Recently, FleishmanHillard was at TEDxEastEnd, an independently-organised TED event held at East London’s Oval Space, helping to amplify the ideas shared by its 23 speakers and extend their reach well beyond the 400 people in the room.
This year’s TEDxEastEnd saw speakers, ranging from John Dolan, an internationally-acclaimed artist who made his reputation while homeless in East London, to virtual reality guru David Sackman – talk about a society without borders.
After raising the profile of TEDxEastEnd ahead of the 2014 event, by securing coverage in publications including Time Out and Evening Standard, FleishmanHillard has been working with the team on their strategic positioning and communications across their marketing channels.
TEDxEastEnd is all about giving a platform to ideas worth spreading. The purpose of our partnership has been to use traditional, owned and social communications channels to increase engagement with those people who aren’t at the event, both connecting with existing TED followers and attracting new ones.
Our media outreach focused on highlighting the great ideas and stories that would be shared at the event. TEDxEastEnd speakers were interviewed on London Live throughout the day before the event, and attendees from the Guardian, BBC, Sunday Times and Red magazine helped drive media awareness on the day.
Working with TEDxEastEnd, we developed an approach that would optimise the activity around the event for conversation on social platforms – from what channels to focus on and how often to post, to what content would best engage the target audience.
When the day arrived, the focus was on real-time engagement. FleishmanHillard worked with a team of TED volunteers to post quotes and exclusive content from the speakers, pictures from the event, and interactions with the TEDxEastEnd audience. Content was also created for Facebook, Vine and Instagram, while the team live blogged throughout the day and responded to the thousands of tweets and posts from across the globe.
The results? TEDxEastEnd was trending on Twitter in London, with over 1,800 mentions of #TEDxEastEnd on the day and a 200% increase in interactions with TEDxEastEnd content compared to the 2014 event.
Ultimately, FleishmanHillard’s support enabled TEDxEastEnd to develop a successful multi-channel approach which both enhanced awareness of the event and extended the reach of the ideas coming out of it. As a result, thousands more people were inspired by the ideas shared by some of today’s leading thinkers. All in all, a very good day for communications.
