Social Media Butterflies

This piece is from Evivio Blog - I selected this piece because today is the beginning of the Reinvention Summit where people from all over the world gather together to hear and share stories of change. All businesses are going through reinvention, telling the right stories to connect with their audiences in a new way is crucial. 

Here are some highlights:

**Stories are the new currency in digital marketing, as digital media allow consumers a surfeit of channels to listen to and engage on.

**Consumers want to be engrossed and entertained, and as with other entertainment media, they expect a story.

But stories are not just entertaining.

**Stories are useful, descriptive, beautiful, interesting: shareable.

**Shareable, and participatory: when your audience shares your content, they often add their perspective to it, adding social credence that can further enhance its relevance

**The iconic marketing goal of the social media era is ‘viral’ content – a video, photo or other content that spreads like a virus from host to host, making millions of people laugh, cry or think.

**But one must consider how many of those attempts at ‘viral’ marketing have succeeded.

**On a Wikipedia list of the most viral internet memes very few of them are associated with a brand and those that are were almost always created by a third party or viewed as a public joke.

**Trying to produce a viral internet meme is like trying to stand up on a water slide. The chances that you will fall flat on your face and look pretty silly in the process are very high.

**Rather than attempting to create ‘viral’ content, marketers should aim for ‘shareable’ content. That is, content that genuinely affects their target demographic; content that addresses real problems or communicates similar ideals.

Selected by Jan Gordon covering "Storytelling, Social Media and Beyond"

Read full article here: [http://ht.ly/aiwUY]