Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Every business interaction with a prospective buyer or customer is a potential story. That’s right, stories about your business are already being shared. Isn’t it time to take a more proactive approach to contribute to the conversation?

Stories are media, and media is media, regardless of the source. This is why every business must become a media company to better manage its story within the communities it serves.

What I’m going to share with you today is that your business can actually use storytelling as a means for accomplishing goals beyond marketing to shape future events that become signature stories....

Marketers can reach a greater audience than ever by combining the power of social media and storytelling. The game has changed. We no longer live in a broadcast era where marketers can simply buy people’s attention with a TV campaign. There are different rules now and we need to earn the attention of our audience.

We have a connected consumer revolution. The consumer is now in control of what they view, what they share, and how they view (on what screen). So there has been a major shift in terms of the relationship between consumers and marketers. And there are bigger things at work as well. We saw it with the Arab Spring, and the critical role social media had in the way information was shared. We saw it with the Occupy Movement as well. Social media can have an impact on traditional power structures.

From a marketer’s perspective, that means that we’re moving towards pull versus push approach, sometimes referred to as inbound marketing. We can no longer push our messages across, we need to pull customers in with engaging, useful content. All of these trends are turning the traditional media model on its head, and brands are evolving into media properties. One of the best examples of this is Red Bull.

Red Bull is putting out such compelling content that traditional media properties like NBC are buying the rights to this content. They’ve completely flipped the model around as a brand, where the broadcasters are after them for their content. They’re a great example of a brand doing it well in social....

...Television is undergoing an analogous transformation. Although we sometimes watch with family or friends, we mostly experience TV in relative social isolation. We are disconnected from most of the people watching with us, deaf to the roar of the crowd during a game or the laughter of the audience after a punch line. We have learned to suppress our urge to talk about what moves us, settling instead for chance meetings at the water cooler the day after.

But all that has changed with the sudden rise of realtime social media, particularly Twitter. Just in the United States, tens of millions of people are talking to each other as they watch TV. This year's Super Bowl alone spurred over 24 million tweets. After 80 years of sequestered viewing, television audiences worldwide have forged Twitter into a social soundtrack for TV. If you are not part of the soundtrack yet, chances are that you will be soon....

Customers own the story of the brand now. What brands say is far less important than what brands actually do to serve the well being of the faithful. Whereas before, the brand conversation was based on delivery and interruption, successful brand conversations are now participatory in ever more technology driven channels.

Storytelling is at the very heart of how we humans share and connect what we value about our heritage, our communities and ourselves. Brand storytelling is about connecting the outer value the brand provides to the inner values of the customer. There must be a deep affinity between the two or the relationship is just a transaction.

The foundation for this affinity is built on the shared stories between brands to consumers, customers to brands, and consumers to consumers. Like all relationships, there has to be chemistry. Brands have it or they don’t. How well these collective stories line up with the experience customers have is what creates “insistence without substitutes” in the minds of customers....