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The GREAT campaign: from theory to digital reality

Guest Post

What’s so great about GREAT?

The GREAT campaign was launched in 2012 to make the most of the global interest in the UK as a result of the London Olympic Games.  It was designed to showcase the very best of what Britain has to offer, welcoming the world to visit us, study with us, and do business with us. Three and a bit years on, and the GREAT campaign has already generated £1.5bn of economic benefit for the UK economy, thanks in no small part to the hard work of our embassies all over the world who use the GREAT brand every day.

At the digital level, GREAT is about using inspiring imagery and consistent, high quality branding to connect with a range of different audiences overseas.  It gives us a globally recognisable platform on which to discuss everything from culture and creativity to engineering and exporting.

GREAT digital around the World

The GREAT campaign is active in over 144 countries, as well as in the UK.  Campaign partners such as the British Council, Visit Britain and UK Trade & Investment all have their own digital channels focussed on education, tourism and business respectively, and each with their own, targeted audiences.

It is our role in the Foreign Office, as the united face of the UK government overseas, to bring these themes together in a way that is relevant, interesting and informative for our diverse audiences across the world.  And in so doing, as well as contributing to some of the more fiscal objectives of our campaign partners, explore creative ways of using the brand for our own foreign policy (often termed “soft power”) objectives.

How does our network use GREAT?

Last August, to take advantage of the relatively quiet period in London and many parts of the world, the Digital Transformation Unit undertook a desk audit of how our posts in the top 12 FCO/UKTI priority markets use the GREAT brand on social media – specifically Twitter and Facebook.

The audit looked exclusively at whole-of-mission channels for Embassies and High Commissions in those markets (excluding Head of Mission, subject-specific, and more localised consular channels), and considered the penetration of the brand within the posts’ outputs, and the thematic relevancy and shareability of the GREAT content published to each channel.

#GREAT penetration

The audit considered a snapshot of social media activity over the period of one month – August 2015.  By surveying all content published to Twitter and Facebook during this time we could see at a glance the extent to which our priority posts were using the GREAT brand.

What was immediately apparent was that not all of our priority posts were using the brand as regularly as we expected.  Some didn’t use it at all that month.  This led us to thinking – how well have we communicated our expectations around how posts should use the GREAT brand on social media?

It was also interesting to see that when posts do use the brand they tend to do so to a greater extent – proportionally – on Facebook than on Twitter.  While it might be the case that Facebook audiences are more receptive to this kind of branding than Twitter audiences, anecdotal evidence from our network suggests just the opposite.

When we looked in more detail at the type of GREAT content posted during this period, we saw that our posts fell into one of three camps: deploying the brand mainly around key events (such as the Rugby World Cup or the Milan Expo); featuring the brand consistently, with GREAT content feeling like it is part of a wider campaign and not only attached to discrete and isolated events; or using the brand in a more sporadic fashion, less directly associated with key events or a broader campaign.

#GREAT relevancy

We looked next at which of the three GREAT pillars (the key themes around which the GREAT campaign is based: business, tourism and education) are used by our priority posts.  What we found was that most of these posts deployed the brand across all three pillars, weighted to varying degrees – as we would expect – depending on their policy priorities, any events they were hosting that month, and relevance for their specific audiences.

#GREAT shareability

For all but one of our priority posts, the majority of GREAT content they posted to Facebook and Twitter included an image.  This was good to see given imagery is such a key ingredient of the campaign, and also because it is well understood that images are more shareable on social media than text alone.  Video is becoming increasingly important, particularly on Facebook, so it was encouraging that two of our posts published GREAT branded videos during the audit period.  Read Graham’s blog to hear about the video training we are rolling out to posts around the world to increase their skills and confidence in shooting and editing videos for use on social media.

Anecdotal evidence from the network suggests that some of our posts find heavily branded content difficult to land with their audience – they find it doesn’t get the engagement that other, more spontaneous content enjoys.  Several of our priority posts have found a nifty way around this, by using the GREAT brand within or in the background of other images.  Here’s one of our favourites images, from our post in Brazil:

At the time of doing this audit, four of our priority posts had also branded their social media profiles – an easy way of ensuring the brand is seen by fans and followers.  Here are a couple of nice examples from our posts in Indonesia and Japan:

#GREAT principles

As a result of this audit we developed a list of guiding principles for the use of the GREAT brand by our posts overseas.  We have built these into a new set of FCO social media guidelines, specifically for the GREAT campaign, which we will shortly be sharing with posts to help them make the best use of the brand and the opportunities it offers.

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