Our ‘social media explosion’ at a major UK awards event has proved a big success and we are now developing it into a new offering for clients involved in similar glittering nights.
Our theory was simple – instead of waiting days, even months for images and video clips (if you’re lucky) from an awards night, why not make video links available to the winners and the sponsors on the night, therefore encouraging them to share on social media while they bask in the glory of success?
Give them a hyperlink to YouTube featuring a short interview after they come off stage with their ‘gong’ and it makes it so easy for them
to fire out the news personally or to forward to their marketing team or social media coordinator who can do it for them.
That’s exactly what we did at the 2018 Variety Yorkshire Residential Property Awards (see previous posts for more details) and the results have been excellent with thousands of hits on YouTube Twitter, Facebook and other social media outlets which would never have happened if we had not made the highly rich content available on such a swift turn around.
Jeremy Griffin Technology4Turnover who helped make the social media campaign a big success
Working with Variety’s own social media guru in Yorkshire, Jeremy Griffin of Technology4Turnover, (see his Linked In profile by clicking here), the YouTube posts were connected to Variety Yorkshire’s social media channels which he manages on their behalf in addition, of course, to the posts he created personally ‘live’ on the night from his position in the event marquee.
The additional activity generated by the videos helps to further raise the profile of the organisers, Variety the Children’s Charity in Yorkshire, the 
winners and the sponsors of each category who are vital for the future survival and success of the event. Those sponsors are going to be more willing to give the event their support next year if they feel they’ve had added value above and beyond the normal PowerPoint slide mentioning their name on the night.
As well as the winners videos, we also added in a full roundup of the evening and a final report highlighting brief interviews with people in the audience and you can see for yourself how the videos were received:
Click here to see our channel featuring the Property Awards
Big rise in social media hits
Good Call Media co-owner, Nik Wood said:”We noticed that for many awards, it can take forever for the JPEGs from the night to appear online, never mind any video footage that was shot and that’s simply not good enough in an age of instant social media. People in the audience are encouraged to Tweet and share on the night so why does it often take so long for the organisers themselves to respond?
Our background in BBC journalism means we are completely used to dealing with media on extremely tight deadlines so it comes naturally to us to handle an event like this as a type of news story that needs immediate air time.
We know the charities and organisations that are involved in staging the events are incredibly busy making the evening or the lunch a success so we take the stress of getting exposure for the Awards away from them and can either post direct to their accounts or work with their own social media coordinators. In Variety’s case, Jeremy Griffin already
provides a fantastic service for them through their social media channels so it made sense to work closely with him on the night and over subsequent days when he filtered out fresh content to keep the interest levels high.”
And the good news – it’s the nature of social media that the content stays around on website, Twitter and Facebook accounts so those hit numbers are continuing to rise day by day!
Animal Interaction Organisations. The event, held at the Friendship Sports Centre in Amsterdam, a complex totally devoted to providing sporting facilities and training for people with disabilities, involved individuals and organisations from as far apart as the USA and Australia.
