BlogWell New York Social Media Case Study: Visa, presented by Lucas Mast

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Lucas Mast

Visa Corporate Social Media:Learnings from London 2012

This video is from

BlogWellSan FranciscoJune 20, 2011

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SocialMedia.orgCase Studies

This presentation is from

BlogWellNew York

September 12, 2012socialmedia.org/blogwell

Visa Confidential

Visa Corporate Social Media: Learnings From London 2012

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London 2012 Olympic Games

What We Aimed to Accomplish

Visa Viewpoints Mobile Studio : Brief interviews with Visa executives, partners, clients and Team Visa athletes for use on Visa corporate channels (internal/external)

Photo/Video “Viewpoints from London” Postcard style documentation of Visa’s sponsorship presence and activations (branding, retail stores, merchants, cardholders, contactless/terminals, etc.) around London and at Olympic venues

On-site news/marketing support Leverage Visa news (e.g. Samsung) created in London to syndicate across corporate social media channels and assist marketing team in capturing content


Laying the Foundation: Training & Education

• Training required for all employees attending Olympic Games, with more detailed content for managers of global social media channels

• Topics included marketing & brand campaign, Team Visa athletes, operations/logistics & corporate communications

• Daily taskforce meetings during games included representatives from Corporate Relations, Marketing, Legal, Product & Visa Europe

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Challenges We Encountered

• Olympics rules and regulations created heightened environment of restricted behavior

• Difficult to secure interviews with Team Visa athletes (schedules, cancellations)

• Media/influencers more focused on athletic competition than brand/sponsorship issues

• Efforts to promote content we were creating fell short due to time zones and staffing.

• Underestimated time/resources to capture, edit, create and review content

• Internal reviews/restrictions/approvals hindered the ability to post content in real time

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Additional Guidelines and Limitations

• No photos or video from inside Olympic venues on corporate social media sites

• Photos/videos must be reviewed both internally and by IOC

• No posting results until after the TV broadcast partner has aired the broadcast/posted the results digitally

• Rule 40: Athletes may not promote any brand, product or service during games or credit company for performance during games

• 24/7 moderation of channels required, with derogatory comments removed in timely manner

• Only reference Team Visa athletes in Visa social media content

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Our Content Goals: How We Fared

• Our goals

– Conduct multiple executive and Team Visa athlete interviews

– Post 2-3 items to Visa Viewpoints each day (1 video post/day)

– Photographic documentation of sponsorship (Flickr)

– Tweets (3-4/day)

– Sharing content with others (global CR, employee comms, Talent Acquisition, marketing)

• What we accomplished

– 5 executive interviews

– 2 Interviews with Team Visa/Olympic athletes (Strug, Phelps)

– 26 blog posts over two weeks (9 photo posts, 12 video posts)

– 50+ tweets from VisaNews (2-3/day)

– 8 blog posts reposted via InSite Olympics Hub

– Created content for Security CR team, Brazil, and China

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Metrics: Crunching the Numbers

• Increased @VisaNews followers on Twitter by 10%

• Average monthly traffic for Visa Viewpoints doubled during the two weeks of London 2012 coverage

• Amassed 1000+ views of videos posted to Visa Communication YouTube channel:

– What worked: Live product demo with Visa Global Head of Mobile Bill Gajda (550+ views), Team Visa athletes (500+ views), later executive interviews (250+ views)

– What didn’t work: Early executive interviews

• First time Visa Viewpoints has produced 25+ posts in the course of two weeks with an authentic voice and persona

• Social sharing: 1000+ links to our content created during the Olympics across the web

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Live Demos: Bringing News to Life

– Live demos take some planning, some luck and an executive willing to go with the flow

– Doing a live demo (and shooting a few versions) allows people to see real technology in the wild

– Less “corporate” content allowed for interest from media outlets—including Geek.com which created a blog post around the video and tweeted it to their 16K followers

– Tip: If you want to shoot at a store, secure the necessary approvals in advance (and be prepared for people to say no)

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Sharing Content With Employees

– Employee Communications team created landing page on InSite (corporate intranet) for London Olympics content

– Worked with Employee Communications to syndicate the content we were creating in London to drive employee awareness and engagement

– Visits from employees accounted for 10% of visitors to Visa Viewpoints for London 2012 content

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Content For Colleagues: Chip & Signature Demo

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– Help me help you: Connecting with colleagues in advance can help everyone get interesting, useful content

– Creating a detailed script ensures that you get the shots you need (and saves time in post-production editing)

– Tip: Privacy rules vary by country—understanding necessary approvals will make the lawyers more comfortable with the content


Building a Better Executive Interview

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– Being on-message is important, but being interesting creates engagement

– Shooting an executive multiple times leads to more comfortable, more natural answers

– Asking narrower questions and limiting responses to <1 minute makes for shorter, social-media friendly content

– Think about Q&A that are interesting to external audiences

– Executives are busy—plan for reschedules and cancellations

– Consider your environment—a controlled, quiet room can come off as overly corporate (and even boring)


Team Visa: Social Media Gold

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– Video interviews and behind the scenes moments with Team Visa athletes leverages access

– Real engagement with athletes allows us to tap into their extensive social media networks

– Tip: Like executives, athletes are busy people. They are also competing, so if they don’t perform well, they might not want to do media.


Other People’s Social Media: Cadbury UK

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– Social media content should be less about broadcasting content and more about engaging in dialogue

– Think about who else on Twitter might care about your content—and how you can actually engage with them

– In this example, making the content more conversational and attaching CadburyUK (and their 67K Twitter followers) led to unexpected retweets


Reaching For the Stars

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– We identified a post from RyanSeacrest.com and used it to share our latest congratulatory video to offer context and relevance.

– Turned tweet approvals around in real-time (30 minutes from IDing the article and reaching out to @RyanSeacrest and his 7.6M followers)

– Identifying opportunities can lead to engagement. [Not everything will lead to a retweet—but like the lottery, you can’t win if you don’t play.]


Postcards from London

– Visa was literally everywhere you turned—being able to document it for people not in London expanded our presence to blog audience

– Photos told a story of the various activations around London—from brand and sponsorship, technology and innovation and cardholder usage

– Colorful and casual posts lent a more human voice to the images—more casual tone than typical Visa Viewpoints posts

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Technology Tool: Storify

• Storify is a digital storyboard that allows you to centralize social and digital media content (blog posts, Flickr photos, tweets, YouTube videos, online articles) in one location

• Visa London 2012 Storify Page: http://storify.com/visanews/visa-from-london

• Corporate relations team was easily able to share themes (innovation, travel/tourism, branding/sponsorship) with media

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Key Learnings From London

• Being on location is key to identifying interesting content opportunities.

• Creating the content is half of the equation, but promoting the content is equally important.

• You can’t use content you do not capture. Shoot first, secure permission later.

• Social media content should be bite-sized and be put up quickly.

• Photos can be an easier , equally engaging alternative to video.

• Executive interviews are more interesting when tied to news or offer “behind the scenes” access.

• Getting a streamlined approval process in place is essential.

• Media are interested in leveraging access at events—working with them early is a key to coverage.

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Visa Confidential

Thank you!

Lucas Mast

Visa Inc.

[email protected]

@VisaNews

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Learn more about past and upcoming BlogWells


This video is from

BlogWellSan FranciscoJune 20, 2011


SocialMedia.orgCase Studies

This presentation is from

BlogWellNew York

September 12, 2012socialmedia.org/blogwell

BlogWell New York Social Media Case Study: Visa, presented by Lucas Mast

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