How to Tell Stories through New Media

Check out experts Howard Greenstein and Dean Landsman speaking about this on YouTube. The video was made for the Uplift Academy’s Better World Network. However, it’s articulate and helpful for any organization that wants to understand how better to speak to markets, understand licensing, and breaking down barriers to new media broadcasts.

Lessons On Turning The Political Tide With Online Campaigning

Playing an unlikely but crucial role in the recent Presidential elections in France was a five-minute video called the “Human Bomb”. It was produced as advisors worried that Sarkozy was being constantly demonized in the online media through videos like la France D’après, which imagines a new repressive nation state under Sarkozy with riot police, urban unrest and burning cars. 

The video drew more than 450,000 viewers attracted by an old chapter from Sarkozy’s life: as the brash suburban mayor of Neuilly sur Seine personally negotiates with the “Human Bomb,” a deranged man who seized kindergarten students as hostages in 1993.

The video offers a pensive look at this past along with equally pensive soundtrack music (“Honor Him” from the movie, The Gladiator). According to Arnaud Dassier, a strategist for Sarkozy, their “Human Bomb” video was so effective that people were literally left in tears. “We were losing the battle on Dailymotion and YouTube and before we launched this video there was not one pro-Sarko video in the top 50.”

Accorodng to the IHT – When the backstage story of this presidential campaign is written, new media will play a starring role. American campaign strategists have already traveled to France for a glimpse of the new political rituals and pronounced them “one click ahead” of techniques in the United States, as Michael Murphy, an advisor to the California governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, put it.

Decide whether it’s worth reaching for tissues when you watch it.

Leadership Lessons From The Chairman and CEO at J. C. Penney

Donald Seibert as chairman and chief executive officer at J. C. Penney, he gained a reputation as an effective organiser and peacemaker. And in peace, the company prospered. Here are his key points for leadership in any organisation:

1. Understandyour own objectives, your own sense of mission and goals. Clarity and simplicity of the mission and objectives is vital to understanding and communicating the message.  

2. Clearly articulate those objectives to your organisational leaders and managers, and try to get some feedback as to how well they understand them. Whenever the J. C Penney’s management team prepared to issue a statement, whether it was a press release or an internal memo, they asked themselves two questions: (1) Is this easily understood? (2) Can this be misunderstood? These questions are quite different, and often the original statement failed the second test and needed to be rewritten. How do you measure whether you as a leader are getting your ideas across? A number of techniques could be used: attitude surveys, informal visits by members of the senior management committee, discussions with people at different levels of the company. If you take time to ask questions, you find out quickly what your people understand and do not understand.

3. Exercise patience. It will take time before you have enough of your staff behind you to turn objectives into working programs. There is a need to constantly communicate the organisations mission and objectives until a tipping point of sorts is reached and people become aligned with the objectives and facilitate or enable the execution of programs.

4. Take inventory of your personal resources and those available within your organisation. Management is the process of assuring that the programs and objectives we have set are implemented. Leadership, on the other hand, is the process of motivating people. Both are strategic skills. Every manager or leader needs to know what he has to work with before any work can get done. This means taking inventory of resources, understanding the personnel’s strengths and weaknesses, reviewing all personnel — the human resources — noting where they’re placed, and eliminating structural impediments. These are basic management tools. If a manager or leader is not strong in motivating, he can enlist key people who have demonstrated over time that they have influence with others. If you can identify these people and get them committed to your objectives, they can help sell your programs and motivate others to put them into effect.

Why Include Twitter In Your Mix

 While there has been quite a bit of buzz with regards to twitter, a visit to the homepage would probably leave the uninitiated rather unimpressed. Robert Scoble calls it “blogging mated with IM” and is a frequent user. While some say that it will be dead pretty soon – I do agree that at the moment it adds to the general clutter or noise and would probably not be worthwhile to most organisations. However there may well be a few uses for twitter which are as below:

1. Great for live events or as a broadcast tool.
Kim Bayne offers a few suggestions including a feedback channel for customer service, marketing ticker for journalists and analysts, and monitoring of system status. Key to this would be the ability to segment your Twitter life into different areas if it is to be relevant to various social networks. Also the ability to broadcast perspectives or conversations around a particular event or festival would become more of a usable feature. This would enable the ability to keep tabs on the pulse of an event and enable people to decide where to spend their time.

2. Promotional element
It would allow marketers to user developed content marketing campaigns and other reality based marketing campaigns could be used to encourage user dialogue and participation. It really offers an IM type dimension to the campaign without the issues of privacxy and permissions usually associated with IM.

3. Collaborative feedback
Watching content online or on TV along with others – allowing for feedback, ideas and impressions all while reading those of others could be a powerful tool.

4.  Information aggregation and mashups.
Charlene Li from Forrestor writes about being able to get Twitter Weather, Tube Twitter  and mashups like Twittermaps.com, which uses specific tagging in Twitter to map your locations. While they are cool features they have little use for marketing and PR. Dealtagger.com however is of interest in that it allows any deals that you tag on the service to also show up on Twitter.

In its current state Twitter will really only appeal to a small group of marketers. However given trends with other social networking services could well evolve with new features and functionality to actually become a useful communication and information tool.

Where To Invest In PR and Marketing For Tech Products & Services

Charlene Li from Forrester has put out a new fascinating reporton social technographics which looks at how consumers approach social technologies. Forrester segmented the online audience into several different stratas – what they call a ladder of participation. They found that “Inactives” are by far the dominant group (52%). They’re followed by spectators, joiners, critics, collectors and last but not least creators. This last cluster, according to the analyst firm, dabbles in lots of different activities but few do all of them. See the chart below for more.

While those who engage tend to get all of the attention, the thickest part of the ladder is in the vast majority of people who have no desire to participate. I imagine this number will shrink some in the years ahead, particularly as the generation that grew up with the Web enters the workforce. However, there will always be a large portion of the online audience that remains just that – consumers. While technology is flattening the marketing landscape, there’s a need for agencies that can help guide clients in the dynamic two-way world. Marketing and PR is best suited to thrive in this environment and getting the right mix is where it all starts.

So what can PR and marketing learn from this?

The report provides insights into what drives and motivates people to engage with the web. For each program, you can assess where your audience sits on this continuum. Are they inactives, creators or somewhere in between? The key is to then devise the right kind of communication strategy depending on what you discover. While the ladder provides the outlines marketing and PR will need to provide the appropriate creative components for the concerned audience.

Here are a few ideas:

Let’s say you have a start-up that has a new piece of software that bloggers will love. Then it would seem appropriate that executing a peer-to-peer program that targets creators, critics and collectors would be main thrust  of your strategy. In addition to the possibility of tapping into social networks, blogging and other Web 2.0 communities through the use of the peer to peer program. Media coverage targeting outlets that bloggers read would also help.

Where as if you have software like a 37 signals product that has value to a large number of consumers, then you’d want a broader mix that combines the best of new media/mainstream media, all while investing proportionately in strategies that reflects the groups on the ladder.

How Green is Green

According to a FC  article titled “Is California Sacrificing Green for Green?” California is fast-tracking several big alternative-energy projects in the southernmost quarter of the state. The proposal to build power lines, substations, and transmission towers has provoked the ire of environmental groups given that the infrastructure such as substations and transmission towers need to be built through national forest and wildlife preserves.

According to authorities given the location of resources and that existing corridors are too  narrow to accommodate the new lines, people are going to have to weigh up the advantages and disadvantages of going green.

What is interesting is that Green has taken on a whole new meaning in the last year. It used to convey values of preservation, naturalism–less is more. Today it essentially means ecologically responsible consumption (without clearly defining responsible or limiting consumption). California has an opportunity to merge these two value systems into one true green.

Arnold’s message on the whole issue is as follows:

“People say, ‘You can’t get everything done,” Arnold told Fast Company. “But the only way to know if you can lift 500 pounds is if you put 500 pounds on the bar.”

Maybe it’s time to pump it up to 1,000 pounds, Arnold.

The last three or four reps is what makes the muscle grow. This area of pain divides the champion from someone else who is not a champion. That’s what most people lack, having the guts to go on and just say they’ll go through the pain no matter what happens.

It’ll be interesting who wins out in this attempt to kill out the use of coal and inspire the growth of renewable energy for Californians (ergo, Americans) who have products that are necessary for everyday life – from lighting, to air conditioning, to pool pumps.

Stay tuned for further developments on the Green for Green issue.

How to Market with Finite Resources

The best way to understand the marketing process, the way messages are sent, received, acted upon, and spread, is to think of it as fire says Greg Stielstra author of PyroMarketing: The Four-Step Strategy to Ignite Customer Evangelists and Keep Them for Life. PyroMarketing is a new way to think about marketing—one that acknowledges and accommodates human nature and society’s new realities.

If you have a couple of minutes watch the video below.