Social Holidays
At the Wyss, we want to use social media to increase brand awareness. To us, this includes awareness of our personality. We’re people-oriented, quirky, and fun, all while doing groundbreaking science. A lot of components go into our social strategy. One is taking advantage of social holidays, which we leverage in a variety of ways.
One is creating posts that incorporate our physical space in order to involve our community, which is another social goal. For Valentine’s Day one year, we hung up sticky notes in the shape of a heart and provided markers. We asked, “What makes your heart beat for Wyss?” People were glad to participate and the photo came out so well that Harvard’s main account shared it.
We’ve also created video content for social holidays. For the winter holidays in 2019, a team worked together to create a silent and stop-motion style video that enforced the idea of self-assembly and incorporated scientific materials, but was certainly holiday themed.
Another way we leverage social holidays is having our science writers produce feature stories around a specific topic. For one World Cancer Day, we published a story about how the Wyss was addressing cancer, incorporating a number of different projects from multiple faculty members.
Social holidays have also given us a chance to highlight members of our community for their accomplishments and passions outside of the Wyss. For example, for World Poetry Day, I wrote a story about the art-science connection and highlighted a researcher who is also a published poet.
We’ve taken less scientific social holidays and made them relevant to us. For World Emoji Day, I created an online quiz where participants had to guess what science concept or Wyss technology each emoji combination represented. I also made a version for Instagram Stories.
For other holidays, we’ve created interesting images with our logo. One Halloween, we shared an image of our logo carved into a pumpkin.
