A Social Media Campaign to recharge during the pandemic
At TEDxTUM, we see ourselves as not just the organizers of a series of events, but also as a community of people and a network of ideas that exist in-between and beyond those events. It’s not hard to see that 2020 was a radically different year on the event organization front, but for us, it also changed the way we interact and create value for this community. In this post, we highlight one particular online campaign we executed in September 2020 that brought a breath of fresh air to our followers as well as into our team and the way that it works behind the scenes.
Background
After some hard months where most social media content was focused on difficult topics and bad news, we as TEDxTUM wanted to give people a break. We were fully aware that the pandemic was not over and that most people struggled, and we also knew that we were just preparing for what was coming in fall and winter. Therefore, we wanted to use September to provide content that made it easier for people to just take a break. Or as we phrased it on social media:
Over the next few weeks, we’ll bring you a few talks from the TEDx Universe that have been hand-picked to inspire, to educate, but most of all: to bring pure delight. If you’re tired, now is the time to rest — just sit back and enjoy a happy moment.
We called this campaign “Recharge” and published content under the hashtag #rechargewithtedxtum. Four of our Brand & Creative team members chose one talk that, in their eyes, was related to the overall idea of the Recharge campaign. In the end, we chose the following four talks:
- Simone Giertz: Why you should make useless things (TED2018)
- Harry Baker: How learning German taught me a link between math and poetry (TEDxVienna 2016)
- Mark Ronson: How sampling transformed music (TED2014)
- Ann Morgan: My year reading a book from every country in the world (TEDGlobal2015)
Each talk was then promoted over one week starting with a general highlight of the talk on Instagram and Facebook stories on Sunday and two posts with supplementary information that were shared on Facebook and Instagram on Tuesday and Thursday. After the four weeks, we summarized all talks and supplementary information in a blog post on our website that we then also shared on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Design Toolkit
While we usually widely distribute content research within the team, content creation is normally held in the responsibility of one or two team members per campaign. Especially for larger events, this is necessary in order to achieve a consistent branding across all of our platforms and channels.
For this specific campaign, we wanted to mix things up within the team and tested the ‘divide and conquer’ approach. Unlike our previous campaigns, this time around every contributing member was responsible for preparing his or her own social media material.
This decision put us in front of a new challenge. If there wasn’t a main responsible overlooking the whole design process, how do we make sure that our audience knows all of our posts are linked to the “Recharge” campaign?
In the end we decided to create a design toolkit which provided a guideline for the overall look and feel. The toolkit consisted of:
- A 6 color palette, provided with Hex and RGB color codes
- A font set, with different font styles and weights
- A variation of a “Recharge” campaign logo in the 6 different colors of the color palette
Using this design toolkit, each member of our team was able to create their own designs and adapt it as necessary to their specific content, while still maintaining the overall cohesiveness of the campaign.
Talk Highlights
As a general campaign, we highlight one talk from the TED(x) universe every Sunday, i.e. for a specific talk, we create a few animated graphics that we share on Instagram and Facebook Stories. Often we start with a question related to the topic and the graphics usually consist of a few interesting facts from the talk, a quote, a picture or short snippet from the talk, and a reference to the talk link in our bio. We used the same format for the Recharge campaign, and for four weeks, replaced the weekly talk highlights with the talks we chose for “Recharge”. Each team member prepared their own text for the graphics and one of our team members was solely in charge of creating the graphics. The graphics were created using the custom Design Toolkit. That way we ensured a consistent design between the different talks. So, while the talks were very different without an obvious common topic, it was easy to see that they belong together because they were connected visually. Also, because one team member was in charge of creating the graphics (and she has also been creating the graphics for the normal talk highlights), we have an expert with a lot of experience in creating these graphics which makes it more efficient.
You can watch all stories in a highlight on our Instagram channel.
Supplementary Posts
To complement our talk highlights and to provide further information, we posted two supplementary posts for each of the chosen talks in the week after the talk highlight on Sunday. We followed a posting plan for that and posted the supplementary posts on Tuesday and Thursday to have some consistency when we publish content. The four team members responsible for a talk chose their own material and prepared the posts using our custom Design Toolkit.
In general, the supplementary posts should cover further information related to the topic of the talk. This could include anything like some statistics, additional reading, book recommendations, blog posts, etc. Everyone could research their own material and decide what was most fitting for their talk. That gave every team member creative control to obtain the best results for their talk while still following an overarching concept.
We ended up with a variety of posts, some closer to the actual talk and some more loosely related to it.
For example, for the talk “Why you should make useless things” by Simone Giertz, we shared a series of aha! moments in which inventions created out of personal need changed the world. These were linked back to her talk (view the post on Instagram). For Ann Morgan’s talk “My year reading a book from every country in the world”, we visualized some of the books and their stories she mentioned in her talk (view the post on Instagram).
Also, we highlighted two books and a YouTube channel loosely related to Harry Baker’s talk “How learning German taught me a link between math and poetry” (view the post on Instagram) and we invited three of our TEDxTUM team members to share their experience with sampling after getting inspired by Mark Ronson’s talk “How sampling transformed music” (view the post on Instagram)
Summary
This campaign was not just a breath of fresh air for our community, but also for our Brand & Creative team. It allowed us to piece together our individual passions into a bigger narrative and gave all of us a chance to flex our creative muscles.
We learned that distributing content creation throughout the team, not only alleviates the pressure on specific individuals but is also appreciated by everyone within the team. More people can gain creative control and actively contribute to our TEDxTUM voice.
It’s important to highlight that while many team members put their individual spin and flavor on the content, we were still very aware that our brand voice needed to be kept aligned. This was achieved by two main points:
- A common theme: Understanding what “Recharge” meant to all of us was the important first step. In the end, we decided on a common message — let’s give everyone a break where they could recharge their energy. Once everyone agreed on the message it was easy to find talks that had a similar vibe and feeling.
- The design toolkit: This allowed us to create a cohesive design and tie the campaign together not just on content, but also visual basis.
We all thoroughly enjoyed creating this campaign and are already gearing up for a new one!
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This article was written by Maria Littmann & Jenny Cheng from the TEDxTUM Brand & Creative Team.
