Storytelling and Social Media
October 1st, 2013 • COMM464, EMarketing
Personal, Authentic, Simple, Engaging and Inclusive- these are the five characteristics of a good brand story. While this formula may be easy to learn, it is difficult to put this into practice in today’s times. We today have a multitude of marketing means be it mass means of social media such as Facebook and Twitter or niche marketing means such as Foursquare. Hence the first challenge that companies face is to decide which means to use. Here, the Conversation Prism presented by Solis is useful. So, for example if a company wants to attract a large audience and wants to tell a story through the use of video, then looking at the prism, the company can choose to use YouTube.
Choosing a medium is the first step of brand story telling. The second step is to actually tell the story convincingly and consistently. Talking about convincing story telling, it is important to realize that engaging the consumers is the first step as described by Solis in his book Engage. For this, monitoring and understanding the audience either by means of the altimeter or social ladder is important.
To tell the story convincingly, it is important that everyone who has the responsibility of say, using the company’s twitter account to tweet out messages, has the same tone, voice and message. Conflicting messages because different people are tweeting leads to inconsistency and less value for the story as per this article.
This article talks about how good story telling can reap each dividends in the future: telling a good story through social media can easily be amplified by happy customers thereby increasing the amount of the much coveted earned media.
Story telling is key to marketing both offline and online and combining story telling with cost effective marketing means such as social media can only mean success for the brand in the long run case in point being Dunkin Donuts where people voluntarily shared pictures of the product after an initial attempt by the company.