Most of you will have noticed that with ITS 2013 we started the live communication of the July Finals, channelling through a specific hashtag all ITS-related facebook & google+ posts, tweets, Instagram photos & videos, pins on Pinterest and more. Ours was a real “call to action” sent out to everyone who wanted to tell their ITS story, in order to have a real 360° perspective of what the event looks like, from the eyes of all of those who live it.
The results were so impressive that with our internet partner Develon – the guys behind this amazing idea – we decided to take it even further at ITS 2014. Through their amazing social media aggregator software called Collektr we once again created a livefeed asking everyone to contribute by sharing their ITS-related activity on social networks using the hashtag #itscontest. You know, our way of looking at things is like “ok, we did very well last year, so this year we must do better”. But who would have expected THAT much better??
This year’s social network activity was literally incredible, and we would like to share with you what happened on Twitter: an exposure of over 33,400,000, a reach of more than 7,900,000 with over 8,300 tweets and 1,400 contributors. We were the 9th global trending topic on Saturday 12th 2014!!
We must be honest, such a huge amount of generated traffic would have been impossible without the help of precious collaborations as the one with CrowdM , an agency specialised in crowd marketing. Or with triestesocial which gathers through the hashtag #triestesocial all news and events happening in our territory. We worked once again side by side with our local newspaper IL PICCOLO which published lots of ITS posts on their social networks and of course we cannot forget all the bloggers who were invited to attend ITS 2014 and who posted a great amount of content too.
The presence of some internationally renowned celebrities certainly helped. International popstar Mika and his sister Yasmine Penniman, Renzo Rosso, Nicola Formichetti… people were constantly shooting pictures at them and posting them online!
A further boost was certainly given by to the giant screen which we mounted at the entrance of the ITS location, showing the posts the minute they would appear on our livefeed page. It encouraged everyone to participate and during the three days of the event we often saw people standing in front of it just smiling at the funny, exciting, emotional, even poetic content that would appear.
Of course, in proper social media style, some posts made a stronger impression than others and received stronger feedback. Like the picture of Barbara wearing a yellow worker’s hat with a catwalk in construction behind her as if she were literally building the location (which by the way isn’t entirely far from truth…). Eva & Adele, living works of art and ITS ARTWORK jurors together with Mika, would of course attract attention wherever they went, and everybody wanted to take a picture with them. Some truly amazing shots of the huge storm coming in the harbour on Saturday evening, right before the beginning of the fashion show, were incredible, too. As well as posts communicating the totally relaxed, familiar atmosphere one can experience at ITS, well represented by a beautiful pic of Diesel’s Art Director Nicola Formichetti with his arm over ITS ACCESSORIES juror Andrea Rosso.
And we cannot forget the craze for the ITS Lucid Dream Machine, the brainchild of our creative director Fabio Bressan. Literally everyone wanted to put the goggles on and dive into this lucid dream experience. Even Renzo Rosso couldn’t resist it and everyone went nuts shooting pictures at him.
It is incredibly interesting for us to see how quickly the social network phenomenon is evolving and how it influences our everyday lives more and more. Our social network activity is bound to increase and it won’t stop here. So stay tuned.