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.

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.