4 TED Talks All Brand Storytellers Must Watch

Posted by Jon Thomas, 30 Jan 2013

TED talks are a gold mine of knowledge. Because the TED website’s topics include not only technology, education and design (TED) but also business, science, activism, health, storytelling and everything in between, one can get lost on the site for days.

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!

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Is Foursquare Becoming the Perfect Local Ad Platform?

Posted by Luke Dringoli, 25 Jul 2012

Local merchants that’ve ignored location-based check-in platform foursquare have just been handed a serious reason to get on board: Local Updates, the first-ever way for merchants large and small (all one million of them, currently) to communicate directly with their customers on the platform, has arrived. As of today, they’ve even begun testing the waters with Promoted Updates, a way for a business to attract new customers through paid placement (the difference: spots, matched relative to interests and activity, are only seen when you’re actively searching on the Explore tab). This, coming a month into foursquare’s strategic shift in approach—including a rebuilt mobile app (try it out if you’ve written FS off)—means that the newfound focus for the platform as a social-exploration tool is as much about enabling richer user-to-user interactions as about enabling richer business-to-customer and customer-to-business interactions.

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Facebook’s New Admin Features and What They Mean For Brands

Posted by Jon Thomas, 06 Jun 2012

In the last few weeks Facebook has rolled out a number of new features that Page Administrators have been clamoring for (at least we at Story have). However, unlike the Timeline rollout that featured a billboard at the top of your page notifying admins of the new features, some of these latest updates have flown under the radar.

As I'm sure you've come to expect, we at Post-Advertising would never leave our readers in the dark. We not only took an in-depth look at the new features, but discussed what they mean for community managers and how they can be effectively implemented (or avoided).

Here’s a breakdown of the newest features and what they mean for your brand.

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Why There’s More to Facebook Pages than ‘Likes’

Posted by Katie Edmondson, 22 Mar 2012

The most successful brands on Facebook Pages aren't the ones you'd think. If I told you that Coca-Cola’s Facebook Page has an engagement rate of less than one percent, would you believe me? Well, it’s true. After calculating the ratio of Coke’s total Likes to total engagement (“Talking About This”), the Page clocks in at a meager score of 0.7%.

But this is not unusually low for Facebook Pages; in fact, it’s quite average. Most brands are very successful in generating Likes but fail to keep their fans talking. When it comes to real success for a brand on Facebook, in the end, engagement numbers mean a lot more than total Likes—a number that often speaks more to the size of the brand’s media buy and not to the quality of their content. As such, Talking About This is actually a far more valuable metric and tool than total Likes are. Here’s why.

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Is Your Antiquated Legal Department a Brand Killer?

Posted by Karen Nagy, 20 Feb 2012

Additional reporting by Luke Dringoli and Jon Thomas.

We’ve all seen it before: Marketers create an innovative social media campaign only to have it squashed by the legal department into a bland, lifeless lump of the original idea. Sadly, many archaic legal departments are wary of social media at best and digitally illiterate at worst. Their fear of embracing these tools can be a barrier for brands that want to interact with their audiences in authentic, transparent and engaging ways. But that doesn’t mean brands shouldn’t sacrifice creativity (or throw out their old-school legal department) just yet.

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Crowdsourced! Eight Ways to Involve Your Most Important Allies

Posted by Luke Dringoli, 01 Feb 2012

Brand-hatched crowdsourcing is nothing new. But constructive crowdsourcing with usable output? Crowdsourcing that evokes a palpable sense of togetherness? That’s new. Steps being taken by nimble branders like Warby Parker and Betabrand to engage (and we mean really engage) fans and enthrall newcomers will soon become tomorrow’s staples for sourcing success.

Want in on the unique new ways brands can use advanced crowdsourcing to engage followers? Read on. Each of the eight ideas we’ve carefully chosen has the potential to send your engagement numbers through the roof, as long as requests are within reason and rewards are provided.

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Balancing Privacy and Transparency in Social Media

Posted by Jon Thomas, 19 Dec 2011

This post originally appeared in our December issue of "Live Report from the Future of Marketing," our monthly Post-Advertising newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

The art of tightrope walking is one of those feats whose objective is simple but accomplishing it is not: The walker must travel from one end of the tightrope to the other without falling off. All of us at some point in our lives have tried a version of this, usually on the curb of a sidewalk, and have quickly realized that it’s not as easy as it looks. It takes balance and concentration to keep from falling. Make it a high wire and the difficulty increases exponentially: Failure now has much more dire consequences.

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When Faking It (on Twitter) Is a Good Thing

Posted by Jon Thomas, 30 Nov 2011

It’s late November, and UK Lord Chancellor Sir John Simon has just told Parliament that Britons have sent watches, jewelry and gold to help the government pay for war. According to Sir John, “One girl sent a small envelope, asking me to accept her ‘peace offering.’ Inside was her engagement ring.” Incredible. Particularly because I just learned of this from a tweet chronicling the world war that’s raging in Europe right now.

You didn’t know there was a war going on in Europe? That’s because it took place in 1939. It’s the beginning of the Second World War, and it’s being retold on this date and at this time by the Twitter account @RealTimeWWII. After tweeting for only three months, @RealTimeWWII, which according to Mashable is maintained by Oxford graduate Alwyn Collinson, has already exceeded 150,000 followers. Why can't brands be this inventive?

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Story To Host World’s First Post-Advertising Summit!

Posted by Keith Blanchard, 29 Sep 2011

After three years of charting the emerging Post-Advertising world right here with you guys, we decided to throw our very own real world event: The Post-Advertising Summit! (March 29th, at New York’s Cult Studios. Details here). In other words, we're throwing a party...and you're all invited!

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What Facebook Questions Means for Brands

Posted by Jon Thomas, 04 Apr 2011

On March 24^th, Facebook rolled out a new version of Questions, allowing brands to directly poll their fans. Questions was launched in beta nearly a year ago and released to users soon thereafter, but its roll out to brands was met with little fanfare. While the reaction to it may have been small in comparison to Facebook layout update, Questions means far more to brands than meets the eye.

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