 Your new post is loading...
Your new post is loading...
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....
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....
Brands have turned to content to tell stories with content marketing. With access to broad distribution channels, it's easier than ever before to consume, create and distribute content. But where should a brand start?
Delving into content marketing and brand storytelling can be daunting, especially if you are just beginning. Here are four tips for brands becoming publishers to get started.
According to the Custom Content Council, 61% of consumers say they feel better about and are more likely to buy from a company that delivers custom content. This is just one reason brands have jumped on the content marketing bandwagon.
So how can a brand distinguish itself if every company is creating content?
According to Ogilvy Singapore’s Barrie Seppings, “In the era of big data, we need stories in order to build marketing messages that are both ‘accurate and human.’”
The most successful marketers know that it’s all about telling stories....
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....
Here comes the first grab bag post of 2015.For those new to the neighborhood, these posts consist of three vignettes on storytelling techniques that caught my attention, but can’t quite stand alone....
“Deconstructing the art and science of storytelling, This sentence, the one you're reading right now, is the most important one in this entire feature.”
...But while brand storytelling may be dominating the trade conference stages, it’s not enough on its own for brands aiming to add meaningful value to their customers over the long term.
Strategies for Retention: Own Every Consumer Touch Point
Most content marketers know this particular statistic: 70 percent of consumers prefer getting to know a company via content over ads. To deliver this type of lasting, comprehensive value to their audiences, brands must build their content strategy around three core areas of focus: Foundational content Engagement content Social content...
There are two important parts of delivering a message: the delivery and the message. If one is a dud, it doesn’t matter how good the other one is.
You wouldn’t read a story if it was printed underneath a bus, and the most atrocious film in the world is still a car-crash if played on an IMAX cinema. The same applies to your brand storytelling, you can have the most heartwarming and engaging campaign in the world, but if it’s not delivered effectively your time and money has been wasted.
You wouldn’t want to spend months creating an incredible story only for nobody to hear it, would you? Every day there are brands who do this by not thinking carefully about how to present their message to their audience. An intelligent delivery strategy will make it easier for people to hear the story you want to tell, optimizing your chances of turning them into customers. Here’s how to ensure that the story your brand is telling doesn’t get missed...
One of the best parts of my job involves conducting storytelling workshops.It’s both fun and satisfying to help participants connect the dots to a simple premise: Given a choice between “interesting” and “dull,” human beings pick “interesting” virtually every time.
I’m constantly refining the package shared with participants in our workshops for business storytelling.Lately, these are my go-to narratives....
We are about to launch our second product (HookFeed), but it’s not our second launch. We’ve been doing countless mini-launches (alpha versions) for months now with both HookFeed and Minimalytics — and we keep making the same damn mistake:
Giving users too many choices…Below, I’ve illustrated our mental excursion from key iteration to key iteration across both products in search of simplicity.
TLDR: We’ve been reminded (brutally) that as product people we need to make the hard choices up front if we want any of our products to succeed. The vocal minority isn’t usually right and ultimate flexibility isn’t really what people want or need....
It could almost be a writing workshop prompt: tell a story, do it in six words, go for the wow effect — and that’s exactly what the Ritz-Carlton wants. Recently, the hotel company launched a campaign inviting social media friends and followers to provide six-word stories about their Ritz-Carlton experiences with the hashtag #RCMemories.
The company calls these stories “Six Word Wows,” and the campaign, if one were to believe the corporate website’s press release tagline, is “Paying Homage To Classic Ernest Hemingway Line.” “Which classic Hemingway line?” we might ask. “If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them”?
No, Ritz-Carlton is referring to the probably apocryphal anecdote that when bet he couldn’t write a story in six words, Hemingway replied, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”....
Why did people donate to help a kid who made a cardboard game arcade? How did a game show boost the sales of IBM? Andrew Davis explains how great storytelling boosts ROI.
|
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....
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....
Authentic stories help powerful brands make deep connections with customers. But that high-level principle creates real-world challenges for content marketers. What is a powerful story and how do you tell it? I’d like to share four tips on how to tell stories that make connections and get results.
“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....
So you are a film student or filmmaker and you’re interested in telling a story that will stay with your audience beyond the “fade out.” Let’s say you want a webisode to go viral. Or, a couple of years ago, you heard Disney and Fox talking about transmedia. Now you’re wondering how to stay on trend with these big distribution companies. How would you even begin to write, shoot and produce a story that is “transmedia” ready?
There are four key elements you can pay attention to when creating your work that makes it easier to transition into something interactive and cross-platform....
One of the by products of this research is that we’re learning how much of decision-making is unconscious, and indeed beyond the reach of the conscious mind until the decision is already made. So your traditional means of testing – the focus groups, the in-depth interviews, the surveys, and so on – by their very nature miss out on the interesting parts of consumer choice.
If you’re not tapping into this new kind of data, you’re not only behind the curve, you’re out of the loop, the one that matters, the consumer decision-making loop.Can your story stand up to that kind of pressure? Does your story meet these new kinds of tests?...
...For example, a selfie of a young twenty-something with a snowboard at a ski resort represents both the endorsement of a product, an endorsement of an activity, as well as an identifier of someone saying “I am a snowboarder”.
While its easy to dismiss that this is just a photo, the movement signals a future that we here at Curatti dub The Content of People, or the Internet of People. Note that this sounds a little bit like something similar, The Internet of Things, better known as IoT. That’s because in some sense, people and things are converging as we head towards an even more digital society — as consumers associate themselves with things and items, they become that item, as opposed to that item molding who they are. What you’re now seeing is a world where products no longer define people, but a world where the end user defines the product. Identity ultimately will (and has begun to) shift.
How to Execute in the Content of People (CoP)
Executing in the Content of People is a challenge, but not entirely impossible. As I look to the future of marketing and storytelling, here’s how I see the CoP impacting how marketing is done....
Storytelling can be complex and the information about storytelling, well, overwhelming. The good news, is that you can start either way — from the future (with a vision story) or the past (with an origin story). In this article I want to show you simple ways that you can dive right into telling your story (without fretting or worrying so much if you’re getting it right).
In a recent client workshop in New York City we unpacked this process, sharing some of my favorite ways to lead off any purposeful story. I shared six kick-off phrases that ANYONE can use to start a story in a way that’s compelling, uplifting, and inspiring. I like to think of it as Mad-Libs for transformational storytelling!
The Story Literally Spills Out Of You, When You Use One Of These 6 Kick-Off Phrases.
These 6 strategies are something we cover in great depth in our StoryU Online course Undeniable Story. Today, I want to share with you a few of them that are really important in setting the context and frame for your marketing, storytelling, and leadership efforts....
Traditional advertising campaigns just don't make the grade anymore, and here's why.Advertising has helped many brands become category leaders. Brands such as Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Kellogg’s, General Motors, Microsoft and more have produced ad campaigns that have made their products household favorites.
So what could be wrong with following proven advertising techniques such as theirs? Plenty.More than ever before, people are tuning out advertising campaigns. The traditional approach to “telling is selling” and using creative techniques to grab consumer attention really don’t work anymore.Let’s consider the stories of two fast-food brands.
Story time isn’t just for kids. In my analysis, top sales reps use stories at almost every stage of a deal -- clarifying the product, overcoming objections, answering questions. No matter what step they’re at or what the issue might be, they have a story on hand.
But the powerful art of sales storytelling is only mastered by a few. One reason is that salespeople aren’t taught how to talk about case studies and other marketing content as stories. It’s great to create written case studies, film an accompanying video or two, and put those resources on the website for potential customers. But the next step should be to provide training that walks salespeople through the talking points in the context of a story.
Also, too many sales reps use case studies as a way to puff out their chests. But they’re much more effectively put to use as a way to talk through challenges from the buyer’s perspective. Less “look how great my company is” and more “here’s how our client’s life got better thanks to our help.”
Here are the elements that should be in every sales story, to help both sales and marketing determine how to structure these valuable tales....
...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....
Pixar's 22 Rules to Phenomenal Storytelling, originally tweeted by Emma Coats.
|
Scoop.it!
Isaac Morehouse offers sage advice for bloggers, writers and content marketers alike: tell your story, not your status. Recommended reading. 9/10