An Insider’s Guide to Storytelling: The Key to Making Connections

October 5, 2011 by

We all want to tell a story.  And when it comes down to it, storytelling is a key to making connections.  Not only personal connections, but business connections as well.  Being able to tell a good story can make the difference between a missed connection and a lasting impression.

There are a few basic tips for telling a good story.  Much like a reporter, you’ve got to figure out what your main point is, why it’s relevant to your audience, and how it will benefit them.  For the sake of explanation let’s focus on a story from Mashable about Facebook giving away free advertising to small businesses.  In this story, as in every story, you need to establish what it is we’re discussing.  Mashable let’s us know that Facebook’s Marketing Solutions is spearheading this operating, as well as why they’re doing it.  They tell us why it’s relevant by giving us a statistic that the audience will find interesting.  And finally, they give a call to action to allow the reader to follow up and create a benefit.

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This is the first part of a five part series on storytelling.  To watch the entire series, click here. You can find Butch Stearns on twitter @ButchStearns and you can find Tyler Pyburn on Twitter @TyPyburn

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The Pulse Network Solutions – Executive Brief 3.0

August 12, 2011 by

This is part three of a five part series between Butch Stearns, host at The Pulse Network, and Allen Bonde, Chief Marketing Officer at The Pulse Network, as they explore the lifecycle of digital marketing and the new solutions offered by The Pulse Network.


At the Pulse Network we’ve developed a solution that is designed to capture, produce, and deliver a months worth of proactive, C-Level content with just one hour of your executive’s time.  As someone who struggles to find time to do all my writing, it’s a pretty cool idea.  And it’s the idea behind our new Executive Brief 3.0.

It seems like just yesterday that marketers were struggling to convince our CEOs that we needed to expose our business to social media.  Now that everyone understands the concept of social media, and knows it’s essential to be engaging on social channels to reach customers where they congregate, we face a different challenge: getting these same executives to make the time to blog, and tweet and create posts so they can stay in touch and (especially in B2B) reach influencers.  The irony of course is that the people who are most equipped to tell the company’s story, and represent the brand on social channels, have the least amount of time to do so!  This is where Executive 3.0 steps in and provides a practical solution.

As I’ve  discussed, effective social marketing starts with a good story.  And blogging is a core way that executives can tell stories, start discussions and articulate a point of view.  Your corporate blog is the voice of the company, and needs to be authentic, informed and informative!  Yet, it takes a good half a day to write a good post, when you include the time to read, research, get links, and distribute it.  Multiply this by 4 or 5 – since it’s good practice to have each contributor doing at least one new post per week, and we are talking 2+ days a month just for blogging!

Executive Brief 3.0 breaks this bottleneck by building an outline/rundown for a blog ‘series,’ capturing the executive’s perspectives, thoughts and examples in one 30-minute video interview, creating 5 segments of content, post producing the output, and creating video blog posts, vignettes, transcripts, and even sound bites that can be easily cleaned up by your PR or marketing folks and turned into a month’s worth of social content.  What’s it look like?  This is how I created this post!

 

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Using TPN’s video engine and production capabilities, our social media know-how, and managing the process end-to-end makes it all work.  It’s a great way to tap your best storytellers, and create valuable, repurpose-able content assets.

Also, in case you missed Part 2 of this segment, I talked about virtual event marketing and how our Webinar 3.0 can benefit your business as well. Thanks for reading!

Allen Bonde is the CMO of The Pulse Network and can be found on Twitter or email,abonde@thepulsenetwork.com.

Butch Stearns is the COO of The Pulse Network and can be found on his Blog, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Filed Under: CEO Corner, The Pulse on Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Making The Most of Your SEO – An Introduction

August 10, 2011 by

 

This is Part One of a Four Part Series in Which Nick Saber, President of The Pulse Network, and Butch Stearns, C.O.O. of The Pulse Network, Discuss How to Get the Most Out of Your Search Engine Optimization Strategy.

Most companies aren’t thinking about SEO the right way.

Image Credit: seo-tutorial.net

Search Engine Optimization strategies can’t live on an island.  In the past, SEO could be considered an isolated strategy, but as search engines have become more intelligent, we need to update the way we think about driving inbound leads.

It’s more important than ever to bring your social media strategy, your content strategy and your SEO strategy together.  In Februrary of this year, Google changed the game with their release of  “Google Panda”.  SEO used to be about keywords and link-building, but search engines are now thinking like people.  As a result, the impact of popularity of content and volume of discussions on social media have a much larger impact on your website’s SEO.

In order to truly get the most out of your SEO and make sure that your website lands above the fold on a search engine, you must work to combine your strategies into one.

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In Part 2 of this series, we’ll get into the logistics of keyword analysis, and how you can use it to your advantage in building an SEO strategy.

Nick Saber is the President of The Pulse Network.  You can find out more about Nick on his blog and by following him on twitter @NickSaber

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Storytelling Drives Social Media Marketing: Conversations Lead to Conversations

August 5, 2011 by

This is part four of a five part series between Tyler Pyburn, host at The Pulse Network, and Allen Bonde, Chief Marketing Officer at The Pulse Network, as they determine how storytelling drives social media marketing.
It’s every marketer’s goal to get people to go from casual conversations about your brand, to having conversations about your products, to having them consider buying the product – and buying it, and then telling everyone about it!

In referring back to our formula for social marketing, if you create shared experiences and make it easy to spread the word, it’s exponentially easier to provide in-context offers or sign-ups that takes you down the path to social commerce. This is really about in-context marketing, and at it’s extreme we are talking about bringing the ‘store’ right into the channel like JC Penny’s facebook page – and early example of “F-Commerce.”

Shopping right from your favorite merchant’s Facebook page may be a stretch for a lot of companies, but delivering deals, creating a way to share offers with friends, and building fun ways to talk about your products and spread the word to their friends is key to creating more educated – and motivated buyers.

 

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In case you’ve missed Part 3 of this series, in that post we talked about curation, one of the hotter topics in social media today.

 

In part 5 of this series, we will talk B2B conversations and social marketing, and the best ways to engage in these types of communities.

 

Allen Bonde is the CMO of The Pulse Network and can be found on Twitter or email, abonde@thepulsenetwork.com.

Tyler Pyburn is a host at The Pulse Network and can be reached on his twitter or e-mail, tpyburn@thepulsenetwork.com

 

 

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Storytelling Drives Social Media Marketing: The Art of Curation

August 3, 2011 by

This is part three of a five part series between Tyler Pyburn, host at The Pulse Network, and Allen Bonde, Chief Marketing Officer at The Pulse Network, as they determine how storytelling drives social media marketing.

 

After breaking down the TPN Content Model in Part 2 of this series, I want to now fous in on a vital piece of that model: content curation.

There are many definitions and active discussions about the topic of content curation, but at its core, curation is simply the process of gathering and organizing (and maintaining) artifacts. In social media marketing, this is how we capture, deliver and package pieces of content to fuel the development of a community. Although people have been collecting things – and content – for long before the advent of social networking, whether it’s gathering news articles or just compiling a group of links together, curation for social marketing is a lot about creating lists (like in Twitter), building groups of content, and packaging each link or ‘translating’ each article into the appropriate language for the targeted channel.

Curation in today’s multi-channel world is also a matter of being a ‘transmedia’ storyteller and being equally comfortable in each channel or outlet.

A great example of this type of storyteller is Garrison Keiller. Garrison and his Prairie Home shows do an excellent job in making his stories authentic and related to the listener’s personal experiences. Of course the radio format also enables ongoing stories or serials, and is very much a variety show that draws content from many sources, packages it up in familiar segments, and delivers it a format that builds community.  The key: make your stories about the audience, and your audience will want to share them as well!

 

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In case you missed our past episode, you can see it here. In Part 4 we’ll look at driving conversation from conversations.

 

Allen Bonde is the CMO of The Pulse Network and can be found on Twitter or email,abonde@thepulsenetwork.com.

Tyler Pyburn is a host at The Pulse Network and can be reached on his twitter or e-mail, tpyburn@thepulsenetwork.com

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: The Pulse on Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Email Marketing, How and Where

August 2, 2011 by

 

This is part three of a five part series featuring Stephen Saber, Chief Executive Officer of The Pulse Network, and Butch Stearns, Chief Operating Officer of The Pulse Network, in which they discuss the changing landscape of e-mail marketing.
 

If you believe in the survey done by Hubspot, then the next question is what type of content needs to be pushed through e-mail.  This is where marketers are contending with a multichannel message*.  I dole out some tips on how to understand your channel and your target market.

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In part four of the series we will focus on e-mail marketing metrics.

Also check out part one of the series on how e-mail marketing has changed and part two where we discuss how to make your e-mail content king.

 

 

Stephen Saber is the CEO of The Pulse Network and can be found on his Blog, Twitter, and LinkedIn.  Butch Stearns is the COO of The Pulse Network and can be found on his Blog, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

*During the interview I stated that the multichannel study was done by Mashable, it in fact was conducted by Marketing Profs.

Filed Under: The Pulse on Marketing, The Pulse on Tech Tagged With: , , , , ,

Creating Good Content, Tips to Communicate

August 1, 2011 by

This is part two of a five part series between Tyler Pyburn, host at The Pulse Network, and Butch Stearns, Chief Operating Officer at The Pulse Network, as they hash out what goes into creating good content.

 

In order to enhance your communication skills one must understand the concept of being a great communicator.

It all starts with talking about content that you care about. For instance, I love to canoe and kayak. When I am out in the water I will talk about what I love about this hobby and why I care so much about it. Talking about things that you care about is where the concept of “creating good content” should derive from. Also, to avoid going off on a tangent when talking subject matter that I care about, it’s essential to organize your thoughts. The organization should be focused on having a conversation, which gives your audience the sense that you’re not reading off of cue cards. Lastly, don’t be afraid to use references. In using an article, a video, or even a person as your reference it not only provides your content with another expert testimony, but also builds a form of trust between you and your audience.

 

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In Part One of this series I talked about where to start when creating good content.

In part three of this series I will talk about keeping someone’s interest in communicating effectively with them.

Butch Stearns is the COO of The Pulse Network and can be found on his Blog, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Tyler Pyburn is a host at The Pulse Network and can be reached on his twitter or e-mail, tpyburn@thepulsenetwork.com

 

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Storytelling Drives Social Media Marketing: The Formula

July 29, 2011 by

This is part one of a five part series between Tyler Pyburn, host at The Pulse Network, and Allen Bonde, Chief Marketing Officer at The Pulse Network, as they determine how storytelling drives social media marketing.

Telling a good story is essential to reaching your target audience.

This is especially the case in social media marketing.  In fact, I’ve always thought that good marketing is good storytelling.  But in social media marketing, the trick is getting your customers to tell these stories for you!  We can break down the formula that makes this work on social channels into three parts: content, connections, and lastly participation (and influence of participants).

The goal for those of us in social media marketing is to package up the appropriate content and then translate it into the language of the specific channel.  For instance, on Twitter you need to keep your story very short, but can also use links and hashtags to make it easy to learn more and share your content.  The way you format your story to fit the language of each social media channel determines your audiences engagement and also how effectively you generate word of mouth and take your audience down a path where they’re expecting to hear the next story – and maybe even an offer or pitch!

I lay out some of these ideas in my conversation with Tyler, so check it out:


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So, what do you think?  Which brands do the best job with storytelling?  Add your thoughts in the comments, and look for part two of this series, when we’ll explore how content can be used to build communities.

 

Allen Bonde is the CMO of The Pulse Network and can be found on Twitter or email, abonde@thepulsenetwork.com.

Tyler Pyburn is a host at The Pulse Network and can be reached on his twitter or e-mail, tpyburn@thepulsenetwork.com

Filed Under: The Pulse on Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Driving Revenue – Revenue Model at The Pulse Network

July 28, 2011 by

 

This is Part One of a Five Part Series Featuring Colin Bower, Chief Revenue Officer at the Pulse Network, and Butch Stearns, Chief Operating Officer at The Pulse Network Discussing the Topic of Generating Revenue.


Every company needs to make money to remain viable.  The trick is discovering the most efficient way for your business to take what it does best and turn it into revenue.

At The Pulse Network, we generate revenue by creating and syndicating content for targeted communities.  But content goes so far beyond videos and images.Content takes many forms, and there’s potential revenue in every piece.  One of the ways that we create content is through face to face events, such as Inbound Marketing Summit.

I sat down with Butch Stearns to discuss the different types of content The Pulse Network creates, and the revenue model we’ve created to use that content.

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In Part 2 of this series, we’ll discuss the five ways that The Pulse Network monetizes its content.

Filed Under: The Pulse on Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,