Tag Archives: brand streaming

SXSW: Forget Stories. Your Brand Needs a Narrative.

Posted on March 12, 2013 by | 11 Comments

If you’ve spent any time at all recently reading PR and marketing blogs, you know that storytelling is a top trend, and for good reason.  Building storytelling into the communications mix delivers the personable and engaging messaging that sticks with audiences and is effective fodder for social content consumption.

However, at SXSW yesterday, I learned where stories fall short in a brilliant presentation titled “Moving from Story to Narrative,” by John Hagel, author of “The Power of Pull” and co-chairman of Deloitte’s Center for the Edge.

The problem with stories, Hagel argued, stems from the fact that they’re not participatory.   Stories are told to the reader, from the vantage point of the teller.  This leads to the next problem.  Stories eventually end, and the reader moves on to other things.  Now, savvy marketers reading this will say to themselves that those other things can be influenced by providing compelling calls to action, streams of related nurturing content or the ability to participate an adjacent community.   Without a doubt, this is all true, but even the best CTAs don’t work all of the time.

Enter the narrative.

Narratives differ from stories in two important ways, according to Hagel.  First, narratives don’t have an end.  They are open ended, and the resolution is yet to be determined.  Secondly, narratives invite participation.   The inherent message isn’t “Listen” — it’s “Join.”

“Narratives motivate actions,” Hagel noted in his presentation.  “In some cases, they motivate life and death choices.  Stories don’t do this.  Every powerful movement that has impacted our world has been shaped and energized by a potent narrative.”

The “Think Different” slogan from Apple beautifully encapsulated the company’s narrative: how technology and intuitive design can enable people to achieve  more. As Hagel said, Apple founders Jobs and Wozniak thought differently from day one.

  • Apple:  Their charge to “Think Different” isn’t about Apple.  It’s about us, and how we can use technology to achieve more.  Apple is the catalyst.
  • Christianity:  People are born in sin, but have the opportunity to be saved.  How things turn out isn’t known, but it will be determined by people’s choices and actions.
  • The American dream — Anyone from anywhere can achieve anything:  This opportunity expressed in this narrative has drawn people from all over the world to America for hundreds of years.

“In a business context, if you can harness the power of narrative, you can derive competitive advantage,” said Hagel.  Narratives work because they don’t simply motivate employees, they can galvanize a broad swath of people, and inspire them to action.

From campaign to context

I took pages and pages of notes during Hagel’s presentation, even winning kudos for speed and thoroughness from the reporter sitting next to me in the audience.  For the last 24 hours, I’ve been noodling on what he said, thinking about how a brand might start to embrace narratives.  As Hagel mentioned in his presentation, narratives take root organically, growing from the actions of people, and they evolve over time.  They aren’t the product of a brainstorm session, so this post won’t contain Tips for Making Narratives Work for Your Brand or anything like that.

However, there are strong parallels between Hagel’s description of the narrative, and the move we’re seeing in marketing away from episodic campaigns, and toward living brand streams.  The clear message is that today’s audiences crave context, and communicators can derive more power for their brands by providing that important framework.

I’m going to go away and think about the narratives emerging within my company, and my industry, certainly. However, I’m also going to be thinking long and hard about the connective tissue content generates, and how that can be used to create context around opportunities.  If a narrative emerges, great.  But in the meantime, there are important lessons for communicators about what makes people tick in John Hagel’s work.

sarah avatarAuthor Sarah Skerik is PR Newswire’s vice president of social media, and is the author of the e-book “Unlocking Social Media for PR.”  Follow her on Twitter at @sarahskerik

Is your interest in honing your brand’s content strategy piqued by today’s post?  Join PR Newswire and special guests Brian Solis,  Jim Lin and Lou Hoffman for a live event  in San Francisco titled  Tipping the Engagement Scale in Your Favor: How to Employ Multimedia Content for Compelling Storytelling

Related reading:

Create narratives, not stories – Moxie Interactive

Moving from Story to Narrative – @ItsDane

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Social Media & The Presidential Election

Posted on October 17, 2012 by | 1 Comment

With only a few hours to go before the second presidential debate, a session at the 2012 PRSA National Conference titled “Social Media in the Presidential Election: Its Impact, What We Can Learn” offered timely and interesting insight.

The panel was comprised of:

Joe Garofoli, national political reporter, San Francisco Chronicle -

David Almacy, senior vice president, digital strategies, Edelman PR -

The session was moderated by Lawrence Parnell, public relations program director/associate professor, The Graduate School of Political Management, George Washington University.

Regardless of one’s political affiliation or interest in political discourse, it is virtually impossible to not be aware of how social media is playing a role in politics and driving forward the messages in the upcoming presidential election.  For the first time in a presidential campaign, Twitter and YouTube usage and engagement have virtually skyrocketed in the sheer number of tweets, re-tweets, followers, and postings about the campaign and recent debates.

Social engagement is clearly working for both campaigns, and producing profound top-line results. Donations from individuals have broken records, and the number of donations between $50 – $100 for both Romney and Obama has never been higher.  Each campaign has invested heavily in staffing around their social and digital strategy and this trend is trickling down to local and regional campaigns.

An area where social media has specifically played a huge impact has been around the debates. During the first Obama/Romney debate there were 10.3 million tweets.  Two weeks later, during the Biden/Ryan vice presidential debate there were 3.5 million tweets.  During the Republican National Convention there were 4.5 million tweets.   The Democratic National Convention had 9.5 Million tweets.  We also saw both campaigns use Twitter to highlight their own points as to who won the debate and highlight specific messages to their constituents.  While these numbers are staggering, what do they really mean? Do we know the sentiment of the tweets?  Do we really know if these tweets impact the result?  Is this information overload and is the electorate becoming smarter and more knowledgeable?

Some key points made by the panelists:

  • Dissemination:  While social media is driving widespread dissemination of content and messaging, there appears to be little dialogue.  Or put another way, lots of distribution of messages but is it impacting the message or opinions of the electorate?  Most data is showing that it is not changing behavior.
  • Campaign websites – Mostly used to drive donations and drive followers to social sites.  They are not focusing enough on driving policy discussions or engagement around the issues.
  • Non-major parties – Green, Libertarian, etc. are doing more with Twitter and Facebook and investing less in their website presence.  They are using Twitter and Facebook to get their message out due to limited resources to pay for media/TV placements.
  • Anonymity – Social media is allowing ‘non-elites’ to drive conversation. Any witty or creative person can post something and make a message go viral.
  • Social Media in campaigns is more about discussing things that have happened vs. driving dialogue about new stories or breaking stories about policy.
  • ‘Knowledge’ is not increasing – There’s a lot of distribution of information and sharing, but is it not driving new opinions or increasing the electorates’ knowledge of the issues.

We know that as social sites continue to grow, all political campaigns will put resources toward their digital strategy.   We also know that the only true test to know if one candidate has a better strategy around Social is who wins on Election Day.

Author Andrew Meranus is PR Newswire’s vice president of new business development & agency relations.

The campaigns are doing a great job of streaming content out to social networks, fueling the conversations that spread their messages and galvanize their constituents.   To learn more about how creating a “brand stream” for your organization can boost visibility for your messages (and the results your communications deliver) read our free white paper,  Earning More Media Through Brand Streaming.

(Image via)

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Keeping Brand Visibility Flowing: a Look at Brand Streaming

Posted on June 21, 2012 by | 2 Comments

The concept of brand streaming is the ability to tell your story across multiple mediums, creating an “always on” presence that attracts and engages people when they’re actively seeking information, whether they’re chatting on social networks or using a search engine. With this approach, brands are tasked with being not only entertaining but informative, accessible and engaging.  This can be a lot to handle if the communications teams and processes aren’t empowered to develop messages dynamically and respond quickly as opportunities arise.    This week on our webinar titled, “Keeping Your Brand Visibility Flowing through Content: A Look at Brand Streaming in Action” a fantastic panel spelled out best practices and tactics for implementing a brand streaming strategy.  In case you missed it, here’s a quick recap highlighting the takeaways that you can apply to your own campaigns.

Rebekah King, senior manager of consumer communications for Kelley Blue Book (@KelleyBlueBook on Twitter) kicked off the discussion by describing upon how KBB has built a cohesive team to pool content from various verticals in the company. Her social team builds their content strategy and produces content themselves but leverages the expertise of other departments like PR, Marketing, Customer Service, Market Intel, etc.  This strategy allows KBB to use every angle of their organization to inform their audience.

When dealing with social media, Rebekah said, “Social media is not a monarchy, it is a democracy,” noting the best way to be successful with social media outreach is to get each and every unit of an organization involved in the process.   She also emphasized the importance of measurement and analytics.  Using analytics KBB can see what content is producing better results, and they’re able to quickly tweak their messaging to adapt to the changing needs of their audience.  Additionally, the empirical nature of measurement data makes it easy for others to understand what type of content generates the best results.  Sharing that data with others on the team encourages everyone to create the sort of content they know their audience will appreciate.  Rebekah did make the point of noting that methodology an organization uses to measure social media performance should be made in a manner that fits with how it values its business processes.

Our second presenter, Matt Gentile, global director of PR & social media Century 21 Real Estate (@Century21)offered a look at how Century 21 is using Facebook as a tool for their 100,000+ agents and a way to engage core audiences.  He believes for his organization, Facebook works because it allows them to reach their audience in a variety of ways.  When he took over social media for Century 21, Matt set the goal to get the professionals that work with Century 21, both inside and outside of the organization, to become more familiar with the company – and their content and tools – through Facebook. One of the biggest challenges that Matt has seen with Facebook and other social media platforms is that people tend to think that they are solely platforms for advertising. In reality, as he stated, “Social media is a way to build your sphere of influence”. He believes that the best way to be successful in building this sphere is to “share, respond, and recognize” no matter the social media platforms. Matt made it clear that he believes you should always engage with social media users if they are providing positive commentary. If they are giving negative feedback, he advised that an organization respond to that person with an email where they can state their problem and work on solving it. Matt finished by speaking how he views Pintrest as the next social media platform that more organizations will begin to utilize.

Did you miss the webinar?  Listen to it here: http://promotions.prnewswire.com/LP_Brandstreaming_OnDemandWebinar_20120620_DK.html

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Posted in Agile Engagement, Content PR & Marketing

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Webinar Today: Keeping Brand Visibility Flowing – Brand Streaming in Action

Posted on June 20, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Today PR Newswire is hosting a webinar on brand streaming, continuing the conversation about communicating effectively in this real-time, connected world.

Today’s discussion will really dig into the nuts and bolts of recalibrating the communications function in your organization to capitalize upon the opportunities the digital (and social) information markets provide today’s brands and organizations.  We’ll discuss how to organize your team, leverage “found” content and learn how one brand’s focus on Facebook turned “likes” into leads.

Here are the details, and the link to the webinar registration page:

Moderator:
Sarah Skerik, Vice President, Social Media, PR Newswire

Presenters:
Matt Gentile, Global Director PR and Social Media, Century 21 Real Estate

Rebekah King, Senior Manager, Consumer Communications, Kelley Blue Book

Webinar Time: 10:00 AM Pacific, 11:00 AM Mountain, 12:00 PM Central, 1:00 PM Eastern

Keeping Brand Visibility Flowing Webinar Registration

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Listening: The Foundation of Agile Engagement

Posted on November 1, 2011 by | 2 Comments

Agile engagement starts with listening.

Content is the cornerstone of today’s communications strategies, but let’s face it – if the content is off the mark or isn’t seen by the intended audiences, your efforts were for naught.   That’s why we consider listening, targeting and distribution to be key fundamentals for a truly agile approach to communications.   Today, we’re going to dig into listening.  Listening is truly the foundation of agile engagement.

Listening:

Here at PR Newswire, we use the term “Social Echo” to describe the way messages reverberate around (and in some cases are amplified by) our audiences. As messages enter the stream of conversations, they’re shared by people in networks, sparking other discussions.  I think we can all agree that social conversations can make or break brands and products. Buzz (positive or negative) is a powerful thing. But that’s not the only opportunity for communicators.

I monitor social channels for discussion about PR and social media. This screen lets me see popular subtopics within that broader discussion.

If we’re tuned into what our audiences are saying and what questions they’re asking, we should be able to influence the direction these conversations take. And, of course, “tuning in” really means listening.  But listening is a pretty broad term, so let’s break it down a bit.

First and foremost, it’s imperative that communicators understand what audiences are talking about, and what questions they ask. Doing so will enable you to communicate in their context.  Failing to do so means you run the risk of being the corporate equivalent of “that guy” with the demonstrated knack for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.

Identifying hot-button issues and recurring industry complaints is another important exercise. In addition to identifying opportunities for the brand to be the hero, doing this on an ongoing basis helps communicators either avoid risky areas or meet them head on and mitigate the risks, depending upon whatever is appropriate for the objective. It reduces surprise.

Listening will also reveal to you the language uses – the keywords and phrases they use when discussing you segment and services – enabling you to literally be on the same page, which also delivers search benefits.

Where to listen:

  • Twitter – in addition for specific mentions, keep an eye peeled for discussions around new and established hash tags for your sector.  Making lists of key influencers can make Twitter more manageable, as can a social media monitoring dashboard (I use our own PR Newswire Media Monitoring service).
  • Forums and discussion groups – Discussion groups on places like LinkedIn and Quora are fantastic focus groups to which you should pay attention.  You may also find discussion groups hosted by leading publications or industry groups.
  • Search engines – okay, it’s not truly listening per se, but paying attention to what results surface for the keywords your organization has selected is a good way to keep tabs on competitors, influencers and fast-moving issues in your space.

Read our new white paper, “Earned Media, Evolved,” discussing how the transformed media landscape presents new opportunities for communicators to earn media.

Author Sarah Skerik is PR Newswire’s vice president of social media, and is the author of the free ebook Unlocking Social Media for PR.

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Brand Streaming: The Need, Opportunity & Impact

Posted on October 24, 2011 by | Leave a comment

At PRSA this year,  I gave a presentation focusing on how brands are streaming their content today and how we need to think a little more strategically on how we do that.   We can’t simply post all of our content all over the place, but need to have a more focused stream for our content.    This is not an easy process today.  We not only have to be quick with content creation, but also agile enough to change up when the market moves.  Dave Armon from Critical Mention interviewed me about the presentation – that video is at the top of the post, and my presentation deck is below:

Streaming The Brand: The Need, The Opportunity, The Impact

Keys communicators need to keep in mind when developing the content to support their brand’s stream:

  • People love a good true story
  • Developing and maintaining the audience’s trust is paramount (no one will pay attention if they don’t trust you!)
  • Make the content accessible: easy to find, view and use.

Learn more about managing brand streams at this week’s FREE webinar hosted by  PRSA and PR Newswire:  Streaming Your Brand: Managing Brand Conversation and Cohesion in a Real-Time World

Thursday, October 27, 2011
Time: 12:00 PM Pacific, 1:00 PM Mountain, 2:00 PM Central, 3:00 PM Eastern
Duration:Approximately 45 minutes

About the Webinar
Content flowing from brand to constituent – and constituent to brand – has become a real-time, always-on stream…streaming across channels to media influencers, social influencers, consumers, policy makers and decision makers, and then streaming right back to you – full of insight and opportunity.The ability to more effectively and proactively manage this “brandstream” has much to do with your ability to lead conversations, ensure brand coherence, protect reputation and drive business results. From targeting to distribution to analysis, from social to traditional, the technology and tools now exist to allow you to unleash real-time communications and content opportunities like never before.

Join us as we take a closer look at the essential tools, tactics and practices to help you manage and empower your brandstream.

Presented by:
Tom Stein, President and Chief Creative Officer, Stein + Partners Brand Activation
Sarah Skerik, Vice President, Social Media, PR Newswire

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