Social media has provided a unique opportunity for consumers and brands to connect on a level much deeper than that of a monetary transaction. It may sound obvious, but it’s worth noting that historically, a true fan of a brand didn’t have many options for celebrating his fandom. I could watch my favorite show, but I couldn’t get behind-the-scenes content (unless that too was on television). I could purchase a shirt bearing the logo of my favorite team, but if I wore it in a special place (say I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in it), how would they know? I’d have to mail them a picture, and even if they received it, where would they share it? The relationship was one-way, aside from the moment when I handed over my money and they handed me the product, or when I sat down and tuned in to my show. 

There’s no single reason we follow brands, but it’s certainly rooted in the idea that we as consumers, supporters and fans want to have a deeper relationship with them. But just because a fan wants to follow your brand doesn’t mean you’re entitled to provide them with any content you wish. On the contrary, a fan can opt out of receiving your brand’s content with a single click, so it’s imperative that they’re receiving the type of content that’s valuable to them.

To that end, we’ve put together a list of 5 things your audience really wants from your social presence.

1. Fan Content

Have you ever been to a concert and just wished that the singer would pull you onto the stage with them? Of course, that rarely happens at concerts, and chances are that if it does, you’re not the one who’s pulled up there. And just like a stage, social media is a platform that overlooks a large audience (often much larger than a concert audience!). The ultimate thank-you, which takes little time and hardly any money, is to celebrate the content created by fans. It’s not that fans necessarily want to see content from other fans (though often they do), but that they want to know there’s a possibility that their content will be shared.

2. Behind-the-Scenes Content

The casual fan may be content with the limited interaction they have with a brand. Simply buying and wearing the hat, eating the candy or watching the show is enough for them. But the true fans want to go deeper. They want to look behind the curtain to a place only a certain number of people can see. They want the unreleased footage, the photos of the actors on set and the outtakes, like this cool photo set of actors laughing in between takes.

3. Shareable Content

I used to wonder why Facebook pages like “WTF Crazy Videos” and Twitter profiles that just post quotations existed. But as spammy as they seem (I mean, with no real brand to promote, what is the page/profile manager getting out of it?), people do follow them because they provide users with content to share. I’m not suggesting that your brand start auto-scheduling quotations or scouring Reddit for the latest #fail video, but when determining your content plan, think about this: Where’s the content that audiences will want to share with their audiences? Is the content you’re creating actually worth sharing?

4. Exclusive Content

Why would a fan follow your brand’s content if everything you post there is accessible elsewhere? If you’re just posting your readily available commercials on YouTube or links to your products on Facebook and Twitter, there’s no value in actually subscribing to, liking or following your brand’s accounts. Consider releasing content only on a specific channel. This can be anything from video blogs to sneak previews to coupons to presale codes, but make sure fans can’t get it anywhere else. The Boston Celtics made more than $200 off me recently when they sent a special presale code for playoff tickets to their email newsletter list. I hadn’t planned on going to a game, but when the code provided me with great seats before most other people, my plans were set. It ended up being one of the greatest games (and days) of my life.  

5. Participatory Content

Most of our personal social-media activity is passive stalking…I mean monitoring. But this doesn’t mean that social media users aren’t up for a good game or contest! One of my favorite examples is from the WGN America (a Story client) How I Met Your Mother Facebook page, where WGNA has created albums of its fans suiting up (an homage to Neil Patrick Harris’s character, Barney Stinson) as part of a yearly “International Suit Up Day.” Giving your fans a way to participate (especially if prizes are involved) is a great means of activating them, and in turn they’ll be on the lookout for your content.

Every brand is different, so not all this content is applicable to every brand; but try to be open to sharing new types of content. It not only solidifies the relationship between your brand and its fans, but also gives your fans a reason to follow it.   

Apparently, the ad people peddling brand newsrooms know nothing about news. So the brand newsroom conversation has been ill informed at best and nonsensical the rest of the time.

The focus on news from brands is appropriate and necessary. Brands live in the same digital world as the rest of us. Our world is increasingly dominated by social sharing, driven by content. If a brand wants its stories shared on social platforms – and it does – those stories need to be newsworthy in the most straightforward sense of the term: new and worthy of an audience’s attention. So brands need to master a concept that’s as central to journalism as it is to swapping stories with your neighbor: news value.

News value is tangible and well understood by news people. Not so much for ad folk. The ever-escalating discussion about brand newsrooms has proven that the idea of “news” is a shape-shifter for ad folk and digital start-up people.

I grew up in newsrooms at dailies, weeklies and magazines. I haunted newsrooms as a freelancer for The Washington Star, now defunct; city hall bureau chief, among other things, for The Detroit Free Press; president of Chicago Magazine and so on. Seeing the world through the lens of news value, I founded agencies to create real stories for brands in the form of magazines, newsletters, web content, apps, games and so on. Now I head a shop built to replace the traditional ad agency with content-based advertising in all media channels. Out of our 170 professionals, about three dozen are journalists.

>>> Read the full post at PandoDaily.com. 

The cicadas are coming. Billions of buzzing (relatively harmless) insects will descend upon the eastern United States from Georgia to New England in the coming weeks.

If you’re not familiar with them, cicadas are a unique species. For most of their lives, cicadas live underground as nymphs, digging and feeding on roots. After 17 years underground, in the last few months of their lives, they emerge by the billions, seeking high ground (mostly in trees) on which to shed their exoskeletons and emerge as beautiful winged insects. They mate, the females give birth to new nymphs deep within tree branches, and then they die. While their life cycle is unique, cicadas are most commonly known for their mating song, which is sung by the males and is among the loudest of all insect-produced sounds.

Most people are dreading their arrival. Imagine a fly: Now significantly multiply its size and sound and you’ve got a cicada. Oh, and imagine not one single cicada but billions. Plus, when their life cycle is complete, their carcasses will litter the ground. Are you excited yet? I’m going to ask my wife if she’s excited and will check back with you in a minute. Spoiler alert: She’s not excited.

Until recently I shared her sentiments. That is, until a short film by Samuel Orr about cicadas completely changed my perspective, and taught me a lesson about storytelling in the process.

Second Time Was a Charm

Samuel Orr is a natural-history filmmaker and time-lapse photographer who is creating a one-hour documentary that focuses on the 17-year varieties as well as cicadas in general. He has begun a Kickstarter page to help fund the endeavor, hoping to increase the production quality and be able to film in various countries.

I never thought I’d be interested in this topic. Last week, a friend sent me a link to the video, a seven-minute preview of the documentary, but I was busy at the time and it inevitably slipped my mind. When I received it again from a marketing colleague, I figured it wasn’t a coincidence and gave it a watch. I’m glad I did, and I hope you will as well.

It’s Hard to Hate

I once heard an adage whose attribution is lost to me (if you know where it’s from, please let me know), but it went something like “It’s hard to hate a man if you know his story.” It stuck with me, both because I’m such a fan of storytelling and because it’s so true. Those we love the most are those closest to us, their having been with us our whole lives. Our mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, wives, husbands and children—we love them unconditionally because they’re entrenched in our lives, as we are in theirs. But it doesn’t require family ties to love or at least care deeply about someone, obviously. On the contrary, it may simply take understanding what’s beyond face value to quell ordinary feelings of anger, frustration and annoyance. David Foster Wallace, in his commencement speech given to Kenyon College’s class of 2005, explained the idea of framing one’s perception. He uses a common source of irritation, traffic and impatient drivers, as an example. (I have edited for brevity.)

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. It’s not impossible that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: It is actually I who am in his way. Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

(You can listen to the full amazing speech here.)

It may make sense to get angry with a person if they cut you off, are rude to you or merely root for a different professional sports team. But when you understand their story, your perspective can completely change.

A week ago I didn’t hate cicadas, though I can’t say I cared for them either. But now that I’ve seen and experienced their story, I’m not capable of perceiving them in the indifferent way I perceived them just a week ago. I know their story. I’ve seen them crawl from below the surface, plod across the earth and climb, excruciatingly slowly, up toward the sun to shed their exoskeletons. I’ve seen them create life, and I’ve seen their lives tragically cut short. I saw the poor nymphs whose wings were deformed or were trapped in their exoskeletons, trying desperately to free themselves. My heart broke as they were snatched up by a passing possum, eaten by ants or flew too low near water and drowned. I smiled as the newborn nymphs dropped from their branches and headed underground for their 17-year slumber.

Your Brand Through Their Lens

Almost everyone is taking your brand at face value. Brand evangelists are nice but are few and far between. How are you helping casual audiences understand your brand’s story? How are you arming your brand’s current fans with conversation-worthy content so they can share it with their friends, who then share it with their friends, and so on? Because as conversations increasingly become the currency of media, it is those stories that others tell about your brand that can determine how an individual feels about your brand and, ultimately, what actions they take.

Samuel Orr told me a story about an insect and completely changed my perspective on it. How are you, or more important how are your brand’s current fans, helping provide new audiences with proper perspective?

Photo Credit: OakleyOriginals via Compfight cc

This isn’t true, of course. But I understand why everyone’s making the claim: Digital is the only part of advertising that’s growing rapidly; social media is the red-hot center of digital; to make social work, you need conversation-starting (and sustaining) content.

So content creation now is the biggest challenge of 21st century marketing. It’s time-consuming and complicated. Most startling to ad people, it requires a creative and strategic mindset that is alien to life-long inhabitants of adland. I still find myself explaining to agency people, for example, that good brand content must be ownable and original. Re-running content from well known magazines doesn’t build your brand, it spreads the magazines’ brands. Imitating others’ great content will sell about as well as Karaoke versions of classic hit songs. “Native advertising” that’s really just offensively self-serving advertorial will both fail and embarrass. (For more on “native,” look at Native advertising will fail if it means ‘Let’s lie to the natives.’)

Get brand content wrong and you can generate incredible brand damage. (Ask Fleet Laboratories’ Summer’s Eve “feminine wash,” Nestlé’s Kit Kat brand and many, many others.) But get it right and you generate legions of fans who promote your brand with more credibility, less cost and far greater effectiveness than you could ever muster with traditional ads. This is the enormous pot of gold at the end of the content rainbow. (Ask Ford Fiesta or a host of Story clients, including WGN America, and others.)

With so many claiming storytelling expertise, how does a marketer figure out who’s competent to lead a brand to the correct end of that rainbow? How do you ensure that you head toward greater effectiveness and away from being (literally) a douche? Let me suggest an approach.

Past, Present and Future

I’ve been mixed up in storytelling work—photography, music, the movies, newspapers, magazines, books and online—since I quit high school, which I confess was quite a while ago. 

My Story colleagues and I predicted some 15 years ago that the world, driven by digital technology, was entering a post-advertising age (hence, the name of this blog). CMOs, we said, would quit searching for the perfect 30-second spot to interrupt well-loved TV programs; instead, adland would have to focus on making rich, original content — content good enough, smart enough, involving and valuable enough to attract and hold an audience on its own. 

The predictions have come true. From academia, the Wharton School’s prestigious SEI Center for Advanced Management Studies has declared, through its Future of Advertising Project, “Classical advertising has gone the way of black-and-white television.” The new marketing gospel preaches that “every brand is a publisher” that must create its own media. But even that mantra is now out of date because creating and spreading brand content is not about publishing; rather, it is replacing advertising. 

This simple, true dogma has caught most marketers unprepared, struggling to figure out which stories to tell and how to get original content created that the brand’s targeted audiences will value.

More than a year ago, the Advertising Club of New York invited five top marketers from big brands to debate the future of advertising. I sat in the audience and heard Kimberly Kadlec, Worldwide Vice President of Johnson & Johnson’s Global Marketing Group, say, “Content is the biggest opportunity in front of us and probably the most complex.”

Kadlec was representing the prevailing sentiment. Many others have identified the problems associated with creating good content as among their biggest marketing challenges. Kadlec told the Ad Club that the quality of brand content is far more critical than the channel used to convey it. “Content—it isn’t going to be about where it is, but what it is,” she emphasized.

The Great Switch

I’m pretty sure we all know what’s driving the great switch to original brand content: It’s partly traditional advertising’s continued slide down the slippery slope of ineffectiveness; partly the ascendancy of social media, which demands and devours interesting content to spark conversations; partly the fact that brand storytelling is now old enough to have a track record which proves stories can drive purchase behavior quickly and profoundly. 

Just as importantly, we’ve seen a renaissance of the cultural acknowledgement that stories are the best way to communicate an idea in a persuasive way. Here’s the literary glorification of storytelling that I encountered most recently. It is, of course, one among thousands of such passages permeating our literature. This one is from Middlesex, the Pulitzer-winning novel (2003) by Jeffrey Eugenides. The passage describes a Greek Orthodox seminarian’s response to another character’s cynical comments about Bible stories. (The added emphasis is mine.)

“That’s how people live…by telling stories. What’s the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? ‘Tell me a story.’ That’s how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything. And what story does the Church have to tell? That’s easy. It’s the greatest story ever told.” 

With experts from Eugenides to old-fashioned management guru Tom Peters now saying stories are everything, what’s a beleaguered CMO to do with that information?

Can we start with the history? Please? Like any discipline worth mastering, storytelling has a history that needs to be understood and a set of skills that can only be acquired through long experience and maintained through constant practice.

Treating an old and tested idea as if it were new and revolutionary is never very helpful. In the case of brand content, it’s really important for CMOs and their teams to understand that content marketing is actually a very old idea that is being driven to ascendancy by the rise of digital media.

Brand Journalism

Mitch Joel, a thoughtful marketer whose blog we read regularly, posted in 2011 “Will a Brand’s Next Big Move Be A Journalism Department?” It seems an interesting question, especially now that “brand newsrooms” are all the rage. But it becomes somewhat less revolutionary if you happen to know about all the brands over the past century that created journalism departments to reach, involve and influence their audiences.

I have to assume that Joel’s post would have been more valuable had he known something of modern brand journalism’s rich 111-year history. I tend to date brand journalism from the exquisitely factual and deeply reported travel stories first published in 1900 by a little French auto tire outfit called Michelin. The Michelin Guides, of course, still flourish.

Since 1900, brand journalism has recorded numerous milestones. Two of my old favorites include fashion brand Benetton’s launch in 1952 of Colors magazine, an experiment in crusading international journalism—pro-integration; anti-discrimination—that captured the imagination of the brand’s young audience. Another great milestone is the first publication in 1986 of a Dutch technology firm’s brand magazine, Language Technology (later, Electric Word). The content proved a lot more exciting than the original title and the magazine eventually morphed into Wired. (I first reported this story at length in my business book, Thinking Inside the Box, published by Simon & Schuster’s Free Press in 2003.)

Finding the Right Brand Storytelling Agency

I tell these tales only to suggest that random thoughts about storytelling—a discipline as old as humankind—are likely not worth much. With all this in mind, let me quickly sketch the things a CMO ought to look for to make sure the agency that’s claiming storytelling expertise actually is content-focused:

1. The agency has got to know content marketing is not a new idea.

The first step toward being a storyteller—including a brand storyteller—is to know what’s been done in the past so you can imitate the best, avoid repeating the worst and constantly move the craft forward. Knowledge of the history and heritage of content, in other words, is the first critical component needed to answer the central pragmatic question confronting marketers: How do we DO this? (For example, if your potential agency partner brags that it’ll build you a “brand newsroom,” don’t let them do it unless they can explain the process by which the Associated Press cranks out its regional wire editions.)

2. The agency must have people who know how to hold an audience— journalists, animators, writers, filmmakers, artists and others with real experience as storytellers.

Recognizing and crafting a good, authentic, persuasive and original story is both an inborn talent and a learned skill. Make sure your agency puts people in front of you who have deep experience at a very high level with all kinds of stories. A great content-focused agency will have award-winning journalists, screenwriters, playwrights, comedy writers, filmmakers, novelists and so on. These are people who have spent their professional lives working to engage audiences. Since the point of marketing content is to attract and hold an audience, these are the people you want in the room as your brand stories are crafted.

3. The agency has to understand that there are three ways to tell a brand story and two of them are wrong.

I’ve written this before, but it bears repeating. Most traditional ad agencies and digital agencies try to tell stories about a brand, which is just traditional advertising with a longer runtime and a new label. Or they present stories unrelated to the brand and tell the audience it’s “brought to you by” Brand X. This approach, which rarely works anymore, should be familiar from TV’s earliest days. The right way is to tell compelling stories that embody the brand, its attitudes and its promises. Brands must literally turn themselves into stories–creating original media that their customers actively choose to engage with, explore and then share with others. 

4. There must be a repeatable, proven, understandable, results-oriented process for locating a brand’s core narrative and turning it into executions. Hunches won’t cut it.

A consistent narrative is really the only way to create effective multi-channel integration. It also is the only way to insure that a global brand will maintain the power of consistency while being crafted into different local stories that will resonate across cultures and countries. So branding has to begin by locating the core narrative of a brand. That means your agency must have a proven process for finding a brand’s core narrative, for explaining the narrative and its creative implications to the brand team (including other agencies) and for setting brand strategy to achieve your marketing goals. Make sure your agency has such a process and that you aren’t the guinea pig for it. 

5. Your agency must understand audiences and the stories of their lives.

Your content-focused agency is not there is broadcast the “messages” your brand “needs” to broadcast. Nor do they exist to agree with you about how important and compelling you and your brand’s attributes are. Your agency is there is understand what drives your audience, what role your brand can best play in their lives and how to narrate that relationship between brand and audience in convincing and entertaining ways that build the most powerful connections and most profoundly affect purchase behavior. Your agency needs to understand that the best brand story is the one the audience wants to be a part of. As we say at Story, we sell by respecting the audience.

There are lots of other considerations, of course, in choosing an agency. Do you like the people? Can you work collaboratively with them? Do they understand your industry, your brand? Are they smart? And so on. But the five must-haves listed here can eliminate most pretenders and allow you to choose among tested, competent contenders. 

EDITOR’S NOTE: This post originally went up on Story’s site two years ago, on June 6, 2011. Given the growing interest in brand storytelling, we tought it was a post whose time had come again. Kirk updated it just a bit for a modern audience.

Photo Credit: Stitch via Compfight cc

For decades your hazelnut spread has turned everyday consumers into product purists. From brownies and cookies to hot chocolate and crepes, Nutella has been the cornerstone of a delicious treat.

As you’re aware, since 2007, Sara Rosso—arguably your most passionate superfan—has hosted World Nutella Day. She love(d) your product so much that she wanted the world to dedicate a single day—February 5—to embracing it.

What she did was nothing less than astounding. On the World Nutella Day website, Rosso has gathered more than 700 recipes, tweeted and shared on Facebook the favorite sayings, stories and links of Nutella fans and, most important, encouraged everyone to try Nutella just once.

But on May 25, all her hard work will have been in vain. That’s because you inexplicably shut down her tremendous efforts, sending a cease-and-desist letter to her mailbox—the sort of action a brand might take against a brand hijacker, hacker or activist. 

Author’s Note: Per a report on Ad Age posted the morning of May 22nd, a few hours after this article was published, Nutella has reached out to Rosso and saved World Nutella Day, stating that their outreach was simply “a routine brand defense procedure that was activated as a result of some misuse of the Nutella brand on the fan page.” I think it’s obvious that someone was asleep at the wheel (can there really be such a disconnect between the brand team and legal team?), but good to see that they’ve changed their tune. This announcement renders this article moot, but there’s still value in the message. I hope you read on. 

I’d like to explain something we’ve learned about fans like Rosso. She is a rare breed. Fans like Rosso don’t come along often, and for many brands they don’t come along at all. She generated free positive press from the likes of NBC, CNN and ABC (credit to HuffPo for sourcing the links). She even built social-media presences with more than 47,000 fans and followers. 

Sara Rosso is a bona fide Nutella superfan: a consumer so passionate about Nutella that she has dedicated her precious time to furthering the brand’s cause. She’s the type of fan that brand managers dream of—creating content on behalf of the brand and sharing it with her following of other superfans and casual fans, who then pass the message along to potential fans. This superfan activity helps the brand’s message spread exponentially, at little to no cost to the brand.

I didn’t know there was a World Nutella Day. However, I now know that there isn’t going to be another one. So not only have you eliminated one of the most impressive superfan-created content-marketing activities that I have ever seen, but the story of the holiday’s cancellation is garnering national attention. You’ve turned a positive into a negative, and I haven’t the slightest idea why.

It’s funny that something like this has come up, if only because embracing the superfan is at the core of many of our social-media strategies. It’s what expanded a community of “Mother Lovers” (fans of the show How I Met Your Mother) from zero to more than 2 million in less than two years. It’s what keeps that community’s People Talking About This (PTAT) percentage above 20 percent (well above the industry standard). The ability to celebrate the passion of a brand’s fans is exactly why social media is such a powerful marketing medium for brands.

We have a category on our blog called Consumers Control Brands. That’s not meant to be taken literally, of course, but we strongly believe that in the post-advertising age, it’s the conversations between people—the content they’re sharing and creating across a variety of publishing channels—that can spell success or failure for a brand. So it’s a fool’s error to think that one can fully control one’s own brand. Your attempt to control the Nutella brand by eliminating World Nutella Day has not, in fact, controlled the message. Instead, it has spawned negative press that will be read by thousands, if not millions.

So what did you accomplish? 

I don’t mean to come off as brash (though I’m sure I did). All of us here at Story are passionate about creating engaging branded content, and it’s heartbreaking to hear a story such as this one. But there’s still time. If you’d like to save your story, we’d love to help.  

Sincerely,

Jon Thomas
Editor-in-Chief, Post-Advertising

P.S. Sara, if you’re reading this, bravo. Regardless of what Nutella has decided to do, your actions are utterly impressive, and I’m sorry I’ve only now noticed them. We should have been applauding you for years. 

Photo Credit: allison.hare via Compfight cc

Why would I care? Why would I share? These are two key questions that Droga5’s chief creative officer, Ted Royer, says his agency considers when creating social content for brands on Facebook.

Royer and Carlos Figueiredo, associate creative director at Publicis Kaplan Thaler, hashed out what makes engaging Facebook content during a Creative Week panel titled “Newsfeeder: The Most Creative Posts From Facebook Brands,” moderated by BuzzFeed’s CCO, Jeff Greenspan. We’ve gathered a few of the key takeaways from the conversation for you as well as specific brand takeaways. 

1. Don’t Be Dull

Brands want to be your friends, and like a good friend, a brand should have something new to offer every time it interacts with its audience. Essentially, a brand should be as interesting as its audience’s friends are and have a wealth of things to say.

If a brand is going to engage in social media, it can’t be boring. In other words, it shouldn’t be the guy who walks around at a party and repeats the same joke, praises himself and shares only stories about him. What works in a TV or print campaign (three ads transmitting the same message) usually does not work in social media.

Brand Tip:
Create a content calendar that has different types of content offerings every day. Try to diversify as much as possible (photos, memes, videos, links, questions/quizzes, games, etc.), and utilize user-generated content as well.

2. Create Multifaceted Brand Identities

Sometimes brand narratives are dictated by what is said in traditional media. But often those narratives that are created for TV or print are not true enough to the brand to play in the social space—they are one-dimensional and leave no room for real conversations or natural growth.

Agencies must help brands bridge the gap between traditional and digital advertising, going deeper into the brand story to create compelling social content. To go deeper, it is essential to understand the brand’s mission and identity. If you think about your brand as a character (or persona), developing a rich personality for it, you’ll better understand the types of content your brand should and should not be publishing as well as the topics it should and should not comment on.

Brands have to carefully determine which conversations are appropriate for them to join. As things happen in the world, think about how they relate to the brand. Even if a brand isn’t talking about the specific event, understand the environment and adjust content publishing accordingly (e.g., don’t tweet about your award as a natural disaster is happening).  

Brand Tip:
Always ask, Does the social content I’m creating fit the role and tone of voice I’ve developed for my brand? Does it have the authority to publish?

3. Test and Learn

Instead of your investing millions of dollars in a new, traditional advertising campaign you’ve just dreamed up, social media offers a place to test and learn with smaller campaigns. If these ideas are well received on the appropriate social channel, the brand can start developing a full-blown social and/or traditional campaign. Vet things by your own audience. Figure out what you did right, and continue to play with and develop the idea.

Brand Tip:
There are established and emerging platforms that are free to join that provide innovative ways to offer content to audiences. Lowe’s did this wonderfully with Vine. If the test-and-learn campaign doesn’t work, it’s been exposed to only a small audience. But if it works, that content can be extended to the audience’s audiences and beyond. Don’t be afraid to try!

4. Unlock the Truth

Social content should be thought of in the same way a stand-up comic would think about a joke—as immediate and fairly disposable. People should laugh and move on. Regarding the Newcastle #nobollocks campaign that Droga5 created, Royer said the idea was to be too honest and reveal the machinery behind the bullshit through feisty, attention-grabbing images and refreshingly true statements, like “Newcastle winter IPA. Our worst selling beer in the summer. #NoBollocks.” One of the April Fool’s Day gags that Publicis Kaplan Thaler created for Scope, about bacon-flavored mouthwash, was shared almost three times more (112,803) than it was liked (30,971).

Not every brand can own humor, however, or should try to play in that space. Recognize the role of the brand, and create from a place that is relevant. Comedians and writers are trying to scrape away the inessential to reveal a truth, and truth is by far the most powerful thing a brand can bring to life. The best content reframes something already known, and the content that is shared the most is the content that helps promote one’s own identity and strengthen one’s social bonds.

Brand Tip:
Be careful about the tone your brand takes, and don’t reach for humor. Branded attempts at humor often can backfire or simply fall flat. Be true to the brand.

Speed, honesty, humor, usefulness and relevance are some of the most important aspects of creating dynamic social content.

Is your brand creating the dynamic content that audiences want, or is it just creating content that furthers the brand’s own agenda?

Most answers, at least from the readers of this blog, would be similar. But I’ve got another question. What’s Tumblr? I would bet that at this point the definitions start to differ. 

“It’s a blogging platform, like WordPress or Typepad.”

“It’s a social network where people share all sorts of content.”

“It’s a website for theme-based GIF repositories.”

For the record, Tumblr defines itself as a platform that “lets you effortlessly share anything” including “text, photos, quotes, links, music and videos.” But the six-year-old content platform is still commonly misunderstood by brands and agencies as it relates to social strategy. Even its self-definition fails to clearly define its focus, its user base or its potential as a place to engage with fans through organic and paid media.

Should your brand be on Tumblr? Let’s discuss.

Embracing the Creators

Even though Tumblr is often forgotten by brands, it’s still a massive community. In fact, the absence of brands (and the only recent emergence of in-stream advertising) may play a big part in the site’s continued rapid growth. More than 107.5 million blogs and 50.5 billion posts have been created on Tumblr, including the more than 70 million new posts that appear every day. 

But aside from the numbers, what’s impressive about Tumblr is the type of content and community it has. Though users can certainly post short text-based updates akin to what they would on Twitter or Facebook, the platform is more often used to express a user’s creativity or even their fandom regarding a brand. It’s a very visual medium and one of the few that can accommodate the GIF, which has produced a new source of content creators for Tumblr.  

Embracing the GIF

Though it was introduced almost two decades ago by CompuServe, the GIF has made a comeback of late, acting as a lo-fi method of short-form-video sharing. The file format, whose initials stand for graphics interchange format, has allowed content creators to express themselves through relevant video. Many Tumblr blogs dedicated to the application of funny GIFs to everyday-life situations have popped up. As a soon-to-be dad, I’ve found “The Pregnant Husband” to be one of my favorites.

Fans are also utilizing the format to distill their favorite moments from a television show into a few seconds and add narration in the form of overlying text (since GIFs don’t have audio). Shortly after a television show airs, the best moments can commonly be seen on Tumblr. This practice is actually what makes Tumblr such fertile ground for television networks.

Embracing TV

Television networks regularly create Facebook pages and Twitter accounts for their respective programs in an attempt to foster conversation and generate a community for fans. This is certainly a sound strategy, since many conversations about TV shows occur on these platforms. But are they paying attention to where the superfans gather? Because some of the most passionate TV fans are gathering on Tumblr. 

Just head over to Tumblr and search for your favorite television show (you’ll have to set up a free account if you don’t already have one). Can’t think of a show? Try searching for HIMYM, the initials of How I Met Your Mother, which just wrapped up its eighth (and next to last) season. What you’ll find is animated GIFs, images, quotations, songs, text-based reactions and more related to the season finale, which aired on Monday. Self five!!

GIF credit

It’s a smorgasbord of content organized in a way that few other platforms could manage. Twitter has hashtags but is still largely text based. Facebook can support images and text but doesn’t organize them well. Tumblr’s flexibility in the types of content it can publish, as well as its tagging functionality, offers something unique to fans, which is rare in today’s age of “me too” social platforms. 

Networks are taking notice too. We’ve talked before about HBO seeing how much user-generated content was being created for its hit show Girls and creating a Tumblr blog dedicated to curating it.

Tumblr has carved a niche in the crowded world of social media; it is just taking brands a long time to notice. But that may play in your brand’s favor. A few brands have firmly planted their feet in Tumblr, particularly now that it has a growing ad platform, but it’s still a place where your brand can establish a presence before its competitors do.

Like any platform, it’s not going to be the right fit for every brand, so do your research before diving in headfirst. But there’s a good chance you will find engaging fans and user-generated content you’ve never seen before. 

Author’s Note:

This article was written the week before Tumblr was acquired by Yahoo! for a cool $1.1 billion (hence, I didn’t mention it!). It’s difficult to predict what the acquisition means for both entities. The millennial audience was painfully lacking on Yahoo! owned properties, so Tumblr will help that. But Tumblr’s audience is fiercely loyal and won’t take lightly to any changes, so Yahoo! must tread lightly if they want to keep the peace. Of course, they have a responsibility to make this relationship lucrative, so we’ll see how/if things change. 

Photo Credit: Scott Beale via Compfight cc

I’m my father’s son—a Boston sports fan through and through, hardworking and always trying to please. But he and I know absolutely nothing about maintenance or repair work. So when I recently bought my first house with my wife, the renovations we opted to complete ourselves weren’t going to be easy, no matter how simple they were.

But in the connected world we live in, help was no further away than a YouTube search. Hanging towel racks, painting stripes and installing the Nest thermostat (a must-have, IMO), lighting fixtures and house numbers—if my father-in-law wasn’t around to help, the good ol’ Internet was. 

In situations from home improvement to fitness and more, brands have a golden opportunity to provide useful information to an audience that is seeking answers, but it seems they are instead trying to engage audiences with the type of content most often seen going viral—fun, quirky and amazing (amazingly good and amazingly bad) content like Gangnam Style, Kony 2012, Red Bull’s Stratos project, Grumpy Cat and Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like.” Problems can arise quickly when brands try to re-create content like this, and most such efforts will fall flat.  

So what’s a brand that is ready and willing to create useful content to do? The recent #SixSecondFix campaign by Lowe’s may be the perfect answer.

Blazing a Trail Through The Vines

The home improvement store got some great press last week when it launched its spring campaign on Vine. The campaign featured six-second fixes for common problems, like stripped screws, forgotten paint tray liners and lost water cans. (If the Vine doesn’t play, simply click on it)

The notion of providing quick-fix videos on Vine isn’t groundbreaking (people have been putting how-to videos on YouTube for years), but until now most of the industry back patting of brands on Vine has been for fun, pithy stop-motion videos featuring products instead of solutions. Taco Bell, Malibu Rum, Urban Outfitters and General Electric are often-cited Vine case studies.

Unique product-based posts, like Taco Bell’s announcement of its Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Tacos, have proven to increase engagement, but eventually that engagement has to lead to something. Granted, a new product announcement can create awareness and lead to sales (I’m a big fan of Taco Bell’s social strategy, actually), but most brands don’t release new products every day. Lowe’s’ vines (which are professionally produced stop-motion) provide actionable, useful tips that can lead to a trip to Lowe’s to pick up supplies. Even if the fix doesn’t require additional supplies, like pillowcases for the purpose of organizing sheets, it will keep Lowe’s top of mind when the idea of home improvement comes up.

Fun Versus Useful

We all want to be liked. It’s no different for brands. So it’s no surprise when brands make an attempt to be funny in hopes that the humorous content will be liked and shared by its audience, or even go viral. Don’t get me wrong—I love it when a brand hits comedy paydirt. Newcastle is my new favorite Facebook presence. Dollar Shave Club and Old Spice are two of the poster children for funny, viral content, and AT&T’s “It’s Not Complicated” TV campaign makes me laugh every single time. But if a brand’s content isn’t funny (and let’s face it, most of the time it isn’t), like a tree falling in the woods, will anyone engage with it? Probably not.

On the other hand, while a steady stream of useful content may not hit the viral home run that a brand like Oreo did, it can create a strong connection between brand and audience, adding meaning to the relationship (Lowe’s means home improvement). This type of content also requires less planning and budget than content with top-of-the-charts viral aspirations. But ultimately, an effort from a brand to openly and honestly engage with audiences, whether it be a useful tip or the celebration of fan content, is what increases People Talking About This (PTAT) and humanizes a brand. 

Award-winning Versus Effective

Lowe’s may be the exception to the rule, since it was the first mainstream brand, but the brands that follow in its footsteps on Vine (and there will be many, for sure), particularly smaller brands with limited budgets, probably won’t be winning any awards at Cannes and the like. But don’t let the lack of award hardware fool you. Campaigns that consistently provide relevant, useful content to the audience that generates engagement and sharing can be extremely valuable to a brand, even if none of the singular content pieces ever go viral.

This isn’t limited to how-to videos on Vine, either. Simply committing to an always-on mentality, offering useful content, replying to and speaking to fans, republishing their content, providing simple (but not overly branded) imagery and videos and glimpses behind the curtain can engage and increase audiences. 

It’s not always about over-the-top humor or yet another product photo. Sometimes your customers need you. 

Many households have “pulled the plug” on television altogether, opting for on-demand television viewing with Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, iTunes, Roku, HBOGo and many more alternative services. Add to that the Nielsen Global Survey revealing the decline in consumer trust of ads on television (from 62 percent in 2009 to 47 percent in 2012) and one would have to wonder how television advertising can or will stay relevant in the post-advertising age.

The answer? Storytelling.

While some emerging platforms and technologies have made it more difficult for television advertisements to reach an attentive audience, they have also made it easier for the best ads to spread. One of the common threads of many of the most shared and viewed advertisements is storytelling. Some stories provide a deep history; others make you laugh; and yet others may make you cry. These ads have a second, often more successful, life in digital format, in which mode they are passed from one person to the next. 

Here are six ads that have embraced storytelling, thereby engaging audiences and garnering attention long past their airdate. 

1. Dodge Ram—“God Made a Farmer”

This two-minute ad from the 2013 Super Bowl tells a moving story about the life of a farmer. Dodge isn’t a farming company but makes trucks for all those who are farmers, and this ad speaks to them. 

2. Johnnie Walker—“The Man Who Walked Around the World”

This Johnnie Walker ad clocks in at five and a half minutes—far longer than any commercial on television could run —but tells the authentic story of the brand in just one take (the 40th, to be exact).

3. HBO—“I Still Have a Soul”

It may just be the fighter in me, but this commercial always gets me. A story of passion, sacrifice and perseverance, it gave deep context to the sport of boxing and what HBO was bringing to television in its late-night series Boxing After Dark, all without a single word of dialogue. 

4. Chipotle—“Back to the Start”

A winner of the Cannes Film Lions Grand Prix, Chipotle’s first national ad was one of our favorite examples of successful long-form branded content. The ad helped audiences understand the brand’s commitment to a sustainable future.

5. Canadian Paralympic Committee—“Running (Unstoppable)”

This ad hits close to home after what happened in Boston a few weeks ago. The Canadian Paralympic Committee captured in reverse chronological order the story of how one man became an amputee, providing inspiration to us all.

6. Epuron—“The Wind”

At first I didn’t get it and thought the commercial had no point. Then it hit me, and I laughed out loud at my desk. 

Did I miss any of your favorites? Let me know in the comments. 

This post originally appeared in our April ’13 issue of “Live Report from the Future of Marketing,” our monthly Post-Advertising newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

No matter how lofty a brand’s goals are when it uses hashtags, there are always individuals ready to use them to drag it into the gutter.

McDonald’s is on its second go-round with promoted hashtags gone awry, this time with #UnwrapWhatsFresh. The hashtag was created to support McDonald’s new Premium McWrap, which features chicken (grilled or crispy) and fresh vegetables served in a warm tortilla. 

The hashtag was promoted on Twitter, but instead of talking about healthy eating, a number of people were tweeting these sweet nothings:

Luckily for McDonald’s, the hashtag wasn’t completely hijacked by authors tweeting unsavory thoughts, but it did remind us of #McDStories—a disastrous campaign that inspired countless tweets from former employees and customers alike revealing horrific details about the company that would instantly spoil your lunch.

Tweets courtesy of Huffington Post 

I’m not here just to pick on McDonald’s. It isn’t the first brand to have its hashtag hijacked, and it certainly won’t be the last. But do these media “disasters” make promoted trends and hashtags unwise or risky investments? Or could all engagement be good engagement? Should the blame fall on hijackers for voicing their opinions, or is the onus on the brand to ensure that the promoted content is authentic enough to generate largely positive discussion? 

The Success of Failure

Just a cursory search of the #McDStories hashtag will produce dozens of articles about how this campaign blew up in McDonald’s’ face, and at first glance that’s pretty accurate. But what is success when it comes to promoted hashtags? If it’s awareness, how much negative effect on a brand does it have if the virality is fueled by negative tweets?

Don’t get me wrong; I’m thankful I wasn’t in the shoes of anyone working in the company’s PR agency during that time. I don’t believe that McDonald’s wanted the campaign to garner such a negative reaction, but I also don’t think it came as a surprise to the brand. In the end, engagement, positive or negative, will increase the reach of a hashtag, pushing it closer to the tipping point of going viral. It’s up to the brand to manage the conversation as best it can.

#YourBrandStory

The larger issue here, and one McDonald’s may have skirted with its #UnwrapWhatsFresh campaign, is the necessity for a brand to remain true to its story. If we’ve learned anything about social media, it’s that you can’t bullshit your audience (pardon my French). McDonald’s has faced harsh criticism for much of its existence but more recently in the past few decades, as the health craze has gained momentum (seemingly in parallel with our nation’s growing obesity problem; go figure). If an audience feels it’s being misled or flat-out lied to, it will react, and now it has its own online audiences to preach to.

The #McDStories hashtag, also known as #McDHorrorStories, is easy to pick on; if you take into account the indigestion and overall malaise that is felt shortly after having consumed McDonald’s (at least for me—your experiences may differ), most people don’t have positive stories about their experiences there. #UnwrapWhatsFresh is less obvious but still smells inauthentic. When the average person thinks of McDonald’s, they don’t think of fresh. I realize that McDonald’s is trying to promote a lighter side of its menu (and I applaud the effort to provide healthier options), but the brand’s effort to straddle the health divide is opening up too many opportunities for ridicule and negative sentiment.

Getting Honest

McDonald’s, as well as a number of other half-health-conscious restaurants, has to get honest about its business. Domino’s is the poster child for owning up to a negative brand story and using that negativity to craft a new brand story. Domino’s used to be like most fast-food restaurants—making the food as quickly and at the lowest cost as possible in pursuit of high volume and profit margin. Unfortunately, the lack of pride in the product resulted in feedback claiming it was “mass-produced, boring, bland pizza.” 

Instead of deflecting or ignoring the negativity, Domino’s embraced it, publicly admitting its faults and using them to fuel a marketing campaign called The Pizza Turnaround. It documented its reinvention, changing its recipe and tracking down the detractors in hopes that they’d try its #newpizza and reconsider.

“You can either use negative comments to get you down or use them to excite you and energize your process of making a better pizza,” said Patrick Doyle, president of Domino’s. “We did the latter.”

McDonald’s isn’t a stranger to this tactic. They recently won an Ad Age Viral Video Award for “Best Brand Transparency” for their work on “Our Food. Your Questions” where they show you step by step how a real McDonald’s hamburger goes through a transformation to become “commercial-ready” (since they never look like the commercial when you get them in real life). It’s informative, transparent (hence the award) and showed that McDonald’s doesn’t always shy away from the truth behind their product. 

Back to the #Hashtag

There’s definitely an argument to be had about whether all virality is good virality (feel free to substitute awareness for virality). I bet United Airlines would argue that it’s not. But the reasons that hashtags like #McDStories and, to a lesser extent, #UnwrapWhatsFresh can backfire is that they cause a disconnect between the brand and its story. Is McDonald’s now a place where we go as a family to share (#MdD)stories? Can I start regularly eating a healthy lunch there? What is it, exactly?

Creating hashtags is no easy feat and not something left to an intern to brainstorm for 30 minutes. They embody a part of your brand in as few characters as possible, but they still tell a story. Make sure it’s the right one.

I was a superfan to the full extent of the definition. I begged my parents to buy me championship belts and action figures, take me to local wrestling shows and I was undefeated against my big stuffed panda bear. When Hulk Hogan had his ribs broken by Earthquake, I sent a bevy of get well letters to his hospital bedside. I even got a postcard back. The “writing” looked eerily similar to Arial, but I’m sure it was just coincidence and he wrote it all himself.

Superfans are everywhere. From television shows and video games to automotive and even CPGs, superfans are embracing the brands they love. They aren’t getting the “superfan” title just because they tune in every week or refuse to drink any other kind of soda. Superfans are the rare but powerful fan base that is sharing branded content with friends, creating unique content of its own and providing an authentic endorsement of a product or service that a brand could never replicate. 

Brand managers: Are you listening to your superfans? Are you recognizing and rewarding them? Are you embracing them on their own platforms? If not, your brand may be suffering because of it. 

Going the Extra Mile(s)

I got to thinking about superfans when a colleague passed along a link to a Game of Thrones (GoT) graphic tribute website called “Where Have All the Wildings Gone?” The site, created and designed by Nigel Evan Dennis, is one of the most extensive piece of user-generated content ever created and is attracting about 8,000 new visitors every day.

The single, vertically scrolling page features dozens of illustrated characters and colored icons that represent their respective houses and allegiances; an infographic about the alliances; an infographic about the faiths; a time line; iPhone backgrounds (color-coded by allegiance); an interactive map; and even a timer counting down the days, hours, minutes and seconds until the next episode.

How much did HBO pay for this? Not a cent.

Strangely enough, I don’t have HBO, so I’ve never actually seen an episode of Game of Thrones, but I can still appreciate Nigel’s superfan status. In a brief Twitter interview Nigel revealed that he started working on the illustrations in January and does consider himself a GoT superfan.

He’s not the only one, obviously. GoT superfans are writing fan fiction, creating extensive infographics and animated GIFs (mostly on Tumblr), updating wikis, dressing up like characters from the show at Comic Con and even playing the theme song on a church bell tower. How’s that for earned media?

It’s Not the Size That Counts

It’s a mistake for an agency to guide a brand onto a channel just for the sake of being on it. Just because Facebook’s (or YouTube’s or Twitter’s) audience is massive doesn’t mean it is the right platform for a brand. Instead, finding the right channel(s) on which to create a branded outpost starts by finding the brand’s audience. That audience doesn’t have to be a large one; it simply has to be the right one (and we’ve laid out some tips on how to find them here).

Audiences generally can be split into three major categories (and there are a number of variations on these terms)—potential fans, casual fans and superfans. In the case of a television show, superfans are the ones dressing up in character for the premiere, casual fans are DVR’ing it, and potential fans are watching only if they happen to pass by the channel and see the program. 

Where brands often slip up is when they try to create strategies to pull in only the casual and potential fans, since there are so many of them and they may not be tuning in every week. This strategy ignores the superfans because, the reasoning goes, the brand would be spending marketing dollars to preach to the converted, and if the goal is to attract new viewers, why market to the superfans?

The problem with subscribing to that strategy is that casual and potential fans are fleeting, rarely spread branded content and aren’t necessarily loyal. The superfans, however, are the ones fostering the conversations about and creating content on behalf of the brand. Superfans empower the casual fans with content (UGC and branded), the casual fans then spread the news to potential fans, and the potential fans kick back and enjoy. Conversations have become media in the post-advertising age, and the brands that spread are the ones that can inspire fans to talk about them. 

Fish Where the Fish That Love You Are

If you fish in a pond that has thousands of fish, you’re bound to get a few bites because of the sheer numbers. Fish where the fish are, right? But what if I told you there was a stream down the road that had far fewer fish, but that those fish absolutely loved the type of bait you use and simply couldn’t resist it? You’d have fewer potential fish to catch but a far greater chance of catching the ones that are there. Plus, when the fish realize that their favorite bait is frolicking in their stream, they’re going to tell other fish about it. Where would you rather fish? 

Social media is no different than the rousing fishing example I just gave. There isn’t, however, just one pond wherein which your superfish…er…superfans are. There are often many. So it takes effort to seek out superfans already spreading your brand’s content. But over time, the reward of embracing your superfans can far exceed isolated efforts to generate awareness (often in paid media) with potential fans.

How are brands doing this? Let me share a couple of examples with you. When HBO realized that fans of its hit show Girls were making animated GIFs of their own, it  created a Tumblr page dedicated to fan-submitted content. HBO curates the page, but every piece of content is created by a superfan (do any other kind make GIFs?). WGN America (disclosure: a Story client) doesn’t create any original programming but was able to attract over two million fans and increase viewership by creating a community on Facebook that was dedicated to embracing and sharing the passion of How I Met Your Mother superfans. Speaking of the WWE, it has created a foothold on the upstart video social network Tout, not only to publish content but to curate fan-created content, even sharing fan-submitted Touts (short video clips) on the air! Imagine if the Hulkster had read my get-well letter on the air! I’d have leapt out of my footy pajamas. 

Back to the Wildlings

Very few, if any, superfans will go as far as Nigel did to create branded user-generated content, but his work is a great example of the passion that audiences have for brands. Passionate fans exist for your brand. They may be few, but they’re out there. And if they’re not, it’s not your marketing that’s the problem.

To make your marketing dollars go further, find the superfans, not just on Facebook and Twitter but also on those channels (Tumblr, Pinterest, etc.) where fans like to curate content (and that are free to join). Invest in blogger outreach that doesn’t target just large publications but also the niche ones that are talking directly to your audience.

Remember that it’s the conversations that will fuel media and get people to take action. Find the superfans. 

But now Big Beer is out to eat their lunch: Anheuser Busch InBev, SABMiller and other companies believe they can fool distinguished suds sippers into drinking imitation craft brands by enticing them with brand stories that ignore the companies’ true origins. Will it work? Time will tell, but there’s already a great divide between the authentic and inauthentic brands. 

Authentic Craft Breweries

Stone Brewing Co.
As one of the most highly rated and regarded craft breweries in the United States, Stone Brewing Co. is militant when it comes to the craft of beer—and not afraid to speak its mind when it comes to imitators. In fact, its attitude, along with its long-running passion for the highest-quality brews possible, has come to embody its brand story.

The current brand site of Stone, which was founded in 1996 in California, features a section devoted to reporting expired Stone beer (so Stone can replace it). Elsewhere, its unique brand voice shines through in the detailed, thoughtful descriptions printed on each bottle. Stone has devoted video content to interviews with its brewmaster to discuss not only the company’s achievements (for one: spearheading the movement toward extra-hoppy India Pale Ales now seen nationwide) but also his own personal story as it related to the beer he now crafts for the company.

For its promotion of its “Enjoy By” IPA (another product that serves to reinforce its passion for quality and the unconventional approach), Stone is encouraging fans to speak up to demand it in their neck of the woods and report back through a system of national and location-specific hashtags when they spot the time-sensitive beer.

Stone also connects to its fan base of beer aficionados via in-depth behind-the-scenes coverage on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

This is how to tell your brand’s story:

This is an aggressive ale. You probably won’t like it. It is quite doubtful that you have the taste or sophistication to be able to appreciate an ale of this quality and depth. We would suggest that you stick to safer and more familiar territory–maybe something with a multimillion-dollar ad campaign aimed at convincing you it’s made in a little brewery, or one that implies that their tasteless fizzy yellow beverage will give you more sex appeal. Perhaps you think multimillion-dollar ad campaigns make things taste better. Perhaps you’re mouthing your words as you read this. 

At Stone Brewing, we believe that pandering to the lowest common denominator represents the height of tyranny—a virtual form of keeping the consumer barefoot and stupid. Brought forth upon an unsuspecting public in 1997, Arrogant Bastard Ale openly challenged the tyrannical overlords who were brazenly attempting to keep Americans chained in the shackles of poor taste. As the progenitor of its style, Arrogant Bastard Ale has reveled in its unprecedented and uncompromising celebration of intensity. There have been many nods to Arrogant Bastard Ale…even outright attempts to copy it…but only one can ever embody the true nature of liquid Arrogance!

New Belgium Brewing

Meanwhile, the Fort Collins, Colorado–based New Belgium Brewing tell its multifaceted story daily on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Its passion for great-tasting, inventive beer is mirrored by a passion for cycling and a penchant for the age-old techniques of Belgian brewers. Its philosophy on life shines through on each of its social-media channels in the voice and variety of content posted.

And the “Alternatively Empowered | Employee Owned” company knows its channels: It publishes a new piece of video content each week to YouTube and on-the-fly, amateur-style photos on Instagram; tweets with fans and pushes out time-sensitive content on Twitter; and utilizes a mix of locally and globally appealing content on Facebook. Its Beer Mode mobile app is promoted with discretion across its social platforms.

Most important, New Belgium never loses touch with what makes its brand unique: It educates fans about the work it does via bicycle advocates around the country, celebrates local events and companies in the Fort Collins area (in a way that is of interest to a wider audience, as a way to keep the brand grounded in its immediate surroundings) and publishes travelogue-esque content to followers when it makes occasional pilgrimages to Belgium to pay its respects and hone its approach to beer. New Belgium also goes out of its way to feature other craft-beer peers—both in collaborative brewing projects it takes part in and with its #beerpairing posts on Instagram. 

Big Beer – The Wrong Way

Third Shift Brewing Company 
“Third Shift is not just a beer, it’s a story,” proclaims a long-winded Facebook tab. Third Shift Brewing Company, a seemingly new craft beer appearing on store shelves nationwide, is actually a crafty offshoot of SABMiller. While the story is in part true—the beer in question, Amber Ale, did win a gold medal at the Great American Beer Festival—the beer competed under a different name and had been created by a brewer at SABMiller named Tom Hail. His story is largely untold or greatly modified to fit the masked Band of Brewers moniker used in all marketing and packaging (the only mention of SABMiller is at the very bottom of its Our Story tab).

AdWeek, which mentions Third Shift in a recent report on the growing tensions between beer conglomerates and their craft counterparts, reports that faux craft brews experienced double-digit growth in 2012. Beer advocates, influencers and other discerning drinkers aren’t so easily fooled, though: Sources like BrewBound are skeptical, the Brewer’s Association has issued stern words, and Third Shift’s Facebook page is filled with negative user comments about the authenticity of the brand. A few choice comments that sum things up:

John Dutton
Man… that’s some nasty Stroh’s/Blatz/cheap imitation tasting brew. Good luck selling that crap after initial buzz is over!

Mike Simerly
You keep spamming my page and I’ll keep telling you how bad your beer and company sucks. Drink local. Drink real craft, not a wannabe craft.

Justin Umholtz
More Coors brewing company swill trying to be cleverly disguised as a “craft” beer. Nice try. 

Nick Nichols
So why is coors setting up a fake microbrewery. why not make a quality coors beer? why do you and miller have to create fake beers to try to fit in with real craft beers? Instead of just ignoring me Id like a straight answer. So would a lot of us who just cant wrap our intelligent heads around the lengths BIG BEER will go to to lie to customers. You do know that people who wont support corporate swill can easily find out who you are and not drink it right? 

Mike Wing Jr.
This stuff that InBev (Anheuser Busch) and MillerCoors is trying to pass off as craft beer ruins the market for actual craft breweries. Support your local breweries folks!

Chad Brandom
Sure doesn’t look like a sack of malted barley to me. I’m guessing this is the corn/rice adjunct you clowns at MillerCoors and your compatriots at places like AB INBev are famous for using to create watered down beer without any real flavor. Pity.

(Note: Third Shift has responded to the comments, but its hands are by and large tied by the storytelling approach it’s taken.)

Big Beer – The Right Way

Newcastle

While a new spin-off from Coors masquerades as a craft brand, Newcastle has found a way—while not losing sight of its status as a global beer brand—to authentically tell its brand story. Its No Bollocks campaign includes video spots and social media (Facebook, Twitter) dedicated to full-on honesty no matter the situation—including the ways its beer is created, the truth about what it’s doing on Facebook and the reality of life in Newcastle.

Its “Subtexter” Facebook tool encourages fans to apply Newcastle’s same brand of #NoBollocks British wit while its Timeline Covers Facebook tab offers fans a collection of cover photos with clever copy geared toward the individual user’s Facebook profile. Both content features were clearly designed with social sharing in mind.

From Facebook to Twitter, its approach is tongue-in-cheek and incredibly funny—not to mention eye-catching and share-worthy.

Key Takeaways

—Embrace what’s true about your brand, and make sure you can back up the stories and philosophy you put forth.

—Craft beer brands, like Stone and New Belgium, don’t owe all their success to their marketing efforts across social media—but the groundwork they do on each platform each day is incredibly important: It helps drive home, again and again, what separates them from the competition.

—Backstory and the locality of a beer brand are important to craft drinkers. Taste is important, but the people behind the beer are also important. Visiting a factory tasting room and getting familiar with local pours (or the prospect of doing so) lead to deeper connections to these brands.

—Newcastle proves that corporate brands don’t have to be embarrassed about their size or status and can engage in an honest discussion with their fans. Their tone of voice and content topics draw a clear connection to Newcastle, England, the brand’s namesake location.

—AdWeek points out that Big Beer believes that craft-beer drinkers care only about taste. In reality, they’re buying into something much bigger. They also care deeply about the story behind the suds: the location, the philosophy, the ingredients used and the methods involved in concocting each product. This consumer behavior is far different than that of the typical Bud Light or Coors drinker.

—If the story’s not sound—if it’s not grounded in truth—the brand is weak, and its clout among its intended audience is weak. Real brand storytelling builds a strong brand; the opposite will result in only a fleeting sense of community at best and surface-level fandom.

Do you think there’s a place for Big Beer in the craft brew space? Do they have an authentic story to tell? What other craft brews are telling great brand stories? Let us know in the comments. 

Photo via Stone Brewing’s Instagram

I like to think that the best part about going out to eat, particularly with friends, isn’t the food (though don’t get me wrong; I adore food). It’s the stories we share and the stories we create. It’s like the times spent with my wife reviewing our plate of nachos in hopes that someday we’ll cull all those reviews into a blog just about nachos (though that’s a whole other story). It’s the times spent with friends catching up and reminiscing about old times.

Restaurants have a unique opportunity to tap into brand storytelling, and there’s a restaurant in the U.K. doing just that. 

An Irani Dish With a Side of Story

Dishoom is a Bombay-style café that takes its roots and stories very seriously. So seriously, actually, that they’re baked into its dishes. Since Dishoom is an Irani café (an Iranian- or Persian-style café in India) that holds tight to the traditions of 19th-century Bombay, it wanted to capture people’s experiences at other old Irani cafés.

“Irani cafés of Bombay were eating, meeting and drinking places for people from all communities where rich lawyers could find themselves drinking chai next to sweaty taxi-wallahs,” reads its website. “This melting pot was where stories began.”

The campaign started with 80 plates into which were baked personal stories of Irani cafés as recalled by the older generation in Bombay and the U.K., according to Adweek. Now visitors to the site also have the option of sharing their stories and even designing their own plates! The best stories and designs are chosen and added to the collection of plates.

The effort is unique and memorable, but most importantly, it’s talkable. Patrons will share the unique elements of the Irani café with their friends. I’m thousands of miles away and, even having never been there, I’m sharing it with you.

Serving Up Fresh Content

Dishoom’s commitment to brand storytelling and content marketing doesn’t stop at the creative story-driven plates. It consistently creates content on its beautiful blog, which features vibrant imagery and articles (once or twice a month) on topics such as Bombay, design, events, food, heritage and life at Dishoom.

Even when you first land on Dishoom’s website, you’re greeted with storytelling. The top of the website (and a good majority of the content above the fold) is dedicated to a horizontally scrolling montage of photos depicting a day at Dishoom. From a cup of chai at 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. dinner and tipples and nibbles after dark, the visitor to the site is given every reason to stop by Dishoom anytime, day or night.

Dishoom’s Facebook and Twitter presences are engaging and on brand and boast quite respectable fan/follower counts (both more than 6,000), considering Dishoom’s small geographic footprint (just two small cafés).

The Brand Takeaway

You don’t have to run a restaurant to learn from Dishoom. Its commitment to content and storytelling can be applied to any brand. We’ve seen a number of other lesser-known brands make this commitment and reap the rewards, notably Warby Parker and Hiut Denim.

Dishoom has unearthed its brand story and found innovative ways, both online and off-, to express various chapters of that story along the customer journey. As one follows its digital footprints into the physical store, its strong culture and history are omnipresent, creating an emotional connection to the guest. 

Dishoom is memorable and talkable and fosters a community atmosphere that keeps guests engaged (online) and coming back for more (offline). It provides customers with conversations—something to tell their friends long after they leave the restaurant—and it’s conversations that drive action. Or as our CEO, Kirk Cheyfitz, would say, “It’s the conversations, stupid.”

Which other brands have you seen that have this type of commitment to storytelling?

The grassroots movement, initiated by the Human Rights Campaign on March 25, spread virally throughout the week, filling users’ news feeds with a sea of red and pink (and other various one-offs). The campaign was timed to coincide with the oral arguments in the Supreme Court over Proposition 8, California’s gay-marriage ban, and DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act, a law that denies federal benefits to same-sex couples.

We’re big fans of viral content here at PostAd, because more often than not it stems from having created content so funny, entertaining or useful that it had to be shared. Facebook did us a favor by investigating the campaign’s data trends, helping us all dive deeper into the HRC’s success.

So why exactly did the photo meme spread so quickly? Will this have an effect, or is it more social activism (or slacktivism)? What role did brands play, and was their participation genuine? More after the jump.

Equality by the Data

Since the intent of the campaign was to get users to update their profile photos, Facebook compared profile-photo updates on Tuesday, March 26, when the campaign went viral, to the previous Tuesday and found a 120 percent increase (roughly 2.7 million users). It also used a time-series model to show the drastic increase.  

Facebook uncovered data suggesting that the vast majority of users taking part in the viral campaign were between the ages of 20 and 40, and that the highest participation was by 30-year-olds (roughly 3.5 percent of 30-year-olds updated their profile pictures). The highest participation rates by geographical location were (not surprisingly) the Northeast and Pacific parts of the United States as well as the Great Lakes region.

One interesting observation was of the high rate of participation in counties with colleges and universities. This demographic seems to be a jumping-off point for viral media—the perfect audience in that it has time to consume content and networks of friends to share it with. The first Harlem Shake video [link] is believed to have been filmed in a college dorm room.

Activism or Slacktivism?

The effectiveness of viral, cause-based efforts not rooted solely in fund-raising is often questioned. Will 2.7 million people’s changing their profile photos actually make a difference? If so, in what way? The same questions plagued Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 campaign. Many teens and millennials shared the video that exposed Joseph Kony’s atrocities, but were those low-cost efforts a substitute for more-substantive actions? The answers to those questions depend on whom you ask. 

Facebook’s data science researcher Eytan Bakshy is optimistic about the campaign’s effectiveness, according to Venture Beat; he notes that “for a long time, when people stood up for a cause and weren’t all physically standing shoulder to shoulder, the size of their impact wasn’t immediately apparent. But today we can see the spread of an idea online in greater detail than ever before. That’s data well worth finding.”

Part of what’s behind the achieving of a cause’s ultimate goals, which are often lofty and long-term (curing cancer, ending poverty, capturing Kony, equal rights for all), is mass awareness, and an effective viral social-media campaign can help achieve that in a shorter time. While thirty-somethings on Facebook’s all at once updating their profile pictures may not sway the Supreme Court one way or another, it does make uninformed audiences aware that the discussion is being had, as well as of what’s at stake and of what can be done to support gay rights. 

The Brand Bandwagon

With viral success comes imitation (and parody), and the equality meme was no different. Along with original user-generated remixes, countless brands threw their hats in the ring. The HRC loved the support, and all the promotion that brands added was (for the most part) good for the HRC’s awareness push.

But the issue caused a hot-button debate in the Story offices. After Bud Light posted this photo of the equality sign composed of two Bud Light cans, we began to wonder whether these branded spin-offs were in fact public support of marriage equality or just an attempt by a brand to insert itself into a popular meme.

Before Bud Light posted its spin-off, we applauded True Blood’s version of the equality photo. The addition of fangs aligned the brand with the HRC without inserting overt branding, and the show itself has an authority to publish because it has explored the topic of discrimination (as regards gay rights) in previous episodes.

Though I applaud Bud Light’s effort to take a side (one that I happen to agree with), something about the substitution of two beer cans for the equal sign didn’t feel right. Bud Light didn’t embrace the spirit of the meme, which was to use the photo as one’s profile picture. It was willing to pounce on the opportunity to embrace an already proven meme (versus those brands that embraced it early on, unsure of public reaction) but unwilling to go as far as using it for its profile photo, even though its version included Bud Light branding. Finally, it’s unclear if Bud Light has the authority to publish on the topic. Does it actually do anything to support gay rights? Bud Light does have a history of supporting the LGBT community according to Business Insider, but that hardly seems to be part of the brand’s core narrative. 

Reaction to Bud Light’s version was overwhelmingly positive, according to the top comments (this could be determined thanks to Facebook’s new, threaded reply system) and the post garnered more than 11,000 shares, 55,000 Likes and 2,000 comments. So it’s fair to say that the Bud Light audience appreciated the brand’s alignment with the cause, and Bud Light’s audience is what’s most important. But it’s not an effort that can be held in the same high esteem as that of Oreo, which created its multi-tiered, rainbow-colored Oreo cookie as a stand-alone expression of equality without the comfort of knowing how audiences would react.

Billons and Billions Served

For the HRC, the effort can be seen as nothing less than a complete success, at least from the perspective of awareness. There’s no evidence that any paid media went toward promoting the campaign (though that’s unconfirmed), so the millions of people who took part in the effort provided the HRC with billons of impressions, all for little or no cost. The HRC did have a sizable audience to help ignite the campaign (more than 1,000,000 fans), but a success like this can be attributed only to the power of social media and its ability to expose audiences, particularly influencers, to content and campaigns, branded and otherwise, at a lower cost and with a greater effectiveness than can be gotten with paid media alone.

The branded and user-generated spin-offs helped fuel the HRC’s success but existed in a gray area between wholehearted support and an attempt to piggyback on what was already a proven meme. While I’m all for brands supporting gay rights (just my opinion), they have to think carefully about how they execute that support in a social space.

What do you think? Did it make sense for any/all brands to take part? Did brands need an authority to publish on this topic?

Image via Human Rights Campaign

I know that at some point in my life I did. I could wait in lines, sit through three-hour college classes and even read a book for hours, all without feeling as though I’d missed out on something. But not anymore.

Today my patience (or maybe it’s just my attention span) has deteriorated to a sliver of what it was. In a normal day at the office, I scan hundreds of tweets and status updates, read (or at least skim) a dozen or so blog posts and view countless Facebook photos, YouTube videos (the short ones), Touts and Vines. I can’t stand in line without checking my email, Facebook or Instagram. 

I’m not reading books or even long- form articles. I’m busy (at least I think I am), and I don’t have time to read your lengthy e-Book or watch your 60-minute webinar. In reality I probably do have the time, but the advent of social media has changed not only the type of content I consume and where I consume it, but also the speed in which I feel I must consume that content. And by “I,” I mean most everyone. 

So what does that mean for content marketing?

A Trip Back to 2006

Though the context of the content may vary (a banker, a teenager and a mother of four will consume very different content), there has been a clear progression in the creation and consumption of long-form to short-form content over the past seven years, give or take a year. In 2006, blogging was all the rage. Any and every digital marketing expert was telling brands to create their own publishing channels and start creating content, often in the form of helpful articles. Blogging fueled SEO results, and that success on Google would develop more inbound leads. 

It was a simple strategy but one not easily sold to C-level executives worried about dedicating resources to an effort that might only indirectly result in revenue. Most would rather have stuck to the old methods of traditional advertising (where it is nearly impossible to truly valuate ROI) or to sales teams cold-calling potential customers. The job for agencies or forward-thinking marketing managers with their fingers on the pulse of digital was to show how the landscape was changing and how audiences were changing with it. 

A Content Drive-Thru

That strategy is still at the core of digital marketing today, but the proliferation of tools has changed the way audiences connect with each other, and that connection changed the way audiences found, consumed and shared content. With each passing year, social media audiences and channels grew more. While the big three—Facebook, Twitter and YouTube—continued to expand and iterate, smaller players, like LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, SnapChat, Tout and Vine, began to capitalize on niche social activities. These social platforms have smaller audiences but grow rapidly and offer features that the big three don’t have or at least whose versions of which aren’t as robust. Facebook knew that early, and even though its Camera app has filters, it went ahead and bought Instagram, a platform that’s becoming more popular than Facebook with teenagers, for a cool billion dollars.

This resulted in what I call a content drive-thru. Like customers without time to park their cars and stand in line at a fast-food restaurant, audiences now favor bite-sized content that can be consumed and shared in seconds, not minutes and certainly not hours. This has led to many brands ditching the keyboard for the camera, creating image-based content that grabs attention and is visually appealing yet is quickly understood and consumed. Even when it’s just text, as with Twitter, there’s a hard stop at 140 characters for good reason.

The Road Ahead for Brands

I don’t claim to know with 100 percent certainty what’s in the future of content marketing, but there are clues from the past and present that may help us predict more accurately what’s to come. One clue is the notable shift in the style of branded Facebook content. Updates from brands have shifted from text-based questions and link sharing to including a photo for every post, regardless of type. Sharing a link? Find a photo and put the link in the copy. Want to use a quotation? Put it on top of a photo. 

In this climate, Instagram has flourished. The photo-based social network utilized filters to give photos a unique glow and a retro feel. But it’s not the filters that make it special (Facebook has filters, and there are Instagram competitors, too). What makes Instagram special is its dedication to one type of media—photography. Add the ability to search, comment and hashtag, and the mobile-based app is becoming a force in the social-media world. Brands like Nike, Red Bull, Victoria’s Secret and Starbucks each boast more than a million followers and offer a glimpse into the visual essence of the brand.

Following Instagram’s success, the Twitter-owned short-form mobile video platform Vine, as well as Tout (self-described as a “real-time information network for video updates”), have emerged in a world where YouTube is the 1,000-pound gorilla in the room. Both allow the user to quickly record and upload a video into a dedicated stream that is easily consumed and shared by their audience. 

A number of brands are already experimenting on Vine (you can see them at Brands on Vine). As recently as this week, the first trailer for Wolverine was released, as a Vine. Tout has resonated with flagship brands, including the WWE, which has posted more than 2,000 Touts and attracted more than 100,000 followers on its branded account. More impressive is the fact that the WWE has managed to get most of its large roster of personalities (about 40) on the platform as well (though not all have “touted”), increasing the brand’s exposure. They encourage users to Tout at them as well, using those user-generated Touts on-air during live broadcasts. 

Finally, the GIF has made a comeback of late, fueling the success of Tumblr, and brands like HBO and Pixar have taken notice. HBO created a Tumblr for its hit show Girls, curating user-generated photos and animated GIFs. For the upcoming film Monsters University, Pixar developed its own Tumblr, creating comical memes based on footage from the film.

The Irony Is Not Lost on Me

An article about the emergence and success of short-form content (branded and otherwise) has exceeded one thousand words. Yes, I get the irony. But long-form content published weekly is what our audience has come to expect, and that’s an important lesson. 

While there are many successes across various new and (relatively) old social media channels, ultimately your brand has to understand who your audience is, where they are and what type of content they want to consume and would be willing to share. The answers to those questions will differ for every single brand. While Pinterest seems fun and popular, it may not resonate with your fans and may consume valuable resources for little to no return. Always remember to take an audience-first approach to determine which channels your brand embraces. 

Is your brand creating short-form content? Are you focusing less on long-form? Let us know in the comments. 

Photo Credit: Wade Morgen via Compfight cc

So their buying a viable home computer in the early 90s was a feat; and that they subscribed to Prodigy (before AOL even existed) is hard to believe, but it happened. And so my addiction to the computer and all things Internet was born, and to this day I’m still knee-deep in it, only now I’m getting paid for it instead of running up the phone bill using a dial-up modem. 

All this paved the way for the way I use social media today, as a 30-something. But I’m part of just one demographic, and the Internet landscape has drastically changed. The way individuals use social media depends on a number of factors—age, gender, income and even race—and if you’re an advertiser, it’s important to dig deep into the sometimes-subtle differences in the ways they interact with it. What you think you know about the use of social-networking sites and mobile may be far from the truth, and that mistake can cost your brand. 

It’s Not As Obvious As You Think

Today it’s difficult to find an adult (or teen, or child, for that matter) who’s not using the Internet in some capacity. Dial-up modems are a thing of the past (they are, right?), having made way for 24/7/365 broadband and mobile access. Save for those times when they’re on the water or underground, it’s rare for an American adult to be more than an arm’s length from Internet connectivity.

 Sixty-seven percent of American adults who are online use social-networking sites, according to the Pew Research Center. Of course, this includes a large part of the “younger” demographic—83 percent of 18- to 29-year-old users—but it also includes more than half the 50-to-64 demographic and a third of those 65 and over. Sixty-seven percent of these online adults use Facebook, an impressive number considering that Twitter is used by only 16 percent of the same group, which, surprisingly, is only one point above the percentage that uses Pinterest (15 percent) and three above that of Instagram (13 percent). 

We know there’s a large audience on social media. So the question then becomes, where is your target demographic? Do you really know? 

Don’t Believe the Hype

A Marketers’ knee-jerk reaction may be to believe something that’s quite untrue. Take teens and young adults. Because of how quickly the social-media landscape changes, this demographic is a moving target. In mid-2012 (which may be a while ago in social-media time), Common Sense Media studied how teens view their digital lives. Ninety percent of teens aged 13 to 17 were using social media, according to the study, and Facebook was the main social-networking site in a landslide. 

But a more recent Business Insider article tells a different story. Titled “It’s Official: Teens Are Bored With Facebook,” the article cites an informal survey conducted by Adam Ludwin, who launched a social photo album called Albumatic, of a focus group of more than 20 people under the age of 25. He noted that the group didn’t like the app, simply because of its reliance on Facebook. In Facebook’s annual 10-K report, the social-networking behemoth admits that it is losing ground because of younger users’ jumping to other platforms. An interview by a BuzzFeed editor with his 15-year-old sister found that she is more obsessed with Instagram and Snapchat than with Facebook, and that Twitter use by her and her friends is almost nonexistent. Another informal poll showed YouTube as the big winner (note the informality and small sample sizes). 

Teens may be digital natives and may often understand the implications of new technology before other, “busier” demographics do, but can they be trusted to predict what’s new and next in digital? Can they provide insight into what is best for your brand’s audience? Probably not, unless your audience is those teens. 

It’s a Mobile, Mobile World

Mobile throws yet another wrench into any preconceived notions of social-media use. As of December 2012, 45 percent of American adults owned a smartphone, an increase from 35 percent in May 2011, according to Pew. Because more than one billion smartphones are currently in use, social-networking applications (Instagram and Vine being the poster children) often don’t have native web counterparts, as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn do. 

It’s a question not only of which social media your audience is using, but also of on which device they are using it most frequently. Is it an audience in school all day? At work all day? Retired? Parents? Wealthy? Urban or suburban? 

More than a passing knowledge of a few social channels is required to truly understand an audience and develop an effective social-media strategy that engages them on the right channels in the appropriate tone of voice. Whoever is creating your brand’s social strategy, whether an in-house team or a brand storytelling agency, must understand how individuals interact with social media and be able to dig deep into audience demographics. It’s not enough to know how to execute on a channel. You have to know which channel to execute on in the first place. 

Photo Credit: Flооd via Compfight cc

Though it was founded in 2006 (which makes it older than Twitter), BuzzFeed stormed onto the social media scene in 2012, more than doubling its 2011 traffic (per Alexa).  

The format is perfect for the way audiences consume and share media today. The content is easy to consume, relevant, entertaining and frequent, as the site posts dozens of times a day. Brands like HBO and Velveeta have even joined in, co-creating content with BuzzFeed. It’s a publishing model that requires lots of staffers and community contributors to keep the content fire hose pumping.  

So it was quite a surprise to see that Disney has launched its own BuzzFeed-like site. Entitled “Oh My Disney” (OMD), the site features articles with Disney imagery, GIFs and other short-form Disney-related editorial built specifically to be easily consumed, enjoyed and quickly shared. Posts like “15 More Reminders That You’re Great Today” and “You Know You’re a 90′s Kid When” are organized into five categories: Awww; Oh, Snap!; Retro; Silly; and Whoa. 

The page is updated quite consistently, anywhere from two to eight times a day (even if the content isn’t necessarily timely). So how is Disney doing it?

A History of Social Media Success

If any brand were going to dive headfirst into publishing, Disney might be the one best suited to it. Far and away its largest and most successful platform is Facebook, where the Disney page boasts more than 42 million fans. The pages for Pixar Studios and Walt Disney Studios aren’t shabby either, having 12.5 million fans and 6.4 million fans, respectively, and the OMD Facebook page has 11,000 fans after only a few weeks of existence. Oh My Disney is also on Twitter and Tumblr. 

So the foundation is there for Disney to create its own publishing channel, where a post can expand beyond the confines of a 140-character tweet or a single-image Facebook post. But what makes this possible for Disney, and difficult (though not impossible) for most other brands, lies much deeper than social media. 

A History of Storytelling

Having movies and characters at its core and countless physical and digital extensions, Disney has endeared itself to many through its heartfelt storytelling. Disney has a wealth of original and beloved content and characters with messages that are relevant no matter what decade you were born in. Parents watch Disney films with their children, just as they watched them with their parents when they were their children’s age. All this content gives Disney vast amounts of ammunition for OMD. They’re not creating new content as much as curating existing content. 

This inherent storytelling is what makes social media and content marketing such a fruitful endeavor for entertainment-based brands. Imagery and quotations resonate with audiences forever. I still crack a smile every time the Forrest Gump Facebook page posts an update, referring to a movie that was made nearly 20 years ago (has it really been that long?).  

Finding Your Audience and Delivering Content

Another reason OMD can work for Disney is that the brand has done a great job of finding its audience. There is certainly no shortage of social media channels, but Disney carefully chooses where it will publish content and plans appropriately. Disney isn’t just creating articles on OMD and cross-posting to Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Tumblr. Disney creates content specifically for each channel. Granted, the content is often very similar (photo and GIF heavy), but that creates familiarity and a unified social media voice. The key is that Disney finds its audience on the appropriate channels and uses those channels to create instead of solely promoting. 

What Does This Mean for Your Brand?

As a content agency, we’re obviously big fans of creating an owned channel, like OMD. But we warn brands about biting off more than they can chew. Disney has made such a commitment to content that it’s dedicated a team (albeit small) to OMD, and that’s really the only way to pull off a channel like this. 

But that doesn’t mean that brands should ignore the trail Disney has blazed. Like the first brands to create custom-published magazines, Disney has decided to move beyond native advertising and own its content channels. Even though it is an established brand that’s been around for decades, Disney remains at the forefront of brand storytelling.  

It’s a bold move. Do you think this will pan out for Disney? Will more brands follow?

(image)

We’ve all seen an endless number of ads for cars, car dealerships, and the like. If I think really hard, I may be able to remember a few of them. Let’s see… I remember the Volkswagen ad with Kid Vader (but mostly because it was so talked-about, not because I thought it was so effective). I remember the Toyota Celica ads in which the senior citizen sees a parked Celica and yells, “Slow down. This is a neighborhood!” If you gave me 10 more minutes, I could probably think of another three to five, but not much more. Considering how many car ads I’ve seen in my lifetime, that’s a pretty low recall rate, and I can assure you that none of them influenced my purchase decisions.  

Recently I watched a six-minute video in which a young man, who happens to be too young to drive, tells a story that takes place in a Honda CR-V. His story nearly brought me to tears, then [spoiler alert] had me rejoicing at the end. I was smiling ear to ear, and immediately shared on every social network I could. If you haven’t heard Noah St. John’s story, you should now. 

The Power of Story 

I own a Ford Escape now and love it (somewhere Scott Monty is rejoicing). Though I had searched for an SUV, a Honda CR-V never entered my consideration set. It just didn’t seem to be a fit for me. 

But I find myself thinking of Noah and his family’s CR-V lately. My mileage is about to exceed 50,000, and I wonder where I’ll be at 100,000, and I think of Noah’s story. When my wife and I were at Babies“R”Us this past weekend to register for her shower, we looked at car seats, and I thought of it again. I wondered what kinds of practices I’d bring my child to. I wondered if my Escape would be as cherished as his CR-V. Granted, the video is fresh in my mind, but I watched a lot of TV yesterday and I couldn’t tell you five commercials I saw.  

Stories are so powerful because they move us emotionally (which ads also can but rarely do). We may not remember the story forever, but we certainly remember it longer than we do that $4 million Times Square Billboard or Super Bowl ad. 

The Best Ads Aren’t Ads

At the end of last year, Kirk Cheyfitz (our CEO) put together a list of the best ads of 2012 on Pando Daily, and go figure, the best ads of 2012 weren’t ads. I’ll argue that Noah’s story is going to be Honda’s best CR-V ad of 2013—one the company didn’t pay a single dime for, and one that isn’t even an ad. It’s a story.  

If the non-ad does come out on top, it will be no surprise. The most shareable media is most often owned or earned, and that’s because effective advertising isn’t about exposure. It’s about conversations. Since 99.99 percent of the time, the conversations people have with one another are not about your ad (or anyone else’s), only the most relevant, entertaining and informative content will be remembered and shared.  

Honda’s Reaction 

I’m actually surprised by Honda’s reaction. If I were Honda, I’d be embracing Noah’s performance in a bear hug. But other than earning a passing mention on Honda’s Facebook page, Noah’s story (which has received nearly half a million views) was practically ignored by the brand. Granted, it’s still early. Honda may have larger plans. Maybe it’ll record his performance in a real studio and use it as a long-form ad. Or maybe it’s distancing itself from the story because it features a two-mother (and no-father) household. I don’t know.  

Unfortunately, there’s not much a brand can do to create stories like this one. That’s what makes them so effective—their authenticity. But brands have to implement ways to find customer stories like Noah’s and embrace them in a way that will amplify the message and allow it to be more searchable and shareable. It also requires a certain commitment to quality. If the CR-V constantly broke down and was unreliable, they may have never it might never have made it to 100K. 

Lean Forward

Whatever the case may be, Noah’s story is 100 percent authentic. It’s from Noah, not from a brand. That allows audiences to uncross their arms and lean forward, accepting the story into their lives even if it contains a brand, because the story isn’t from the brand. 

Most people don’t have 30-seconds to be interrupted by a commercial or held hostage by a pre-roll ad, but nearly a half-million people had six minutes to hear Noah’s story. Heck, I had 90-minutes to blog about it. 

The greatest brand stories are the ones told by the brand’s fans. 

But the topic of brands reacting to television programming via social channels has been discussed ad nauseam. I’m not sure anyone can write an article lately about social media without mentioning Oreo, and this year’s Oscars apparently invited every brand to the social media party, whether it was relevant or not.

What is largely forgotten in all this is the shows themselves. Social media is fertile ground for television programs to engage audiences not only before, during and after an episode airs, but also during the off-season, making social a year-round commitment. Now that countless brands utilize real-time second-screen tactics, it’s time to investigate which shows and channels are innovating in the social space. 

Real-Time Marketing Versus Social TV

Let’s get one thing straight: While real-time marketing by brands most often happens during live television programming, that’s where the similarities end. Brands simply hope to catch lightning in a bottle, as Oreo did (though one can argue that it  succeeded only because of the long-term efforts it dedicated to Facebook the previous year), but television channels and programs have to view their audience-engagement activities as a long-term endeavor lasting the entirety of a show’s run. From the lead-up to the premiere to the bridge between seasons and everything in between, there are a wide variety of channels and tactics to use to get audiences talking about and tuning in to shows. Here are a few that are doing it best.

1. The Walking Dead (AMC)

Facebook Fans: 15,657,720 (page)
Twitter Followers: 1,221,962 (page)

AMC’s The Walking Dead, now in its third season, is one of the most popular shows on television and a juggernaut in social media. The show’s Facebook page shares quotations, photos, contests, episode quizzes and behind-the scenes content (often from the show’s very in-depth website). Also on Facebook (as an app) is the Walking Dead social game, which allows the fan to create a unique character and kill zombies in environments taken straight from the show. Not too fond of your Facebook profile picture? Their “Dead Yourself” app can fix that, too.

TWD is also very active on Twitter, engaging viewers during the episode as well as encouraging user-generated content via Vine reactions (#TWDvine). TWD also offers a second-screen companion app that viewers can sync with the episode (even if they’re watching on their DVR) for snap polls, trivia and exclusive video and to contribute to the social conversation.  

2. Duck Dynasty (A&E)

Facebook Fans: 3,867,151 (page)
Twitter Followers: 411,936 (page)

It’s tough to follow The Walking Dead in this list, but if anyone is up to the task, it’s Duck Dynasty. Though not as well-known, the most watched show on A&E has a passionate fan base. Its real-life characters, the Robertsons, are a walking, quacking quotation machine, particularly because of their colorful Uncle Si (perfect for GIFs and meme photos). The third-season premiere saw the #DuckDynasty hashtag reach trending status on Twitter through active audience outreach and response as well as relevant and near-real-time creative. Fans can also “duck themselves” (put beards on their faces) courtesy of a Facebook app, perfect for sharing. The show even did some outreach, “ducking” influencers who were most likely to share with their audiences (and who almost always did). The show commits 100 percent to its fans and the second-screen experience, and this results in a quick ascent to success. Quack!

3. Girls (HBO)

Facebook Likes: 519,335 (page)
Twitter Followers: 164,934 (page)

Relatively new and seemingly (though not necessarily) geared to a specific demographic, Girls has emerged as one of the most talkable shows on television, which is even more impressive considering that HBO is a subscription channel and not as widely available as cable or network channels. To be heard over all the noise, the show has taken innovative steps, including making a commitment to editorial content on BuzzFeed, unique GetGlue stickers for each new episode (including real-life rewards for checking in, such as cross-stitchings as seen on set), a behind-the-scenes social-media production diary courtesy of Storify and a user-generated (but brand-curated) Tumblr featuring Girls GIFs. 

Honorable Mention—How I Met Your Mother (WGNA)

Facebook Likes: 2,003,949 (page)
Twitter Likes: 105,858 (page)

Since WGNA is a Story client, we’ll remain unbiased and keep it off the official list, but the page boasts a PTAT number nearly identical to that of the official HIMYM Facebook page, though the official page is more than seven times larger. Through active engagement, live-show tweeting, contests, games, Meme Monday, anointing of SuperFans and the promotion of user-generated content, Meet at MacLaren’s fosters an engaged community that encourages tune-in to WGN America. Not bad for a channel that syndicates content. 

The Brand Takeaway

These shows aren’t necessarily creating completely new or innovative tactics (Mad Men yourself…Dead yourself…Duck yourself…you get the point), but we’re surprisingly still in an age where most shows aren’t making much of an effort. Some shows have no presence. Others have pages but simply promote heavily branded press photos with lines of fine print and completely ignore their audience, even when that audience is pleading for responses and engagement (and most times you can blame their agencies).

Now that the effectiveness of mass media is rapidly decreasing, it’s imperative that shows find a way to reach audiences where they already are with content they’ll enjoy and want to share. The commitment these programs have made towards an always-on relationship with their fans has helped turn their brands into something meaningful to their audiences. They’ve provided a way to go far beyond just the on-air programming. It’s not easy, but it’s obviously rewarding. 

This is by no means a comprehensive list. What other shows are doing a great job socially? Let me know in the comments. 

The combination of social media and storytelling, the term social media storytelling could be the holy grail of buzzwords. Half emerging technology that everyone said would either rule the world or totally fail, half proven method of transferring emotion and knowledge since the dawn of humanity, social media storytelling is a relatively new and an oft-misunderstood term. Nearly every digital agency claims that they’re “storytellers,” and if the client is interested in a social media activation, then they’ve magically become “social media storytellers” as well.

My mom and dad are clueless about what “social media storytelling” means, and that’s okay. But I fear there are other agencies and brands that are misunderstood, and that can be dangerous for audiences.

What Exactly Is Social Media Storytelling?

Though I would argue that we, as humans, are all storytellers by nature, that doesn’t make a group of us effective brand storytellers, transmedia storytellers, digital storytellers or social media storytellers, just as I’m not a world-class runner simply because I know how to run and can do it for two hours continuously (finished my half marathon in 1:59:58 thankyouverymuch!).

Storytelling, at its core, is more than just telling stories about a brand, and social media storytelling is more than just creating Facebook, Twitter and blog posts promoting that brand. Effective brand stories must embody the brand. They must be unique and noticeable and inspire people to engage, share and eventually buy (or watch, or whatever drives profitability). They must be selfless and meaningful to audiences.

Since there’s a chance I might not know everything, I posed the same question to noted storytelling expert Michael Margolis, CEO of Get Storied. Said Margolis, “Storytelling means you have to reveal something beyond self-congratulations. [It] is not just a gimmick to sell more crap. Storytelling is about relationship—most importantly describing the world of your audience, and how much you get who they are, what they care, and where they are trying to get in life.”

Effective social media storytelling starts at the beginning as does all brand storytelling on any platform or in any medium, and that’s the difference. An effective social media campaign rooted in storytelling will be united by one aspect—the brand’s Story Platform. 

The Story Platform

At its core, the Story Platform serves as the emotional heart of the brand—the enduring idea that will serve as the consistent basis for the many stories that a successful brand must tell over time. It’s developed by deeply understanding a number of elements including audience, brand and category, as well as the goals and objectives of both the brand and the business.

Not just a tagline (though sometimes it can end up being the tagline), the Story Platform is a central thought around which all communications can be built. In the case of social media, it gives direction and coherence to all subsequent marketing work.

It’s the single thought that should be apparent in everything your brand does and says—the core narrative of every story that is told about your brand (and something we at Story can help unearth for your brand).

Social Media Storytelling From the Heart

Without unearthing the brand’s core story, it’s difficult (if not impossible) for a brand to effectively tell its story across social platforms. But having done it, the brand has a starting point—something it can use to ensure that every single post, tweet and video is on-brand.

From there a brand’s social media presence has a heartbeat. That heartbeat fuels the executions while offering inherent weights and measures. It helps answer questions like:

• Who is the audience, and how do they interact with our brand?
• How are they innovating our brand? What are they saying?
• How do we differ from similar brands, and how can we use stories to persuade customers to choose our brand over a competitor’s? 
• How quickly should we respond to social comments (positive and negative)?
• Which pop-culture events should we be ready to respond to in real time? (Because sometimes the Oscars audience doesn’t need your Photoshopped photos and pithy copy.)
• What user-generated content should we encourage? Which contributions should we share?
• Does this app make sense to our brand? Will our audience use it, and more important, can it add value to their lives?

How Can You Find Your Story Platform?

It’s not simple or done overnight. We’ve done it for large brands, but that has required weeks of research, full-day intensive workshops and the wealth of design power that is required to create a beautiful brand bible. But small brands rarely have the budget to work with an agency that knows what it’s doing, leaving them in a tough spot; but all hope is not lost. 

If you have time to spend with your brand’s stakeholders, you can take a giant step toward understanding your brand’s core story (and continue to do this every few years as things change). Start by investigating your audience, your brand and your category. Try to ensure that you’re working with some sort of core story for your brand, and map all executions back to that story. Develop a content plan with that core story in mind. 

Social media storytelling isn’t telling a number of stories about a brand. It’s unearthing the core story at the heart of your brand and telling it in meaningful ways that people enjoy, appreciate and share.  

How closely do you pay attention to your brand’s story? Have you made an effort to unearth it?

Our traditionally analog means of consuming media—television, newspaper, radio, outdoor—are quickly being replaced by digital means. We supplement TV watching with our iPads, get our news in near real time from Twitter, and share life’s moments in an instant on Facebook. Other technologies have allowed fast and easy creation and curating of content, like Pinterest, Vine, Storify, and even something as simple as an Instagram hashtag.

This consumption of digital content has led to the concept of “virality.” Just a few years ago this concept didn’t exist. Videos, images and articles didn’t “go viral.” If your funny video didn’t make it to America’s Funniest Home Videos,  nobody saw it. If you thought of a funny dance in your dorm room, you’d be lucky if the exposure reached the floor above you. Exposure on all levels, particularly for advertising, was limited to the very rich or very lucky.

Now individuals, media outlets and brands alike are owning their channels, creating and publishing content in hopes of that content’s being consumed, appreciated and shared. So now the question is not whether or not to own a channel and create content but what type of content is most likely to be shared. This leads to other questions. What resonates with audiences? Where do they consume it? Why do they share it?

That’s where editing comes in

If you’re reading this, it is likely that within the past day or so you’ve encountered an article by the likes of BuzzFeed, This Advertising Life, ICanHazCheezburger? and any of a number of other sites (there are millions) dedicated to curating and sharing quick bites of content. Lately BuzzFeed has done this brilliantly, creating content with little educational value yet a boatload of entertainment value, any of it consumable in a matter of seconds.

But what’s important is not so much why the editors at BuzzFeed create this content (hint: It’s to monetize the audience); it’s more the lessons learned from how they do it. BuzzFeed has concocted a lethal formula for social-publishing success, combining dozens of unique pieces of content each day with pop culture, timeliness, topics proven to be shareable (animals, nostalgia and hilarity, to name a few) and brevity. Most articles contain images with captions, and only a few articles contain more than a couple of hundred words.

It’s even proven this formula for brands. It’s monetized its site by helping brands create shareable content instead of finding ways for them to interrupt the BuzzFeed audience. (Check this post for an in-depth look at BuzzFeed’s success in creating content on behalf of brands).

What does all this mean for brands?

The idea of editing and succinctness isn’t just a concept for media outlets pushing Grumpy Cat memes and Gangnam Style videos. There is a correlation between the success of viral-media sites and the success of brands on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Vine and other channels. Shorter content works (hence the existence of Twitter, Vine and Instagram). Here are a few tips to keep in mind when creating content in hopes of achieving viral success: 

1. Understand your platform
What works for Facebook doesn’t necessarily work for Twitter. Write with the platform (and its audience) in mind.

2. Push the boundaries
Many platforms have technical limitations, but that doesn’t mean the boundaries aren’t there to be pushed. Brands are already using Vine for creative stop-motion videos. 

3. Stay on topic
Nothing can derail a shareable piece of content like too much irrelevant content. Stay focused and stick to what your headline promises (easier said than done, especially for me).

4. Don’t under-deliver
If you’re spending more time on your headline than on your content, you’re doing it wrong. Don’t promise “10 Tricks You’ve Never Heard Of” only to repurpose tricks everyone has heard of. 

5. You can sacrifice time or quality, but not both
If your content is quick, audiences will forgive a lack of quality. But if you’re publishing long-form content, the production quality must be able to override the audience’s brief attention span (think Harlem Shake versus Kony 2012).

Of course, a brand’s content-marketing strategy must correspond to its goals, since bite-size content won’t work for every brand. But in 2013, there’s no question of the power of effective editing and the shareability of entertaining short-form content. Thinking like an editor when creating your brand’s content may just turn ordinary into viral. 

Photo Credit: yauhin1 via Compfight cc

This post originally appeared in our February Issue of “Live Report from the Future of Marketing,” our monthly Post-Advertising newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

The blanket of snow that fell across the UK a few weeks ago reminded me of one of my favourite marketing campaigns in recent years. If you haven’t seen this fantastic piece of opportunistic advertising before, the Polo Snow Stamp was pressed into thick snow on cars, park benches and roads across London, creating a perfect replica of the iconic white mint with the hole.

What impressed me most then and still impresses me now is that whilst the rest of the country perceived the onset of snow as the perfect excuse for a day off from work, Polo’s agency was looking at the weather reports and seeing only opportunity. Smart planning and a quick response to circumstances beyond its control (in this case physical) created some fantastic earned media. Now, three years later, people who saw the campaign are reminded of Polo every time snow falls. 

Over the past month, I’ve noticed other brands adopting the same tactics time and again with great success. No brand can wait for that one-day window when it snows in England for an opportunity, so instead the white canvas of snow and mint replica have been replaced with social media platforms and seminal events that tap into the buzz in those communities. Those that do it well join the conversation and experience the moment with their audience. 

1. Oreo’s Dunk in the Dark

The winner of the #BrandBowl 2013 has had enough praise since Super Bowl XLVII that everything that could be said has been, but it’s so brilliant that it’s worth revisiting. The creation of a Super Bowl command centre hosted at the offices of agency 360i, with representatives of several of Oreo’s agencies as well as the brand, meant that even though no one knew the lights were going to go out in New Orleans, Oreo was the brand in the best position to react to even the most unpredictable events.

The other side of this ad, which has been overlooked amongst all the compliments, is why an ad with such simple copy and unexceptional visual imagery managed to resonate so exceptionally well with audiences on social media (our own Jon Thomas has a strong opinion about it). It is my belief that the fundamental reason relates to something that is at the heart of everything we do here at Story Worldwide: connecting brands to their audiences with engaging and entertaining stories that audiences actually want to hear.

As the lights went out in New Orleans and confusion enveloped the hundreds of millions of observers around the world, people took to their trusted social channels for more information. As friends checked Twitter and Facebook, amongst the jokes about the imminent arrival of Bane or the Undertaker, Oreo was there, sharing the moment with its audience and in a tone of voice true to the brand. No one will forget the great Super Bowl Blackout, and Oreo will forever be a part of it by having placed itself in the conversation with its audience.

2. Specsavers

In discussing brands reacting in real time to events, our CEO, Kirk Cheyfitz, observed that ‘we all know social media is a real-time sport, not to be attempted by those who can’t work weekends or nights’. An obvious statement, but no brand has epitomised this always-on, reactive approach better than the UK high-street optician Specsavers. 

The tactic of responding to sporting mishaps began at last summer’s European Championship. Once again a game involving the English national football team boiled down to a decision on whether the ball had or hadn’t crossed the goal line, though replays showed it had. The next day, Specsavers posted an ad taunting the official for his decision in a number of the UK newspapers. The strapline ‘Should’ve gone to Specsavers’ is so deeply etched in popular culture that the audience knew exactly what was being said even when it was written in Ukrainian.

After the success of its Ukraine press ad, Specsavers was quick to react again to sporting stories. When the South Korean flag was flown during the North Korean national anthem at last summer’s Olympics, and last month after Chelsea player Eden Hazard was accused of kicking a ball boy, Specsavers utilised its Twitter account to post similar ads.

3. Virgin Holidays

Of the three examples given here, no brand has been truer to the audience it is attempting to reach or its brand persona than Virgin Holidays. Instantly recognisable and personified by its eccentric founder, Richard Branson, Virgin is renowned for fighting the established force in whatever market it chooses to diversify into next. For example, if it comes up against British Airways, the flag carrier for Britain, which represents the choice of airline for the conformist, Virgin Atlantic offers the sexier and younger option. 

When a historic bill granting same-sex couples the right to marry was passed by the UK government, Virgin was uniquely positioned to genuinely engage through a picture of two lipstick-marked champagne flutes and the strapline ‘Time for a honeymoon’. If the same strategy had been adopted by another brand to address this particular situation, that brand could have risked looking opportunistic for the wrong reasons. 

Virgin’s excellence highlights again how vital the twin pillars of smart planning and quick response to external circumstances are to ensuring great real-time social media advertising.  In this instance the smart planning guaranteed that the published ad spoke to the audience and brand in a genuine way, and it was delivered the moment the bill passed.

These three examples illustrate how powerful advertising can be when agencies and brands work in tandem to engage in real time with their audiences. The ads that are winning these moments are those that respond fast whilst staying true to the brand story and its audience. The brands that continue to tie up progress in review processes will continue to miss out on these opportunities and will see audiences going elsewhere. 

It can be a scary place. No moderator. No filters. Only rule is that you prove who you are. So why would POTUS and one of the wealthiest men in the world spend time answering questions, some intelligent, some inappropriate, from this fairly anonymous yet large (and to a point, influential) digital community? 

Answer: An audience of digital influencers.

Of course, the answer is much deeper than that, but the Reddit is a huge, albeit largely forgotten community in the sphere of social media marketing. Reddit’s nickname is the Front Page of the Internet, a place where pictures, videos and stories can go from anonymous to viral in just a few hours. It’s an early-detection warning system for what is worth sharing and what’s not, and some amazing AMAs have come from it.

Facebook and Twitter dominate social strategies and deservedly so, but in order to raise awareness in a short time, Reddit has served its famous AMA participants well.

Bill Gates

Just a few days ago the Reddit community sat down with software mogul and philanthropist Bill Gates to discuss all things Bill. He promoted the AMA event with this short but well-done video in which he answered a few questions: 

Bill Gates, who is often (incorrectly) portrayed as a geeky introvert, swimming in money like Scrooge McDuck, quickly exposed his true personality, sense of humor and deep-seated concern for our planet and humanity’s well-being as he answered a variety of questions. 

The top question: “What is something that needs to be changed in the world, but money won’t help?”

Bill’s answer: “It would be nice if all governments were as rational as the Nordic governments—reaching compromise and providing services broadly. The Economist had a nice special section on this last week. African governments have often been weak, but you can’t write a check to change that. Fortunately the average quality is going up. Mo Ibrahim tracks this in a great way.”

Gates answered questions about emerging technologies, how he was portrayed in Pirates of Silicon Valley and what he does for fun (tennis and bridge, apparently). His humanity was completely transparent, and he exposed a massive audience to his foundation and his sites www.billsetter.com and www.gatesnotes.com.

Barack Obama

Gates gained mountains of earned media, but Barack Obama’s AMA not only broke Reddit records, but literally broke Reddit, causing a brief disruption of access to the site.

Obama was on for only 90 minutes, but at a time when the election was coming to a close and many voters were still trying to decide whom to vote for, one could safely assume that POTUS won over a number of voters. He came to their turf and answered their questions (at least the ones he chose to answer). He was able to highlight his campaign agenda and truly connect with an audience.

What does this success mean for brands?

If we are looking at it from a brand’s perspective, then we have to take all this success with a grain of salt. The aforementioned examples feature individuals with major power and fame. There’s no place in a Reddit AMA for a brand in general. For example, the Pillsbury Doughboy can’t host an AMA, nor can Audi (“I am an Audi” doesn’t make sense).

A brand would have to utilize a well-known leader or someone with a great angle, like the director of an upcoming movie or a lead singer in a band or the product designer of the latest smartphone. The most successful AMA feature individuals who are forthcoming, transparent and willing to answer a wide range of questions, not just those that fit their promotional agenda (Bill Gates was very honest and answered a lot of questions and did a good circling back to the issues he was there to address).

So maybe it’s not for every brand, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t overarching social lessons to be learned. A community like Reddit could be seen as one that a brand would want to stay away from: few rules, user anonymity, no control and no measurement. But a brand can’t steer the conversation anymore. A brand can set up outposts like Twitter and Facebook, but ultimately it is along for the ride, for better or worse. This is especially important for independent channels, like Reddit and other forums. If there is a conversation going on about your brand, you have to be present to dispel rumors and at least make your best effort to turn negative opinions into positive ones.

There are conversations happening about your brand. There are digital audiences that dwarf the audiences your print ads are going to reach. There’s a proven return on engagement when a brand (or, more specifically, an individual representing a brand) is transparent and forthcoming.

Are you ready to respond?

As I brace for the backlash, I’ll try to explain myself. I do realize that Oreo is making all the brands that invested $4 million for 30 seconds of interruption look foolish. Oreo is the talk of the town, and it’s not because of its own quite funny Super Bowl commercial (that’s right: I’m not going to call it the Big Game or El Plato Supreme) or it’s impressive efforts on Instagram re-creating photos sent by fans out of either Oreo cookie or Oreo cream, which I insist marketers would be talking about today if there hadn’t been a blackout. No, it’s because of a single tweet (I realize that it was also a Facebook post, but let’s call it a tweet for simplicity’s sake). It was a photo of an Oreo cookie in a pool of light surrounded by darkness and the words “You can still dunk in the dark”—and it was re-tweeted more than 15,000 times.

It was timely, on-brand and a much faster real-time response than any other brand (though brands like Tide and Audi had some great responses as well). If you were scouring the online marketing rags on Monday morning, you couldn’t click twice without running into an article about Oreo’s success.

But I wasn’t impressed by the tweet.

As Christian McMahan, former CMO of Heineken and a founder of Smartfish Group, said, “Think about it: How hard was that to do? So some ABM was at the agency with the brand team, and they slapped a half-clever blackout line on an existing piece of creative. Whoop-de-do.”

Red Bull’s Stratos campaign was tough. Setting up Beyoncé’s monstrous stage during a commercial break was tough. Even Oreo’s 100 Days campaign was tough (the creative in itself was such a storytelling device that barely any copy was necessary). Creating the blackout photo and writing the caption was easy. 

I wasn’t impressed by the tweet. I was impressed by something else Oreo did.

I’ve read at least a dozen articles on the topic. Only a few looked past the tweet and mentioned the key to Oreo’s success that night. What was difficult, and what truly propelled Oreo to viral status, was that a brand and all its agencies worked together, ready to react in real time to anything and everything that happened during one of television’s biggest nights of the year. That was the key to its success. That impressed me (so yes, I was impressed after all).

A Year of Evolution in Social Viewing

As the years pass and major events recur, the rapid evolution of social viewing (or second-screen viewing) becomes more apparent. Every year, the Super Bowl, Grammy Awards and U.S. presidential election are more and more involved with the real-time web. This year, 85% of all Super Bowl ads between kickoff and the end of the game integrated technology hooks into second-screen experiences, a 7% increase from last year, according to Altimeter. The use of hashtags increased 31% from the previous year, while the use of corporate URLs and microsites declined 8%. Audiences are responding to real-time engagement mediums and abandoning destinations.

Social media was always a 24/7/365 proposition. Brands have to be ready to respond at any moment (within reason). But now brands have to be present at major pop-culture events, too. It won’t break a brand if it isn’t present, but that brand won’t have the opportunity to newsjack the event and earn millions of dollars’ worth of media exposure for the cost of an order of Chinese food and some major elbow grease.

It’s What’s on the Inside That Counts

The real-time web is here, whether brands want to admit it or not. Collaboration between brands and their agencies, particularly during major events, is critical. If audiences are becoming accustomed to hearing from brands in real time, how is a brand going to look if it takes days to respond to a simple Facebook comment or @ reply?

Maybe you’re a fan of the Oreo cookie outside, but in this case the creamy inside made the difference. Granted, Oreo’s original intent was to monitor conversations about its own commercial, but there is still a lesson to learn. The brands that are willing to do what it takes to respond in real time, finding ways to remove the red tape and reduce the time required for brand approval, will be in the best position to succeed in today’s social landscape. 

Oreo is killing it lately. There’s no argument there. And that’s because they are fully submerged in the world of social media and creative fan engagement. Now it is up to other brands to try and catch up. 

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A number of these short talks (most are around 20 minutes) revolve around storytelling. While they don’t necessarily address brand storytelling, they do offer insights that a brand could apply to its efforts to engage audiences through its brand story. I’ve gathered four talks I found particularly useful, and I’ve included a brand takeaway for each. Enjoy!

1. Andrew Stanton—The Clues to a Great Story

Filmmaker Andrew Stanton knows a thing or two about effective storytelling and breaking storytelling conventions. But no matter the type of story, one rule remains: the storyteller has to make the audience care. Stanton draws on his experience at Pixar as well as his own life to explain what makes a good story, why the audience wants to be put to work, and the roles of drama, anticipation and uncertainty in a gripping story. If for no other reason, watch the talk to hear a great opening for a presentation.

What brands can learn from this talk
The success of a brand, at least from a marketing perspective, isn’t defined by a collection of isolated events, executions or campaigns. Instead, it is determined by how well the brand exists over the long haul—how effectively a story can be woven around the brand and told in a way that makes the audience care, propelling them forward and enticing them to “read on” (so to speak). “If things go static, stories die, because life is never static,” Stanton says.

Ensure that your brand is consistently creating content, whether it be Facebook posts, tweets, an email newsletter or videos. You’ve heard the saying “Keep your audience engaged” time and time again, but it’s imperative for your brand’s ongoing narrative. When your content ends, so too does the act of telling your brand’s story. 

2. Chimamanda Adichie—The Danger of a Single Story

Novelist and storyteller Chimamanda Adichie, a native of eastern Nigeria, has learned firsthand how listening to only one story can lead to critical misunderstandings. She tells of how her U.S. professor felt that her portrayal of Africans in a novel wasn’t authentic, because they were well-fed and driving cars; and of her own guilt when on a visit to Mexico, she realized that her belief in the story of Mexicans sneaking across the border and fleecing the U.S. health-care system was far from accurate. Stories are powerful, but they can create untruths when they become the only story.

What brands can learn from this talk
Stories can and often will define a brand, for better or worse. While it is important for a brand to unearth its story platform—the story at the heart of the brand—and tell it in ways that inform and excite, hearing only one such story can cause misunderstanding—even if it’s a good story. Audiences hearing a single negative story can receive an even more destructive message.

If you believed the single story of energy drinks as a category, you’d believe that all brands are selling a glorified concoction of caffeine and sugar. But Red Bull has a vise-like grip on its brand story—about living life to the fullest—thus propelling them to social success and incredible brand affinity. 

As a brand marketer, you must ensure that your audience hears a variety of relevant stories and forming ideas and opinions about those that come from the brand itself. That means you’ll have to not only create content but actively engage with audiences, particularly negative ones, to steer all conversations toward the truth.

3. Karen Thompson Walker—What Fear Can Teach Us

Walker, a fiction writer, explains that fear is a kind of unintentional storytelling we’re all born knowing how to do. We imagine our own futures, accurately or not, by creating stories. Doing so can alter the paths we choose to take. And as is evident in the story she tells of the shipwrecked sailors, how we read the stories we create in our minds can determine whether we achieve our desired outcomes.

What brands can learn from this talk:
Creating content worth sharing often requires faith and courage. Few brands are brave enough to go out on a limb, and instead create uninspiring content that prevents most people from reacting in any way, positively or negatively. It’s the fear of the unknown and the stories that brand managers create in their minds that bind their creativity and limit their spontaneity. What if the content is too edgy? What if the article ruffles too many feathers? Won’t responding to the irate customer’s Facebook post just make the problem more obvious?

Instead of fearing the unknown, take a look at the types of content and brands that have succeeded in the post-advertising age. From Red Bull to Oreo and Warby Parker, the brands that aren’t afraid to push the creative envelope, embrace unique and innovative marketing techniques and actively (and equally) respond to customers’ praise and criticism are the brands that have succeeded.

4. Joe Sabia—The Technology of Storytelling

In less than four minutes, iPad storyteller Joe Sabia introduces the audience to Lothar Meggendorfer and explains how Lothar’s invention of the pop-up book is helping us tell stories today. He also makes me realize that I’m underutilizing my iPad.

What brands can learn from this talk
“The art of storytelling has remained unchanged…but the way in which humans tell the stories has always evolved, with pure consistent novelty,” Sabia says. Emerging technology has allowed brands to tell stories in many ways. Consider all the storytelling options available to your brand. You aren’t required to embrace and be present on all channels, but don’t limit yourself to traditional mediums because that’s all you know. There are so many tools available that are more effective and less expensive than traditional, interruptive means, and inevitably there will be even newer tools that have yet to be imagined.

5. Author Edit (1/31/13): J.J. Abrams—The Mystery Box

Ack! What a gross oversight! In the initial publishing of this post, I completely overlooked this fantastic talk by J.J. Abrams. It was one of the first TED talks I saw that addressed storytelling. Abrams grips the audience with his personal story about the mystery box and his passion for the infinite possibilities that lie in a story. 

Which TED talks did I miss?

Up until what ultimately became the Patriots’ final game, their season was fantastic. They won 12 out of 16 games and earned the second seed going into the playoffs. But against a motivated Baltimore Ravens team, the wheels came off and the Patriots were handily defeated, at home no less. I wholeheartedly expected the Patriots to at least make the Super Bowl, if not win it. I never expected this. 

I had a similar surprise as I watched Coca-Cola’s two-minute spot addressing the obesity problem, which is often blamed on the soda industry and high-fructose corn syrup. If you haven’t seen it, take a look. 

Everything was going great, until it wasn’t

The first 90 seconds of the spot were fantastic. As a viewer, I learned some of the steps the nation’s leading beverage company is taking to provide us with healthier drinking options. It has more than 180 low- and no-calorie options, many of which have replaced higher-calorie offerings in school vending machines. It has created smaller, portion-controlled sizes as well as boldly stated the calorie count of each drink on its cans. It supports initiatives like the Boys & Girls Clubs that encourage kids and young adults to get active. These efforts have helped reduce the average calories per serving across the soda industry’s products in the United States by about 22 percent.

That’s a fantastic story, if it stopped there. If Coca-Cola had admitted that overconsumption of its higher-calorie beverages has led to greater numbers of obese individuals while emphasizing its efforts to offer healthier beverage options, portion control and transparency in calorie counts, I’d applaud it (though would wonder why its message warranted a 90-second spot). But it didn’t admit the truth, and the ad didn’t stop there.

At about the 90-second mark, Coca-Cola’s storytelling machine went off the rails. Instead of coming clean and admitting that it’s a source of the problem, it proclaimed that “all calories count, no matter where they come from.” The line was made intentionally vague because it implies something that is not true. While it’s true that all calories count, it’s untrue that they’re created equal, and that’s indisputable.

Telling an Authentic Story

The essence of brand storytelling is to find your brand’s story platform—the authentic story at the heart of your brand—and tell it in ways that people will enjoy and share. While Coca-Cola offers healthier options, its story platform does not revolve around health in the way that the quick-serve restaurant Subway’s does. Subway has earned the right to tell that story because it’s committed to supporting a healthier lifestyle, even though you can easily get a foot-long meatball sub with a Coke and chips at any of its restaurants.

Taco Bell, on the other hand, doesn’t support a healthier lifestyle, and to its credit, it doesn’t pretend to. Taco Bell’s story focuses on being open late, serving affordable food fast and creating unique food combinations, for example a taco that features a Doritos shell. Taco Bell doesn’t promote healthier options, because that’s not its story. It doesn’t even promote authentic Mexican fare, because that’s not its story either. A visit to Taco Bell’s website reveals promotions for its $0.99 Loaded Grillers, its Variety Taco 12 Pack and its “Live Mas” motto. Admittedly it does have a link buried a few pages deep to its support for a “balanced lifestyle,” but you’d be hard-pressed to find it or find any value in it. 

Taco Bell doesn’t pretend. It embraces its story and sticks to it.

There Is No Middle Ground in Brand Storytelling

Coca-Cola is a fantastic content marketer, and at Story we’re big fans of its commitment to storytelling. But to think that Coca-Cola was crazy enough to open this door—a door promising complete transparency—and then failed to meet the standard it was pretending to set is kind of breathtaking.

A brand must have a commitment to its story. Coke’s product line and its efforts to make the world a healthier, more active place are indeed part of its narrative, but Coke went too far. It is hard to believe that Coke will offer anything of value in the fight to rid our world of obesity. The two-minute spot concludes without a promise to take action or an answer to how we can all make a real difference (as the spot promises in its YouTube description to provide). 

Rohit Bhargava believes that tackling obesity now is a smart strategy for Coke. It’s true that there’s a lot of public pressure and that high-fructose corn syrup has a bad reputation, but if promoting a healthy lifestyle is not an authentic part of a brand’s story, I can’t agree that it is a smart strategy. At least it won’t be a fruitful one. 

What do you think? Is Coke making the right move at the right time? Is it telling the right story?

Additional reporting by Kirk Cheyfitz

Yesterday Facebook announced its biggest innovation since the News Feed in 2006. It is finally taking search seriously, launching Graph Search. 

What Google is to the web, Graph Search is to your social network on Facebook. Graph Search, which will appear on the top of every Facebook page, enables people to find information through the filter of their friends in relation to four pillars—people, places, photos and interests. With Graph Search, people type in what they’re looking to find, not just by name but also by category or simple phrase.

Whether you are a Page, place, group, app or game, you and the content you share can appear in search results according to the information you have shared and the connections you have. 

Some examples of queries could be:

• People who like volleyball and live in my city
• Jazz clubs in Seattle that my friends like
• Photos of my friends before 1998
• Favorite TV shows of my friends who like The Walking Dead

In the mid-’90s I was a teenager just entering high school. I loved computers, and the emergence of the Internet simply astounded me. I would spend hours on Prodigy, then AOL, chatting away and browsing every corner of the emerging web.   

My big prediction was that there would come a day when we’d go to the mall online. We’d walk a character through the mall, entering shops where we could buy real items. Turns out it wasn’t that bold a prediction, as I wasn’t far off.

Today e-commerce has become a formidable challenger to brick-and-mortar stores, which rely on customers getting dressed (it’s harder than you think), leaving their houses, driving to the store, finding parking and dealing with store employees who are too eager or absent to be of any assistance, only to realize the item is out of stock. But in the early days of the web, it wasn’t clear that anyone would ever buy anything online. Who would you be buying from? How would you pay, and would it be safe? Did you need that item now, or could you wait six to 10 days for shipping? Why buy online when you could get everything at the mall (or so you thought) in one day? What if the items didn’t fit? What if they never arrived?

Just take a look at this report from a show called TV.com where they cover the growth and dangers of e-commerce and feature a very correct and forward-thinking Jeff Bezos. Wasn’t it great when we used phrases like “the Net” and “Cyberspace?” 

Those doubts weren’t enough to stop a new industry. Companies did achieve economies of scale online, and e-commerce continues to grow year after year as access to the Internet increases. Smartphones are more ubiquitous every day, so a customer doesn’t even have to be near the computer to snag that pair of shoes they’ve been eyeing since they saw them on Pinterest.

But the final bell in the fight for retail supremacy hasn’t rung. The brick-and-mortar stores that are still in there swinging are those that have evolved into e-commerce innovators, finding ways not only to keep up with Amazon (Target recently vowed to match Amazon.com prices) but also to offer experiences that simply can’t be duplicated by pure e-commerce; and it all starts with your phone.

Mobile + In-Store = Experience

Don’t blink, because if you do you’ll miss yet another evolution in mobile technology. The limits of mobile experiences seem to be limited only by our imagination. Apple wasn’t kidding. Whatever it is, there’s an app for that. 

Mobile has the potential to enhance in-store experiences by delivering special offers at the shelf, generating a shopping list and guiding you through the store by using the phone’s GPS, enabling comparison shopping from anywhere, taking and making payments, providing product reviews with the scanning of a barcode, and so on. In other words, mobile technology can allow customers access to the necessary information and let them take command of physical stores the way they do online. 

Your Customers are Ready

It’s one thing to develop innovative technology; it is another to get your customer base to adopt and actually use it. Mobile shoppers are expecting more from retailers when it comes to mobile technology, a recent study by Latitude found. Some of the highlights are:

• 79% of participants were interested in having digital content delivered to their mobile phones while shopping in the store
• shoppers of all ages are looking for a more comprehensive mobile-payment platform
• 80% are interested in a “mobile wallet”
• 60% of smartphone owners have used a mobile device while shopping in a store
• 79% want the ability to virtually try on clothes while shopping in a store
• 86% want their mobile deice to alert them when they’re near a store that sells recommended or sought-after items.

Set. Go!

The barriers between e-commerce and in-store retail are coming down. Just as social media will eventually become just “media,” e-commerce will eventually be just “commerce.” Now it’s up to the retailers to see who will innovate the fastest and smartest.

Have you seen any brands enhancing the in-store experience with mobile technology? Let us know! 

After I took her out for lunch and a spa treatment, we returned to the house, where the guests were huddling in the rear hallway. When we pulled into the driveway, my wife noticed that one of the trash barrels had been moved to the side porch (to make it easier to clean up after the party). Even though I begged her to take care of it later, she had to put the barrel back in its place. This would mean we’d enter from the side door, not the front door, as had been intended.

As we stepped onto the side porch, I could hear the guests inside the house shuffling away from the door to hide elsewhere. Luckily, she was too preoccupied with cleaning her porch to hear anything, and when she entered the house she was completely surprised and delighted. Friends and family had come from as far as six hours away to celebrate, and we partied and danced into the night.

It was a lot of work, but in the end it was beyond worth it. You don’t have to plan a party for your brand’s fans, but surprising and delighting them when they least expect it can do more for your brand than you might think. 

Surprise and Delight in Social Media

Social media has given brands a new way to respond in real time and be truly agile. But it’s not easy. Many brands shackle their community managers with several levels of approval and red tape that make social agility just a pipe dream. And when it comes to brands surprising and delighting fans, it takes not only agility but also a great deal of selflessness. In a world where brands are still trying to broadcast to the masses, spending time and resources to make a few fans, or even one fan, happy isn’t high on many brands’ marketing priority lists.

But the post-advertising age has created something else—audiences of audiences. A single effort to surprise and delight can be (and often is) shared with that individual’s audience of friends and followers. If that effort is unique, some of those audiences will offer it to their own audiences, amplifying the reach exponentially.

Here are a few brands that have committed themselves to surprising and delighting their fans and reaped the rewards of earned media in the process.

1. Taco Bell

If you’re a community manager of a Facebook page, you know that every once in a while fan-generated posts can be unique, to put it mildly. In mid-December, the Taco Bell Facebook page, which is home to more than 9.5 million fans, received a request from Ryan Klarner, a high school swimmer and diver and self-proclaimed Taco Bell superfan, for a customized Taco Bell Speedo featuring the phrase “Outside the Buns” (one of the franchise’s slogans) on the back.

Three weeks later, Taco Bell responded, asking Ryan for his size and address, and appears to be following through on its promise. The post itself has more than 2,400 Likes, and individual comments are themselves garnering hundreds of Likes. Those are impressive numbers when you consider that it’s a post by a fan, which doesn’t post to the feeds of individual fans.

The story has garnered lots of earned media, too. A Google search for “Taco Bell Speedo” returns 734,000 results including mentions in the HuffPost, Business Insider and Adweek. All that earned media for the cost of a custom Speedo and shipping. How much are you paying that PR agency again?   

2. REI

With the joys of the Christmas season comes the stress of figuring out gifts that won’t leave your husband unimpressed and your niece straight up crying. Outdoor-gear company REI knows this and took to YouTube to proactively set out to help shoppers who were facing the gift-giving crunch.

REI’s social and creative teams partnered with REI’s Green Vests (well-informed store associates) to create customized videos that contained gift suggestions in response to queries from customers. Twitter users could use the #giftpicks hashtag to request a response.

In all, 89 videos were created, including this response to @RobbieHolliste1’s tweet.

Old Spice may have popularized this type of social-media ingenuity, but REI’s videos were unique in that they actually offered the recipient something of value, not just something to chuckle at. The effort resulted in action, as well. According to Fast Company, it doubled traffic to the REI site. 

If that wasn’t enough, when REI received a fan photo replicating the outfit in one of the company’s ads, it responded in kind:

3. WGN America

CBS’s hit show How I Met Your Mother is a bona fide success in the world of sitcoms, and it has a host of loyal superfans. There’s no better place for them to congregate than on Facebook, namely on YourMother, the Facebook community for “Mother Lovers” that is supported by WGN America*. 

But it’s not enough to just be one of millions (the page has nearly 2 million fans). WGN America wanted to find its biggest superfans, and it found one in Tyler Madden. Tyler may be among the youngest superfans, but his entry in the first Suit-Up Challenge caught the brand’s eye. WGN America was so impressed by his fandom, which included asking for suits and pressed shirts on his ninth and 10th birthdays in honor of Barney Stinson (the iconic character played by Neil Patrick Harris), that WGN America invited him to Chicago to film promotional spots that aired on the network.

All this attention helped get Tyler a mention by none other than Neil Patrick Harris himself when Harris joined Kelly Ripa on her morning show.

WGN America continues to work with Tyler to help him meet his idol.

4. Canadian Space Agency

That’s not a typo. Indeed, the Canadian Space Agency, in particular Commander Chris Hadfield, who is better known on Twitter as @Cmdr_Hadfield, has done an amazing job documenting his time orbiting Earth. Commander Hadfield tweets anywhere from a dozen to two dozen times a day, often providing followers with breathtaking pictures of the planet from his perch in the International Space Station.

While his Twitter stream is full of interesting content, Hadfield also surprised and delighted William Shatner, known for his role as Captain Kirk on Star Trek, when he replied to @WilliamShatner’s question about whether Hadfield was actually tweeting from space.

Fellow cast members George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) and Leonard Nimoy (@TheRealNimoy) also responded to and shared the conversation with their audiences. Even Will Wheaton (@wilw), a member of the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation, chimed in.

The witty repartee between the real-life astronaut and the on-screen talents from Star Trek brought massive awareness to the CSA and has helped Hadfield acquire more than 140,000 followers. Who even knew Canada had a space program?

It’s the same in marketing as in life: The difference between good and great is in the little things. Doing the little things can be tedious and expensive and even end up not working out. But it’s the willingness to do what most brands aren’t willing or able to do that can differentiate your brand in a crowded space. 

Take a look at your brand’s audience. What can you do for them right now?

*WGN America is a Story Worldwide client.

This type of advertising is nothing new. It’s something we’ve lived with for decades and it expands further with each passing year. But the age we live in now, the post-advertising age, has provided audiences with a bit of perspective. The stadium sponsorships, Super Bowl commercials, Times Square billboards—it all seems a little…funny, doesn’t it?   

What’s the joke?

The humor, at least from my perspective as someone who works for a brand storytelling agency rooted in digital and social media, is in the fact that we’ll see each of dozens of brands happily invest nearly $4 million for a 30-second Super Bowl spot yet wonder if a $500k spend on a yearlong social media effort is worth it.

“Where’s the ROI in social media?” they ask after signing the $3.6 million check for that digital billboard at One Times Square. Just think of the foot traffic that will pass by, see the billboard and just run out to buy the product or set the DVR right then and there to watch the show! 

I’m being facetious, of course. Any brand with the budget to advertise in Times Square or during the Super Bowl surely has invested in some sort of post-advertising presence. But when I see such a grand investment in forms of traditional advertising, particularly display media, that can promise only potential reach, and such trepidation regarding the adoption of new forms of advertising (a.k.a. post-advertising) that offer deep analytics, I can’t help but wonder where the justice is.                        

The ROI of Social Media

My intention is not to wander down the rabbit hole that is the argument over whether it’s possible to measure the ROI of social media. In certain places the subject is black and white, and other places it’s gray. But let us not forget that it’s rooted in a digital platform on which technology exists to record a wide variety of data points. 

Using Facebook as an example, there may be an argument to be had over how to accurately calculate the value of a Like, but there are insights that expose who your audience is, where they’re from, what content resonates with them, when they are active and much more. Paid media on Facebook can be measured—and thus it can be determined which creative and copy work best—as well as targeted through a variety of demographics. All these interactions are caught in a moment of time and stored for brands to collect, measure against and refer to months or years later. 

Compare this with the laughable immeasurableness of the reach of a billboard. How can a brand know how many people saw it? Of that, how many took action? Why does nobody care?

A Fair Shake

Only those vested in creating engaging social media experiences for brands realize that calculating return on investment isn’t just a stubborn demand by a curmudgeonly CMO. It’s a valid request, for something that all agencies should be able to properly monitor and measure. But isn’t it about time that traditional advertising faced the same skepticism among budget holders? Wouldn’t it be nice finally to figure out if the millions of dollars spent on traditional, interruptive display media are worth the investment? 

Do you think there’s a double standard? Why are the mediums treated differently?

Image via Flickr

My wife has never seen the movie Goonies, released in 1985. That’s a shame. So many classic lines, and one of the most well known yet practically silent characters, Lotney Fratelli, better known to the masses as Sloth. 

The strong, silent type, Sloth had only three audible lines, but anyone who has seen the movie can recite his most famous one, “Sloth love Chunk!” 

For the more than two decades since the movie’s release, the only words Sloth muttered were those in his three lines. That is, until he joined Twitter.

In August 2009, Sloth tweeted “Hey you guys!” His handle: @SlothGoonies. His location: In a basement. His run on Twitter lasted only two months and garnered only 20 followers, but they were a glorious two months for those of us who love Goonies.

Twitter gave a voice to all, in 140 or fewer characters. But what may not have been expected was who (or sometimes what) would manifest themselves/itself on Twitter. Characters from our favorite movies, television shows and commercials came to life on the social platform. Some of these were created by forward-thinking brands or media outlets, but most of them, like @SlothGoonies, were created by superfans, who cared about a character and show. When these characters find success on Twitter, it can create a wealth of earned media for the brand.

Mad Men’s Success 

It’s not surprising that with the success of Mad Men, a drama depicting life in advertising in the 1960s, came a number of fan-based Twitter accounts for the show’s characters. Helen Klein Ross, a social storyteller and advertiser, brought @BettyDraper, Don Draper’s ex-wife, to life. A cursory look at @BettyDraper’s “Rolodex” (a Twitter list) reveals 91 Mad Men–related Twitter accounts, including a half dozen Don Drapers and one for Don’s daughter, @sally_draper, a fainting couch and the copy machine. These accounts, often working together, extend the story line beyond just what’s seen on film, including @sally_draper’s live tweeting of the Beatles’ concert at Shea Stadium, which was briefly mentioned on the show (Don called Sally to tell her the good news that they were going to attend).  

Mad Men is the common case study for character-based Twitter success, but just having a Twitter account doesn’t mean that positive earned media will follow. The endeavor, whether created by the brand or by its fans, has the potential to create more questions and anxiety than social-media momentum. 

Does every brand character, like Tony the Tiger, Toucan Sam and the Green Giant, need a Twitter account? What if a fan creates the account first, as in the case of Mad Men? Should a brand seek out and quell these accounts, particularly if there is no brand oversight, or is it more authentic if the account is fan run? 

When Fans Take the Wheel

While Mad Men is an early success story, one popular fan-driven character is the Twitter manifestation of Kenny Powers, the not politically correct protagonist of the short-lived HBO show Eastbound & Down. His handle, @KFUCKINGP (his language, not mine), boasts nearly half a million followers. As there’s a dedicated author behind the account who’s perfectly in tune with the character’s tone of voice and humor, one would imagine that this is a huge win for HBO. I mean, who doesn’t love earned media and free labor?

While the account does offer classic one-liners that are not safe for work and constantly promotes the show’s upcoming episodes and seasons, a closer look finds the author of the account using the audience for his own benefit. In various tweets, he asks vendors for swag, promotes questionable contests and even gets paid to tweet (or at least appears to be being paid, because he uses the #ad hashtag).  

The popularity of the account implies that HBO’s not creating its own Twitter account based on the Kenny Powers character was a missed opportunity for the network. In an age when brand real estate is claimed on a first-come, first-served basis, however, the larger incentive for HBO to support a character-based account would be to avoid the pitfalls that come with an unpoliced, fan-run account. The popularity and exposure are nice, but credibility is paramount ensuring that an accurate brand story is told. 

When Brands Take the Wheel 

Should a brand decide to extend its character’s persona into the social sphere, a unique world in which fans can actually interact with their beloved character awaits. But unlike standard branded Twitter accounts, it’s not a ticket to one-way self-promotionville.

Progressive found success on TV with its bubbly insurance salesperson, Flo. If you can’t get enough of her enthusiasm in Progressive’s commercials, you can hop over to Twitter and read her daily musings. On a social platform designed for short, witty comments, Flo is primed to succeed. But @ItsFlo follows only 43 people, and of her 1,422 tweets, zero of them are @ replies. The tone of voice is spot-on, and the content is split evenly between self-promotion and witty banter, but the lack of fan interaction limits the brand’s ability to endear itself to fans.

On the flip side, it is a slippery slope when a fictional character tries to engage with the real world. What would the character say? How would they interact? Is that really the point of view that character would take? Six characters from Fox’s Glee are on Twitter (Kurt, Quinn, Rachel, Brittany, Sue and Will), but none of them engage with the audience. Homer Simpson, who has nearly a million followers, doesn’t reply either. It’s a clear attempt to avoid any possible fan interaction snafus. 

Out on a Ledge

There’s no question that Twitter offers a unique opportunity for brands to engage audiences through their characters, but it seems that it’s difficult to protect a character’s authenticity while engaging with a real-world audience. Character accounts started by superfans seem to drive the most engagement and get all the press, as in the cases of Mad Men and Eastbound & Down, but come with risks (what if the fan uses the audience for self-serving purposes? What if the fan simply quits or writes something that’s completely out of character?). Character accounts started by brands maintain the character’s authentic persona and tone of voice and even garner considerable audiences (as measured by number of followers) but rarely create far-reaching earned media, since there’s little to no two-way engagement with the audience.

For a brand, whether it’s a television show or a buttery spread, to find success in this space, it is going to have to extend itself beyond its comfort zone.

Here are a few things to keep in mind: 

1. Keep to a regular content-publishing schedule
It doesn’t have to be every day, but manage the audience’s expectations and adhere to what you promised.

2. Content matters
The character can promote, but most of the content should be shareable and/or engaging.

3. Keep brand and character separate
Don’t mix up roles and responsibilities. In the case of Progressive, @ItsFlo should be engaging but direct all customer complaints to the appropriate Twitter handle.

4. Model best practices
There’s no broadcaster or agency that could create a Twitter handle for every single character and inanimate object on a show. Instead, work together with fan-created accounts to be a best-practice example.

5. Attract audiences with exclusive content
Use Twitter as a place to extend the story, playing out storylines that simply couldn’t be expanded during the show. This can be especially useful for 30-second advertisements as well. 

There’s no clear blueprint for how brands should proceed, and there’s always a risk that fans will taking the wheel when brands hesitate. But there’s enough potential for earned media that brands should take a very serious look at bringing their characters to life.

What characters do you follow? 

Image via IMDB

BuzzFeed is killing it on the interwebs lately (WIN), and not just because it creates some of the most shareable content around. It’s “killing it softly,” so to speak, monetizing its wildly successful site by partnering with brands to create branded content that people actually consume, enjoy and share with their audiences.

But why was this a difficult assignment? To write about BuzzFeed means one has to peruse BuzzFeed. And when one peruses BuzzFeed, time is sucked into a vortex while one reads journalistic masterpieces like “40 Reasons Honey Boo Boo Became a National Treasure in 2012” and “12 Days of Grumpy Cat Christmas.” Minutes quickly become hours, and deadlines come and go. But Grumpy Cat doesn’t care.

They Know What’s Hot

Founded in 2006 (which makes it older than Twitter) by Jonah Peretti, who also co-founded the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed is a content-sharing powerhouse. Its posts, most often featuring photos and small amounts of humorous copy, are primed for viral success. Plus, the content is always timely. There may be no media outlet with its finger more precisely on what’s trending. It’s as if it had an IV in the veins of the web.

But aside from understanding that the primary audience that is embracing the digital age loves cats, GIFs, funny videos, more cats and the upcoming revival of Boy Meets World, BuzzFeed puts its money where its mouth is—it has no banner ads. None. If you haven’t noticed, go back and look. It’s pure content and a few sharing buttons. You don’t even have to navigate away from the homepage. The site scrolls endlessly downward, revealing more content each time a visitor reaches the end of the page.

Monetizing Content, Not Interruption

So how does BuzzFeed make money off its 30 million unique monthly visitors without interrupting audiences? By partnering with brands to create interesting, shareable content that looks and feels like content visitors would want to share because it is content visitors will want to share. This might be the definition of native advertising we’ve been searching for. This approach to native advertising has generated what industry sources say is close to $20 million in 2012 alone. 

Because the content on BuzzFeed has a high viral coefficient (the content is likely to be shared), most visitors don’t come in through the homepage. Instead, they are sent directly to BuzzFeed articles recommended by friends or colleagues. This was my experience when I happened on a funny article entitled “20 Things You Didn’t Know Were Illegal” in which I learned that Silly String is banned in Southington, Connecticut, a town about 45 minutes away from my house. 

Before I shared the article with my fellow Connecticut residents, I noticed that the post was presented by Discovery Channel. The content was so good and the branding so covert (yet strategically placed) that I almost didn’t recognize it as branded content. Even when I did, I still shared it, because the content was that good (and relevant to my audience, some of whom live in Southington and apparently have to go out of town to buy Silly String).

Out Of Your Face Branding

BuzzFeed’s partner pages are uniquely designed to cater to brands without sacrificing quality or BuzzFeed’s own branding. Below the article title is a short write-up connecting the page content to the partner (in this case, to the illegality of moonshine, as featured in the Discovery Channel’s new season of Moonshiners). Clicking on the Discovery Channel icon/link below the description brings the reader to a page that collects all Discovery’s featured posts atop a branded backdrop. On the right sidebar of the featured post (where ineffective banner ads would normally appear) is a Discovery Channel Facebook fan box where readers can easily “like” Discovery Channel’s page as well as Discovery’s Twitter feed. It’s tastefully done—promoting the brand and helping expand the brand’s social following without sacrificing BuzzFeed’s brand integrity.

Branding aside, what most endeared the partnership to my advertising self was how on-brand the content was. It fit the Moonshiners story (brewing moonshine is in fact illegal, as the show explains) without feeling forced or inauthentic. The same goes for other brands, like Velveeta, HBO and Old Spice, whose posts were good enough to share without getting that yucky “I just shared branded content” feeling.

Defining the Future of Advertising

We firmly believe that the future of advertising will leave the age of interruption behind. As more content providers create real, tangible partnerships with brands that benefit all parties (including the content consumers), those who are promising only eyeballs and exposure will find their customer base dwindling.

We still advocate that brands have a strong commitment to creating content on their own channels, but BuzzFeed has provided an effective blueprint for brands that want to tap into existing audiences without simply getting in their way of good content. 

Image via BuzzFeed Store

Advertising still is a joyous place, but for different reasons. Two-martini lunches are a thing of the past (or at least I’m not invited to them). But martinis aside, advertising in the post-advertising age is filled with amazing creativity and opportunities to constantly challenge the status quo, innovate and reach audiences with unique and authentic content.

The Burning Questions

But how can this authentic content prompt intended audience behaviors? How can that be tracked, measured and mapped to ROI? 

Digital advertising, social media, digital media, paid/owned/earned media—we like to call it post-advertising—in particular is thriving in this new era not only because of its endless possibilities, but also because it enables brands to track user behavior and measure effectiveness in ways that traditional advertising simply can’t, or at least hasn’t yet. And while Nielsen is respected in its field, any belief that its ratings are an accurate measure of not just what audiences are watching, but also talking about and sharing (to the extend that TV can be shared) is pure fantasy.

In post-advertising, we know who’s paying attention, who’s sharing, where they came from and where they went after interacting with the content. And by matching online identity to offline and specific desired actions, those actions can be measured too. Post-advertising is proven by research and by results. 

Depending on your business objective, specific digital tasks can be developed that correspond to metrics that measure success. Want to introduce a new product to Millennials? You can target specific audience demographics and use metrics like impressions, organic likes/followers and completion rate of media to determine what is working and what’s not. Download our Introduction to Social Media e-book to take a deeper dive.

The Simple Answers

All this boils down to a simple strategy: Attract a targeted audience by creating a valuable piece of native content (defined, sort of) that is crafted and deployed to stimulate maximum social sharing, and measure its successes and failures (often in near real time) in order to adjust and fine-tune. Set specific detailed goals and dedicate a team to measuring the metrics that establish whether the efforts are a success.

We’ve done this successfully for clients like WGN America, for which we established a How I Met Your Mother SuperFan community across Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, attracting more than 2.1 million fans and followers and consistently reaching engagement levels of between 10 percent and 20 percent (on Facebook).

We also used social to power a one-day alumni-giving drive for Columbia University that raised a record $7+ million in 24 hours and enjoyed the participation of alumni in all 50 states and in 39 countries. 

Stop Asking Whether Post-Advertising Works 

I’m not saying that Story is the only agency that creates great brand stories with measurable successes. Plenty of great agencies and individuals out there have their own success stories.

What’s important is that brands understand the type of advertising and marketing landscape we’re living in. Brands are no longer slaves to the gatekeepers of traditional advertising. Endless opportunities abound in the digital age; there are techniques and technologies that are better at prompting desired audience behavior and sharing than traditional advertising has been or ever will be. Not only that, but what we deem post-advertising can be actively measured, adjusted and proven, all at a lower price point than traditional advertising (what’s the going price of a Super Bowl ad again?).

There’s no longer debate about whether post-advertising can spread brand impressions effectively. We know it can, and we know that people trust their own friends and complete strangers online before they trust a branded advertisement. Stop complaining that Facebook is charging you to use its free platform and forcing you to constantly engage your audience with high-quality content. Stop claiming that social media works only for building customer loyalty and can’t drive action.

The only discussion to be had is about how post-advertising works best. How can we create native advertising that’s truly native? What does “native advertising” really mean? Is the best advertising even advertising at all? What will advertising look like next year? In five years?

Advertising doesn’t have to be advertising as usual, and brands can and should expect a lot more from their agencies than the promise of exposure. Oh, and I’ll take my martini shaken, not stirred. 

Image via Flickr. 

Whatever it is, native advertising doesn’t work simply because someone put the word “native” before it and because it doesn’t fit the standard definition of advertising—the 30 second spots, the billboards, the banner ads. 

Over at pandodaily, Post-Advertising contributor and Story CEO Kirk Cheyfitz argues that most native content is just advertising as usual. Native content that works on TV is the show itself, not a 30-second spot. Native content on a blog is a newsy post, not a display ad or an “advertorial” — a disingenuous piece of paid ad copy dressed up to look like a post. Native Facebook content is a shared story from a friend on your newsfeed that looks, reads, attracts attention, and compels Likes and sharing just like any other good Facebook story; it isn’t a piece of copy pushing product in your newsfeed. And so on.

How can native advertising truly work? Head over to PandoDaily to read Cheyfitz’s take.

It’s not breaking news but something I thought about as I was going to bed last night. I was about to fall asleep when I realized I hadn’t checked my Instagram feed. I reached from my bed, grabbed my phone and scrolled through the square, filtered photos of people, buildings, foliage, workouts, posters and, of course, food. I commented, Liked and even searched through a few hashtags to find fellow Instagrammers who share my passions.

For the better part of the last decade, I haven’t checked a social media platform not named Facebook or Twitter daily until now. Instagram has quickly become one of the top three social networks, and since photos are more personal than a 140-character statement, it has the potential to connect brands with fans on a deeper level than Twitter.

Instagram is a channel that brands soon won’t be able to ignore, and innovative brands are already making waves on the platform.

Here are a few tips for steering your brand’s journey on Instagram:

1. Employ user-generated content

If you can motivate your fans to submit photos of their own, like pictures of them using your product or just living your brand story, add them to your Instagram stream. Sharpie does this well, often featuring works of art created with its pens and markers.

2. Offer a glimpse into your humanity

While Instagram can be a place to feature your products in action, consider using it exclusively as a place where your brand’s fans can get a glimpse behind the scenes. Feature photos of faces and places they never get to see. Show them that your brand is more than just the product or service you sell. The Boston Bruins have done a great job of this, especially while the league is in a lockout. The team often shares photos of their fans, the players, and the organization’s philanthropic endeavors.   

3. Product in action 

There’s no hard data to back this up, but I’d bet that Instagram features more photos of food than any other subject. Outback Steakhouse and other restaurants have used Instagram as a place to find photos of all their dishes in their filtered glory. There’s a thin line between sharing great content and being overly promotional, so be considerate when sharing photos of your product in action. 

4. Consider using text, but not to brand or copyright

Overgram and other apps allow you to add text to your Instagram photos. Add a hashtag, give credit for user-generated content, or just add creative copy that will resonate. But use it for good, not evil, and not on every photo. It’s not a place to stamp your brand mark or try to copyright your images. In fact, doing this will make it very unlikely that the photo will be shared with your audience’s audiences.

5. Dedicate design resources

Instagram has challenges that other social channels do not. The app is purely mobile, so the photos have to be at least published, if not taken, from a phone. Make sure your Instagram community manager knows the brand’s tone of voice well enough and has an eye for photography so he or she can capture the right kinds of photos. 

6. Hashtags

The best way to find users with a common interest is through hashtags. This is a feature that quickly caught on because of its popularity on Twitter. Are you a sneaker brand? Check out #kicksoftheday. Instagram will even help you with similar suggestions and sort them by popularity. Create your own hashtag, like Tiffany’s did with #TrueLovePictures, to activate fans on Instagram. 

Remember, there’s a risk and reward here. Instagram isn’t the best social network to help you drive traffic to your site or be a conduit for e-commerce as well as Twitter or even Facebook will. It’s this inability to “sell,” however, that allows Instagram users lower their guard and embrace the brands that use the platform well.

I’m not ashamed to admit that one of my favorite movies is You’ve Got Mail—a complete rip-off of Sleepless in Seattle, even using the same lead actors (Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan). Ryan’s character runs a small independent bookshop in Manhattan, while Hanks’s character is opening a large retail bookstore with low prices (if only he’d known how technology would change the way we read) just down the block.

In the late 1990s, when the movie was made, this was a common story line. What were small businesses going to do when Borders, Walmart, Kmart and Target moved into town? How could they compete with rock-bottom prices and one-stop shopping?

To be honest, I thought the movie would end with Ryan’s Shop Around the Corner somehow spared by Hanks’s Fox Books store because of their anonymous online romance, which (spoiler alert!) materializes at the end of the movie. It doesn’t. Her shop still goes out of business. Even in the movies, the big-box store wins.

It seemed as though the growth of these massive retailers would only continue, leaving in its wake a trail of broken entrepreneurial dreams and century-old businesses too small to compete. In an economy like ours, in which the dollar is weak and so many are unemployed, such an outcome was almost a sure bet. 

In 2012, that’s hardly the case. Just ask Kmart. 

The growth of digital (namely social) media—its early forms chronicled in You’ve Got Mail—has provided a marketing weapon for small brands. The antithesis of big-box stores, artisanal brands are sprouting and flourishing in the post-advertising age.

These small brands are built with a focus on craftsmanship, hometown pride, storytelling, a clear purpose and spot-on branding. They’ve made their businesses unique and provide consumers much of what big-box stores can never offer. 

Artisanal brands can teach us a lot about effective content marketing. Here are 10 lessons:

1. Endear audiences to the brand through a worthwhile mission

You can buy a pair of jeans 80 percent cheaper at Target, but Hiut Denim’s commitment to its mission, to go back to making jeans in Cardigan in the UK—where for three decades a factory, now closed, made 35,000 pairs a week—helps keep the Welsh town afloat. Knowing that your purchase is keeping craftsmen employed in a town that depends on manufacturing may very well make it worth it. 

We mentioned Hiut Denim in a recent post about brands doing post-advertising right. When they heard they made our list, they sent a direct message via Twitter that said, “Thanks for help. The town is grateful ” How cool is that?

What’s your mission and how are you furthering it?

2. Get your audience involved in the conversation, even if they’re just listening

One of the keys to building a brand from the ground up is to ensure that the talkable products and content you’re creating have an audience that can share them. A number of brands, including Best Made Company and Herschel Supply Co., have well-designed pop-ups on their websites that greet you with the option of opting into their mailing lists. Even their pop-ups, like their products, are custom made.

Are you giving your audience ways to opt-in to receive your content?

3. Practice What You Preach

With artisanal brand’s higher price point and lower consumer penetration (compared with nationwide brands), it’s imperative that staff members showcase themselves using the same products that they champion. The staff of Huckberry recently posted on the active-lifestyle company’s blog an article chronicling a recent camping trip they took, a trip on which they used and reviewed a number of products Huckberry sells.

Does your audience know you believe in your product or service? 

4. Turn the purchase into a story about a long-term relationship

A focus on craftsmanship often means that the product will last a long time. While your run-of-the-mill CPG brand will try to sell you a cheap product that rarely makes it past one use, an artisanal brand helps customers understand why its price points are appropriate. Whether it’s a made-to-order ax from Best Made Company or a backpack from Herschel Supply Co., its higher price point makes sense because the brand has conveyed a transparent story that helps customers see the value, literally.

What story is the craftsmanship of your product or execution of your service telling?

5. Use a consistent and relatable tone of voice

One of the best aspects of artisanal brands I’ve found while researching is that they convey a consistent tone of voice across all channels. Rarely do you find typical corporate brand jargon. You won’t hear that their products are industry leading, on demand or turnkey. Instead, the voice is friendly and down-to-earth and offers glimpses behind the scenes that help humanize the brand.

Are you speaking the same language as your audience?  

6. Offer a steady diet of content

Particularly because these brands are so small, and you won’t find Warby Parker frames at Sunglass Hut or Hiut Denim jeans at Macy’s, it’s imperative that artisanal brands constantly create content for their audiences to keep the brands top of mind. Many brands create extensive Pinterest and Tumblr pages, blogs, films, social content and more to keep a constant connection with their audience.

Are you creating enough content to remain on your customer’s mind?

7. Design matters

Artisanal brands take pride in the way everything about their brands looks, not just the products themselves. If you want your audience to believe that your product is good, your branding had better reflect it.

Have you paid enough attention to design, particularly on your digital channels? 

8. Embrace local

Now that big-box stores are in nearly every town in the United States, it’s difficult for them to “represent” their “homes.” But an artisanal brand often depends on its hometown—the place that defines the brand and its employees. Warby Parker’s site proudly links to the Made in NYC site which lists the “internet companies made with ♥” in New York City. The staff of Huckberry often writes about San Francisco–related topics, such as the city’s being a “bastion of the bean.”

What’s unique about your brand’s home? Does your audience know?

9. Encourage user-generated content

Warby Parker and Herschel Supply urge customers to submit photos of themselves with the product. Warby Parker puts the pictures on its Facebook Wall and encourages users to vote for their favorite pair, while Herschel Supply includes the photos on its Tumblr page.

Are you tapping your audience for content?  

10. Empower your customers to create stories of their own

I bought a pre-owned Ford Escape (which I love) from a dealership back in January. In a fairly hidden compartment, I found a CD of hymns and some other items that led me to believe the car might previously have been owned by a member of the clergy. Hopefully that means he didn’t speed much. But in reality, I’ll never know.

Hiut Denim puts a unique history tag on all its jeans that when entered on the brand’s HistoryTag website allows a customer to craft a story about the purchased product by uploading pictures of where he went in the jeans, what he did and whom he did it with. If ever someone else were to receive the jeans as a hand-me-down or buy them secondhand at a consignment shop, that person would know where they’d been (for better or for worse, I suppose).

How is your audience telling stories about your product/service?

These small, passionate brands are carving out niches and taking risks in the content-marketing space that many larger, inflexible brands only wish they could take. Even if you’re not in the market for an ax, an outdoor frying pan or a wallet, make sure you follow them. There’s a lot to learn.

Which artisanal brands are you a fan of? Let us know!

Image: Adorn & Emblazon Badge courtesy of Best Made Co

Manipulation:

It’s a touchy subject, but arguably advertising in its purest form is manipulation. Campaigns want to change behaviour or elicit a response. You can’t argue with that. 

But we’re not in the business of manipulation, are we? We’re in the business of moving and compelling people to engage with, share and advocate a brand or product.

We’re in the business of storytelling.

Meet documentary maker Ken Burns—a master of manipulation through the medium of storytelling. He’s the man behind titles such as The Civil War and Baseball. He argues a good point and one that has inspired this blog post.

Manipulation is present in every story whether we like it or not.

“Jean-Luc Godard once said ‘cinema is telling the truth 24 times a second.’ Maybe. It’s lying 24 times a second, too. All story is manipulation. Is there an acceptable manipulation? You bet. ‘Oh my, I was moved to tears by your film.’ I manipulated that. That’s part of storytelling. I didn’t do is disingenuously. I did it sincerely. I was moved by that too.”

We can apply this to telling a brand’s story. We’ll manipulate an audience into a response by moving them and engaging them with an emotion. We might even, on occasion, move them to tears.

It doesn’t matter what medium you choose—print, social media, television—wherever there is a story arc, there is manipulation.

As storytellers it’s our job to bring a brand story to life. We craft that emotional hook. It’s our responsibility to move an audience. It’s our responsibility to make sure we do that sincerely and not disingenuously.

Manipulation is okay when it’s rooted in the fabric of the story we’re telling and not rooted in a sales pitch or promise.

Here’s an example. 

You’re at home in front of the television, fast-forwarding the commercial break until suddenly something catches your eye. You stop and rewind, and play again. You watch it closely. And watch it one more time. Then you call through to the kitchen ‘Hey Barbara, come through here and check out this advert.’ 

What’s just happened? You were in control of what you were watching, weren’t you? In fact, you weren’t even watching it until one advert drew you back. What compelled you to stop and watch? 

The story. 

Just one of 24 lies or truths in a second that resonated. You were more concerned with how the story ended. By watching the story, you inherently understood which brand was telling it. You stopped, watched and shared. Probably you’ll buy that brand now, because you were moved to, by the story.

Since Christmas is around the corner, and everyone is talking about the new John Lewis advert, let’s look at how they tell a story.

This is their award-winning ad from last year. A little boy waits around impatiently for Christmas until finally it’s the morning he’s been waiting for. He’s out of bed before you can say “Jingle Bells” and into his parents’ room, just to give them a present.

Watch it again and see if it doesn’t move you still. Just a little, a year later.

That’s an emotional hook. That’s a sincere and compelling story.

Now let’s look at another John Lewis spot from mid-year. Never Knowingly Undersold. Two lovers live out their love story across two different eras. The audience is compelled to remember the things that matter. It puts an emotion before the brand or product. 

That’s a good story.

You see, sometimes it’s okay to manipulate. But only when a genuinely compelling story does the legwork, not a disingenuous strapline, offer or promise.

Do you agree or disagree? 

I saw that a Facebook friend of mine had commented on an FM radio station’s page (that I was not a Facebook fan of). The post included a slightly distorted image and promised that my mind would be blown if I just typed the word Club in the comment box. 

The post had been commented on more than 1.6 million times, shared more than 4,700 times and Liked more than 80,000 times. Surely something had to happen when I followed the instructions.

Nothing happened, and don’t call me Shirley. What the heck was going on?

Of course nothing happened. It wasn’t a glitch in Facebook. It wasn’t human error. It was intentional, and it’s pathetic.

Page managers (with little talent in social media) have caught on to the fact that engagement in the form of Likes, shares and comments has become a social currency of sorts. They trick users into engaging because it (falsely) informs Facebook that a brand page is relevant. And the more relevant Facebook thinks it is, the more often it will show up in any given user’s Facebook feed and the feeds of their friends, thus creating awareness.

As fans see only, on average, 10 percent of any given brand’s posts (unless you want to pay, of course), there are brand-page owners out there willing to do anything to gain fans and increase engagement metrics.  

These tactics aren’t the only abuses page owners commit. Here are four other Facebook tactics you’ll want to steer clear of.  

Repetition

(courtesy of Condescending Corporate Brand Page) 

Don’t fall for it. They don’t care if you can type ‘P-L-A-Y’ without interruption, and even if you do, there’s no prize. They just want your comments…lots of them. 

Guilt

Is there a better way to expose your audience as nothing more than a bunch of metrics than to ask for responses that will have absolutely no consequence? Of course there is—emotional blackmail! You can make them feel even more appreciated by saddling them with guilt if they don’t take action on your page. Granted, this is not a brand (it’s one of those vague phrase pages—why do these even exist?), but it is a prime example of what not to do to engage audiences. 

Broken Promises

(courtesy of Condescending Corporate Brand Page)

Only, when they say it will stop her tears, they mean it will definitely not stop her tears. Kia’s End Poverty Campaign should be lauded, but unfortunately, tactics like this overshadow it. 

False Voting

This is much lesser offense than the rest, and Major League Soccer overall does a good job with their social presence, but it is still a misuse of Facebook functionality. Pitting Likes against comments can’t possibly create an effective debate between two camps. Having your fans vote can prove to be a fun engagement, even if you don’t use the polling function, by simply asking users to comment with their choice. Try to get a real discussion brewing in the comments and ignite passionate debate between the opposing sides.

A few of these examples are from Condescending Corporate Brand Page, which does a fantastic job of exposing what not to do on Facebook. So give their page a Like, because if you don’t, that means you love global warming. 

What other poor Facebook tactics have you come across? Let us know in the comments. 

Image via Flickr

Considering how quickly marketing happens in the post-advertising age, we aren’t able to cover everything on the blog and a lot of great work that we discuss on our weekly call falls through the cracks. In the last year, we’ve made it a point to highlight the brands each season that have embraced Post-Advertising and have focused their efforts on creating engaging content and igniting movements that spread.

It’s been six long months since our last edition, so let’s get on with it! Here are Ten Brands Doing Post-Advertising Right: Fall Edition.

1. Oreo

Undoubtedly one of the shining stars of social media in 2012, Oreo was already one of the top brands on Facebook—over 28 million fans—when they created Daily Twist, a uniquely engaging campaign in celebration of their 100^th anniversary. Starting on June 25th and lasting through October 2^nd (100 days), Oreo posted one original and relevant branded image each day. The images celebrated various holidays, events and achievements, including Cheesecake Day, the Olympics, Twitter’s 6-year anniversary and the Mars rover landing. The images were shared hundreds of thousands of times by the brand’s fans.

The content was innovative enough to command attention while still staying true to the brand’s core story. By including a rainbow cookie for gay pride (which garnered an incredible influx of mostly positive page posts by fans), Oreo showcased their values in a productive way and created large amounts of earned media across major publications.  

2. Red Bull

Perhaps the only brand on this list that could challenge Oreo for the top spot on our list would be Red Bull. The energy drink that “gives you wings” has a steady Facebook presence (like Oreo, they’re one of the top ten brands on Facebook), attained in part by the sharing of vibrant imagery, many of which feature the brand’s sponsored extreme athletes.

But Red Bull made its biggest boom—literally—with the Red Bull Stratos mission. Supported by Red Bull, the only sponsor, and a team of experts, Felix Baumgartner ascended to 128,100 feet and broke the record for highest freefall jump. Watched live on YouTube by over 8 million viewers (a record), Baumgartner reached supersonic speeds and broke the sound barrier—all while flying the Red Bull flag on his spacesuit. The branded mission seemingly grabbed every headline and flooded social media channels, in the process enhancing their bold brand personality.

3. Tough Mudder

One interesting trend over the past few years: the rise in popularity of extreme races (or obstacle courses for adults, as I like to call them). Complete them and you can consider yourself a warrior, a spartan, or just plain tough. Tough Mudder is arguably the most difficult race of them all, and their marketing efforts have been just as strong. Boasting over 2.6 million Facebook fans, Tough Mudder invests in creating shareable content for its fans across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. They hire professional photographers and videographers to document every step of the race. Since just finishing one of these races is an impressive feat, how could you not share photos and video from the event, featuring yourself, to everyone you know? Plus, Tough Mudder issues a steady diet of email messaging to keep participants engaged, along with daily workouts to keep them on track.

4. Bodyform

There was some argument amongst the PA team as to whether or not Bodyform should make the list this time around. If you’re not familiar, the UK-based feminine hygiene manufacturer received a comment on their Facebook page from a disgruntled male that quickly went viral on its own (84k likes, 3,500+ comments). Bodyform responded with the video below, which has garnered over 3.1 million views on YouTube.

The argument against showing up on our list: while it was a clever video, it wasn’t truly authentic (the woman is an actor, not the CEO, like she claims), and it was an isolated marketing incident. Post-advertising is about effectively telling your brand’s story in a variety of audience touch points. However, while those points are valid, as a man, watching this video has been the one and only time I’ve ever cared for more than a split second about a feminine hygiene product. That has to count for something, right?

5. Sharpie

How many pen, pencil or marker brands do you follow on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or Instagram? Probably not many—except Sharpie. The brand has amassed over 3.6 million Facebook fans by embracing all the unique ways its community uses its markers, highlighters and pens. Most impressive is its Instagram presence, which, admittedly, is what first caught our eye. @sharpie posts unique photos not of the product but the art created with the product, which routinely garner thousands of likes a piece. It’s a perfect blend of the brand’s personality and the product’s capabilities.

6. James Bond – SKYFALL

In anticipation of the release of the 23^rd James Bond film, SKYFALL, and in celebration of the franchise’s 50^th anniversary, the official JamesBond007 Facebook page sent their 1.3 million fans off on an adventure of their own. Utilizing the feverish growth and popularity of Instagram, the mission challenged fans to upload photos on Instagram of themselves at famous Bond locations and tag them with #Bond50 and #SKYFALL. User-generated content is an easy and direct way to build relationships with fans, and we loved this execution. Plus, Adele—a brilliant choice—sang the official theme song. The music video has been viewed more than 45.4 million times on YouTube.

7. Hiut Denim

You may not have heard of Hiut Denim. But, if you appreciate good jeans, then you better get familiar. Their story is rooted in the idea of doing one thing and doing it well, and for Hiut Denim, that one thing is jeans. And in order to buy their jeans, you have to choose what type of denim. Do you want organic denim from a great mill in Turkey or selvedge denim from Kuroki, the artisanal Japanese denim mill?

Visit their beautiful brand site where ecommerce is given as much weight as their story, their blog, their films, and a page featuring products they love that have nothing to do with jeans. Every user interaction feels true to this artisan brand’s story. While you might not be able to pronounce their name, you certainly won’t forget them.

8. Movember

Here at Post-Advertising, we’re big fans of brilliant cause marketing, and few (if any) do it better than Movember: A moustache-growing charity event held during November each year that raises funds and awareness for men’s health. They’ve impressed us so much that we’ve written about them not once but twice. However, since we’re in the month of Movember and the nonprofit organization is poised for their biggest fundraising month ever, they deserved a nod in this list. The brand embraces moustache growing as a way to get others talking about prostate cancer and every touch point sports a fine moustache. In case you’re wondering exactly how to grow a moustache, Movember—by way of a spot-on celebrity endorsement and collaboration with Made Men— has you covered: 

This, year, updated branding (a sharp new look-and-feel for “Movember and Sons”) is featured in a slick mobile app, numerous localized websites and Facebook pages, and a fantastic YouTube page. They have a tone-of-voice all their own. By creating a movement centered on the viral, talkable nature of moustaches and social fundraising, Movember has embraced post-advertising in a big way.

Honorable mention to The Art of Shaving, a perfect sponsor for Movember that offers a free shave to participants today, November 1^st.

9. Kayak.com

Frank Reardon now spends hours searching through dozens of travel sites because he was mean to the founder of Kayak.com in college—or so the commercial goes. But when the “real” Frank Gordon responded to the ads, upset that he couldn’t use Kayak and pleading to have the ban revoked, Kayak.com did what any good brand would: said no to the bully.

In a great use of YouTube’s playlist feature, you can watch the story unfold yourself. But beware; this is our Free-Time Paradox in action. While busy writing this article, I found myself venturing further and further down the rabbit hole until I was booking a flight from San Francisco to D.C. at FRANKSKAYAK.com (best…Facebook…page…ever). Bravo to our neighbors at Kayak.com, who are just a block away from our South Norwalk, CT office.

10. eBay

One way to reach our hearts here at Post-Advertising (besides through our stomachs) is through long-form content that features those who help define a brand’s story—customers. eBay created a campaign called “eBay Thanks You” that focuses on real stories of success. Of course the content helps eBay, showing audiences how effective the auction platform can be. But it’s a great piece of storytelling, especially when you think about how eBay has literally created new lives and livelihoods for individuals that simply weren’t possible 15 years ago.

We recently featured three carmakers that are embracing brand stories. In the process, they’ve launched digital platforms that aggregate their customers’ stories. We’d love to see eBay provide this possibility for its users. 

Honorable Mention: AMC

I can’t remember what AMC was prior to 2008 or so. Can you? But with the success of Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and The Walking Dead, they have redefined what it means to tell great stories. It’s as if they hired someone who sat everyone down and said, “Let’s stop showing old movies and find great storytellers who want to create high-quality programming.”

There’s definitely a content marketing lesson to be learned from AMC. They’ve proven that a focus on quality content can bring a lesser-known brand to the forefront of an audience’s awareness because the best stories win. In other words, people share content they think is great. No number of commercials or billboards could have done this. Their paid media only fueled their owned media (like Breaking Bad’s Facebook page), which has created a groundswell of earned media, including character-based social media accounts, Reddit categories, forums, active Twitter hashtags and more. Now, when talking about high-quality, award-winning programming, you can’t mention HBO and Showtime without mentioning AMC.

Honorable Mention: Grey Poupon

We already dedicated an entire post to them, so we won’t repeat ourselves, but they deserve a mention here. Their “Society of Taste” on Facebook was a lesson in brand storytelling. 

Which brands would you nominate?

Although I’ve had the great fortune to travel to southern France, I don’t know much about wine. I know that there’s red, white, and my wife likes a good Riesling. But I do have a special place in my heart for the wine we drank that week in France, celebrating good food, friends and conversation. Of course it’s highly unlikely that the wine from the local vineyard in Plan de la Tour tastes exponentially better than whatever I could find at the liquor store down the road, but without the story, it’s just not as special.

That’s my personal story. But don’t think it has nothing to do with content marketing. It’s stories just like this one that have allowed one man to sell millions of dollars of wine over email.

From Email List to Empire

Jon Rimmerman is whatever you want to call him—maverick wine enthusiast, taster, businessman, content marketer, emperor, great and powerful Vinous of Oz—but if nothing else, he’s a captivating storyteller.  

Rimmerman (whose success was recently featured in the New York Times) didn’t build a wine empire by harvesting acres of vineyards in southern France or by creating an extensive ecommerce site. Instead, over the last 16 years Rimmerman has carefully nurtured and multiplied an engaged and loyal community of email subscribers from a handful of friends to 130,000 followers. He did this by creating an email newsletter, entitled “Garagiste,” featuring stories about his favorite wines from his hands-on wine tasting adventures throughout the world.

Interestingly, in order to be an early adopter, you couldn’t just sign up on a website (he’s only had a website for a few years). You had to hear about it through word-of-mouth and politely ask to be added. Now you can now subscribe online, but resellers and wholesalers are still not welcome. Keeping it as authentic as possible, Rimmerman types the emails on his mobile device, spur-of-the-moment (complete with authentic spelling mistakes), and never includes photos. It’s not a wine club and there’s no obligation to buy, though there are limited quantities and he rarely (if ever) features the same wine twice.  Oh, and you have to be patient. He only ships twice a year to ensure an optimal climate for transit.

The Pursuit of Truth

Rimmerman is certainly not the only wine critic with access to the Internet (see Vaynerchuk, Gary), but what makes his emails so special is the way in which he spins captivating stories about each wine he offers. In fact, to make sure each email comes through in as personal a tone as possible, he deliberately asked his assistant to leave typos and grammatical errors in. It’s a refreshing concept for the wine industry and helps differentiate his brand (to say the least) from other top critics. It reeks of authenticity.

In an age of technologically advanced email marketing and CRM systems, this approach seems too antiquated to be successful. But Rimmerman cites a broader cultural shift working in his favor (from the aforementioned New York Times article):

“It’s almost like ‘everything old is new again.’ Or the music scene going back to turntables or . . . vintage 1960s tube amplifiers — people crave warmth, whether it’s auditory or in business, and eventually they come around to what makes them feel good, what keeps them warm — sensory or mentally.”

Success stories like this are admittedly more the exception than the rule, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t lessons to be learned. Rimmerman’s refusal to play by common email marketing rules seems to connect him even more closely with his subscribers. By breaking the mold of standard email newsletters, the email reads like a note sent to a select few of his wine-loving friends.

4 Key Lessons To Learn from Garagiste

1. Be authentic, even if it means imperfection
An audience doesn’t require its performer to be perfect. In fact, imperfection helps humanize the performer. Slight imperfections are a well-known presentation strategy. Don’t strive to make mistakes, but don’t act like the sky is falling if you do.

2. Understand what keeps your audience warm, in both their minds and hearts
Effectively connecting with your audience means you have to do your research. Why are they subscribing to your email list? How can you help them? What will make them smile, nod and share your content? 

3. Don’t be afraid to exclude
Social media has led us to judge success purely by the numbers. But what does having a million fans, followers or subscribers mean if they’re not targeted, engaged or relevant to your brand? In the beginning, Garagiste’s exclusivity helped the groundswell. Being selective can have its perks. 

4. Storytelling matters
Garagiste is so successful because of the stories Rimmerman tells about his experiences traveling to taste the wine, the setting of the wine tasting, the demeanor of the wine maker, and all the other arguably pointless details that make his stories so interesting. Leading with a story before the offer can add that extra value to what you’re selling. Brand + Story = Value. 

As long as the content captivates, even something as simple as text-only email messages can work. I’m not advising you to ditch MailChimp, fire your copy editor and shut down your e-commerce site. Rimmerman’s successful brand isn’t a blueprint, but rather a source of insight into the power of storytelling.

Do you have any good content marketing success stories to share? Or just stories about wine, for that matter?

Image via Flickr

Data can be maddening. Like Play-Doh, it can be molded into a variety of shapes and sizes and can resemble whatever the creator wants it to resemble. Let me explain.

Imagine you’re a salesman and you have only one hour to sell your product (and you can’t divide that hour) to a roomful of potential customers. You can choose any day of the week, any time of day or night. If you don’t have any further information, it’s pretty hard to decide when to do your selling. You’ll probably just follow all the other salesmen. 

But I’ve got some data to give you. I know that the room with your potential customers is fullest on Wednesday from 1 to 4 p.m. Does that help? 

What if I also told you that while Wednesday from 1 to 4 p.m. provides the most potential clients, Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. provides the highest percentage of those who are willing and ready to buy? On Saturday the room is noticeably less full (of both salesmen and potential customers), but the likelihood of a sale is much greater.

When would you sell? Note: There are no right answers…or wrong ones. 

Data Deluge

The hypothetical circumstance I just laid out is not very far from the real-life situation that community managers face when developing content plans for brands. Marketing-automation platforms and link shorteners have allowed massive data sets to be compiled and compared to see exactly when audiences are using social media, when they’re engaging, what type of content they engage with most, how these elements vary by platform and more. But we’ve seen people come to different conclusions about social-media timing depending on where the data is coming from. 

This past summer Buddy Media conducted a Twitter engagement survey that analyzed user engagement of more than 320 Twitter handles for the world’s biggest brands. What it found was that tweeting during the busy hours of 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. generated 30 percent greater engagement (a combination of replies and re-tweets) than tweets published outside that frame. Twitter engagement rates for brands, however, are 17 percent higher on Saturday and Sunday as compared with weekdays. Brands in the publishing industry, especially, could take advantage of this, since their weekend engagement rate is 29 percent higher than average. 

Going further down the rabbit hole, link-shortening service Bit.ly also conducted a study of its link-click data, which spans a variety of social-media channels (wherever users want to paste their links). It concluded that with Twitter, posting in the afternoon from Monday to Wednesday is your best chance for achieving a high click count, with 1 to 3 p.m. EST on Wednesday being the sweet spot. Also, and quite contrary to Buddy Media’s recommendations, Bit.ly recommends not tweeting after 3 p.m. on Friday, since, far from being a gateway for driving traffic to your content, it appears that Twitter doesn’t work on weekends (according to Bit.ly). The chart below is a little confusing but day of the week is the Y axis with Monday at the top and hour of day is the X axis with 12am EST on the far left. (Click to enlarge) 

Dan Zarrella, Social Media Scientist at HubSpot, has conducted extensive studies on social-media data as well and found that Friday, Saturday and Sunday had the highest click-through rates, as did tweets made after 1 p.m. (If you’d like to learn more, go check out his Science of Timing webinar).

Is your mind spinning yet?

Let’s look at Facebook

We know that audiences and experiences differ from platform to platform, especially from Facebook to Twitter. Buddy Media also conducted a Facebook study, which found that Wednesday is the worst day for Facebook engagement (7.4 percent below average). Plus, as on Twitter, Wednesday is the most active publishing date for brands, which means that your brand will have lots of competition.

Another study, though slightly dated (2007–2010), by Virtrue, produced one similar conclusion that Wednesday around 3 p.m. is the absolute peak for activity, but also found that Facebook posts made in the morning were 39.7 percent more effective. 

Zarrella’s studies found that Facebook posts made later in the day (6 to 8 p.m.) get the most Likes and Shares (contrary to Virtrue’s findings), while Facebook posts made on the weekend have the highest Like percentage.

3 Questions with Dan Zarrella

For a marketer, consuming all this data still leaves questions, especially when it comes to reaching conclusions for varied industries. To get answers from someone who makes a living poring over this data, we contacted Dan Zarrella with some questions that may linger for brands. The bolded emphasis is our own.

1. While understanding that every brand is different and should test and learn, what’s a brand to do to sort out this confusion?

That’s really the key with any marketing data gleaned from large data sets. All my work, for instance, comes from big databases of thousands, millions and, in some cases, billions of rows of data across multiple industries, company and audience sizes, countries and time zones. Brands should use these kinds of recommendations not as set-in-stone laws but rather as jumping-off points for experimentation. If they find a study recommending a time different from the ones they’re currently using, they should experiment with it. If it works, great; if not, keep testing.

2. If your brand isn’t one of the 320 largest, should you pay less attention to Buddy Media’s findings and more to Bit.ly’s?

The data you should pay the most attention to is your own. Test the two recommendations on your own audience and content, and see which works best. It may also be that each time can work for your audience, depending on the type of content you’re promoting. Always be testing.

3. Is it worth it to change the standard approach and start actively posting on weekends and the tail end of the week? In other words, if your brand is doing the nine-to-five with social, how much should your approach change? 

If you’re not doing any weekend or late-week posting right now, you should make an effort to try some for a time, perhaps a few weeks or a couple of months. You may find that certain kinds of content work best on the weekends, or that there isn’t the big drop-off in response rates you expected on the weekends. And don’t be afraid to use scheduled posting to manage this. You don’t have to be glued to your computer to do this kind of testing.

*Make sure to visit Dan’s blog as well as HubSpot’s blog for in-depth information on social-data discoveries and inbound marketing, and pick up his book Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness on Amazon. 

Setting Your Content Plan

A number of conclusions can be drawn from all this data, but the most important one may be that the data tells a variety of stories and that the truth lies somewhere in between them. Every audience is different, and your brand and/or industry may be drastically different from those featured in the study.

Always keep an open mind when viewing social-media studies. Don’t shy away from them, but realize that it’s impossible to define specific content-timing rules that will apply to every brand in every industry. Instead, use that data and test it. If a new study suggests that midnight is the optimal time to reach your niche audience, test it, and pay attention to the results. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. No brand has gone under because it tested different theories regarding its social-media content. It’s possible, however, that a brand could suffer if it refused to change, or at least test, its content approach.

How do you decide when and where to post your content? Are you utilizing off-hours and/or the weekends?

That was how local advertising began, before commercial TV stations really took root in the UK. The US were working on it from their side too, and in no time local commercial and cable television advertising had arrived—effectively taking the best of local radio commercials and adding visuals. That very quickly grew into national TV advertising and from then into the pan-continental advertising that we know today.

As viewers, we barely noticed this progression; it was something we grew up with and something that we as eager adopters would never question. We quickly consigned ‘50 yards from this theatre’ to the scrap heap of time and didn’t give it a second thought. It’s an embarrassment from the past… we thought as our brains struggled to comprehend the eye-popping technology behind ads for Quatro.

We’re going to be doing that all over again. Last week, in another statement of intent in taking on conventional television broadcasting, YouTube announced a fresh, 50-channel-strong pan-European video strategy supported by many of the best UK, French and German professional TV production companies. This comes in addition to the 100 channels launched in the US last year, with a further batch of channels set to launch there in very near future. They provide daily content to ‘niche’ audiences around the globe; more on that later… 

As one of the largest members of the Google Content Network, the Original Channels video output is supported by a steady stream of highly targeted advertising. Set that against conventional daytime television, in which the majority of advertising is loosely targeted (accident insurance, gambling and budget sofas) and you can see the power of their opportunity. 

When you also consider that many of these ‘niche’ channels cover subject matter including sport (Fox), music (Pitchfork), education (TED), science (BBC Topical Science, fronted by Top Gear’s James May), nature ([BBC] On Earth), entertainment (Guinness World Records), drama and food (The Jamie Oliver Food Channel), you easily begin to see that they aren’t really that niche at all and in reality tap directly into the information that people look for daily. 

Success Thus Far

Even at this early stage, Original Channels have already proven a great success for YouTube, which have just announced quadrupled viewing figures for mobile devices. The top 25 claim an average of more than a million views a week, and subscription rates are doubling. YouTube’s skippable ads are now making as much in revenue an hour as cable television in the US. 

The phenomenon has even started to go the other way. One YouTube show—Recipe Rehab (brainchild of Mark Koops, the man behind MasterChef and The Biggest Loser)—has even made the jump from online to television, repackaged into TV-friendly 30-minute episodes ready to air soon on US TV network ABC on Saturday morning.

Not More Channels. Better Channels

The problem until now, however—Recipe Rehab notwithstanding—has been in emulating television-quality production values, just as those old local cinema adverts had problems emulating their high-budget commercial counterparts (James Bond wouldn’t eat chicken tikka 50 yards from a cinema…). It’s fair to say that the world doesn’t need more channels; it needs better ones. This is where the likes of BBC, ITN, Endemol and FremantleMedia come in. They can retain their own production values and decrease the cost of delivery whilst dramatically increasing the speed of turnaround to millions of eyes. With the big production houses on board, the big celebrities become excited… and then you can start to attract some very big brand partnerships.

Will the quality rank against traditional television? Well, of course it won’t be HBO, but it is unlikely to be digested in the same way. These are intended to be short, sharp time fillers for an audience with a hectic schedule. They’re essentially a free extension of pay-per-view, without the pay. The channels are likely to contain content that is highly shareable, not just via social networks but as instant chat, with viewers dropping in and out whenever they please—finally dispelling the last knockings of the ‘appointment to view’ ethos, which has been much discussed since the world began illegally downloading television shows. They are also likely to be chapterised, as the recent BBC Olympic coverage was, so that viewers can dive straight into the content most pertinent to them.

Google is reported to be investing a cool $200 million in the channels, paid as an advance against advertising revenue. This comes on top of the $100 million they invested last year to generate further profit on what is already a successful ad revenue stream. This diversion from conventional broadcasting is being taken very seriously indeed.

The Opportunity for Brands

If we take a moment to look at the development of ‘local’ (read niche) advertising in the 34 years between Cobb Gate Fish Bar and where we are nowadays, it’s easy to see how instrumental YouTube can be by getting a strong foothold in the future of broadcasting. Recently, in what can be taken as a exceedingly bold show of strength, they have shattered their own records with the Red Bull Stratos #livejump, attracting eight million concurrent viewers—a perfect example of performance-branded advertising.

These small steps into ad space are giant steps for brandkind. Ashton Kutcher, Amy Poehler and Shaquille O’Neal are already successfully broadcasting in the US, and Jamie Oliver is launching his very own Food Channel in the UK in the coming weeks. On one hand, it is reasonable to say that the best Jamie Oliver’s Sainsbury’s Finest Chicken Tikka in town won’t be 50 yards from your theatre, or even on television—it’ll be much closer. 

‘And where can we see this phenomenon in action?’ we hear you cry. Well. Here are YouTube’s Original Channels, available to browse now, with rollout expected over the coming weeks. You can thank us later.

Image via Red Bull’s Facebook page

It’s not enough in today’s competitive landscape to simply have a static brand site. In order to outrank your competitors, you must be committed to steady content and a strong social media presence. Organic and paid search should also be working in lockstep to maximize efficiencies, discover valuable user search habits and inform call-to-action messaging that can be used in content development.

Just as important, search marketing should always be grounded in keyword research. Keyword research should be not a one-off project but something that is done regularly, as users have altered their search behaviors over time, searching for new keyword combinations, longer keyword phrases, etc. This should simply be a core aspect of every content-development initiative your brand takes part in.

In this e-book you’ll learn the steps necessary to create an effective search-marketing strategy that will help your brand rise to the top.

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150 Million Tweets

Alex Balfour, the man in charge of all the digital and social programs for the 2012 London Olympic Games, got up onstage and shared some astounding insights, facts and figures.  

• 627,000 Facebook check-ins
   
• 5.3 million email address in the database
   
• 4.73 BILLION page views with 431 million visits to london2012.com
   
• Mobile accounted for 60% of all interaction

Facts aside, Alex had some interesting insights to pull from LOCOG’s experience.

• Location-based services actually didn’t play a big role in the Games.
   
• Against their better judgement, they chose not to respond to users on social platforms, as there were simply too many to tackle.
   
• A major constraint on sharing during the Games was not being able to share video content, because of strict broadcasting rights.
   
• Email was actually their biggest channel; there were 5 million subscribers and 83 million emails sent during the Games, 15 million of which were opened.
   
• Cadbury were the one 2012 sponsors that really stuck their neck out and delivered on digital for the Games. 

For more interesting digital statistics from the Olympics, head over to the BBC Internet Blog where they provide an in depth look at online viewership. 

Cadbury’s Olympic Social Engagement Strategy

When we heard Alex talk about Cadbury’s involvement in the Games, our ears pricked up. We love a good social-media win when a brand is involved. So much so that we got in touch with Cadbury’s social media & community manager, Jerry Daykin, ourselves to unearth a little more about their Olympics, which started long before the opening ceremony.

‘We ran campaigns connected with our London 2012 sponsorship from over two years out,’ Jerry told us, ‘and saw huge levels of engagement throughout, but it was possibly only during the opening ceremony where it felt like the whole nation really clicked and got caught up in the excitement of the Games.’

It’s no surprise that interaction stepped up a gear as the Games took place, but what is most impressive is how Cadbury handled their channels. In fact, they capitalised on their interaction to make the Olympics an experience to remember.

‘From that point on our sponsorship allowed us to be fully involved in a conversation everyone wanted to be having rather than watch from the sidelines.’

Cadbury used traditional media alongside their digital and social activity, but engagement was delivered mainly through social channels during both the Olympic and Paralympic games ‘where we could be responding within minutes of relevant events happening or news breaking.’

For Cadbury, sponsorship of the Olympics was ‘always about giving people all over the country a chance to be involved in the Games in some way’, and social media allowed them to do just that, both at scale and on a direct, personal level.

Managing Cadbury’s social presence throughout the Games was an involved and full-time job, as Jerry recalled, ‘On one memorable day, I spent 14 hours walking around the Olympic Park taking photographs of things our fans wanted to see more of.’

Now, that’s commitment. He also gave us some impressive facts on Cadbury’s activity:

• 20,000 people used near field communication-enabled cards to share photos from our Cadbury House site in Hyde Park (featured in the top left image), creating 7 million impressions on Facebook.
   
• 15 million unique people saw Cadbury UK Facebook posts during the Olympic fortnight.
   
• During the Paralympics. there were 60,000 tweets containing the #CadburyHeroes tag, increasing @CadburyUK followers by 100,000 and creating 70 million opportunities to see content.
   
• In total, Cadbury generated 3.3 million followers on new social channels through the sponsorship.

The London 2012 Olympics is arguably the best example of inspiring change brought about through collaboration to occur in recent years. Both LOCOG and Cadbury have brought people together and created an overwhelming community of engaged and excited fans across countless networks and enforced the importance of managing your social networks effectively.

Check out the Olympics event, and other archived live streams from the #SMWLDN events, at http://new.livestream.com/pages/smw.

Did you engage with any Olympic sponsors via social media during the games? Let us know. 

Image via Cadbury

Lots, according to Jon King, Story Worldwide’s Chief Storyteller. During the ‘Storytelling for Brands’ session at our London office last week, part of Social Media Week London, we shared Story’s brand-centred approach to narrative content.

We draw our inspiration from the most important study of storytelling ever done, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell. Campbell’s insights have influenced and guided the approach, which he called the hero’s journey and which is used in all forms of narrative, including classic films from Cinderella to Fight Club.

The Hero’s Journey is a model story format—honed by the knowledge contained in myriad cultures and history—which follows remarkably consistent rules that reflect profound human needs. It explains the narrative structure found in the great myths, timeless fairy tales and modern action films. Here’s how Cinderella’s story maps directly onto the Hero’s Journey:

And, surprisingly, Fight Club can be mapped to exactly the same pattern (spoiler alert!!):

So what does this mean for brands?

Brands are stories, effectively. At their most successful, these stories powerfully narrate the relationship between the brands and their audience(s). The most powerful brand stories, like the most engaging fairy tales, speak to fulfilling deep, unmet emotional desires.

Humans are psychologically hardwired to respond to meta-narratives that have been informed by human culture and history: the long journey home, marrying outside your tribe, the quest…It’s a search for meaning that defines what we are and want to be.

Through digital and social media, using maturing social-listening and search techniques, we can uncover and understand meta-conversations across cultures in a way that was not possible even five years ago. Tapping into these conversations reveals the current mind-sets of different audience segments and reveals their deeper unsatisfied emotional needs, providing a rich seam of consumer insight that brands can use to learn the best way to position and promote their stories to create value for themselves as well as their consumers.

Once marketers understand which aspect of the brand consumers really identify and engage with, the next step is to plan and shape the conversation between brand and audience over time. This content plan’s sole purpose is to bring the brand’s story to life across every touchpoint between consumer and brand, in the real and digital worlds.

In the Social Media Week session, we shared some of our latest thinking on the social multiplier effect (Kirk Cheyfitz will be publishing more on this topic soon)—which is the process of using digital to leverage a brand’s fans so they make the brand story genuinely contagious, delivering exponential return for the brand and lowering media spend dramatically.

According to Nielsen, recommendations are roughly twice as trusted as advertising. Add to this Forrester Research’s recent studies of how social fans share brand stories through their networks, and you’ll see the beginnings of the compound multiplier effect. But greater trust and greater reach are totally dependent on how interesting, credible, useful and, most of all, contagious the content is as well as where it’s shared and promoted.

The Role of Traditional Advertising

This is not to say that we should dismiss years of established traditional advertising knowledge and practice. Traditional advertising still has a role to play, as has been proven by one or two stunningly effective long-term brand campaigns—Sainsbury’s ‘Try Something New Today’ being a perfect case in point. A few years ago, Sainsbury’s deployed a simple but rich ‘big idea’ to impressive effect across its brand ecosystem, extending it across everything from integrated comms to internal staff engagement. The campaign makes an eloquent case for the age-old marketing practice of delving deep into a brand to uncover an idea so broad and powerful that people, consumers and staff, can’t help but listen and act.

But brand work like this, despite London’s prominent place in the global advertising industry, is the exception rather than the rule. It is noteworthy precisely because it is rare and because it depends heavily on constant support by large amounts of paid media.

So think how valuable, for both brand and consumers, a rich and satisfying brand story can be, and how powerful its impact can be as it is spread across the media ecosystem by brand advocates who share with their far-flung social networks using the latest developments in social and mobile. Such contagious brand stories spread on their own as a matter of routine, gaining currency by tapping into ongoing conversations and multiplying across social networks at extremely low cost. That is the present and, increasingly, the future of the new advertising. And that is a story every brand will find well worth telling.

So what’s your story?

Image via IMDB, 20th Century Fox

Aunt: Guess what I got today?
Me: What?
Aunt: The iPhone 5
[cue jaw dropping]

I was reading this on my iPhone 3Gs, yet I’m the one who works at a global post-advertising agency. That’s when I knew it: Mobile has reached significant penetration and can’t be ignored by brands.

There’s more proof than just the fact that my aunt owns her first smartphone (three generations newer than my own). This past Monday, during a panel discussion of mobile marketing at OMMA Global (where Story happened to take home an OMMA award), moderator Matthew Snyder, founder-CEO of ADObjects, Inc., said, “We’ve been hearing since 1995 that next year would be the year of mobile adoption and exponential growth. I think 2010 was finally that year, and now we’re moving toward the next stage of mobile innovation.”

The stats back Snyder up. According to the Flurry Blog, 78 percent of U.S. adults between 15 and 64 years old own a smart device of some kind. The adoption rate of iOS and Android devices has surpassed that of any consumer technology in history; it’s 10 times faster than the one that marked the ’80s’ PC revolution.

A July 2012 survey by Google found that 67 percent of users surveyed are more likely to buy from a mobile-friendly site than they are from one that’s unfriendly, and 61 percent of users surveyed said they’d leave a website if they couldn’t quickly find what they were looking for. So if your site isn’t optimized for a mobile device, then you may as well just redirect your customers to your competition.  

A Flat Tire

What Zappos.com is to your feet, TireRack.com is to your car. When I blew out the rear right tire on my car last week (pictured on right), I was instantly in the market for new tires. As I sat on the train yesterday, I thought I’d price tires on TireRack.com and possibly purchase them right there. But its website completely ignores the mobile visitor. Instead of a seamless mobile version, I got the full site, which took ages to load and had me zooming and swiping all over the page. I made it only halfway through the search process before I boiled over with frustration and gave up. 

I could just have waited until I got to my laptop, but by then it was too late: My installer had already gotten back to me with prices, and I ordered through him. Data from Viacom indicates that 96 percent of tablet owners in the United States use their devices in their living rooms. Even when laptops or desktops are near, users still turn to their smart devices.

I’d been there on TireRack.com, on my phone, with time to kill and a need to fill, and the sale was lost because of a bad mobile experience. The value of e-commerce is in its 24/7/365 nature. Without mobile optimization, TireRack is leaving money on the table.

Speaking of Zappos, its mobile site is fantastic, and it also offers an iPhone application. The search function (for the mobile site) is right on the front page and has big buttons and simple criteria. No extra fluff, just a smooth user experience that creates the shortest path between customer interest and product sale.

What it means for your brand

Given that there are businesses that still don’t believe they need websites at all, it may seem premature to try to move the masses toward mobile development. But for most brands, having a website, even one that’s continually updated with fresh content (for inbound marketing and SEO purposes), isn’t enough anymore.

If your brand values consistent and recurring engagement, you’re doing it a disservice by creating a torturous (read: non–mobile optimized) mobile experience for your audience. Mobile optimization is not just for e-commerce sites, either. It’s for all sites. The fact that smart devices can access full websites doesn’t mean that the experience translates well. On the contrary, it rarely does. In fact, PostAdvertising.com is very bad as a full-site web experience, which is why it’s optimized for mobile and available as an iPhone and iPad application.  

It’s About Time

Whether they concern moving a print magazine to the iPad, creating a mobile-friendly e-commerce site or constructing a stand-alone mobile application, these statistics and stories are, as Google put it, “a sobering reminder of just how quickly and deeply users’ attitudes about companies can be shaped by mobile site experiences.” 

How has your brand embraced the mobile world?

I’ve always been a picky eater, though my palate has developed as I’ve gotten older. I used to avoid nearly all condiments and toppings. I’d eat salads without dressing, sandwiches without mayo, and whatever you put mustard on, I didn’t. I’ve come around on some of those. Any salad is better with ranch.  I need mayo on my tuna sandwiches.

I still hate mustard, though.

Hello. My name is Jon, and I’m a fan of Grey Poupon on Facebook.

It makes little sense, allowing a brand I have no intention of ever buying into my precious Facebook timeline. If my wife sneaked it into a sandwich, I’d spit it out like a petulant child. But Grey Poupon took an approach to building a community on Facebook that was so unusual, so exclusive, that I had to become a fan (or at least try). 

According to the brand’s Pinterest page, which also serves as its website, the mustard is  “synonymous with all that is refined, exquisite and delicious.” So, like country clubs and gated communities, Grey Poupon’s Facebook page is not open to just anyone. No, it’s a “discerning Facebook Society that rewards those who spread good taste,” and you have to apply to become a member.  

While brands are racing to expand their follower bases, buying Facebook ads and, in some sad cases, even buying fans, Grey Poupon is doing the opposite.

Any Facebook user can Like the page, but Grey Poupon features an in-page application that houses the Society of Good Taste—a “private club committed to upholding the pillars of good taste set by our mustard. Only applicants with the most discerning palates will be admitted.” The kicker is that if you don’t “cut the mustard,” so to speak, your Like will be rescinded. The algorithm looks at the movies you watch, the restaurants you frequent and your grammar.

It’s unique. It’s grabbing headlines. It’s being shared. It’s creating massive earned media—the kind that’s free and that continues to work for a brand.

The Grey Poupon Story

In every marketing endeavor, it’s important to ensure that the brand’s efforts are aligned with its story. Aside from this campaign’s uniqueness, what impressed me most was how the approach fit perfectly with the Grey Poupon brand story. Grey Poupon’s story platform revolves around an exclusive, elite culture. While all the other mustards are letting fans Like their pages at will, Grey Poupon will not. The mustard itself is a mass-consumed CPG product available at your local grocer, but its story makes you believe, even if only momentarily, that your Grey Poupon should be situated right next to the caviar and eaten before you head off to your croquet match.

Quality Versus Quantity

In the world of social media, large numbers of fans, followers and members is a holy grail of sorts, though it’s something of an empty vessel. Whether you have 20 fans or 20 million fans, it doesn’t matter unless those fans are taking action.

Also, since Facebook is now answering to Wall Street, it’s searching for ways to milk brands of money by promising them bigger and more efficient exposure and engagement. Features like Promoted Posts allow your brand to show up in more fans’ feeds; the pricing, however, is based on how many fans you have. The more fake, unqualified or disengaged fans you have, the more you’re paying for absolutely no return.

Ensuring that fans on Grey Poupon’s Facebook page are in line with the brand’s values may not be enough to move the revenue needle, but it will lead to more engagement and more value for Grey Poupon’s advertising dollar. 

Of course, I am a fan yet I have no intention of buying the product, so maybe I’m exactly the fan that’s wasting this brand’s advertising dollar. But think again: I just wrote more than 600 words about the brand, for free, with no hidden agenda, and you read every word. That’s earned media. 

What do you think? Will this strategy lead to a more engaged community for Grey Poupon? Or will it just grab headlines?

For those of you who don’t know, Social Media Week returns to London for it’s fourth consecutive year from 24th – 28th September 2012. Hosted by Chinwag, this year’s theme is Empowering Change Through Collaboration. Digital dons and social-savvy client-siders will reflect on the global impact of social media and its role as a catalyst in driving cultural, political, economic and social change.

The last Social Media Week took place in February and proved to be the biggest conference to date, with participation from more than 36,000 attendees, across 1,000 individually hosted events and with 2,500 speakers driving the conversation in 12 cities.

It’s not often that you find yourself at the centre of such a huddle of hash-taggers, but this year Story Worldwide will be right there tweeting, pinning and blogging our way through the heart of the discussion.

Of course, it wouldn’t be very Story of us not to create a little content and conversation ourselves. So we’re putting on our own afternoon of storytelling to share our proven approach to propagating socialised narratives across the web. 

You can register to attend our event, held at our Farringdon office in London on Wednesday 26^th September, here: Storytelling for Brands. From the world’s first Post-Advertising Agency.

We couldn’t possibly list every event scheduled in 140 characters but we do have some top picks from the events in London that you might want to check out. Many events will be streamed online if you can’t make it or you can get real time updates using the #SMWLDN hash tag on Twitter.

Global Keynote: Alex Balfour

Fresh from six years at the digital and social helm of LOCOG, and after a busy couple of weeks over the Olympic and Paralympic Games monitoring over 400 million clicks across digital channels, Alex Balfour is gearing up to share his experiences and tell us what he learnt from hosting the world’s “first social Olympics.”

We Are Social FMCG Panel

We Are Social have gathered together some of the most innovative, and progressive FMCG brands operating in the social space to discuss the fine line between social media success and suicide. How do these brands avoid death by Edgerank? Is Google+ really a minus? Will social commerce be a commercial success for them? With an open panel, this one could get (p)interesting.

Facebook’s One Billion Birthday

Social Media Week wouldn’t be complete without a morning spent discussing the future of Facebook with friends and fans alike. This session, hosted by Betapond, will bring together fans and foes of, arguably, the world’s most important social network to discuss what will happen over the next couple of years as it continues to float (or sink) on the stock market and sails ever closer to one billion users.

Man your Smartphone, clear your diary, set a short cut for #SMWLDN and get involved. We’ll tweet you there. Visit the Social Media Week Official Website to find out what events are taking place near you, and when.

I bought the car using the money I earned scooping ice cream and washing dishes at Brigham’s restaurant the two years before. It was a stick shift, and since I didn’t know how to drive a stick yet, my mom had to test-drive it as I sat in the passenger seat. I remember that test-drive vividly. Supposedly it had great gas mileage and shifted like butter. I didn’t pay much attention. I was on cloud nine because I knew this would be my car, and I was dreaming of the possibilities.

I owned it for three great years, and boy, I could tell you some stories. Eventually the car broke down one too many times, and it wasn’t worth it to fix. My mom took a picture of the car as it was driven away on a flatbed. I still have that picture somewhere. 

Our lives are filled with material things often sold to us by faceless corporations with which we share no real emotional relationship. Many of these products are mundane and simply serve a need. Paper towels, milk, breath mints—it’s hard to create strong bonds between brand and consumer. But consumers have a connection to their cars that they have with few other products.

Our cars define a certain time in our lives. They transport us to family vacations, first dates or that night out with friends that turned into an adventure. 

Our cars become an integral part of our lives, to a point where we depend on them as we do on our coworkers, friends and family. We know their interiors like the backs of our hands, exactly when they’re going to switch gears and all their little idiosyncrasies. Let’s face it: we even name them.

Stories from brand advocates are incredibly powerful. We (as consumers) trust online opinions of complete strangers more than we trust any form of editorial content or advertising. So it’s no wonder that brands like Volkswagen, Toyota and Subaru all have gone beyond just planting tweets and Facebook comments on billboards and have launched digital platforms with which to aggregate their customers’ stories.

Let’s take a look:

1. Volkswagen

After knocking it out of the park with its 2011 Super Bowl commercial, “The Force”, to the tune of nearly 55 million views, the German automaker has committed to unearthing the brand stories of its owners in a project called Why VW?. The site, which features a matrix of content spaces that include videos and articles, allows owners to add their stories about “where they’ve been and where they’re headed.” Currently it features some impressive tales, including one about an Argentinean man (pictured at the top of this article) who drove his 1981 Beetle from Ushuaia, Argentina, to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, as well as a very smart sponsorship of a UK man who plans to travel across the United States to raise awareness of Parkinson’s and funds for research into the disease (VW donated two vehicles to transport his team and equipment). The page is a bit crowded with noncustomer, semi-promotional stories, but the campaign is still in its early stages; there’s a lot of potential for unique, interesting owner stories to emerge.

2. Subaru

Subaru was ahead of the curve with its embrace of brand storytelling. Its brand site has featured a section called Dear Subaru that since 2009 has housed short stories by owners. The site was launched as part of a multichannel campaign across print and digital, but the story hub has lived on long after the paid media ended. 

While looking somewhat dated, the site is completely owner-centric, featuring stories (including photos) submitted by Subaru owners. The only promotional portion is a section showing the print ads, all of which include real stories. Who knew they made tents for the top of your car? The site shows the enthusiasm and passion of Subaru owners as well as implicitly promotes features of the brand, like safety, durability, versatility, storage and all-wheel drive. 

3. Toyota Camry

In spring 2012, Toyota launched the Camry Effect, in which Camry owners could share their stories. The site is the most robust of the three, very well designed (it was a FWA Site of the Day) and featuring numerous stories about the “effect” Toyota Camrys have had on their  owners’ lives. The site does have some promotional content but weighs heavily in favor of customer stories. 

This wasn’t a short-lived effort, either. The digital component has been live for more than six months, and the recent TV campaign has featured real Camry owners telling their stories in their own words.

Embracing Real Stories

Auto manufacturers certainly aren’t the only brands utilizing customer stories. Facebook has been gathering stories of how its almost one billion user base is using the social platform in extraordinary ways. Tumblr has taken a different approach but is still embracing storytelling from around the web using Storyboard, Tumblr editors’ daily selection of the platform’s best blogs and stories  that has included such brand sponsors as New York Magazine.

What all this means is that brands are starting to realize why richer content, particularly emotive storytelling, is in many ways a smarter investment than simply putting all their eggs into paid advertising. These efforts aren’t low budget, but we can safely assume that they cost a fraction of what a 30-second Super Bowl ad would. Plus, owned and earned media have the opportunity to work harder than paid media. Nielsen reports that the impact of a brand website is three times greater than that of a paid digital ad.

We’ve outlined some interesting things brands are doing with user-generated content, but the efforts of these automakers to encourage the sharing of personal stories are more likely to include brand evangelists and super-fans—those who share a brand’s content most often. As we move further into the post-advertising age, brands have to be progressing to the realm of true, compelling, long-lasting storytelling.

Do you have some stories to share about your first car?

It’s difficult to define what “existence” even means in today’s digital age, when social technologies are imagined, developed, funded, adopted and acquired by a media conglomerate (often Facebook) in a matter of months, not years. Myspace is technically still in existence (I had to test it in my browser as I wrote this, just to be sure), but it’s far from relevant anymore in the social sphere. If Facebook goes the same route, I’ll concede defeat. 

But I don’t expect to be in that situation come 2020. Though Wall Street is panicking about the stock price, which has shrunk by nearly half, Facebook is a game-changing technology, and technologies like that don’t just fade away in less than a decade. As we do the automobile, we can’t image what we ever did or would do without it. It’s a technology that we seemingly never saw coming (as opposed to a smartphone or tablet, which were arguably natural evolutions in product innovation), and technologies like that are special. 

So if I’m so confident about the future of Facebook, where do I think it’s going? What do I think it will look like in seven to 10 years? As technology is moving so quickly, it would be futile for me to speculate on exactly what Facebook may be at that time, but here are four that opportunities could help sustain the platform.

*Note: This was the lead article in our September email newsletter. You are welcome to share it (thank you!), but newsletter articles aren’t published publicly to the blog until 5 days after the newsletter is sent. So sign up now to be the first to get articles like this direct to your inbox. 

1. Mobile

Our own Jim Boulton forecast that in five years (four since he made the prediction), there wouldn’t be any more websites. At least not in the way we’ve historically seen them exist (static and brochure-like) for the past decade and a half. The most fruitful opportunity for the future Facebook is embracing the idea of mobility—building amazing products specifically for mobile devices.

With each passing year, we become ever more connected to the web (and, consequently, each other), yet the devices are becoming ever less connected to our desktops (the ones with four legs). Tablets and smartphones can handle nearly all our connectivity needs and are progressing rapidly toward handling our content-creation needs.  

It’s very possible that future of Facebook is as a mobile entity, complete with mobile advertising and other monetizing strategies, with us wherever we go, as opposed to just a destination we visit. AdAge reports that Facebook’s mobile-ad machine is expected to gain steam, growing more than 500 percent in 2013, to $387 million. By 2014 it should be the second-largest seller of mobile advertising, after Google.

According to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook is already a mobile company. Regardless of what our communication devices will look like in 2020, I believe that Facebook will (still) be part of it.

2. Search

According to TechCrunch, investors are salivating over the prospect of Facebook getting into the search game (Faceboogle? GooBook?). Facebook gets a billion searches a day “without even trying,” Zuckerberg said, and it’s a good move. Facebook knows far more about our personal lives than any search engine could. There are privacy issues galore, but just imagine the possibilities. Instead of searching Google or Yelp for a good restaurant in town, you could use Facebook’s search utility and find which restaurants your friends have checked into, what they said about them and the pictures they took there (and I’m sure that if they have Instagram, it’s pictures of their food). One author at Social Fresh even thinks that Google should legitimately be worried. 

Using search is another way to monetize, by possibly helping curb the intrusion of ads into our timelines. Facebook already inserts sponsored results into searches; these results are reported to have a higher click-through rate and a lower cost-per-click than display ads. According to Facebook’s career page, the company has three open positions for software engineers who can “Help build the next-generation search experience for Facebook to help 800 million people around the world find what they’re looking for in a quick, fun, easy-to-use way.” (Hat tip to InsideFacebook for the find.) Don’t be surprised to find Facebook head-to-head with Google in the next few years. 

3. Currency/Payments

Probably the most intriguing possibility (at least to me) is the proposition of Facebook payments, in both their own currency and real currency. 

Right now the thousands of apps and games on Facebook can generate revenue through Facebook Payments. Whether it’s a BFF locket, Agar Bucks or a new shovel in FarmVille, you can use real dollars to buy not-real stuff online, with Facebook taking a cut. The overall marketing for virtual goods in the United States was predicted to be heading to $2.9 billion for 2012, according to the Inside Virtual Goods report.

Also, since Facebook has become the social hub for most of its users (is there any other place on the web that has as much information?) and has begun to be our standard log-in for connecting to third-party sites via Facebook Connect, it could become our online wallet; PayPal has tried to achieve this but has yet to become ubiquitous. We spend so much time on Facebook; why should we even have to leave the platform to buy things? And if we do leave the platform, why can’t we just use our Facebook log-in to buy items with a single click? Even if only a quarter of Facebook’s user base, which is quickly approaching one billion, is comfortable enough to link its credit cards to Facebook, that’s roughly 250 million, more than double the user base of PayPal. This is a major opportunity and one that some analysts believe is Facebook’s best option for a sustainable future. 

4. Advertising and The User Base

The elephant in the room is advertising, as well as all the possibilities that revolve around leveraging Facebook’s user base. Between the near billion users, the amount of information each user provides and the ever-expanding criteria for ad targeting, Facebook has provided advertisers with the most comprehensive social graph ever. “There has never been any single company or organization, with the exception of possibly the U.S. or Chinese government, who have been able to map the relationships of people around the globe to the extent Facebook has been able to do,” said Reuven Cohen in his great piece “Mining the Human Cloud” on Forbes. 

Facebook’s advertising model has major faults, and should it wholly embrace advertising in the way that Myspace did (full-page takeovers and such), I’m losing the aforementioned bet. What we know about Mark Zuckerberg and his company’s mission, however, is that Facebook’s products come first. I find it very hard to believe that it would ever mortgage its future by going all-in on advertising. The previous three scenarios, or more likely a combination of all three plus new opportunities we haven’t even imagined yet, will define the future of Facebook.

The Role of Brands

I don’t want to forget the major role brands play on Facebook. Or, conversely, the major role Facebook plays in brands’ efforts to market content and engage audiences. Currently brand pages are free, but Facebook seems to be quite aware that it costs money to build and support them. The idea, as highlighted in this Business Insider article by Jim Edwards, is to get brands addicted to Facebook in the hope that they will utilize promoted posts, paid ads and sponsored stories to help expand their reach. “The company can’t reach all its fans without spending money to promote posts,” Edwards said, “and it can’t ratchet down its always-on Facebook spend, because it has a large fan base who expect it to be there when there’s a problem.” Now it has a customer for life.

Who Am I To Predict the Future?

I am no futurist. I don’t own any stocks, and I’m not even sure which players I should start on my fantasy football team this week. To put the previously disparaged Clifford Stoll in a positive light, he gave an enlightening (yet frantic) TED talk in which he made a great point about the ability of technologists (and marketers and financial analysts, I believe) to predict the future:

If you really want to know about the future, don’t ask a technologist, a scientist, a physicist. No! Don’t ask somebody who’s writing code. No, if you want to know what society’s going to be like in 20 years, ask a kindergarten teacher.”

What’s your prediction for the future of Facebook? In seven years, will Facebook still exist?

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