 Your new post is loading...
Your new post is loading...
Is relocating your nascent company to a startup hotbed worth the price of admission A Renobased entrepreneur weighs the pros and cons.... ... Creating a startup is hard enough without the additional expense and stress of moving, of not having friends and family around, and of not knowing where the best restaurants are. So I decided I had to make my new venture work in the place where I was already established. My point is that while there are benefits to planting yourself in a hub, there are plenty of advantages to setting up shop in a more isolated place. For starters, when I started ShortStack three years ago, I already knew where the best brew pub in Reno, Nevada was--so I haven’t wasted any time or money on bad beer! Here’s how to start a business wherever you are...
Drinking From the Content Marketing Fire Hose As we launched the site, the iQ team started to work with a team of journalists and editorial partners, conducted editorial meetings and worked closely with the Intel social media team to amplify and extend iQ content. Before we knew it, we were beginning to operate a newsroom, managing a robust content machine and starting to see our goals for iQ come to fruition. By end of 2012, iQ was emerging as an essential asset to Intel’s marketing and social media strategy. Although satisfied with the early success of iQ, we knew there were many improvements to be made. In January 2013, iQ version 1 (the current site) was released. Several new changes and strategies were implemented from our learnings since the BETA launch. So what have I learned about content marketing in the last 11 months? I’ve distilled the 12 core lessons for brand publishers organized by the tenets of the iQ content marketing approach; production, process and promotion....
How to craft and tell your story to truly stand out in the mind of your social media contacts. The story makes the message resonate. That’s right: An important element to cultivating relationships, especially via social media, is the story. No, I don’t mean you must turn into your favorite novelist and spin a compelling tale of mystique, intrigue, and danger. But if you want to truly stand out in the minds of your contacts, you do need to think about your story and tell it across social media....
The value of visual storytelling will only increase over time. You don’t need a research grant from the feds to reach this conclusion. There are only so many words a human brain can process before the overload buzzer goes off (unless you’re Stephen Hawking). Which brings us to the infographic. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then an infographic must weigh in at around 10,000 words. Yet, grapevine chatter has the media suffering from “IF,” infographic fatigure. Jesus Diaz from Gizmodo shared this in an exchange with Sam Whitmore at SWMS...
According to Howard Gardner, a professor at Harvard University, “Stories are the single most powerful weapon in a leader’s rhetorical arsenal.” Yet most people struggle to think of compelling stories that reinforce their messages. That’s usually because they’re trying to think of a “big” story. In order to help people get unstuck, I tell them to think smaller. I encourage them to think of a single customer whose life was improved because of their product or a community that is enjoying the benefits of a new public school. A story can be many things: your personal experience with a person, place, thing, or topic; somebody else’s experience; case studies in the news; or a historical or fictional example....
There is plenty of advice out there on how to create a great presentation. Most of it centers on two pretty common pieces of advice: Tell more stories.Use bigger fonts. Neither is always easy to do, but the more events I attend – the more I realize a single fact that still manages to surprise me about why people do (or don’t) connect with you as a speaker. Having a good story or great visuals is not enough.
By now most of us content marketers have heard of, and probably already started using, Vine, the new app from Twitter that allows users to easily produce and share six-second videos. When it comes to adding the new tool to our content marketing toolbelt, how do we avoid misusing Vine? I say the answer is the same for producing six-second videos as it is for producing sixty-second videos – you need a plan. Or, since Twitter is a micro-blogging platform, let’s say Vine is a micro-storytelling app and you actually just need a micro-plan. Download a free copy of a printable Vine micro-planning tool, check out the whiteboard video below, or read the transcription to start planning right away....
...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....
As content takes its rightful place at the forefront of marketing, I'm seeing many marketers fail at basic storytelling. Marketers are ineffective when they use the classic "customer testimonial" format and pop that onto their blog or make it into a video. "Here’s our product. It is great. Here are customers who say it is great. Now buy some of our product." This just doesn't hold people's attention. How interesting would a book or movie be were it to have this plot?:
Boy meets girl.
They fall in love.
They get married. That's what most people do with their business writing....
Rick Klau of Google Ventures posted a video from Google's co-founder, Sergey Brin speech he gave last fall at Google Ventures CEO Summit.
He explained a story that most people do not know, how Google really got started.
Via Joy Bhattacharya
When a helicopter crashed in a densely populated part of London around 8am today, next to one of the busiest trainlines in Europe and a large bus station, the news was always going to be broken, within seconds, by members of the public on Twitter, armed with camera phones.
Twitter user Craig Jenner was one of the first to put a picture on Twitter which was shared far and wide.
What happened next is indicative of the way the media are increasingly playing catch-up on such stories, moving from reporting to aggregating (or curating, if you must) - images, eye-witness accounts and videos. Journalists were asking to use the picture with a credit and were trying to get Jenner on the phone...
...In my work for Colgate's laundry products, it was validated that P&G's Tide brand is the industry's gold standard when it comes to getting things clean. In fact, at the previous agency, I worked on Tide's campaign to find the"Dirtiest Kid in America," and the promotion that put a few real diamonds in P&G's Spic N Span boxes to celebrate the brand's diamond anniversary. Most had cubic zirconia, but when shoppers started ripping open boxes onto supermarket floors, the widely covered promotion ended.
Today, a piece in New York Magazine reveals just how valuable this "liquid gold" Tide has become....
Many companies concentrate social media efforts on getting as many fans as possible, but focusing just on the number of fans misses their true value – they are loyal customers who have raised their hands to say they want a relationship.
The real win is achieved by engaging with customers. An Ad Age study found that only 1% of the Facebook fans of major brands engaged with the brand pages in a given month. One-time promotions to increase the number of fans rarely produce long-term benefits. IBM’s Yunchun Lee writes, “That isn’t to say that CMOs shouldn’t strive to build a fan base. The issue is how to do this in a productive way. There are no short cuts. Winning a loyal customer begins with matching a great product or service with a flawless and repeatable customer experience.” Social media marketing requires a long-term commitment to enriching the customer experience. Starbucks is a great example of a company taking the right approach. In an interview with Adweek, Starbuck’s Alexandra Wheeler said that the firm’s social media strategy “isn’t a marketing initiative. It isn’t a PR initiative. It’s cultivating and creating great consumer value and great consumer relationships.” Starbucks treats its fans to a steady stream of special deals and a richer experience than they’d get solely by going to a store, including interesting background stories on coffees and great photography of merchandise....
|
The Pulitzer Prizes for journalism were announced this week, and the winning stories represent a variety of different angles, techniques and tools that provide good ideas – and more than a little inspiration – for public relations and marketing communicators.
Forget the elevator pitch. You only get four words. If you want to start a business or launch a new project, you need to be able to describe your effort in four words. Why four? If you write a longer story, the door cracks open to ambiguity; you can start to hedge your bets, get vague or abstract. Stick with four. It means you must identify a subject, an object, a verb and maybe one descriptor or refining notion....
Many people will tell you that marketing is a game of numbers. They’ll say it’s about researching a target audience, developing a targeted message, and using advanced statistics and metrics to determine where that message should be delivered. Of course there’s a significant amount of truth to that statement, but I don’t think it remains as true as it once was. Successful marketing is about storytelling. In the past decade or so, that’s become even more true than it was before. Why has it become more true? Social media. Social media has turned marketing from a numbers driven game to a story telling game. How has it done that? That’s what I’ll discuss below....
...With the increasing reliance on gadgets in everyday life, the PR industry risks losing some of its storytelling edge. With all the information we need available at our fingertips, many are beginning to question if storytelling has lost its value. Temasek Communications head Stephen Forshaw explains that, “we’ve lost the art of developing key messages and we’ve lost the art of storytelling, and storytelling is the heart of our business.” It is hard to engage an audience with a meaningful, personal story when the world seems to become more and more impersonal every day. You can have a conversation with friends or family without ever actually seeing them face to face. The important thing to remember is the value of personal connections as our world becomes engrossed in technology....
...So the question is: Why is a story so important to your personal branding strategy? First of all, it sets your brand apart as unique. Every brand has its own story to tell, but yours is the only one of its kind. What drives you? Why did you enter the field that you find yourself in today? You’d be surprised at what details will intrigue the reader and give your audience an idea of what your brand is really about. Perhaps one of the most effective characteristics of a story is that it humanizes your brand. It’s easy to launch a brand, but the story behind it can leave your target audience wondering where it came from. What is your actual purpose? What drives your actions? Was it the right opportunity at the right moment? Now consider how your brand has affected others. How have you impacted the lives of those involved with your brand? Has it always gone smoothly? Are you new at this? What’s your experience prior to the creation of your brand? What is the story behind your personal brand? While the story for your brand might satisfy your present audience, the aspects of your personal brand story can turn you from just a brand into the personification they can truly relate to....
About today's guest post: As companies mature their online presence though more robust social engagement, individuals within those companies are advancing use
Andrew Mason’s resignation letter last week reflected the best of storytelling in business communications. With this in mind, I tried to track down Mr. Mason to take us behind the curtain in how the letter came about. Unfortunately, he proved elusive. If Mason had agreed to an interview, I suspect the exchange would have gone something like this:...
Talk about an outlier. Over 400,000 views on the need for financial types to embrace social media. The topic doesn’t exactly scream click bait. So what explains the staggering number? The one element that makes this Forbes post different from other executive byliners lies in the headline and the use of the hashtag, “#Accounting: Why Finance Teams Need To Get Social.”...
Every company wants a signature win in heavyweight publications like Fast Company, BusinessWeek and Fortune. By signature win, I mean 1,000-plus words devoted to a behind-the-curtain look at the company. Yet, few PR teams cultivate the needed content assets to give themselves a fighting chance for this type of attention. It requires thinking like a journalist, framing the tension in the story and teasing out potential texture. To understand the type of fodder that drives such #storytelling, we selected a Fast Company feature, “Walmart’s Evolution from Big Box Giant to E-Commerce Innovator” and categorized the content type (3,324 words)....
Consumers don't care about you. They care about what you mean to them. And meaning comes from stories. When you tell your company story, you become more relatable. And when consumers relate to your brand, they'll buy from you. Social media allows you to tell your stories at scale and build powerful relationships with your customers. In the past, storytelling to the masses was expensive and only possible via large media firms. Now, storytelling is free, or near-free, via accessible social media tools. Here are seven simple ways you can become a more effective storyteller on social media
How to Tell Your Story Tell stories through the voices of the people you serve, and/or your staff/members/volunteers. Check out these 7 Guidelines for Telling Your Organization’s Story and learn more about the Art and Strategy of Storytelling. Plan - So you're ready to make a video for your organization. If you're planning to upload it to YouTube, remember to make it no more than ten minutes long. You may want to use storyboarding to plan your video. Check out these production planning tips from See3, and this post from Idealware: Creating a video? A few things to consider before you shoot.
Via José Carlos
...No. It’s no longer good enough to force the customer to rationalize with their inner self why they’re friends with a laundry detergent. You have to give them another reason to like you, to be an online resource in their daily (or weekly) life, and to serve a need that is above and beyond your actual product benefit. In a word: content. Content marketing is the key to building not only links, but enduring popularity. While some may say that content marketing has been forced upon SEO’ers by Google’s recent updates, it simply flies in the face of human nature NOT to focus on quality content. Which is exactly why Google updated their algorithm in the first place - to get people what they really want....
|
Good storytelling about small business challenges and choices.