KPMG : Covering a conference

Brand marketing imposes on reputation building.

The Site

KPMG, a leading global accounting firm, has launched a Twitter-based news microsite to cover the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

KPMG’s ad hoc microsite, World Economic Forum Live, aggregates the tweets from those attending the summit in Davos in real time. The central display can be toggled between Latest (the setting on launch) and Trending. Left navigation allows filtering by any of nine types of forum attendee, such as Public Figures, Technology Pioneers, Media and WEF Staff, or by keyword. On the right of the page is a graphic representation of the flow of posts, replies and retweets plus a tabbed ‘top five’ of users who are posting/commenting/retweeting.

The site is branded in KPMG’s corporate livery, with a large logo at the top of the page and buttons encouraging visitors to follow one of the firm’s Twitter accounts or other social media sites, and to check out the Davos-related content on its own global website, where the microsite is included in the home page content carousel and a WEF Live tweet stream is featured on the Davos pages.

The Takeaway

KPMG’s live tweet site is an early corporate example of a new breed of sites and apps that leverage social media feeds to provide up-to-date news and ‘real time’ coverage of an event or conference. While its adaptation lacks the serendipity of Twitter’s own hash tag system, that’s partly the point – an attempt to filter out and amplify the various interests and themes. It also makes it easy for those who are not regular Twitter users – or don’t have the time to be – to find or follow the relevant sources.

Some conferences develop their own proprietary tools but by constructing a site around the newsworthy WEF conference, KPMG has seized an opportunity to attract a large audience to a central hub with its name on it. The choice of the Davos summit as the feature event is an appropriate one for the firm and fits logically with the strong ‘expert commentary and analysis’ stream on its global site. That said, it doesn’t perhaps need to drive the association home quite so heavy brandidly. A little more subtlety and a little less zealous self-promotion would arguably strengthen the effectiveness of the underlying message.

First published on 26 January, 2012