Excellence in Social Media Strategy

Summary of work

With Merck’s long history of commitment to the multiple sclerosis (MS) community, the challenge was set to communicate and celebrate its global support and action for MS patients, on World MS Day 2016.
The result was the hosting of a truly global and interactive experience - a 24 hour Tweetathon starting in Australia, travelling as the globe turned, from country to country, with final tweets issued in the USA.
Participating countries/regions were provided with a one-hour slot, linked to when the country’s audience would be most socially active, to showcase exciting local activities through engaging content on Merck’s global Twitter channel. A total of 29 countries provided content in 11 languages alongside English to maximise engagement and reach a truly local + global audience.
Community managers in three time zones monitored and engaged with interested stakeholders across the full 24 hours to enhance engagement, making the campaign fully interactive.
Across the Tweetathon, 140 tweets were issued and content was engaged with by global influencers, journalists, politicians and advocacy groups around the world. The #MSday24 reached a total of 2.7 million people, and its use was second only to the official #WorldMSDay hashtag.

Judges' comments

For something that could all too easily have been a really ‘vanilla’ campaign, this was a very clever way of communicating, with content that was written in an appropriate style for social media and not just dropped on it. The undoubted efforts of global and local coordination and the operationalisation required to make it happen were impressive, as were the high quality tools provided. We also liked the local language distribution and the mixture of content produced.