Children ask their parents to tell them stories because they like to fit the pieces of the story into a picture they can understand. It is the same with adults. Audiences at seminars and conferences don’t want to be overwhelmed with data and figures. They prefer stories – relevant stories – with emotional impact that hold their interest and convey meaning. One of the most powerful ways to get your message across is by telling a story. One of the reasons that Christianity took hold is that Jesus conveyed his message not in sermons or theological discourses but in parables – he told stories that people could easily understand and repeat to others. Stories involve people, emotions, feelings, consequences and outcomes. They hold our interest because we want to find out what happens to the people in the stories.

Be prepared to tell stories in social and business contexts. You can tell a personal story on all sorts of occasions – on a date or when giving a keynote talk. The stories that only you can tell are the best. However, interesting stories about other people are also worth retelling if they are really amusing or make a relevant point for your audience. Keep a file or notebook with interesting stories and think creatively about how you can weave them into your work and conversation.

So, how do you tell a story? Here are a few simple steps to follow:

1. Introduce the characters. Stories involve people so describe them.

2. Set the scene. This often involves some challenge or difficulty that has to be overcome.

3. Explain what happened next and how the situation resolved itself.

4. Draw out any conclusions or lessons learned.

E. M. Forster illustrated this very simply. A fact is ‘The queen died and the king died.’ A story is, ‘The queen died and the king died of a broken heart.’ When your goal is to convey a message, don’t think just in terms of giving information. Ask yourself how you can illustrate the message with both examples and tales. Use fewer facts and more stories. You’ll capture your audience and that’s good for business!

The post Tell More Stories: It’s Good for Business. appeared first on StoryFirst Media Website.

Be sure to understand the implications of these changes before pitching your next Facebook project.

1. Email is now a supported channel
Facebook has long hidden user emails, but soon Facebook will provide developers access to a user’s verified email address. For brands that are serious about engaging in an ongoing dialogue with their fans, email becomes a powerful communication method. Email will allow brands to better reconnect with users who have interacted with them on Facebook. This becomes important given that…

2. Status updates are no longer guaranteed
Previously users’ streams included everything their friends and pages (including brand pages) published. Now the news feed has returned to a default view showing select highlights that Facebook’s algorithm thinks are most relevant to the user, which may or may not contain your brand’s message. There’s still a live feed view, but it’s no longer default, so only brand posts that fans interact with will appear in most users’ streams.

3. Other communication channels are consolidating
Many brands rely on application-to-user and user-to-user notifications to reconnect with users, and this communication channel is disappearing. That means in order to remarket to users to let them know about new product launches, sales, events, or promotions, you’ll need to acquire users’ email addresses or send popular posts (per above).

Source: iMedia Connection. Click here for full post.

The post Upcoming Facebook changes: 7 things brands need to know appeared first on StoryFirst Media Website.

“I like the show,” says Janine Popick at the Vertical Response blog, “because he gets down into the inner workings of a small business and peels away the onion to find any issues that might be hampering the business from growing.”

She finds six business lessons in the story arc of each episode. Here are some:

– Ramsay starts with an honest assessment of the situation. You cannot fix something until you know what’s wrong, and he always begins by observing a typical lunch or dinner service. Most are, predictably, disastrous. “He also takes to the streets,” notes Popick. “[I]n many shows he walks the streets of the town to observe other restaurants and he’ll stop people and ask what they think about the restaurant he’s trying to help.”

– He then identifies, and tries to rectify, fundamental problems. A strong business is built on a strong foundation. Disturbingly, almost all of the restaurants on Kitchen Nightmares share one failure in common: filthy kitchens that must be cleaned before anything else can happen. Beyond that, Ramsay addresses the unique mix of issues challenging each restaurant—everything from poor leadership to overambitious menus to subpar chefs.

Whatever you think of Gordon Ramsay, you just might benefit from his simple formula for jumpstarting a struggling business.

Source: Vertical Response. Click here for the full post.

Thanks also to Marketing Profs.

The post What Any Business Can Learn From Chef Gordon Ramsay appeared first on StoryFirst Media Website.

SUMMARY: Your marketing content library can be an incredible resource in lean economic times. You have opportunities to repurpose, reformat and reuse that content for new lead generation campaigns.

We’ve collected five examples of clever content repurposing strategies that B2B marketers shared with us over the years. Includes tips on generating audio and video from text and finding new content for nurturing emails. Tight budgets require marketers to stretch every dollar they spend. Fortunately, few investments are as elastic as the content you create for lead-gen campaigns.

Every white paper, webinar, client case study, video, podcast or other piece of content you create can work for multiple campaigns. The process can be as easy as recording your webinars, then using links to archived versions in lead-nurturing campaigns. Or, it might require a bit more work, such as by developing a Q&A podcast with the author of a white paper.

The key is to examine your marketing content and find the best opportunities to repurpose and reuse what’s already available. Here are five examples from past Sherpa case studies to inspire you:

Strategy #1. Use past media coverage as content in nurturing emails

Staying in touch with prospects in your nurturing funnel doesn’t necessarily mean developing a new white paper, case study or other piece of content every time you want to send an email.

You can build friendly, low-pressure, lead-nurturing emails simply by sharing a link to media coverage you’ve generated from public relations efforts:

– Executive interviews or by-lined articles in trade publications typically cover relevant industry topics that demonstrate your industry leadership.

– Sharing an article you believe prospects would find interesting gives them a break from repeated calls to register for content or provide contact information.

For example, Matt Barker, Director, Marketing, TeleHealth Services, made the most of his team’s PR strategy by recycling bylined articles they had previously written for trade publications.

Barker and his team used nurturing emails to follow up on a direct mail campaign touting one of the company’s health information products. The first nurturing message offered a recap of the product line the DM campaign had been promoting, but also included a link to a bylined article citing the value of those products in a healthcare setting.

The result: A 12.5% open rate on the email — a key step in a campaign that generated more than 20 warm leads for the sales team. One deal from those leads would be enough to cover the entire cost of the program.

Strategy #2. Create podcasts from in-person speaking engagements

Here’s a quick, low-hassle approach to creating podcasts: Record and edit any public speaking engagements by company executives, or by clients describing your products or services.

Michael Williams, Marketing Director, Global Management Technologies Corp. made the most of his speaking gig at a major industry event. He obtained permission to record the presentation (using an inexpensive digital recorder) and turned the raw audio into a podcast using free digital editing software.

Through promotion via email and PPC ads, the podcast was heard by more than nine times as many people as there were in attendance at the event. Additionally:
o 16.7% of the podcast listeners were deemed sales-ready leads
o Those additional leads reduced the average cost-per-lead from the trade show by 71%

Strategy #3. Supplement white papers with audio highlights

White papers can also be a source for new audio content. Interviewing an expert author on the paper’s top findings, providing an audio summary of key takeaways, or simply excerpting a portion of the paper are all ways to turn text content into a podcast.

When Paul Dunay was a marketer at the management consulting firm BearingPoint, his team developed podcasts to use as related offers for their financial services white papers:

– The team wrote and recorded six- to eight-minute audio summaries of the white papers.

– They used active titles, such as “How to Avoid the Seven Pitfalls of…”

– They added podcast offers on the white paper download page to serve as content previews.

– They promoted the podcasts by emailing their house list and posting them to audio sites like iTunes.

The results:
– Conversion rates tripled when podcasts were added to the white paper landing page
– Podcast listeners were just as qualified as other leads
– 18% of listeners downloaded more than one podcast

Strategy #4. Recycle testimonials and case studies for advertising campaigns

It takes a lot of time and effort to find clients willing to share their testimonials. It then takes your team just as much effort to shape those stories into suitable case studies for your marketing campaigns.

Why not use as many channels as possible to drive prospects to that collateral?

Here’s one approach: Angela Sanders, Director, U.S. Marketing Operations, Aon, recruited several clients to share their success stories for use in the company’s booth at an annual trade show.

To prepare for the event, the team developed:
– Video testimonials from the clients
– Case studies that provided in-depth descriptions of the client/company relationship

The event was a huge success for Sanders and her team. But afterwards, they realized the marketing collateral could form the basis of a new print advertising campaign:

– They created a series of client-focused advertisements for one of their regular trade magazine ad placements.

– The ads provided a brief description of how the company helped a particular client, and included a URL for a dedicated website where prospects could view the video testimonials and case studies.

Strategy #5. Turn boring-but-necessary documents into video

Technical specifications and other product details play an important role in the later stages of the buying cycle — but they can make for pretty dry reading. Breathe new life into old docs by converting them into videos.

Brian Ellefritz, Sr. Manager, Customer Relationship Marketing, Cisco Systems, created five-minute videos of product managers guiding prospects through the company’s two- to three-page product data sheets.

Within six months, video files accounted for 21% of all product data downloads.

The post Reformat, Reuse, Recycle: 5 Strategies to Stretch your Marketing Content appeared first on StoryFirst Media Website.

Product Demos

Replacing the initial in-person demo or online meeting presentation keeps your salesforce more available to focus on ripe opportunities. Giving your prospects the opportunity to watch product demos whenever they want, allows them to become better informed more quickly. There’s no need to schedule a time to walk through the same canned demo; prospective customers can watch just what interests them. The result is that prospects will already understand your product during initial sales calls, resulting in more meaningful questions being answered earlier in the process.

Customer Testimonials

Giving a prospect access to a happy customer is one of the most effective ways to gain trust and ultimately close deals, and yet one of the most difficult things to scale. Your customers may love your product but they’ve still go their own job to do and life to live. Interviewing your customers for testimonials on video can help you to harness one of the most effective (and underutilized) marketing and sales techniques.

Cold Calling

Cold calling is a polarizing issue. It draws “w00ts” from those seeing success and “@%!#’s” from almost everybody else. Many companies still use cold calling effectively but it’s at the expense of the 90% of people who never wanted to hear from them in the first place.

Fortunately we’re seeing a positive shift… turning cold calling scripts into video. Taking your message and putting it into a video format allows you to improve the quality of the message, annoy less people, and focus on communicating with those people that are actually interested. The goal of most cold calling is to gauge interest and qualify potential leads. Letting people receive your message when it is convenient for them lowers barriers and makes it easier for the person to demonstrate interest. By tracking what a potential lead watches you can spend more time following up with meaningful conversations and less time playing phone tag.

In Person Training

Keeping your customers, employees, and prospects well educated about your company and products is crucial to keep your business moving forward. When there weren’t technological options, it was common to ask people to fly in from around the country and spend an afternoon learning about all the new whizbang products and services your company has been cooking up. Today, we’re seeing people in the same company, sometimes even the same office opting to educate each other using video instead of meeting in person. Using online video to educate means that there’s no travel to schedule, venue to book, or documents to print out. It allows people to learn on their own time when it fits into their schedule. Just as you knew how many people came to your event, you can track how many (and which) people watched the video to get a sense for the impact.

Help & Support

Providing a solid line of defense for customer support is key to keeping customers happy and prospects engaged. Some customers will tweet questions @you, others while be satisfied with a FAQ or forum, but others want more in-depth explanations. As expectations have shifted we’ve found an increasing number of people expect that they can find the solution to their problem without having to pick up a phone or send an email. This is great, but it puts the onus on you to make sure that you can help answer even the most complex solution to problems on-demand. We’re seeing more and more businesses embracing video to get this job done right. Over time every business will include videos to explain many of their complex processes.

What’s next?

While even a few years ago it would have been a pipe dream to use online video to make all of the above business processes more efficient and scalable, today it’s a reality. As technology advances and high quality video becomes easier and cheaper to produce, what will be the next generation of things in your business to be replaced with video?

Thanks to WISTIA.

The post 5 Things Video Will Replace in Your Business appeared first on StoryFirst Media Website.

Even if the ink on the business plan isn’t dry yet, you want to be armed with the social media tools that will play an important role in company communication, product and brand promotions, and business development for your start-up. Some of the tools in this list will be familiar, but it’s worth taking a moment to reframe how they might become power tools in a business context.

10. Monitter

As an entrepreneur, you need to know what people are saying about your company as well as your competitors. Enter Monitter, a service that monitors Twitter mentions in real-time in a multi-column interface reminiscent of TweetDeck. Simply input a search term into a column, add or remove columns as desired, and get an automatically-refreshing picture of what people are saying about your brand or competing brands in your space.

Pro Tip: By default, the Monitter interface is gray on black, which can be hard on the eyes. You can switch to a more typical color scheme by selecting the “light” theme in the menu at the upper right.

9. YouTube

You already know about YouTube, but have you thought about how it could help your business? Could your product benefit from an awesome video walkthrough? Could your marketing strategy include a viral video strategy that gets you lots of exposure at relatively low cost?

And now with Promoted Videos getting placement in AdSense units around the web, there’s even more incentive to think about leveraging social video as a brand exposure tool. If you can create interesting content that’s relevant to your brand or products, a positive visual association with your company can attract new interest, build company culture, turn inquiries into sales, and give back significant brand dividends over time.

Pro Tip: The most obvious and frequent business use of YouTube is for marketing and advertising, but don’t overlook other ways in which your company can leverage YouTube. Visual walkthroughs and FAQs can be a great boon to customer service. Videos of you and your team giving public presentations, speaking at conferences or engaging with the media can establish and enhance your company’s reputation as a thought leader. And don’t forget the utility of private videos for use in executive and new employee trainings and recording company events; access can be shared with only the people who should be able to see each item.

8. UserVoice

As a small business, it’s hard to juggle building and improving your products with supporting what’s already out there. That’s where UserVoice can help.

From bug reports to feature requests, UserVoice can help track and manage the feedback of your users and customers. Not only does it assure your userbase that you care about what they have to say, but it can potentially leverage the best suggestions from the people who are actually using your tool or service. Since users can vote on the ideas of other users, you can start to get a picture of the most-requested features and fixes for your app or service to feed back into your products’ lifecycles.

Pro Tip: You can also use UserVoice to get feedback on a limited release or beta version of a product by setting up a private forum or forums. You can send invites to specific email addresses, or limit your feedback to company-wide participants by restricting access by email domain.

7. MailChimp

Most reports and punditry on the death of email are a bit premature. The good old-fashioned mailing list is still a good way to maintain relationships with customers, especially when done well.

The web-based mailing list manager MailChimp offers list management, tracking and analysis, and custom HTML templates for up to 500 subscribers and 3000 emails a month for free. Paid plans kick in at larger subscriber numbers. Featuring integration with WordPress, Twitter, Salesforce and more, MailChimp is the list manager of choice for an impressive list of heavyweights including Mozilla, Intel, Canon, Fujitsu, Staples and more.

Pro Tip: MailChimp has a well-documented API that allows you to integrate the service with your own existing applications, tools, content management system or CRM solution. There’s a growing list of plug-ins already created for a number of platforms.

6. Get Satisfaction

Great customer support is important, but it can also be time-consuming and costly. Get Satisfaction aims to help by leveraging the strength of your user community and cutting down on repetitive support costs.

Get Satisfaction provides a forum where your customers can get answers to questions, solutions to problems, and submit feature and new product requests. Those answers and solutions are stored and searchable over time, cutting down on support costs and building trust with your userbase.

Used by small businesses and large popular brands alike, Get Satisfaction gets rave reviews for human customer service and helping to build communities around brands and products.

Pro Tip: Embeddable widgets allow you to bring the conversation back to your own company’s site or even within your products themselves. Drop a searchable FAQ or a feedback tab or page right into your website or service to integrate the customer service experience right where your users need it.

5. Twitter

What would this list be without our favorite microblogging service? From best practices for brands to tips for executives to using Twitter for customer service, there’s no shortage of creative ideas for leveraging Twitter for your business.

Even if you’re not in a technically-oriented industry, you’ll want to know which influencers in your domain are on Twitter and which of your potential clients and customers are there (hint: probably a bunch). You’ll want to wrap your head around hashtags for business, and more certainly check out Twitter’s own guidebook for businesses (as well as our own guidebook, of course!).

Pro Tip: Try not to use Twitter as a purely broadcast medium; whether one person or several posts to your official account, make sure your company is listening and interacting as well as simply posting. Strive for authenticity in your company’s tweets and try to think of it as taking part in a conversation, not just another soapbox platform.

4. Facebook

Facebook is the other social networking giant you’ll want to be sure your business has a presence on. It’s another powerful tool for building relationships, raising visibility for your brand, and targeting your customer niche.

With a robust and relatively low-cost advertising platform, you can connect directly to the potential customers or clients who might want to know about you. Optimization tools help you fine-tune and target your ads more intelligently, and get detailed insight into who is responding to your ads.

Pro Tip: Authenticity is key here too for maximum impact. With changes that made Facebook Pages more like personal pages, your brand’s home on Facebook is no longer relegated to fairly static profile information. Since the Wall Feed is usually the main point of entry for your fans and visitors, think of it as an opportunity to provide some sort of utility to your visitors, whether it be information, entertainment, or relevant expressions of your company’s culture and mission.

3. Basecamp

If you’re like most startups, you’ve got a heck of a lot going on. You need to keep on top of your projects and open loops, not just internally but with your clients, partners, and customers as well. That’s where a good project management tool comes in.

Basecamp from 37signals is a great and cost-effective web-based tool for project management and collaboration. Featuring to-do lists, milestones for important due-dates, file sharing, blog-style messaging, wiki-style writeboards, time tracking, and integration with the excellent group chat product Campfire, basic plans for small businesses start at $24 a month.

Pro Tip: Add extra functionality to your Basecamp environment or integrate it with your existing systems in the extras and add-ons department. For example if you use Freshbooks, you can even invoice your Basecamp projects via Freshbooks.

2. LinkedIn

From hiring to networking with cohorts and potential clients to participating in groups and question threads, LinkedIn is a powerful social network for entrepreneurs and business professionals of all stripes. It’s a great place to both discover and research potential job candidates (with a reported 75% of hiring managers using it over Facebook and Twitter), as well as both keeping up with and extending your network.

Pro Tip: Although it’s not an overnight success solution, positioning yourself as an expert in the LinkedIn Answers domain(s) relevant to your business can be a great way to increase your authority and drive new interest to your business. Don’t underestimate the power of asking for advice here as well.

1. Google Apps for Domains

Start-up costs for outfitting an office with networking and computing equipment are staggering enough as it is without even taking into account the software and maintenance components. One area for adventurous entrepreneurs to cut costs in the latter department lies in the realm of typical office staples: email, calendaring and the office suites businesses typically need to use to prepare documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

Instead of paying an IT staff to set up, host and maintain your own mail servers, Google Apps for Domains can handle custom email addresses at your own company’s URL. As an alternative to Microsoft Outlook worth considering, Gmail also integrates nicely with Google Calendar for your group calendaring needs.

And whereas once Microsoft Office was one of your only choices in the office suites department, Google Documents now handles document, spreadsheet and presentation preparation with aplomb — all the while making it easy to share and collaborate with colleagues without having to email documents around or check items out of a central repository.

Pro Tip: For the truly frugal, you can even opt for the totally free Standard Edition which includes basic Gmail, calendaring, Google Docs and Google Sites. Premier Edition will run you $50 per user per year, but increases user email storage to 25GB, adds more security features and guarantees you up-time and support.

Posted by Mashable Blog on October 26th, 2009

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