GMS Summit 2021
From inspiring talks to celebrity sit downs to entertainment by internet sensations, participants were left with moments of surprise and many, many delights.
The GMS Summit brings together more than 7,000 Facebook employees who are part of its Global Marketing Solutions team. It’s a time to reconnect, talk priorities, network and be inspired. Last year, for the first time ever, the Summit was forced to go virtual due to the pandemic. And 12 months later, Facebook found itself in the same boat. Still at home. Many locked down. Everyone craving connections and contact.
That’s why the theme for 2021 was “Reconnect”, with the goal of reconnecting the audience back to the GMS community, with the organization’s mission, and with themselves. Facebook wanted more than a single viewing experience, it wanted to create something that could be shared amongst all attendees to really create a feeling of connection. To bring that to life, we created an experience that evoked a total digital festival experience, channeling energy, togetherness and discovery. The result was a 360-degree engagement extravaganza at every turn.
We built a creative approach around the emotional and aesthetic elements of a festival, ‘stages’ to host digital content, digital line up posters, maps, tickets and wristbands and designated virtual spaces for socializing. Leveraging private GMS channels on Facebook’s Workplace and Instagram platforms, our team mapped out the entire attendee journey, making sure we touched festivalgoers at every turn.
From inspiring talks to celebrity sit downs to entertainment by internet sensations, participants were left with moments of surprise and many, many delights.
The experience was a sensation. Over nine hours of content featuring 46 speakers from both inside and outside the organization was released over two days – in both video and audio formats for optional on-the-go listening. Segments received over 30,000 views of recorded and live moments. Most spent an on average 29 minutes watching content, a 32% increase over the previous year, demonstrating that a year later (and a lot of virtual content later), the organization could keep audiences captivated.
Engagement on video content increased significantly – almost 500% in comments and almost a 150% rise in reactions. And an internal social good campaign supporting coronavirus relief received over $10,000 in donations. If that isn’t a way to reconnect, then what is?