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So how exactly do you harness audience's ever-decreasing attention span? By giving them an active role in their content consumption process by publishing stories with interactive elements. Such tools can increase engagement, on-site dwell time, and social share rates. ProjectHubSpot and Playbuzz joined forces to scour the web for amazing examples of interactive storytelling. Each industry poses its own obstacles and unique characteristics, but share one common denominator: Interactive content works for all topics and audiences. Let’s take a look at a few examples from the ebook....
Do you remember anything at all when you watch ads -- or is the experience a hazy blur? The fact is, consumers rarely remember a product -- they remember stories, which may inspire the use of the product. That element is what online advertising is lacking. Two weeks ago I talked about the value of complementary storytelling vs. disruption. For advertising to be as effective as it can be, ad stories need to align with the content so that it, along with targeting, ensures relevance of the message in a way that elicits a response.
I also want to remind advertisers to spend the extra time to tell a story that inspires consumers, rather than simply telling them about your product. I don’t mean that all ads have to move you to tears. I’m referring to inspiration in the manner of a quiet...
An ad is an ad is an ad. Or is it? Millennials have grown up with a media diet far different than the generations that came before them. Has that changed their media taste? Do brands need different types of ads to reach people of different ages? Google partnered with L'Oréal Paris to find out....
Turn your words and pictures into a beautiful visual story. In minutes. It's free and easy to create beautiful newsletters, a photo slideshow, reports, and other documents with Adobe Slate.
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You’ve already seen this ecosystem in action: we use it to publish Moments on Twitter. And you may already be using some of the individual tools we’re talking about, such as TweetDeck and Curator. Today we announced a new Collections API that turns multiple Tweets into a single story with a single Collection ID, which can be used to edit, update and publish that story from any of the tools in our ecosystem.” Now you can easily turn unique Twitter content into great stories that attract, engage, and retain an audience.
Tell your story with the best Tweets, simply
Previously, when you wanted to publish a great story with Tweets, you had to manually manage a bunch of Tweet IDs, and embed them into your app or website one at a time. With our new end-to-end ecosystem, we’ve simplified the storytelling process. Now you can use TweetDeck, Curator, Spredfast, Dataminr, ScribbleLive, Wayin, or Flowics to find and organize the Tweets you want into a single story....
The most innovative, disruptive brands across all industries have one thing in common: They are storytelling masters.Warby Parker built an eyeglasses empire by billing itself as a socially conscious lifestyle brand, and itcarefully curated content to share that story. Startup Thinx has a new panty solution to disrupt the $15 billion feminine hygiene market, and it’s boosting brand awareness with feminist content and an emotional connection to consumers. Dollar Shave Club markets itself as a cheap—and cheeky—alternative to store-bought razors, serving up humorous tips and quirky puzzles to keep its community engaged.
Part of these brands’ success is rooted in the ability to tell stories with an emotional connection. Emotion tends to play an outsized role in consumer behavior. MRI imagery has shown that when evaluating brands, people tend to use their emotions over information.
The emotional effect stretches from B2C to B2B companies. If B2B buyers are emotionally connected to a brand, the buyers are 50 percent more likely to purchase those products, according to Google’s research with Motista and CEB....
It’s only August, but voting is already underway for the March 2016 South By Southwest (SxSW) Interactive conference. Long thought of as the breeding ground for new ideas and creative technologies, we can gleam industry insights from the SXSW Interactive Festival. This year, I decided not to wait until the conference to delve into the veritable buffet of groundbreaking panels vying for festival space. This year’s PanelPicker interface received more than 4,000 proposals, which is an all-time record!
While a quick search of infographics yields only 11 results, a mere TWO actually have the word “Infographics” in the title. The industry discourse has shifted away from “how-to” models to “how to do it right.” Infographics have become a key format of the larger conversation: Visual Storytelling.
A quick search for “Visual Storytelling” yields over 200 talks in PanelPicker, along with hundreds more for “data visualization” and “visual content”. Infographics are now used as one of many effective tools in the Marketer’s toolbox, and an accepted part of the larger conversation happening in the content marketing industry.
Visual storytelling is vital to content marketing success. The following types of visual content are at the forefront of the proposals for next year’s SXSW Interactive Festival.
Andrew Essex thinks we are living in an unprecedented glory age for content creators and marketers. Essex, vice-chairman and co-founder of the unique, adaptive ad agency Droga5, and quite a forward-thinker when it comes to content marketing, believes that our current situation as far as content creation and marketing goes has changed for the better, many times over.
In a talk he delivered at the 2015 NewsCred #ThinkContent Summit, he challenged us to think about content differently. His presentation made us consider that ads may be a thing of the past and what we as content creators and marketers should be aiming to do is to build on our idea of storytelling....
Great storytelling is a great differentiator.
Imagine you're walking down the snack aisle at a grocery store. How do you make sense of the hundreds of choices on either side of you? What's going to be on your mind when you decide what to buy? Perhaps you choose one product over another because that company donates a percentage of their proceeds to a great cause. Or maybe you choose it because it has more protein -- and you were just reading this article about how protein helps boost concentration, and you've been having trouble concentrating at work recently.
People like making decisions quickly, and it'll be easier for them to choose your stuff if your message resonates with them. After all, content helps people travel through the inbound marketing methodology so that, someday, they might buy something from your company and spread your company's story with others.
But, as you may have noticed, a lot of people are trying to tell stories these days. How are you going to set yours part from the pack? And where on earth do you begin creating compelling stories for your brand?...
Below you will find 50+ web tools you can use to create your own web-based story. They are grouped into categories of tool types, but you can also access a complete list of all tools. Each link points to a full entry on the tool that includes a description, links and embedded versions of the original Dominoe story, links to other stories created in the tool, and some more feedback that can help you decided if the tool might be of interest.
People who join this wiki can contribute to the content on these pages (learn more...). Again, your mission is not to review or try every single one (that would be madness, I know), but pick one that sounds interesting and see if you can produce something....
An audio recording doesn't have to go through the full-fledged production process of creating an a podcast in order for it to be a valuable activity for students. Creating short, unedited audio recordings is a good way for students to record and share their reflections on things that they have learned and observed in your classroom. The following five tools can all be used for creating and sharing short audio recordings.
“Storytelling.” It’s the flavor of the day, whether you’re talking about content marketing, visual communications or public relations, and for good reason. Stories are how humans communicate – with each other individually, across populations and over centuries.
In fact, many organizations are pretty good at identifying and defining their key story lines. The key to success in brand storytelling is in the next step – the strategic deployment of the story. Telling the brand story effectively requires a plan.
And to be clear, we’re not talking about hanging a touchy-feely post up on the blog and then calling it a day. No. Brand storytelling, in this context, means developing a sustained plan to create and execute a strategic approach to telling the brand story, in a way that supports company’s objectives. Personally, I don’t give a hoot about impressions. Let’s gun for something a bit more meaningful....
If you want to separate your content from your competitors, storytelling is a great tactic to add to your content marketing strategy. Several interesting case studies have shown how the implementation of storytelling can triple sales within one year. The best part is that any business can use storytelling in their content marketing strategy by following these five best practices....
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Breaking the Top 10 storytelling posts for 2016 into two parts, I published the first part last week.
Here’s the second part, again reflecting the varied facets that make up today’s communications in the business world.
In spite of the massive changes in our industry, media relations and PR storytelling still matter, an apt way to kick off the rest of the list....
What happens when people use storytelling for deception? Or downright evil?In this week’s podcast, Shane and I talk to Maria Konnikova, a frequent New Yorker contributor and author of The Confidence Game: The Psychology of the Con and Why We Fall for It Every Time, to learn about the art of the con and the impact it’s having on the media world, from catfishing on Facebook to advertising that crosses the line....
Let’s see if we can make order here and gain a better understanding of where content consumers stand when it comes to long-form articles.
Storytelling has always been in flux. As humanity progresses, so do our technologies and our patterns of perception. The latest popular trends in story consumption involve formats like listicles and quizzes, but people do still like to read.
It may be a generational thing, but it always comes down to personal preference and the mood of the moment. There’s still plenty of room in the content media industry for interactive, quick fun as well as long-form, in-depth immersion into topics.
When it comes to putting news scoops into nuanced contexts, presenting multiple narratives on the same events, or establishing authority and thought leadership, Or, to riff on the oft-cited “snackable content” analogy, just because someone loves a thick, juicy steak doesn’t mean she’ll never want a candy bar....
Not only is visual content integral to how we process information, but it also drives increased engagement from our audience.
What does this mean for brand storytellers? We should be investing just as much time and creativity into our visual content as we do for our written content. And yet, visuals are often treated as an afterthought rather than one half of the storytelling duo.
Visual storytelling doesn’t come naturally to many of us design-impaired marketers (myself included). Luckily, there are some established dos and don’ts we can follow to ensure that our visuals are relevant and effective. Here are four best practices for visual storytelling....
How often does an interaction under the business communications umbrella lend itself to a full-blown story, the type with a beginning, an end and something going amiss in the middle that must be overcome? Maybe 10 percent of the time, and that’s probably high.
That’s why we use the term storytelling techniques in describing how the concepts of storytelling can be applied to business communications. It turns out that within the classic story arc, those who entertain like novelists and movie directors depend on certain techniques to bring their material to life....
It is no secret that storytelling has become the pinnacle practice of 2015. So what can content marketers learn from some of the best stories going right now? Looking ahead to Friday and a new “House of Cards“ release on Netflix, I began to think about the parallels between content marketing and traditional media (in this case television).
In Kevin Spacey’s keynote from Content Marketing World 2014, he told a half hour story about the importance of storytelling using his own career as a vehicle and the stories of the actors he’s played along the way as the gasoline. I distinctly remember this being one of the most #meta speeches I’ve ever heard.
So what advice does Francis Underwood have to dish on storytelling? Spacey recommends that before you even begin, it’s important to ask yourself, “What story do you want to tell?” He suggests that everything will fall in line “if you start with what the result is going to be.” Once you get over the initial hurdle of determining what story you want to tell, you have to examine what elements will make this story truly engaging. Spacey goes on to propose three pillars that must be present in every good story....
With only 21% of B2B marketers saying they are successful at tracking content marketing ROI, it’s inspiring to see success in an unexpected (even perceived as stodgy) environment: academic medical centers. We’re proud to share the story of Wake Forest Innovations, the commercialization arm for Wake Forest University and Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. I was fortunate to speak with its Director of Marketing and Business Development, Vishal Khanna, who is a finalist for Content Marketer of the Year. (The award will be announced at Content Marketing World in September.)
Vishal was chosen as a finalist for his dedication to performance in content marketing. While you may not work for an entity in an academic medical center or a university, you will find insights and lessons to learn from Vishal’s story. He and his staff of one full-time-equivalent employee and two 30-hour-a-week contractors rock performance by executing a content marketing strategy that an agency helped them develop....
While content marketing and storytelling marketing are commonly taken together, since they do feed off and complement each other quite seamlessly, they are two very different styles of marketing, as will be shown by this blog post. In order to illustrate those differences, I will reuse the examples I used to illustrate my original post on the subject: Converse, Red Bull and Ford.
I said previously that “since the long-running nature of Ford cars means that their campaigns fulfil all aspects of content marketing, the examination of their marketing campaign will extend over both blog posts on the subject.” Because of this, I will use Ford as a bridge between the two other products as a way of illustrating the differences between storytelling and content marketing....
The other thing I have to emphasize is that in order for a lot of these ideas to work for you, you need to think of content as something way beyond simply a marketing tactic – you need to embrace it in everything you do on your site and offsite – take for example Ian Lurie’s (from Portent – an organisation whose thoughts on content clearly mirror mine ) post on Content as part of UX over at Moz. And like I point out in the Content is King post, and as Ammon Johns points out in this piece “The Great Content marketing Swindle“, content without a real distribution channel is simply content, not content marketing.
Every single one of these ideas below need a distribution and display strategy for them to work.By no means is this list exhaustive, but it can form a good start to any content plan. Some of the areas may not apply to all businesses, while others will – I have taken the approach of top down- starting with the core corporate communication and then working my way into the more creative areas....
Every story had to have some moment that was there to amuse me — a funny moment, an emotional moment, some original observation I’d made on the scene that no other reporter had. It could just be a nice moment in the script. Every story had to have someone who was more than a talking head, spouting out their point of view on the issue of the day.
To make them more human, it sometimes only took a line of description, an original thought about who they were and why they believed what they believed, a surprising moment, a funny moment on tape.If you cannot find a deep interest in the story to begin with, that's a warning since. As Pixar Filmmaker Andrew Stanton advises in his TED Talk on The Clues to a Great Story:
And that's the first story lesson I ever learned. Use what you know. Draw from it. It doesn't always mean plot or fact. It means capturing a truth from your experiencing it, expressing values you personally feel deep down in your core....
Snap three pictures.
Add captions.
Choose graphics.
Let Nutshell turn it all into a shareable cinematic story....
Thematic is a new service designed for building and sharing visual stories. Thematic allows you to display up to twenty pictures organized around a theme of your choosing. You can add one line of text to each image in your story. Your completed story is displayed in a vertically scrolling format with each of your images occupying all of the available space in your browser. Completed stories can be shared publicly or kept private. Each public story can be shared via Twitter, Facebook, email, or embedding into a webpage. I've embedded my sample story below.
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![A Visual Guide to Telling Compelling Stories for Your Brand [Infographic] | Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/bdgdY0H6lziC8cidQvoRtTl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
Engaging content encourages readers to spend more time on your site. Learn how other brands do it with more than 40 interactive content examples. Recommended reading! 9/10