your objectives
• Understand your audiences
• Create some great and relevant content
• Speak like a human
• Evaluate and do more of what works!

2) Regulation isn’t new – take a look at the Advertising Standards Authority code

The Advertising Standards Authority’s CAP Code has covered social media content in the UK since 2011.

Yes – that does include organic content posted on your own channels – not just ad campaigns. The ASA can and does rule about the appropriateness of organic content.

Still not sure? Try this quote for size – “marketers should be aware that any content that bears a relationship to the products or services they offer has the potential to be considered directly connected and therefore within the ASA’s remit.”

You can read all about the ASA’s remit on social media in its handily new updated guide.

3) The big social networks will continue to tighten up the rules

There are already things that social networks are doing to better police content.

For example, Facebook has cracked down a lot on the use of clickbait headlines in the last 12 months. You need to factor this into your strategy and make sure you’re playing to the ever-changing whims of each individual network to get the best audience engagement.

4) So what’s next?

The biggest point for me on this is how will Ofcom, as a regulator, communicate the work it is doing to its stakeholders and ensure that the public, in particular, understands its remit.

This is going to be particularly challenging given the global nature of social media. We know from our work with clients like the FCA and the SRA where we helped them with communicating complex UK only issues such as regulatory changes that this can be achieved successfully, but the work plan for this will need to start now in order for it to be a success. Get in touch with our team today if you’d like to learn more about the work we undertake daily on this topic.

Thanks for reading

Pete

Developing an effective crisis communications strategy

With today’s 24-hour news cycle, it’s now even more important to be on the ball when responding to a crisis. It’s therefore important that you have an effective crisis communications strategy.

With this in mind, I headed to Newcastle for a CIPR training session last week.

The workshop saw comms professionals from across the North East tackle a hypothetical crisis. Using listening skills, concise writing and a whole lot of empathy, we can make a huge difference.

Here are the five key points I took away from the session when thinking about developing an effective crisis communications strategy:

1. You already know what your crisis could be, so why not prepare the response?

While ‘crisis’ suggests ‘unexpected’, good comms pros will be able to predict what their crises may be.

If you work in the food industry, your greatest fear could be a customer suffering an allergic reaction to one of your products.

If you work for an international airline, the worst-case scenario is obviously a fatal incident involving passengers and aircrew.

A crisis will never develop in the way you thought, so you can never completely prepare. Yet, you can consider the risks, your immediate responses and your tone of voice.

Having a strategy for how you respond will enable you to get the wheels in motion when the time comes.

Practice makes perfect – so by running through a variety of scenarios, it will help should you face a real-life crisis.

2. Don’t hide something that you know to be true

While most of us know that denial is a sure way to double (or triple!) the size of a crisis, too many organisations still instinctively want to try and hide something for as long as possible.

This should never be accepted as the route out of a crisis.

As communication professionals, we need to know everything from the outset – warts and all. We can only advise and protect an organisation if we know the true extent and scale of the issue.

Be honest from the start as lies and deceit will only come back to bite you.

3. Only comment on the facts

Social media is a hive of gossip and misinformation at the best of times, but when a crisis breaks, the rumour mill goes into overdrive.

Fires can become explosions, illnesses can become pandemics and arguments can become full-blown wars.

Remember, if it’s your crisis, people will be looking at you for the true facts of the situation. Take ownership and take control. If you don’t know if something is true, then don’t mention it.

4. Make sure your statements and actions are consistent

You’ve got your statement written. It’s as good as it can be; proactive and reassuring. Make sure it’s on your website and social media channels, all your messaging is consistent and your senior team is well briefed.

Don’t run the risk of your CEO going off-piste by playing things down or diminishing the issue altogether in an interview or on social media.

It’s vital that all messages are consistent and reflect what you are actually doing. Actions speak louder than words!

5. If apologising is the right thing to do, then do it

Many companies and organisations are wary of issuing an apology. But sometimes, saying sorry is the only thing to do.

If the crisis is a result of a genuine mistake, make sure that your response includes an apology.

Regret, reassurance and response to a crisis can protect your organisation from further animosity. We all make mistakes so let’s be brave and hold our hands up. It can win you respect and friends in the long-run.

Above all else, just make sure you communicate with your audiences on a regular basis.

In the era of instant responses, they expect it.

Thank you to CIPR North East and Newcastle University Lecturer in Public Relations, Ramona Slusarczyk, for hosting the event. If you are responsible for managing public communications within your organisation and would like to discuss your crisis communications strategy in further detail, we would love to hear from you.

How does having your own private social media army sound? Interesting…then please read on.

When it comes to posting content as a brand on the likes of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn it’s becoming increasing difficult to reach your audience if you just rely on organic (i.e. you don’t pay to promote it) content.

There is a rapidly diminishing return in terms of the natural organic performance of content – this can mean reach as low as 2% of your page’s audience – as networks push to make themselves more relevant to users and simultaneously try to grow revenue through advertising.

So, aside from reviewing the approach and tone of the content you’re posting or going cap in hand and asking for a bigger budget for promoted content on social media, what are the options?

Social advocacy

As I see it, the biggest opportunity for anyone delivering social media in 2019 has to be around harnessing the power of your employees as social media advocates who can utilise their personal social media channels to amplify your organisation’s messages and activity.

Advocacy grows the potential audience for your content beyond your owned channels to the networks of your employees and creates a more personal link between your messages and the audience – think of it as having your own private army of micro-influencers.

And you’ll be getting one over on those pesky algorithms. The platforms are much more likely to favour content that has been posted by an individual rather than an organisation.

Naturally, there are risks to taking this approach – you are delegating some control of your brand away from the carefully controlled confines of the marketing/communications team and in the hands of your employees, but with careful planning and oversight the risks to this can be negated.

For example, in our work with the Solicitors Regulation Authority, we have helped to train over 100  advocates on how they can effectively use their presence on social media (across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) to amplify the SRA’s messages in a time and place that suits them whilst at the same time enhancing their own presences on social media – a true win-win situation.

Training and resources

In conjunction with training, putting in place a system to centralise and track advocates not only ensures that sharing content is a simple and straightforward process, but also means you can track and reward the advocates who are doing the most to share content. There are a whole range of these platforms out there including Smarp (which we use in our work with the SRA) and Bambu which we have access to as part of our membership of Sprout Social’s Agency Partner programme.

We’re currently working on a whitepaper which will provide a much more detailed insight into how we see social media advocacy developing over the coming months, but in the meantime here are our three top recommendations for setting up an advocacy programme:

1. Plan ahead – make sure what you want to achieve from launching an advocacy programme is aligned with your organisation’s overall objectives
2. Support your advocates – consider ways you can train your advocates around effective use of social media, provide context and give them the confidence to take ownership of their work in the programme.
3. Put a structure in place to systemise the programme – this includes thinking about how you will disseminate the content you want to be shared, track the effectiveness of the programme and recognise/reward success.

If you want to register to receive a copy of our whitepaper when it’s published later in the spring or find out how you could make an advocacy programme work for your organisation get in touch with me – pete@dtw.co.uk or Jess – jess@dtw.co.uk – and we’d be happy to chat things through with you over a cup of coffee.

Thanks for reading,

Pete.

As DTW marks its 30th year in business there’s a significantly bigger birthday going on over our garden wall. Our neighbour Gisborough Priory is celebrating 900 years.

Gisborough Priory is an English Heritage site which is run by a dedicated group of volunteers who catalogue, restore and host events on this historic site. To launch its 900^th year, DTW joined forces to help produce a timeline, which is displayed in the visitor centre, detailing the many events the priory has endured through its turbulent lifetime.

We were happy to give our services free of charge as it’s important to look out for your elderly neighbours.

If you want to know more check out the work of the Gisborough Priory Project– they do a great job.

PS – the spelling pedants amongst you (we know who you are and we salute you – you are amongst friends here!) might think we have a challenge spelling our home town.

But don’t worry, it’s OK.

Guisborough is the correct spelling for the place and for our address, but very confusingly Gisborough is the correct spelling for the Priory (and the nearby Gisborough Hall Hotel).

Don’t you love the English language!

Thanks for reading

Paula

Recent headlines around data and social media means both consumers and marketeers are feeling wary about using and sharing data on platforms like Facebook. Is data being used ethically? How can it be used to effectively target the right audience?

This blog is not here to scaremonger. Instead, it is going to show you how, when done right, targeting using social data is a win/win for everyone involved.

We’re going to focus on Facebook, but LinkedIn and Twitter have similar advert targeting platforms and functionalities.

How targeting works

Once a consumer has signed up and accepted those terms and conditions (the ones we all accept, but hardly ever read), a social network can start gathering information on them. They look at who they follow, which posts they like, where they log on from, what device they log on from and – through cookies – what sites they visit. 

It’s worth noting that social networks like Facebook are not unusual when it comes to this data gathering – Google is just the same.

The networks then provide this information, confidentially, to advertisers so they can serve content that they think is relevant to the consumer. For example, if a consumer has interacted with a lot of fitness and swimming content from their phone, and you are running the new swimming baths nearby, you might want to advertise your new swimming lessons to them when they’re on their phone next.

Image source: Buzzfeed

How to target effectively

Poor targeting is the thing that gives social data a bad name. If you’re a passionate swimmer, you’re not really interested in seeing an advert for expensive running shoes. You also don’t particularly want to see an advert too specific: “You love swimming, why not try running instead?”. This can, quite rightly, freak people out.

Facebook has advertising policies that outline what advertisers can and can’t put in their adverts to ensure the content is relevant to their users. Users can also access, and limit, the information Facebook provides advertisers via their account settings (and for the record, Facebook doesn’t listen to our conversations).

When you first start looking to run an advertising campaign on Facebook, the best place to start is Audience Insights. This helps you define who would be best suited for your content and see how you can make it relevant to them. Again, let’s reiterate, this is all confidential data, there will never be any personal information like names, emails and addresses available to advertisers.

When you go to Facebook Audience Insights, you can filter for users within certain locations, demographics or interests. Once you’ve defined those filters, you can look at which pages they like, how they interact with posts, and what devices they use.

So, with our swimming example – we can see that the people we’ve defined on the left are more likely to click on ads than the average Facebook user, and use Facebook on their iPhones more than desktop.

Then, once we’ve got that audience defined, we can save it and use it when setting up an advertising campaign.

During this time, Facebook helpfully tells you if your audience is defined enough to run a decent campaign as seen here – the target is always to be in the green.

 

 

With this information, we can create relevant ad content for our audience, and make sure our ads look good on mobile.

Once your campaign is up and running, you’ll get a relevance score, which is a number between 1 and 10 that tells you how your target audience is responding to your ad. The higher the score, the more relevant your ad to your audience. This will hopefully mean that your audience is seeing the right content for them and won’t be annoyed or disappointed at seeing your content in their news feed.

Conclusion

We’ve established the sort of data that social networks can get from a user, and how it is used for advertising purposes, but the key thing to remember is that the better the targeting, the happier your audience will be and the more effective your marketing will become.

Here are some key things to remember to make sure you target your audience correctly:

1. Don’t be too broad or too niche – you want to cast a net wide enough to get your message out, but not too wide that people who wouldn’t be interested in your content get annoyed at seeing your ads in their feeds.
2. Tailor your content to your audience – using Audience Insights is a great way to get a steer on the kind of content that works for your audience.
3. Stay relevant – if your relevance score is under 5, have a look at your campaign results (in ads manager). See where people are clicking, who is clicking and tweak your targeting accordingly.4. Talk to an expert – If you’re really struggling, or just want a sense check, there are plenty of social media experts who know the ins and outs of good audience targeting.

We all try to keep our LinkedIn feeds up to date don’t we? We try to log in frequently to check-in to the oldest ‘big’ social network out there but let’s face it, for many of us it’s never our most used app or website. Well, this blog might change all that.

In October, LinkedIn announced BIG changes to their feed algorithm meaning not only will we be seeing some fairly different content when we log in, but we’ll notice our personal content getting a lot more attention.

What’s the update?

Let’s set the scene: LinkedIn has over 567m members who post more than a million posts, videos and articles each day. The thing is, it was the content from a select few (the most followed 1%) that dominated the LinkedIn feed meaning that lowly users like me (and probably you) didn’t get much of a chance of our posts appearing on feeds, let alone get engagement.

LinkedIn followed the common rule in social networks – the more engagement a post gets, the more likely it will appear in feeds, which means that key influencers like Bill Gates and Richard Branson, who have a lot of followers, get more engagement, and therefore appear in more feeds – which gives them more engagement, which gets them in more feeds and…well, you get the picture.

What those clever folk behind LinkedIn have decided to do is look at who is posting that content and evaluate how much a like, comment or share would mean to the author.

Following me so far? Ok – to use the examples that the social network have used themselves:

Source: LinkedIn

Why does this matter?

LinkedIn started as, and remains to be, a social network focused on individuals (professionals) connecting with each other; rather than organisations talking to their audience. Indeed, here at DTW, we champion individuals using LinkedIn over organisations – as seen in the employee advocacy work we do with our clients. It is this personal level that LinkedIn are bringing with this new change.

Therefore, if you are looking to spread your organisation’s message on LinkedIn, now is the time to do it from your personal profile, rather than your company’s.

What should communicators do?

1. When you’re posting content on social media, what is the main objective? It’s for your audience to read it, and engage with it. From DTW’s perspective, it doesn’t matter if that reach comes in the form of a company post, or an employee’s post, as long as that content is being read and engaged with.
2. Therefore, if you use LinkedIn as a platform for your communications, now is the time to think about enabling your employees to share that content in their own feeds and networks, as well as sharing it on your company page too.
3. It’s important to encourage employees to share your organisation’s updates and content on their own channels. This might be in the form of internal communications like an intranet or companywide email – either way, let them know the content is there. As part of this, encourage engagement on other posts that they see in their feed too.
4. This personal-level of sharing might be trickier to monitor as engagement on personal posts won’t appear in your company’s LinkedIn analytics. For us, it’s not too important (we all chat to each other about our posts), but if tracking ROI is a key objective for your organisation, there are employee advocacy tools out there that can help; like Smarp or Sprout Social’s Bambu.
5. We’ve helped clients build confidence amongst their employees to post on their company’s behalf, and using an employee advocacy tool, it can be easier for everyone to share content. With this new algorithm update, it’s a great opportunity to get engagement and recognition for it.

We’re really excited about this LinkedIn update – it’s a step forward to bringing social media back to being social.

Thanks for reading!

Jess