Partners' expectations

VivaTech's partners, whether multinational companies, investors or academic institutions, are looking forward to the event with palpable anticipation for a number of reasons:

1. Discovering innovative players and technology watch: find innovative technology partners via Vivatech and its aura.
2. Raising brand awareness: the visibility of the event helps to raise brand awareness among a highly sought-after target group.
3. Providing an opportunity to tell the group's innovation story. One of the major difficulties faced by major groups is having the opportunity to explain and ensure the communication dimension of their group. Vivatech provides a clear opportunity for partners to develop their own communications.
4. Definite political visibility: this is the start-up & innovation event, with the added assurance of appearing in the notes of politicians, many of whom are interested in the event.

Coverage on social networks: the Vivatech account is very strong!

Next, we're going to focus on the coverage of social networks, focusing on X and LinkedIn, which are the main corporate networks.

On X, taking the audiences of 2023 (more exhaustive), the coverage will be sectoral, economic and media:

When we look at one of the Vivatech partners using our Topical Impact Assessment methodology (the ability to reconstruct the timeline of a person, a list of people, a community or an ecosystem in order to evaluate qualified impressions and coverage of a communication, an event, a crisis or the impact of a theme), we realise that one partner activates very few people around Vivatech. On the other hand, the number of people reached is substantial!

How come? In reality, the Vivatech account is excellent for reaching its own audience. The main concern is that it's not always the key messages that are being propagated. In short, we enjoyed seeing the audiences for the event and the strength of the Vivatech account, but we're going to be especially surprised when we analyse the indicators used in the rankings!

What if we stopped choosing biased indicators such as impressions or retweets?

Impressions, that's not really it

In terms of partner ranking :

We're imagining that the number of impressions will go through the roof. In reality, the rankings are still based on dummy impressions, which still count 400k (instead of 18k) for this type of publication, which only attracts competitors:

18 k instead of 400 k. And no software can display the 18k today. To date, I haven't seen a single organisation changing its reports to actual impressions. I've also seen an influencer at Vivatech who is flashed at 255,561 impressions according to the monitoring software for 22 May 2022, even though he has an incredible score of .... 746 views. This is no longer possible, and the social networking industry can no longer turn a blind eye to it.

Rankings of retweets are meaningless

Next, let's take a ranking of retweets for 2023. We have a top 5 with : LaurentAlaus, jblefevre60, Kalydeoo, Nicochan33 and Pierrepinna. They're going to be among the very active people, covering all the ups and downs of the show and the different points doing a real job of raising the show's profile. But I'm mainly interested in the impact of diversity and visibility for the show or the organisation. So I'm extending this to tweets about 2023 and 2024 as of today (23 May):

In reality, there is a huge amount of activity (over 1,000 publications!), the retweets are between the same types of people and the impact is minimal. A quick look at the retweets shows us the problem with the fair of mentions of people present at the show mentioned for retweets:

The end result is biased retweets from an inward-looking audience. The only interesting thing is that these influencers are the people who are doing the rounds of the show, doing the real work of exploration, and securing them means ensuring that the 'all-terrain' will be there.

On the other hand, some publications that are better researched do have an impact, even if this is clearly not the case for the majority of them. The issue is not the negation of everything, but rather that of indicators and the fact that the really important things are not being observed. A piece of content with 700 real impressions is put on the same level as an impression with 10k impressions, while being displayed with 400k impressions in the reports. That's not in the interests of the organiser, the brand, the influencers or anyone else. But everyone is playing by the same biased rules: this has to change. For real impressions, for target coverage rather than retweets.

On LinkedIn, we're going to take this year's baseline as it's a network where data going beyond one year is difficult to obtain. Let's skip the flops of identifying communities on the basis of small samples via LinkedIn search:

This requires a more refined knowledge of LinkedIn, with a methodology for monitoring on a daily basis or targeted to specific needs. I therefore chose to focus on Orange and Vivatech on LinkedIn:

With the same return! No communities, no audience to match, no strategy in place. In short, LinkedIn is not yet up to scratch!

When it comes to strategy, we can innovate!

In terms of strategies, we can identify :

• The use of brigades dedicated to promoting the digital event. It generates numbers and noise. On the other hand, in terms of impact, the return on investment is more than moderate with people who have a lot of followers, but not very qualitative, stemming from mass following, with people who are no longer on Twitter. The only purpose of this is to fool the indicators in the multiple rankings. But these rankings also have communicative effects that cannot be ignored... A difficult equation!
• The promotion of owned content: an organisation's corporate account takes advantage of its presence or partnership at Vivatech to address innovation issues by dedicating a segment to them. Most of the time, the corporate account reaches the usual targets of its communication, far from the people it really wants to reach.
• Promoting competitions with events: this is a useless way of boosting retweet figures and the KPIs of social media software, which do not give the real impressions. Sometimes combined with a media partnership to achieve the same result: it only reaches contestants.
• Live coverage of the event: this can be interesting, provided that the quality of the coverage is guaranteed, which sometimes happens with certain publications. La Poste, for example, scores very well on this strategy.

In conclusion

• Vivatech is a top-level event bringing together the cream of innovation. The event has a real impact. It sets the media agenda by bringing together the general, business and technology press.
• Vivatech, through its account, has enormous visibility (50% of people who publish on Vivatech follow it or the event's media or economic partners), but this visibility, apart from the presentation quotes, does not serve the partners' messages.
• Vivatech influencers are a complete waste of money. Mass following, ultra-publishing (some influencers are capable of unleashing over 200 tweets in 4 days on a single brand), lack of quality: these influencers are used to boost the official rankings whose impression figures are false, whose engagement figures through ultra-publishing and socialising are false: in short, it's time to objectify the reports with real KPIs.
• Corporate accounts abuse their activities in terms of publications for rankings with little value and a purely quantitative angle. When you publish 900 publications in a week about an event, can you still talk about quality?
• LinkedIn is interesting for partnerships and influencers, but there is no community dynamic outside organisations, and the architecture of the network is still too unconnected for it to supplant X as a network of influence.