Alex McNab-Lundbäck, Mærsk

__________________ My name is Alex McNab-Lundbäck, I work at Maersk as the Head of Social Media for the channels. So my role largely is running the social media channels, so we are on the majority of the main platforms we are on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. My role is to come up with a strategy for those channels which is adapting all the time. It's also then to create and curate the content that will be going on to those channels. It's also then the community management side of things so it's not necessarily always me who is doing the community management but we have a team of people who will be doing that community management as well and monitoring that on our social channels as well as a huge part of what we do is engaging with the people who are engaging with us on social media. So whether that's sourcing UGC, then getting their permission to be able to resharing it on our channels to make sure that we get that message of kind of fan advocacy out there as well which is a huge part of our strategy mainly for Instagram and Facebook. I always think that it's amazing that Merck has fans and super fans and we love engaging with these fans and super fans on our social media channels. We have one individual who is currently travelling the world and he is up to 177 or 178 countries now not using Airplane and one point that makes him a super fan is that everywhere he goes he is tweeting or using Instagram and taking pictures or videos of our logo, of one of our containers, of one of our ships, of one of our trucks anywhere in the world and it's great to see that kind of engagement and we've engaged with him and we've had him in our Merck offices around the world as well. So he's really playing that role of a fan ambassador, a brand ambassador who is not paid for doing what he's doing, he's not got any loyalty other than the fact that he's a fan of our brand and so it's kind of influencer marketing in a different way because it's more about kind of organic influencer marketing rather than influencer marketing as people maybe know it in terms of paying a celebrity or a brand influencer. So it's more of a micro influencer level who we're not paying to do the work for us. I think that Merck is such an iconic brand in its own right and I think that it always has been such an iconic brand. I think that the Merck star means so much to so many different people. I think that it's just an iconic global brand and also we have our tangible assets. We've heard a lot today about intangible assets in terms of social media and brand protection but Merck does have lots of tangible assets as well and these tangible assets are huge. They're the sizes of several football fields floating on the ocean. So you can't really get away from that global brand that means so much to so many people and that's I think one of the ways why people, and that's probably one of the ways why it means so much to so many people and that we get those kinds of fans on social media. And also the imagery looks nice. Seeing a huge ship sailing into the sunset, it's a nice picture, it's a nice image and people love sharing that on their social media channels as well. So my talk today at the Art of Social was largely about three key takeaways that we have discovered with working with Merck and that is know your audience, know who it is you're talking to, what's on the channels that they're engaging with, how are they engaging with your brand, what do they want to be hearing about. And then the second point that I raised was once you know that, stop talking like a marketer so much, stop talking like a brand or business, stop selling your product so much or your service so much and start talking like human beings. Start telling stories, start entering conversations and that's what's going to get you the cut through in a very cluttered world of social media. And the third point that I made was that once you've got all of those kind of things right, once you've kind of mastered that in a way, that's the time to maybe taking that advocacy point of it. So taking those fans, joining in the conversations, taking their content, whether that be great time lapse videos that someone's done at a port, resharing that and telling the story about the port so you're adding value to your customers or whether it's just sharing the messages that our super fans around the world who are travelling globally and sharing our imagery. Whatever it may be, using what is already out there without you having to lift a finger, I think that's what's really interesting is that people say it's really difficult to find good content. It's not if you know where to look and it's not if you're part of the right conversations. And we have found that UGC and utilizing UGC and those fans on social media has been incredibly valuable for our brand awareness going back to when we started social media in a proper way in 2011. Well there's the old saying isn't there, that you know, an image tells a thousand words and if an image tells a thousand words what does a video do? We love video, we love moving images, we're built up to it, we live in a world of moving images now rather than static imagery. And so I think when being human it's about sharing stories and it's much more about maybe people than it is about imagery. It's about kind of showing something different than maybe they hadn't been aware of. So we use for example time lapse and drone video quite a lot for our UGC and stuff that we create ourselves because it tells a different story. It shows a different side to maybe what they haven't imagined. Terminals for us can sometimes be very closed off worlds kind of for somebody on the street kind of looking at what goes on in a terminal. But if you've got a time lapse that shows the goings on at a huge terminal on the west coast of America over the course of 24 hours that's a real good story to tell for the average Joe on the street who's engaging with the content. And that's what's really nice about that is that you get people who wouldn't necessarily normally engage with content to do with your brand such as Merck but they do because it tells a story. It talks to them, it adds value and that's what's kind of really interesting about using video is that you can tell more of a story more succinctly. There's going to be lots of challenges with that in terms of the length. You've got to tell a really good story in 30 seconds if you want it to go on Instagram. You've got to tell a fairly good story in two minutes 40 seconds if you want it to go on Twitter. But those as long as you stay within those confines you can tell really powerful messages and stories through using video. So it's a big part of our strategy. Video is doing really well on all of our channels and it's doing well for lots of different reasons. One as I've mentioned that we still love video and people are really engaging with the video but actually the second thing is kind of less sentimental in that sense and that's the fact that all the channels are prioritizing video now. You look at LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram all of their algorithms when you dive into what you do know about their algorithms they're all prioritizing video so it just doesn't matter what you post if you're posting it in video form rather than still image form you will get higher reach and if you can get higher reach you'll get higher engagement and that's the magic of video. Now whether that changes down the line because everybody's posting video who knows and then it'll be maybe only time lapse doesn't really really well in the algorithms or maybe you have to be doing virtual reality or 360 in order to be able to get that cut through to the algorithms who knows. But the point is at the moment it's video that is leading the way and the algorithms of all the channels are prioritizing video and so not utilizing it in the right way not utilizing it all as some brands are is a huge loss for your reach and you'll wonder why you're only getting 0.5% of your you know entire followers are seeing your content in terms of reach simple reason is it's a static imagery and not a video and our metrics and our analytics prove that as well. I think engagement is probably the most powerful metric for us generally I think whether that's a video post or whether that's a still image post or whether it's simply just a link that we're posting I think that engagement is really key for us and that's probably the metric that I look at most when I look at our metrics but I think that it's really interesting in terms of the algorithm side of things to look at that reach because that's what's really mattering most of us is the algorithm prioritizing our content and we can see that through reach we can see that if we post a still image with a message that might get 2000 impressions if we post a video with the same copy or very similar copy then it might get 20,000 engagements the algorithms are prioritizing video and so the numbers prove that I said that in my talk in fact it's about the fact that if you really want to prove a point look at the numbers whether that's engagement because that's a really key KPI for you whether it's click throughs or whether it's impressions when you look at the numbers that's what will really prove your point and I think that that's generally a really interesting point that I've been looking at. Well the beauty of social media is that it's all public and we don't actually have to ask for it I think that if you search now or you search at any time hashtag MERSC you will find hundreds if not thousands of posts from people who are sharing content about MERSC and so we don't actually have to ask for it it's there naturally we're in a very lucky situation that we're not having to tell people we're not having to do a campaign saying please use this hashtag to when you post your photos about MERSC because it's happening already we've already got access to that UGC that we can use on our own posts the only element that we might have to do is that if we want to repost it on our own channels as us rather than a retweet then we will seek permission that it's okay for us to do that now it's largely a technicality because it wants it's public it's public and we always give them photo and video credit when we post as well so we make it very clear that it is user generated content but they generally are thrilled the fact that MERSC has engaged with them directly on a DM and said I love your video I love your image can we use it on our main channel very rarely do we hear do we hear a no come back so it's more of a technicality or a courtesy but it's also it helps us because we're engaging with the people who are engaging with us it's adding to that conversation that I talked about in absolutely it's difficult to control the brand image generally as it would be for any brand any global large-scale brand it's very difficult to control it when there's so many people they're talking about the brand but it is about being in the room and I said in my talk quote from Jeff Bezos that says your brand isn't your image it isn't your logo it's part of it but it isn't that it's about what people are saying when you're not in the room and I think that social listening plays a huge part to play as to kind of not so much social listening in terms of you know can we jump on certain hashtags can we join in that conversation that is part of it but also about what are people saying about you when you're not in the room and the only way that you can avoid that and respond to it and be transparent about these kind of things is when you are in the room as much as possible and the only way that you can do that is through social listening and trying to find out how you're protecting your brand and then finding the right way to respond when you need to. I think you build trust through conversation I think you build trust from being open and being transparent I think that you build trust by being very accessible so whether that's through DMs whether that's responding to messages in a timely manner whether that's making sure that you're also very honest with the post that you're doing whatever it may be I think that's how you build trust it's by that conversation that two-way conversation being being going to open that will allow you to be to be trusted I don't think it's not so much about the content that you're sharing to be honest with you but it's about the conversations that you are either starting or participating in that will help build that trust within the brand. I'm not sure if there's been particularly one campaign or video campaign that has been the most successful at my time at Merck but one thing that we have seen is a bit of a trend and that is that sustainability is a huge topic of conversation right now and I was lucky enough when I started at Merck that we partnered with the Ocean Cleanup which was a innovative solution to be going out into the Pacific to try and clean plastic in the oceans. Merck partnered in terms of helping with the transport of that device to get out into the into the Pacific and we did lots of great video and Facebook lives and lots of really nice content from San Francisco when this solution was launched into the Pacific and that was really great content but it was also about the topic the topic was being talked about it was again it comes back to conversation it's all about if you can get in with the right conversations and if you can talk about if you can talk with people as to what they're talking about then you will be successful because that's that's the human nature of social it's called social media for a reason we all talk to anybody in this room all 450 people who are at this conference today will talk to people like human beings over lunch over coffee over drinks later whatever it may be but yet sometimes you find that brands aren't doing the same and they're wondering why they're not getting engaged they're not being human enough and they're not engaging in the conversations that people want to be hearing about and want to be talking about and we were really lucky with the Ocean Cleanup that we could actually kind of join a conversation that was really timely and that kind of helped with the engagement that we were seeing through that.