Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

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....

Jeanne is the head of digital analytics at a large e-commerce company. Her daily routine is set to the rhythm of tagging plans, optimisation tests, reports, segmentation and other investigations, always with the same idea in mind: extract the ultimate meaning and learnings from the mass of data being handled. OK, but what comes after that? …

If the end goal is to provide insights, Jeanne must do so in the most clear and comprehensive way possible. But there’s a problem: all the people with whom Jeanne deals are not analytics specialists. She’s facing a diverse array of people whose professions, work cultures, subject maturity levels and objectives are all different. The solution? Build a narrative centred on data… Data Storytelling....

Three quick takes on the intersection of storytelling, digital and communications.

To SEO or Not SEO in the Headline

Actually, it doesn’t have to be one or the other.

We can learn from media properties like Business Insider that have mastered the art of headline eye candy.

Take the BI story that bashed Atomic PR with one of my all-time favorite headlines: “Dear PR Lady: Here’s Why I Didn’t Open Any Of Your 3 Email Pitches”

Few search on “PR Lady.”

But look at how the publication tunes the URL...

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....

As the founder of Southwest Airlines, Herb Kelleher did something no other person in the airline industry could do—grew an airline from nothing to more than 3500 flights a day, and turning a profit every single year.

Organisations that “do things” are said to be more successful than companies that merely “talk”. Now there is proof. As a consumer, we already knew this was true, now your professional alter ego can be persuaded as well.

The world has changed dramatically. Bob Garfield and Doug Levy recently wrote a book about it. According to their conclusions, we have entered what they call “the Relationship Era”. A world in which companies no longer hide behind well-chosen visuals and creative one-liners that — at best — stick. Companies have to do things, more than just saying....

...When it comes to organic search, Google and other search engines place a premium on backlinks. They interpret backlinks as “votes” for the content.Of course, to generate backlinks, you must create content that prompts other digital properties to share your content with their audiences.

For the type of content that grades out as shareable, it’s typically not product information or a personnel announcement or an industry award — information we characterize as company-centric. Instead, it’s the type of business storytelling that’s useful or informative and ultimately helps people in their jobs.In short, thought leadership plays at the industry level, not the company level, ideally offering takes that can’t be found elsewhere.

Such dot-connecting points to blogging as one of the best platforms for thought leadership....

Jessica Gioglio, Social Media Strategist for Dunkin Donuts, and Ekaterina Walter, Co-founder and CMO of Branderati, join the Social Pros Podcast this week to discuss their new book The Power of Visual Storytelling: How to Use Visuals, Videos, and Social Media to Market Your Brand.

The skill set is shifting, says Jessica. A writing background is key to thinking about the whole lifecycle of the content. It’s not just about creating; today’s social pros need to think about how content travels across platform and how it gets consumed.

They see companies hiring more visual artists to create content but also people with publishing backgrounds. “It’s not just about which content you create and which context you put it in,” Jessica says. “It’s about speed too.” What is the right time to produce the right content for the right audience in the right format? Those are a lot of cross-disciplinary skills...

We are all hopelessly distracted. It’s not a disorder -- it’s the new world order. Can I have your attention, please?

Whichever methods we put in play with our marketing, we’re powerless unless we’re able to get a prospect to pay attention. It doesn’t come easy. As long as we’re online, on earth, and in a media-centric society, there will always be a shiny object scattering, shattering, and battering our focus.

Okay, when you practice inbound marketing for a while, you start getting good. You figure out how to write a headline cursors and fingers are magnetically attracted to. But a click is nothing more than a click until you, the messenger, truly click with your customer....

Kevin Spacey's comments about the Netflix release of "House of Cards" contains a road map for brand storytelling worthy of global enterprise brands.

...In the video, Spacey himself speaks to the potential benefits of this innovative distribution strategy, proclaiming, “Give them [the audience] what they want, when the want it, in the form they want it in…”

The success of House of Cards (as well as that of the latest Netflix series to be released en-masse, Orange is the New Black) proves that this distribution model can work. But how might it apply to content marketing, which operates in vastly different ways than the business of television? And, more specifically, how might a nontraditional release schedule like this impact corporate storytelling?

Here are some key insights, derived directly from the words of Kevin Spacey, that all content marketers need to take to heart...

Your competition can copy everything you do except for the story you tell. 

Stop slugging it out with your competitors for a trickle of long-tail traffic. Content Marketing Institute’s Chief Strategist Robert Rose explains how you can crawl out of the trenches and get noticed by shifting your focus from search engines to storytelling.

Your competition is optimizing for the same keywords you are. More likely than not, they even follow the same recipe that you do: research keywords for the different stages of the funnel, spin up a post for each, and wait for Google to deliver new prospects. Even if you tweak your optimization to get ahead, a competitor will notice, copy it, and leave you back at square one.

Instead of relying so heavily on search engines to deliver customers, make your content the lead generator by telling a compelling story that engages readers, gets shared, and produces conversions. Robert Rose, Chief Strategist at The Content Marketing Institute, sat down with OpenView Labs to discuss why storytelling is such an important differentiator in today’s content-saturated marketing landscape and how you can get started....

Think of web television as a nuclear family. It all started with TV — the traditional type. Along came the web, which, in many ways, was TV’s polar opposite: interactive, responsive, progressive. As much as TV was about tradition, the web was all about change.

From this unlikely pairing came little programs that, when viewed together, make up an episodic web series, or webisode. Webisodes share some of the attributes of each of their media parents; yet they also bring a whole new generation of brand storytelling opportunities to life. It’s this pedigreed combination of the web and television that some big brands are experimenting with as a way to provide distinctive and uniquely engaging content to consumers. As one of the most engaging forms of branded content, the episodic web series has a lot of appeal.

For example, just like a TV miniseries or a series of books, a good web TV series can help forge an ongoing relationship with target consumers: Once viewers have been drawn in by the entertainment value of a webisode, they’re likely to stick around to see what happens next — and to visit related YouTube channels, Facebook pages, or other touch points that are part of your branded environment. They’ll get to know your brand a little better. They may even start to like it more than they realized....