Anna Bruce Lockhart, lead of Editorial and Visual Content at the World Economic Forum, guides us through why and how organizations like UNDP can use social media to amplify our message.
Social media never stops changing. With new platforms, algorithms, and trends arriving constantly, why should we still be on social media? How can we best use it? Anna Bruce-Lockhart has guided the editorial team of the World Economic Forum to develop award-winning new formats and drive audience growth into the billions. In this episode, Anna shares her experience and ideas about how we at UNDP can best utilize social media.
Elyse:
Welcome to Digital What?, a podcast series where we join UNDP personnel and experts in conversation about the digital communications questions you’ve always wanted to know, but were afraid to ask.
Today we speak with Anna Bruce-Lockhart. Anna is a writer, editor, and award-winning video producer. Currently she is the Editorial and Visual lead at the World Economic Forum, guiding the editorial team to develop award-winning new formats and drive audience growth into the billions… unbelievable, right?. Her work is impressive. Maybe that is why for our interview I was anticipating a very formal and serious person. However, when we met, I was happily caught off guard by her whimsical spirit.
Elyse:
So we have one really important question we've been pondering. What is your spirit animal?
Anna:
I knew this was coming. Well, I can't deny it. It's the squirrel.
Elyse:
If you were a squirrel and you were expressing yourself on social media. What would that look like?
Anna:
I think constantly scampering around trying to pick up little tidbits and hazelnuts of information and shiny new stories and collect them somewhere and share with my little squirrel family, ever hopeful, ever hopping around.
Elyse:
Like a squirrel, it’s hard to keep track of Anna. Her world is fast-paced, but she keeps her sense of direction regardless of how erratic the social media landscape feels. Every day her team publishes about 60 pieces of content including blogs, videos and social media stories. When it comes to social media, I often feel like a squirrel, but not the agile squirrel hopping from tree to tree. When I am overwhelmed, I am more like the motionless squirrel…that completely freezes when it senses danger. So we asked her, what keeps her going?
Anna:
What organizations like us are doing on social media every single day is like fighting a war for the hearts and minds of civilized society. We are trying to promote stories that are constructive and useful, positive to offer solutions that give people a voice. And that's incredibly powerful. And I think, for us that's what social media means. It's a way of amplifying and getting our message out there, because ever since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we've kind of assumed that universal rights are exactly that, that they're shared by everybody. But as we've clearly seen, they're not. I mean, there are countries around the world where human rights are being eroded, where climate is a political issue. Where access to clean water and education just aren't necessarily a given. I think social media's incredibly important platform. That is where you can fight that fight every single day.
Elyse:
Yet, putting out stories that win over people’s hearts and minds is challenging, especially in a landscape that is constantly changing.
Anna:
New platforms are coming online all the time. And just this year has been so exciting for social media….the algorithms on each platform keep changing. They never stay the same. And the things that you have to do to survive and get the message out there on each platform is constantly it's constantly new. So, for instance, Facebook started limiting its reach for posts, which put incredible pressure on publications like us, for whom it's still our primary source of social traffic. You know, what would you do in a situation like that? You have to adapt and evolve constantly. Facebook so brilliant for groups and communities. So you start to go in that direction instead. You have to keep abreast of it all. Keep alert.
Elyse:
It is challenging, but for an organization such as UNDP, it is necessary.
Anna:
So every organization has a challenge, which is to make people in this new saturated world, stop and listen. And when you're doing something really important that really matters to the world, that could really change lives. You need to be able to reach out to people and stop them in their tracks. And I think that's how social media can come in handy for UNDP, because I think if you can make people stop scrolling past with their thumbs on their phones and if you can write that headline that grabs their attention. And if you can string that story out just a few seconds to really get them to engage a little bit maybe on an emotional level, that's where you can hit home and you can you can deliver your message, even if it's a difficult message that has to do with fiscal deleveraging or multi-stakeholder partnerships. You know, you once you've got their attention and once you've got their emotions slightly engaged, that's when you can you can start to spread your message and start to build engagement and understanding of what it is that you do. And that's just so important, because if people don't understand what you do, then you're kind of isolated, you’re disempowered.
Elyse:
So, I asked Anna, how exactly can we do this?
Anna:
The one thing that I really learned is that you have to be visual. Visual is king. So a few years ago, we started focusing a lot more on video and we saw an enormous spike in our engagement simply because people respond much more instinctively to video. You can get a message across so much quicker with a compelling opening frame and a caption that goes with it than you can, you know, with a really think-y, fantastically written article. So once we started doing that, once we started using data visualizations and video in our posts, that changed everything for us. I would say...that's the one takeaway. I would have from using social media is that. Yeah. Don't get bogged down in the text. You got to be visual.
So I would say a few years ago you'd be seeing a lot of articles, reports going out, tweets that promote an entire report that didn't parse down the report into snackable more consumable elements. It wasn't necessarily sharable because it wasn't all that relatable. So people have got much, much better at creating emotional stories, easy to graph stories, things that you're likely to share with your friends, things that distill information into tiny little 140 characters in order to be more impactful and to be more easily disseminated.
Anna:
And once your audience understands and identifies with you, don’t underestimate the power of their support. Include them in on a call to action.
Elyse:
It's becoming increasingly obvious that readers and viewers want somewhere else to go. Once they've been moved by a story, they want to know what they can do about it. And that actually is a kind of code of the market that organizations like this can really dominate. Because if you have a million calls to action, you have a million brilliant and constructive things for people to do after they've been moved by a story. Whether that's right. That politicians will get involved or send some money...yeah or partner in some way.
Elyse:
Anna said that there’s even something UNDP can learn from Coca-Cola.
Anna:
So Melinda Gates, did this, TED talk about 10 years ago on what nonprofits can learn from the marketing of Coca-Cola. And I just find it really inspiring because she was talking about trying to convince people that they need something such as vaccines. You’ve got to tell them that they want it. And so often we make the mistake, she says, of assuming that just because people need something like the incredible work that UNDP do… that we don't need to tell them that they want it. But actually, that's what an organization such as UNDP can do on social media and with your content is put the stories out there that engage and inspire, that get people on board and make them understand that, ah, this is something that really matters and this is something that needs defending.
Elyse:
At work, social media is sometimes seen as the exclusive responsibility of communications teams. Anna disagrees.
Anna:
Social media is important for everybody. It's a human need. I would go so far as to say, you don't have to just be working in communications to be needing to put content out there. Whatever industry you work in is important to network and to engage with other people in similar roles in other industries and sectors in order to share information, drum up some sort of community, learn about best practices and keep abreast of all the industry news, you know. I mean, it's it's like creating a group of friends. And, you know, those...we are social creatures. And I think there's no end to the benefits of simply engaging in social media and being part of the conversation.
Elyse:
So, where do we begin?
Anna:
Well, I would say the easiest thing to do is create a Twitter account and start following people who work in the same industry as you and your friends and your family and everybody else, you know. Twitter is wonderful and that you can simply log on first thing in the morning and it's like an expresso shot of, you know, information completely tailored to your interests and fields of professional activity. So that would be the easiest thing to do. And once you're on Twitter, I mean, it's addictive. There is information that you can start sharing things and before you know it, you're having conversations and learning things and, you know, information is coming to you without you having to go out and find it. It's really miraculous in some ways.
Elyse:
I am often saying to myself “I can’t keep up with social media ”. But, Anna had some encouraging advice .
Anna:
It doesn't take too much time to repost a fantastic article on Twitter. You know, if you have a Twitter feed, you don't even need to write your own tweets. You can let you just repost stuff to your community of friends that you think is important. Well, fascinating or constructive, that takes no time at all.
Elyse:
On social media there are so many platforms, but at the end of the day…
Anna:
There's one thing that works across all platforms and that's a good story. So if you have a good story, it doesn't matter what platform you're on or what format you're putting into. That will work and it will reach a wider audience. At the World Economic Forum. What we've discovered over the years is that solutions focused stories work best. Unfortunately, in the field of nonprofits, often the stories are fairly sad. You talking about refugees or the need to vaccinate children, disease, the lack of maternal health care. Often the stories are quite, quite negative in that way, and it's really hard to put a positive spin on those stories. But if it is possible, then it should be done simply because people respond. And we've just seen through the data in our web analytics that people respond much more strongly to positive solutions stories. Where they come away with a sense, OK, something's being done about this. I can help in this kind of way. It's not all doom and gloom. I don't just have to send money, you know?.
Elyse:
As Anna expressed, the more hopeful you can make people feel with your message, the more engaged they will be with your content.
You don’t need to be as fast a squirrel. Just keep collecting and sharing those hazelnuts of information.
In our next episode, we’ll continue to explore ways to keep up with storytelling on social media by getting into what’s trending.
Elyse:
This episode of Digital What!? is produced by Oscar Durand and myself. Our theme music is by Lemon Guo, and additional music is by Chris Zabriskie, and sound design by myself. Special thanks to our social media expert, Anna Bruce - Lockhart, lead of Editorial and Visual Content for the World Economic Forum for taking the time to speak with us. To listen and subscribe go to wherever you find your podcasts or DigitalNow DOT UNDP DOT org.
I’m Elyse Blennerhassett. Stay with us.