Storytelling Across Platforms - A review

The Chartered Institute of Marketing South West – Storytelling across Platforms talk was held at the Bournemouth University Executive Business Centre. With great opportunity for networking prior to the talk, this event was seamlessly organised. The venue was purpose build for lectures, which allowed the speaker to connect well with the audience and display digital content that the whole room could easily see and hear.

Paul Sheehy from Folk Digital was a dynamic and inspiring speaker, weaving tales of social media with great visual examples. Paul’s reconstruction of O2 and Tesco mobile’s Twitter rap with Dorset CIM Ambassador Matt Desmier was simply brilliant. Whilst the crowd were crying with laughter, the point was clearly made. Not all social engagement should push products or sales, telling a story that is interesting and relevant can be much more effective for reaching your campaign goals. Paul spoke of the rise of personalisation over SEO as a trend for our campaign futures. We were all asked to take on the role of Alfred, a twenty something looking for that perfect engagement ring.  Two videos were shown for two jewellers, one spoke of product, cut, quality and range available. The other spoke of passion, business heritage and of inspiration. The winner was clear – all Alfreds chose the latter jewellers.

Personalisation is key for social media interaction. Ensuring that your audience buy into your brand on a long term and engaged basis, rather than your message being drowned out in the daily storm of digital noise. Consumers are becoming wise to social media strategy and are bored of pushed products and sales pitches, preferring two-way dialogue, interesting calls to action and opportunity for exclusive content or experience. Consumers are demanding added value from their engagement, which if offered successfully can secure long-term positive brand alliance.

Here are the top tips from Storytelling Across Platforms:

1    Put people not products at the heart of what you are doing. Your audience are all unique, what is the method of communication that best suits them?

2    Speak to the heart not the head. The heart leads with emotional response, which the head will remember and share.

3    Why do you do what you do? What is your central reason or passion? This is key for brand engagement as the audience can relate and trust in this passion.

4    Don’t be restrained by traditional content. Sometimes what appears to be unrelated content, can actually promote the strongest brand response.

5    Finally ensure all content is genuine, interesting and adds value to the reader. Digital spam is blocked in a mind overpopulated with information and communication.

By Maria Parker - Harris

 Group Marketing Co-ordinator

The SPS Group

www.thespsgroup.co.uk

Folk Digital - http://www.wearefolk.com/
CIM South West - http://www.cimsouthwest.co.uk/

#folkdigital #contentmarketing #digitalmarketing #socialmedia #CIM #storytelling

Let's Do Digital 2013 - A review

Let’s Do Digital held at the Southampton City College Hub by Bournemouth Digital Agency Adido was an inspiring and forward looking event. The themes of the day were changes to search functions and social media. Speakers from Google, Microsoft Bing, Linkedin, RNLI, Adidio and Santander entertained the crowd with powerful insights and tips for the future. The next twelve months are set to be very exciting! Delegates also attended workshops covering analytics, website development, effective content creation and integrated campaign planning.

The event’s killer headline was Google’s voice search, which saw the crowd shouting Ok Google! The voice search not only understands your exact search criteria, replying audibly with intelligent results, but can also associate following searches. The demonstration was to search for top New York Hotels, which listed them by location and Trip Adviser reviews. The following question was: ‘Where are the bars and clubs?’ The results showed the best bars and clubs in the near vicinity of the previous search results. So how does this affect us as digital marketers? Well with users now searching for full sentences and linking follow up searches, key words are no longer the top factor for good SEO. Copy needs to consider the developing full sentence voice search style.

The crowd went wild when learning about the impact Google Glasses will have when released to the public (scheduled for early 2014). Users will be able to utilise Augmented Reality technology alongside, social media, image capturing and search functionality, all weighing less than the average pair of sunglasses. Another innovation from Google is the Google Now app which intuitively presents information before you search for it, using previous common search queries and intelligent data tracking. Google Now tells you how long your journey to work will take before you even ask. It is fair to say Google stole the show with the demonstrative style in comparison to Microsoft Bing’s sales pitch approach. Although Bing raised some excellent points about the personalisation of search results through intuitive big data. Personalisation is definitely the buzzword of 2014 and Microsoft Bing have nailed the concept with their paid experience.

LinkedIn revealed the forthcoming changes to business pages. There will be the opportunity to add pages for divisions, departments and teams, which interlink to create amazing networking opportunities and targeting options. This could revolutionise the way B2B social interaction is completed, allowing for online speed networking (the corporate hospitality trend of 2014). Microsoft have counteracted this notion with Yammer, Bing’s answer to LinkedIn. The options for Office 365 integration and share points are excellent, but the pricing is more complex than that of LinkedIn.

Top tips from Let's Do Digital:

1.       Really start to think about your content and the way new search technology will use this for your SEO.

 
2.       Consider the use of liquid content alongside linked content to really engage the user with clear calls to action, don’t overload with purchase or product messages.
 
3.       Start speed networking. Try to regularly get involved with conversations in your industry or engage with your industry’s eco system.
 
4.       Don’t sent digital junkmail. Be realistic, is this content adding value to the reader? Is it ugly, sales lead, pushing product or branding? Target, profile and engage is the steps to building a long- term relationship.
 
5.       And finally, nothing beats a cute animal picture for boosting engagement, which RNLI refer to as the animal klaxon. Don’t fight it, innovate it! See my token animal klaxon above.

Let’s Do Digital was an informative and social event that left me with some excellent perspective and insight. My only niggle was that event timings weren’t followed and this left the afternoon very rushed.

By Maria Parker - Harris

 Group Marketing Co-ordinator

The SPS Group

www.thespsgroup.co.uk

Let's Do Digital - http://www.dodigitalbetter.com/

#letsdodigital #digitalmarketing #socialmedia #SEO #hummingbird #Google #animalklaxon