Languages

1 Overall summary of findings

The findings of our social media research are organised according to the three project aims agreed with the British Council (BC).

• To assess the value of the Shakespeare anniversary programme and the impact it has had around the world especially on how Britain is perceived – whether the UK is seen as creative, welcoming, diverse, and innovative.
• To assess the extent to which the SL programme encouraged people to visit, work, do business, study in the UK and consume UK culture.
• To go beyond quantitative measures and assessment of reach to arrive at a deeper understanding of the quality of intercultural interactions and dialogue generated by SL. Also, to provide a range of evidence in attractive visual formats about how and where users have engaged with SL.

1.1 How did the SL programme stimulate values associated with the UK?

• Across the entire period, the majority of social media interactions around the SL campaign involve members of the public sharing information and are neutral in sentiment. Where users did express opinions about Shakespeare or the SL campaign, the sentiment expressed is almost entirely positive or neutral, across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, VK and Weibo.
• Engagement around particular values depends on and can be shaped by the type of events and promotions BC chooses to run. In our initial analysis (Report 1) we found the SL campaign focused mainly on the UK’s creativity, quality and mutuality. Our later analysis focused on responses to specific SL events and found that the values that these events stimulated in social media interactions depended upon the type of event. For example, tweets associated with the Mix the Play app tend to elicit tweets that stress its innovative qualities. On the other hand, tweets which emphasised mutuality were associated either with visiting celebrities, or with the perception that BC was engaged in a global campaign
• English-language events and interactions stimulated associations with quality and creativity, interactions in other languages and cultures allowed for values of welcoming and mutuality to shine through. An English playwright or actor visiting Russia or China may convey an image of the UK as welcoming, but it is difficult for English-language social media conversations to express regard for BC activities as welcoming when they involve English-speaking actors or plays that are already part of the culture. What audiences value about SL is not simply a function of their attitudes to the UK or Shakespeare but reflects their relationship and cultural proximity to British culture. The closer the cultural relationship to the UK, the greater is the tendency to engage positively with the values associated with the UK

1.2 How did the SL programme encourage engagement with the UK?

• The main hashtag #ShakespeareLives became more closely associated with the specific BC events over time. This may indicate a more event-focused strategy across language services by BC as SL evolved.
• The visibility of BC in the social media data that we gathered varies enormously. In the English-language study, BC’s own tweets were so frequent that we had to exclude them from our sample in order to identify tweets from members of the public. In Arabic only nine tweets out of our 87,000 sample were from BC. Does it matter, for BC, if most members of Arabic publics who engaged with posts around the SL campaign did not realise that the campaign was directed by BC? In Report 1 we suggested that a subtle, unobtrusive and even invisible presence could be regarded as the best kind of soft power in action, as engagement would seem to be spontaneous and not prompted or directed by BC. However, is it an internal aim of BC to be seen to be promoting a particular vision of Great Britain?
• There is scope for greater reciprocity with cultural relations partners. Shakespeare’s status as a world writer (as well as a British one) encouraged a frequently expressed view that he “belonged to the world.” SL triggered a cascade of sharings of Shakespeare reinforcing a sense of mutuality. Partners promoted #ShakespeareLives and Shakespeare often without referring to BC or Britain. In the international competition for attention and trust, forms of reciprocity and mutual benefit could be worked out with greater cross-national/institute coordination or ethos of sharing.
• For Russian, Arabic and Chinese users, any activity related to learning English or  providing links to language training opportunities is popular. The SL campaign allowed for the elicitation of audiences’ favourite quotes and offered. SL strengthened the connections between cultural engagement and languagetraining programmes.

1.3 What do we learn about the quality of intercultural interactions?

• Celebrity drives high levels of engagement but which celebrity drives what kind of engagement is variable. In the Spanish-language study for instance, we found that one local actor in Mexico triggered a proliferating set of interactions while well-known Spanish celebrities made little impact. Engagement requires the right celebrity in the right local context. This suggests that BC will derive huge benefits by supporting and enabling its local teams to recruit and harness celebrities who resonate well in local events.
• The rate of response is much higher for tweets connected to a particular event. In Mandarin, for example, social media interactions were dominated by Sir Ian McKellen’s visit, eliciting tweets that expressed mutuality. It is hard to gauge whether the sense of mutuality identified in these tweets is representative of the tweeters’ perception of Britain in general, or whether this was a particular response to the specific events. To explain the precise nature of drivers of engagement would require further research. Comparative research would also be beneficial. The Goethe Institute’s Instagram account produces far more engagement than BC’s. BC can learn from such comparison.
• There has been great improvement in many SL activities since we made our recommendations in interim Report 1 but also some mixed successes. On Twitter, BC is driving fairly robuts levels of engagement and good quality conversations in Spanish, especially in Mexico. It is also extremely active in English. Against this, BC Arabic is less active and BC Mandarin is yet to set up a Twitter account, despite the presence of a huge Chinese diaspora on Twitter. BC’s success on Weibo indicates how it could perform if it engaged on Twitter. Nevertheless, some regional teams are interacting impressively with users, particularly on Facebook, and experimenting with great creativity on Instagram. This suggests BC has responded to our call in Report 1 ‘to work with the grain of each medium’. However, there remains room for improvement. The creativity applied, for example, to Instagram often relies on techniques alien to it as a platform or service. The result of this is little audience engagement despite creating a highly imaginative innovation in content and form. Interestingly, the creative visual and interactive materials posted on Facebook in Arabic and Spanish tend not to be reproduced on Twitter. This is a missed opportunity. Our conclusion in Report 1still holds true. The BC ‘need to work with the grain of each medium and learn how to create effective cross-promotion of content from one medium to the others. This second step – cross-platform coordination and promotion – remains a challenge. We would add that few organisations in any domain get this right.
• There is great scope to produce engagement around live broadcasting via social media, harnessing local staff to translate and add context for local audiences. Building strong connections to local cultures around specific events enhances audience engagement. This was evident across languages. The rather ethereal, detached time/place of the Instagram European campaign was the exception that proved the rule. The Arabic findings show that live events allow BC to demonstrate engagement, not just talk about it. The Russia findings showed how moderators could keep engagement going around events broadcast with a mix of audio-visual content.

2 Overall summary of recommendations

• Localise celebrity engagement. Find the right celebrities that have social media followings and credible connections relevant to drama and theatre in local languages. Cultural intermediaries of various kinds who are locally prominent are very useful ‘multipliers’ (spreading information and enthusiasm) as well as ‘influencers’ (attracting and grabbing attention and persuading audiences about the value of activities/events). Such cultural intermediaries should be very directly targeted, engaged, promoted and rewarded. This should not be at the expense of using British celebrities; rather, a balance can be struck. Encourage local and British cultural intermediaries to work together on social media as this is an effective way of promoting intercultural dialogue and exchange.
• Time posts carefully to coincide with events and buzz around events. Post quotes from Shakespeare and encourage users to play with quotes at times that coincide with local events. Allow users to express their own perspectives and to be creative and playful with language - as well as feel a direct connection to Shakespeare.
• Value social media. Train, motivate and reward local teams for using social media effectively and not just for promotion, marketing and communications. Treat it as a medium of communication and tool for engagement. Establish a Chineselanguage BC Twitter account and coordinate its content with the BC Weibo account. In addition, the BC Arabic Twitter account is relatively inactive. Given the interest in Shakespeare and Shakespeare quotes among Arabic audiences, and the huge success of the MENA Learn English digital platforms and Young Arab Voices, an opportunity for wider engagement was missed.
• Continue to experiment on different platforms but innovation comes with risks that need to be understood. The Instagram re-versioning of Shakespeare’s plays is highly innovative but often alienates and excludes because of a number of reasons: instructions are not clear about how to engage; it is poorly set up; expectations and conventions are flouted in ways that confound users.