I am fascinated by organizations that begin to live a change before they communicate that change. The ones that sort of sneak up on you until you think, “Wait, is there something different going on?” We talk a lot about this behavioral shift at Waggener Edstrom through the lens of our Social Innovation Practice as these evolutions increasingly are driven, and have impact, beyond of the walls of the brand or organization. Sometimes it happens in the process of doing good business – getting closer to the community that the brand or entity affects. And often, the changes come from evolving strategic direction, or even realigning business practices with what’s coming out of the inventions of that organization.
Sometimes it is accidental, like a flock of birds that seamlessly move in formation; one shift leads to another and another until the entire organization is moving in the same direction. It gets even more interesting when it is a deliberate strategy supported by an elegant communications plan. Why? Business reasons aside, as communicators, we hate to wait and in this “everything on,” razor-thin-margin time, the organizations we support expect rapid results. Carrying the nuggets of the transformation story in our hot little hands without standing on the digital pedestal and shouting out the news is akin to placing a child in a room filled with cupcakes and telling them they’ll have to wait six months to eat any. And yet, the potential payoff of allowing the story to unfold bit by bit is often more profound. It captures our imagination. Makes us curious about what’s next. And invites the audience into the transformation, vs. telling them about it.
I’m watching this happen with NPR. And what is so bold is that it is a reverse transformation. They’re going BACK to why we fell in love with journalism – the long-form story. And even more exciting, it’s a connected, digitized, multimedia approach with significant investment in both the program and the Web presence. Just this week, I traveled down the Congo and watched fishermen dive into the falls to collect their catch, and experienced a desperate helicopter rescue, crash and subsequent happy ending as part of an untold Vietnam story. I counted; each piece was at least 7-10 minutes long, not to mention the blog, photos, videos, and social media connections. In this day and age, that’s a lot of real estate. Reminds me that what’s valuable about the content we consume is more in the telling of the story than the channel. Similarly, in NPR’s quiet actions, we begin to see deliberately orchestrated brilliance.
When to combine business with pleasure with social media is a standing question. The answer: “It depends.” I’ve been on the Twitter bandwagon for a little over a year now and I’m admittedly a little all over the place with the kind of content I choose to share. With only one user name, I’ve taken the combo route. My tweets cover everything from social media tidbits to what I did on the weekend. Bottom line: At this point, I just don’t ever post anything that I wouldn’t want everyone to see. 
Several colleagues have admitted to having two accounts – one for more conservative work-centric content and another for more personal sharing. And I agree that this approach could make a lot of sense.
- Having multiple accounts allows you to network with like-minded individuals. This lets you branch out to other potential followers without ostracizing your current follower base who might only care about media-related tweets and not about the new recipe you’re trying. Twitter is full of cliques and many don’t overlap. Twitter lists are a great solution for filtering other tweeps by demographic, but have you thought about how you yourself are being categorized? What lists do you find yourself on?
- If you are building a brand, you should register the name on Twitter. Point taken: I just secured the name of my personal blog, Living Portland. I’ll pocket this until I’m ready for it.
What are some of the challenges?
- Time management. Having time to tweet from one account can be hard enough for some. Schedule your tweets ahead of time to make it easier. It’s important to keep content fresh but don’t let this become a burden. I recommend TweetDeck or HootSuite, which are both free options to help you stay organized.
- Personal branding. If you’re on Twitter because you want people to get to know you and all your different interests, having two accounts might not make sense.
There are many champions of this strategy, including Mark Drapeau, Microsoft’s director of Innovative Social Engagement. Interestingly, his second account doesn’t seem to be around anymore, which seems to lend more credibility to the one-account approach.
How many Twitter accounts do you actively use?
Guest post by Pete Voss, senior account executive
The week following my first Gnomedex proved to be an odd one. You see, I came away from that conference with a new perspective, and a drive to do something different.
The people who surrounded me at Gnomedex were so passionate! Passionate about activism, lasers to space and even cyborgs. It didn’t matter to the crowd WHAT they were passionate about, just that something drove them. I needed this charge as a reminder about my passion: storytelling.
Monday, I posted a Prezi presentation to my blog. I used Prezi because I saw it used at Gnomedex and I wanted to try it out. Anyway, the blog post was about how storytelling comes in different forms: journalism, politics, music, film, television. These are all mediums of storytelling … but so is social media. The Prezi concluded with the question: How do you use social media to tell your story?
This question was mainly directed to myself: How was I telling my story?
Truth be told, I realized I wasn’t. I have been watching and listening to the Twittersphere and blogosphere and occasionally retweeting things that caught my eye. This is a perfectly normal way to use social media, but, after reminding myself that storytelling was my passion, I knew I had to get out of my comfort zone and start engaging.
That same evening, I participated in my first #Journchat. I had heard of it before, and saw some of the tweets that filled my news feed, but realized that this was my time to participate. At 5 p.m., I introduced myself to the 200+ participants and, by the end of the 3-hour period, I had some great conversations and nearly 30 new Twitter relationships with people in the journalism industry. As someone who is passionate about storytelling, this was a place I needed to be.
Tuesday, I posted a recap of my Gnomedex experience, and it caught the eye of Chris Pirilloand Gnomedex, and it actually got retweeted. For a fan like me who normally just reads blogs and tweets and does the retweeting, it was SO flattering to see Chris Pirillo send around a link to my twitter handle and blog. Before long, many of the Gnomedex attendees who I was too shy to introduce myself to at the conference were quickly sharing a link to my blog.
“Sharing” is so important, isn’t it? Before this week, I saw a lot of my blog posts as just a chronicling of things I’ve seen, heard or read. There wasn’t much of an attempt to really connect with anyone particularly, and so the blog posts didn’t spread much. But with my new attitude of engaging, it helps to have people in mind who may benefit from the post, and sending a link to those people who might find it valuable, they may deem it’s worth sharing with their friends.
If you take anything away from this blog post, it’s get out of your comfort zone and engage. While at Gnomedex, I purchased a copy of Brian Solis’ book, “Engage,” and while I haven’t read it yet (stay tuned for a future blog review), my experience is that engaging the online communities can do so much for storytellers. I posted three blogs this week that I’m proud of: Gnomedex, PhotoWalk and #Journchat. With each post, the respective founder/creator (Chris Pirillo, Robert Scoble and Sarah Evans) retweeted a link to my blog to their networks, including Gnomedex and Journchat. That was the encouragement I needed to to know that my engagement was connecting with people. The lesson learned here is to engage before, during and after.
- Before: Going to the event, and participating in it as it happens, really helped me get to know who I was writing for.
- During: It was so valuable to picture the people I was writing for, as I was writing it.
- After: Sharing the link to folks in the story and other stakeholders showed them that I thought they would be interested in it.
While this inspiration is still very new, I feel that if I can continue to remind myself what my passion is and who I’m doing this for, that I’ll be successful in engaging with the online community so that I can do what I love: storytelling.
This post was originally published at PeteVossPR.com.
Last weekend, I had the pleasure of hearing Ira Glass give an insightful and inspirational talk about storytelling to a sold-out crowd at Benaroya Hall in downtown Seattle. For those who don’t know, Ira is the host of This American Life — a weekly public radio program he started in 1995 that has since gone on to become the most listened to podcast in the country.
Now, the reason a public radio host can sell out 2,500-seat halls and earn the rabid devotion of millions is this: Ira Glass is a master storyteller. From the moment he opens his mouth, he owns you. His narrative and delivery draw you in immediately, he carries you along for as long as he wants, then spits you out gently on the other side — usually with a deeper understanding of yourself and the world around you.
I’ve been a TAL fan for more than a decade. And the thing that never ceases to amaze me is how effortless he makes storytelling seem. But make no mistake, Ira Glass has worked very hard to become Ira Glass. And he’s done so by identifying the basic elements of storytelling and employing them to great effect.
Ira’s Benaroya Hall talk expanded on a few ideas he laid out previously in a four-part video. And for those of us who wake each day intent on finding and telling great stories, this is a worthwhile way to spend 17 min 31 sec of your day. A few nuggets of Ira wisdom to get you started:
The anecdote is a powerful tool.
It doesn’t matter how boring the facts of your story are. If you present the facts in anecdotal form, you’ll create suspense, give your story momentum and keep audiences engaged.
Every story needs a moment of reflection.
At some point, you need to pause and let your audience know why they should care about what you’re telling them. It’s not enough to communicate action. You need to give your anecdote meaning by revealing some greater truth.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Finding great stories is sometimes harder than telling them.
It often takes as much time to find a decent story as it does to actually write/produce it. But to find these gems, it’s up to us as storytellers to dig deep and try different things.
“Not enough is said about the importance of abandoning crap.”
If our goal is to tell great stories, we need to be honest with ourselves when one isn’t coming together as we’d hoped. If you know in your heart a story is a dud, as difficult as it may be, you need to summon the strength to kill it. Because, as Ira notes, “By killing, you will make something else even better live.”
“If you’re not failing all the time, you’re not creating a situation where you can get super lucky.”
We’ve established that finding and telling great stories is difficult. And doing so while the media landscape shifts under our feet is, of course, a challenge as well. The good news about telling stories in our Brave New Digital World is that there’s a lot of room for experimentation and growth. Not every effort will succeed. But it’s important to fight through these failures. Because it’s only through taking chances and, frankly, falling on our faces from time to time, that we’ll achieve the greatest successes later on.
Image by lantzilla
Lately, content curation has been talked about a lot within the content strategy community, and more than one definition has been offered up for discussion. In her five-part blog series about curation, Erin Kissane, a NYC-based content strategist, differentiates between content curation and content aggregation, and offers tips from museum curators about creating a valuable experience for the end user.
Here’s a quick rundown:
- Aggregation closely resembles a laundry list of links that are automatically generated by specific meta data (think Google News).
- Curation involves someone filtering this aggregated content based on a distinct point of view about audience demographics, company brand, user experience and intended outcome.
- Content curation isn’t just about passing along information. Rather, it involves creating an experience for the user, telling a story from multiple perspectives and providing analysis or explanation for why you chose a particular piece of content.
- One museum curator compared curation to alchemy: When you bring together pieces of content (or museum exhibits), you transform them into something different and greater than the sum of the parts.
Done correctly, curation has the potential to validate your product, engage the customer and help differentiate your company from the herd – especially as people rely more on others to filter through and surface relevant content.
The recently launched Starbucks Digital Network (SDN) is considered by some as an example of content curation. In the case of SDN, Starbucks created agreements with Rodale Press, Nickelodeon and Yahoo! to create “premium” content for users of the free Wi-Fi service it provides to customers of its cafes. SDN also delivers localized content and the opportunity to partner with DonorsChoose.org. Yet for all its value in engaging customers, SDN strikes me as more of a co-marketing partnership/content creation outsourcing model than it does content curation.
I’m just sayin’.
In case you’re interested, there’s a plethora of aggregation/curation tools on the market, ranging from consumer-grade tools such as Amplify and the newly released version of Digg, to products like Curata and Publish2, which the New York Times uses to create its Topics page.
But curation is about much more than using such tools to send a laundry list of links or retweet a story. It requires an over-arching narrative that guides the filtering of content and helps determine where that content fits within the narrative framework.
Simply put, effective curation is not automated, and it doesn’t involve merely creating new content and calling it “premium.”
The IBM Smarter Planet site provides a good example of what content curation could look like in a communications setting: Using a Tumblr feed, IBM summarizes and cites content related to the prevalence of smarter, inter-connected technologies, and helps position IBM as the logical choice for companies needing to adopt such technology.
So what’s your take? How do you define curation and is it part of your content strategy?
Image by Atelier Teee
