SXSW: Even Large Corporations Have Small Social Media Teams

Editor’s note: Emily Reeves, director of digital innovation and insight planning for advertising powerhouse Stone Ward, will be providing contributions to Talk Business & Politics from the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive festival in Austin this weekend. She is providing additional content on her observations from SXSW at Stone Ward’s Waiting For The Elevator blog.

Friday was the first day of the 2015 South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive festival. I am here for the sixth year in a row and though I have witnessed many changes and evolutions through the years, one thing remains constant: everyone — big, small, experienced or just starting out — is trying to figure out how to tap into new technologies and new communications channels every day. No one has it figured out. Everyone has to scramble when Facebook changes their rules. No one has as many people as they need on their team to maintain social media, content creation and management, and overall digital upkeep.

Those of us with smaller budgets and small teams may take comfort in knowing this. Or it might make our challenges even scarier. I appreciate seeing what can be done with small teams and it makes me feel more on equal footing with the marketing giants out there.

Take NBC Sports as an example of a large organization with limited resources. The director — Lindsay Signor — of their six-person social media team spoke at SXSW yesterday. She focused on the campaign her team managed around the Super Bowl this year, across 20 social accounts over six platforms.

For the Super Bowl, NBC Sports applied the key “rule” of social media that we all know, yet most rarely follow (due to lack of time, lack of content, lack of resources, etc.): Use the strengths of each channel individually to customize the content for that channel.

For example:

• Facebook gives more weight to videos than to photos or text, so they focused primarily on sharing short video clips to Facebook.
• Twitter is great for quick reads. NBC Sports focused on live tweets, answering questions from fans and sharing behind-the-scenes, day-in-the-life peeks into the athletes’ lives.
  Instagram is all about great photos, so it was used for fan reactions from the stands and sideline shots.
• Tumblr has wonderful engagement. NBC Sports used it mainly for the Super Bowl ads, but also re-blogged content from fans that were commenting and sharing the commercials.
• Vine, with its six-second videos requires quite a bit of creativity. For the Super Bowl, NBC Sports used their Vine channel to explain how Coach Belichick was feeling, despite the lack of expression on his face.

To broaden their audiences, NBC Sports partnered with people and brands that had audiences they wanted: Dude Perfect, Tara Lipinski (former Olympic figure skater), Mark Wahlberg (soon to release the movie Ted 2), Elizabeth Banks (soon to release the movie Pitch Perfect 2) and Jimmy Fallon.

All of the content they created and curated was found on a central digital hub. And the most surprising fact: 20 percent of that content were pieces they created, while 80 percent was curated content from users and around the web.

Even big organizations, with much larger resources than most of us have, use their resources wisely and spend the time they have in the places where they can get the most return.