Behind the Scenes: Planning Social Media Strategy for an Exclusive Client Summit
I don’t talk a lot about work projects on here but thought I’d change that today. I wanted to share a bit of a behind-the-scenes look at what (from a digital marketing perspective) went into an exclusive client event.
Last weekend I had the opportunity to help our Womble Bond Dickinson team host their Latin America Summit at the Park Lane Hotel in New York City. The weekend included:
A private dinner and panel with the former Presidents of Ecuador and Guatemala
A keynote session by a former Minister of Finance of Colombia
Speakers from The World Bank, Goldman Sachs, and McKinsey, among others.
The LATAM Summit was one of the most "exclusive" events I have ever participated in.
The social media lead on my team was out on PTO, so I jumped in to support on-site and day-of social media engagement. I've been spending the past several months deep in the weeds on marketing operations and CRM-related work; it was a nice change of pace to put on more of a "brand journalist" hat for a few days.
Here's the (digital marketing) challenge we faced.
We hosted this event with many influential people in the Latin American business world. We want people to know that we are putting this on and share insights from the event. Despite its invite-only approach, we wanted people to feel like they were part of the event virtually, where appropriate.
LinkedIn post featuring the dinner and discussion with both Presidents on our first night of the event.
Because this was an exclusive event, many attendees being lawyers, with people from large and sometimes bureaucratic organizations, we also couldn't just live-quote them on the spot. We had to be intentional with how we shared insights. We also had to be mindful of our panelists, who needed sign-off from their external affairs departments to have anything attributed to them explicitly.
How do you post real-time content from an event where the content needs to vet through multiple PR and other external affairs departments?
How We Did it
All the panels had prep calls in a week or two before walking through discussion topics, exciting points worth bringing up, and how to effectively use their time slots to provide the maximum value for event attendees.
I attended every single panel call for two primary reasons:
Listen for insights that we could create visual content for ahead of time.
Learn which subjects required more discretion with posting ahead of time so I would avoid causing an unforced error on social media. These were things that were not necessarily confidential but also not things you would want to blast on social media (if that makes sense).
I would take a copious amount of notes from each call, just silently listening in and trying to stay in the background as much as possible. Then, I'd reach out to each panelist individually and share a handful of quotes from their planning session that (in my opinion) would make for great social content.
They would typically need to run my social ideas through their external affairs departments but were personally OK with them themselves. While we waited on approvals, I preemptively sent all of our quotes to the design teams to let them get started, knowing we might have a few tweaks along the way.
We had multiple panels with multiple panelists in each session. I repeated this process roughly a dozen times over a week and a half and didn't want to send a couple of dozen requests to our design team with a same-day turnaround waiting for approvals. The content creation approach was agile, building the plane as it fell out of the sky.
Fortunately for me, we had very little pushback on anything we wanted to create, and the speakers we worked with were very gracious with their time and helped collaborate with me on our social media approach the day of the event.
Once we had all the graphics created, I sat in on each session. We only published our designed quotes and takeaways based on two criteria:
It had been approved and vetted by all necessary parties
It was something said on stage and not just in prep calls.
Several great insights were left on the cutting room floor that needed to meet those criteria. But that's all part of the process. Ultimately, we did more than post random LinkedIn updates but made a more digitally engaging experience for the event attendees and people keeping tabs back home.
I also enjoyed briefly putting my social media marketer hat back on and have a couple of weeks focused less on operations and more on content strategy. It was a welcome change of pace for me and an excellent way to stay sharp on other non-technical areas of marketing.
Not to mention, how cool is it to meet and mingle with two former Latin American Presidents? I was shocked at how approachable both men were at the event. Everyone involved was very gracious, down-to-earth, and easy to work with. There were times where my 23-year-old self wouldn’t believe that I was getting paid to go up to a nice hotel on the edge of Central Park to hang out with former dignitaries and execs. It was a notable week with interesting stories for my career that I may not have had otherwise.