Is Frictionless Sharing a Boon or Black Hole for Brands?

Posted by Katie Edmondson, 04 Jan 2012

As frictionless sharing becomes the norm for applications like Spotify and Huffington Post, it feels like we’re at the cusp of an era of increasingly intense oversharing. Facebook’s new sharing mechanism has already contributed to a distinct decrease in manual curating and the rise of automated sharing through software. But the real question is: Will frictionless sharing create a true paradigm shift in the way we interact and share on the web? And what are brands to do about it?

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Brands: Can’t Buy My Love

Posted by Andrea Fjeld, 14 Dec 2011

Desperation is never attractive, even when it comes to brands. Nevertheless, it’s apparent that brands have stooped so low as to actually buy Facebook likes (25,000 guaranteed for the low, low price of $1,757!). Who knew in a marketing medium based on transparency and honesty, brands would zip up their hoodies, dawn a fake beard, put on their sunglasses and travel to the seedy underworld of black hat social media to inflate their social metrics?

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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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The Future of Content Is Not in Your Computer

Posted by Jon Thomas, 26 Oct 2011

There was once a day when a computer filled a room. Now it’s in your palm. That’s the story my dad tells me at least. Soon, when my future children are old enough to understand, I’ll tell them how I used to read books and magazines made out of paper and I couldn’t simply touch the screen of my computer to make things happen. Also, I used to walk to school uphill, both ways, in the snow.

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The Future of Branded Entertainment

The Future of Branded Entertainment

Posted by Jon Thomas, 19 Sep 2011

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

Blogging has been a fundamental shift in marketing, ushering in social media and the post-advertising age; it's the cornerstone of inbound marketing. This regularly updated text-based content is the gasoline that fuels search engine optimization (SEO).

At Story we have a Facebook page with regularly updated content, we’ve written hundreds of blog posts here since 2008, we've published our own eBooks (with more to come), and we post daily updates to Twitter identities for both Story Worldwide and Post-Advertising. So take that into consideration when I tell you this:

Blogs and social media aren’t the be-all-end-all to content marketing.

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Is Facebook a Failure at Customer Acquisition?

Posted by Jon Thomas, 07 Sep 2011

There's no questioning the power of Facebook, quite new in the grand scheme of marketing, as a tool to engage with fans on a deeper level and with more regularity than anything before it. Typical advertisement media—radio, TV, print, billboards—were always one-way. Social media now allows near-real-time two-way engagement that has the ability to turn lukewarm consumers into brand advocates. New social media tools such as Facebook have allowed those brands we hold dearest to be treated as family.

But what about the brands we aren't familiar with? Is the Facebook environment, complete with hyper-targeted ads, a good place to find new customers? According to a recent study by DDB Worldwide and Opinionway Research (as reported by Ad Age), 84% of a typical brand's Facebook fans are existing customers. The implied meaning is that Facebook, while an incredibly effective customer retention and engagement tool, is much less of a customer acquisition tool than most brands have thought.

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