Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

I am super passionate about what I do in the world of telling business and marketing stories. If you read my stuff and know me, you know I am a storytelling nerd from both the business and improv stages—and proudly!

I love that storytelling is experiencing a “corporate Renaissance” across business, social media, social entrepreneurism, and executive communications. Storytelling is so much bigger than marketing. It’s the foundation of how companies communicate who they are in the world and what they stand for. A resurgence is a great thing, and storytelling itself—the original social medium for humans—is evolving in the business world. That is a great thing.

In doing my work, in chatting with fellow story practitioners and branding execs, and in doing research for a book to be published later this year, I’ve stumbled upon what I believe (and am already experiencing) the next wave of storytelling will look like. Much of it involves getting out of the way, empowering others, and thinking bigger.

Here are seven ways to jump on that next wave and reinvigorate your organization’s storytelling for more successful marketing this year....

The old novelty marketing ideas don’t work any more. With over 825 million Facebook posts a day, 7,500 Tweets a second, and at least 86 different social networks with over 1,000,000 users, your audience is constantly bombarded with blogs, jokes, memes, news, reviews, pictures, and other things on social media that aren’t related to your brand. At the beginning of 2014 there were over 180 million websites on the Internet (one website for every 40 people on the planet), most will have social pages churning out posts that compete with you for clicks and attention.

People have such social fatigue that by the time your post arrives in someone’s feed you could be the 200th thing they’ve seen that minute and they’ll move on to the 201st less than a second later.Your socially fatigued customers live in an age where ‘good’ isn’t good enough, and ‘excellent’ is barely remembered.

To truly stand out you need to create a real impact and connect with your audience on a deeper level than just pretty pictures and humour. Here’s eight key components that successful marketers use to turn socially comatose casual browsers into chipper consumers....

Facebook is training journalists through online courses. What does this mean for publishers and content creators?

Facebook is joining the likes of Khan Academy and Coursera with “e-learning courses for journalists”. Four courses are offered so that reporters can learn how to use Facebook’s products and services to enhance their content. 

We decided to try out them out. Beyond the material itself, the lessons reveal insights about how Facebook sees the future of publishing and content. The current selection of courses goes over how journalists can:

• best utilize Facebook and Instagram,
• engage their audience with Facebook Live,
• create immersive storytelling through virtual reality (360) content,
• and produce Instant Articles...

I like to ask people when I meet them, “What’s your story?”

It’s more interesting to me than typical questions about education, major, city of origin, job title, or sports team. All of these things might play a part in their story, but story implies something much broader and more personal. It’s the narrative of your past, present, and expected future. It’s the drama of your own life as you see it playing out.

When I think of the most interesting and talented people I know, I think of their story. I don’t think of their status. “Oh, he’s a graduate student” is a status. So is, “Married, salesperson, lives in Ohio”, or, “Studying business at USC”. A status is a static snapshot of a handful of labels attached to a person based on some institutions or external standards. It conveys nothing really unique that gets to the core of the person, or the animating force behind their actions and ideas. There is no passion in it. No sense of direction and creativity....

Archetypes can be immensely valuable in the development of visuals, the visual identity of your brand and the story you aim to tell. Handled adeptly, archetypes will evoke certain feelings and become integral to the customer experience.

An amazing study from Allegory Studios reveals the characteristics of 12 archetypes often used to guide brands and their marketing strategies:

-  Consider applying archetypes in your images to connect with your audience.

-  Understand your brand’s persona and let it inform the people you use in your visual marketing.

-  Look to your target personas to understand what and who to show.

-  Seek to be more interesting than a stereotype character....

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....