Millions of updates are shared on social media every day and years worth of content is spread along with it. When we log in to Twitter we are greeted with “What’s happening?” On Facebook it’s with “What’s going on?” Social media demands content from us and is driven by user-generated content, but it adds a lot of noise across the social media channels we are using and on the social web.
Some organisations sport hundreds of followers and unique visitors to their blog every month while others have thousands of followers and generate so much more unique traffic. Which one has more influence? Of course you will think that the organization with a larger audience has more influence, and in some cases, you might be correct. But, digital influence goes so much further than the number of people following you or the traffic you are generating to your blog....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Thoughtful look inside "real" social media to influence...
Outstanding article... blogging is harder than most people think and that is why so many quit.... My blog is finally starting to pay off after a long while.... have to keep going even when only a few are reading... thanks...
A dialogue on the subject of organizational storytelling; narrative as a leadership capability. Author and story consultant David Hutchens of www.DavidHutche...
[Interview with storytelling author Paul Smith. I just finished Smith's book "Lead with a Story" and it's a must-read ~ Jeff]
Storytellers change their presentation style in different situations. What is suitable for an intimate venue, will not work as well in a large venue. What works for a circle of ten people, does not work in the same way for a circle of twenty-five. Even the hour of day, among many other things, might call for a different capacity or approach. Not everything is possible or fit for storytelling. Amplification might solve a volume issue but it doesn’t do much for intimacy. On the other hand there are situations where it does. The way to gain ‘elasticity’ that will enable a storyteller to adapt as needed, is by learning how to stretch and fold his own wings. It’s like learning how to diminish and increase sound in music. It’s not only changing the volume – the entire sound-production mechanism adapts.
[Image credit: brewbooks on Flickr]
Ahhh -- words of wisdom from one of my colleagues and favorite storytellers -- Llimor Shiponi. This post of hers is all about storytelling elasticity and the power of oral storytelling.
In this electronic age when digital storytelling is often viewed as THE SOLUTION -- this post is a reminder that oral storytelling is still the gold standard.
Want executive presence? Focus on building oral storytelling skills and sharing your stories in person as often as you can.
Want to increase business? Focus on building oral storytelling skills and sharing your stories in person as often as you can.
There's no substitute. Enjoy Limor's wise words of wisdom here!
And thank you Gregg Morris @greggvm for originally finding and sharing this article!
This review was written by Karen Dietz for her curated content on business storytelling at www.scoop.it/t/just-story-it ;
Campaigns are gearing up to shape social media reactions in real time.
When President Obama and Mitt Romney take the stage for their first debate in Denver tomorrow night, a far more extensive shadow debate will unfold across social media. Campaigns and supporters will aim to seize the online "conversation" in a vast game of spin unfolding well beyond the telecast and media coverage.
As a sign of just how pervasive and crucial social media has become, in some states elected officials are only one degree of "friend" separation from nearly every Facebook account holder in that state, says JD Schlough, a Democratic political strategist. And by one analyst firm's count, Twitter has 140 million U.S. users, more than 30 million of whom joined in 2012 alone.
"All social media is a conversation, but the amount of people having that conversation in 2012 is a lot greater than it was in 2008. That conversation is going to happen whether the campaign influences it or not—so they better get their message out there and hold the other side accountable for mistakes," Schlough says....
Overall the goal is not just to more broadly deliver a message, but to ensure that it is delivered from trusted friends—the holy grail of marketing. After all, you are more likely to see a movie when a friend recommends it, rather than if you've seen an advertisement.
That's why campaigns want to use all means possible to prime social media to distribute talking points in real-time. "If we know that people believe stuff they hear from friends more than politicians, and one of them does something stupid, or smart—or if there is a contrast on an issue—it amplifies the impact of the debate to hear and to react and add your own spin," Schlough says. "Much like the convention, they will seek to use the social media to capitalize on the good moments and fact-check the hits the other side is throwing."...
[Here's a great analysis of the impact of social media post-debate ~ Jeff]
I recently stumbled across the Infographic of Who’s Who of Social Influence Measurement and while it’s no surprise to see the social influencer industry growing, it’s a little worrisome....
No influencer app can ever accurately measure sentiment by running keywords through a program, because it can’t account for the different contexts of human conversations. Only a human being can do that. And heck, that can even be challenging for humans to determine when they are solely reading words and aren't able to see people’s facial expressions and body language as they speak.
But as organizations try and continue to justify the ROI of social media, there is a lot of pressure to produce lengthy reports to illustrate how they are preforming – thus the growth of influencer apps and products. My advice? Take influencer scores and reports by Klout, Kred, Twitalyzer, etc. with a grain of salt. If you are really engaged with your community, you will manually see how influential you are within your niche community....
Klout and Kred use single score influence metrics that are comprised by many data points. A new crop of software provides channel-specific scores-Which is best?
Big news last week as Klout announced a significant overhaul of its influencer identification platform. Several new features are being rolled out to improve accuracy and add transparency to the much-discussed and oft-maligned system....
I’ve said this before, and I’ll keep saying it. The biggest problem with this entire field of inquiry is that it often confuses “influence” and “audience”....
If you believe channel influence is important, there is an emerging and expanding crop of analytics companies that provide excellent insight into the situation....
[Must-read for public relations and social PR strategists via @JayBaer - JD]
A great infographic about how to make your message stick. This is perfect for any budding social entrepreneurs trying to figure out how to convey their ideas to potential funders, partners, employees,...
LOVE this infographic! It's all about using storytelling and story elements to make your content stick. The infographic makes perfect sense, is easy to read and understand, and is right on!
Keep this one handy and refer to it often :)) I know I will be using it in my classes and workshops.
Most of us are in love with the idea of influence.
Some time back, Malcolm Gladwell came up with an easy to understand model of influence. It seemed to resonate with many of us who are deeply immersed in the web and have seen, first hand, the apparent randomness of online sentiment and human digital behaviour. His book, The Tipping Point took its lead from Stanley Milgram’s principle that we are all only separated by six degrees – suggesting that within a network, the “hub” or “connector” plays a vital role in the transmission of information across that network.
I have always viewed this theory with scepticism – preferring the strength of weak ties model popularised by Duncan Watts. It’s a shame in a way, as the Gladwell model – the Tipping Point – is easily articulated and understood, while Watts’ approach is more complicated, random and difficult to apply in the real world. Yet, even a casual glance at the social media landscape will show you just how difficult it can be to boil “influence” down to a single factor or variable. Klout has tried it as have PeerIndex and Kred – and there are dozens more on the horizon offering different versions, metrics and tools that attempt to measure the chaos of our behaviours and patterns of indifference.
Ultimately, when it comes to influence, I keep returning to one important point –> it’s not about influence, it’s about trust. And until we, as business leaders, as marketers and as publishers of information and content, understand this, we will continue to dance around the real issue....
...There are four key criteria for determining who is influential to you stakeholders online:
- Frequency. How often are they writing about topic - Relevance, i.e. are they writing about topics that are relevant and interesting to your stakeholders, are they producing content that is interesting to them. - Resonance – do stakeholders find the content interesting enough to forward, share, like or retweet? - Trust – do people actually trust the information that those influencers are putting out there...
[An excellent look at online influence, measurement, evaluation and monitoring from KD Paine - JD ]
For leaders at all levels, being an effective public speaker is essential for success. Here are some tried-and-true tips from the pros to help you raise your game.
I like this article because from the very beginning the author talks about how to give a fabulous presentation using story skills. Like -- "begin with the end in mind" and "simplify your messages" and "tell your personal stories."
She gives solid advice about things to remember to connect with your audience, how to avoid the perils of PowerPoint, and how to avoid sameness.
Good tips and insights all. And I've only mentioned a few. I wish more speakers took these ideas to heart.
...PR and marketing types alike dream of the influencer, the person who will trigger an online contagion (a.k.a. viral event). They desperately look for that powerful personality who will become their brand hero.
Finding the ultimate influencer eludes marketers in spite of modern theory. Regardless of measurable influence tools like Klout or the not so revolutionary definition of the influencer as someone who inspires action, today’s influencer theories and approaches still fail to identify the online bezerker....
Can you use Klout to help the effectiveness of your sales and marketing teams? Here's a test case.
One of the things I have been interested in is examining practical applications of Klout and social scoring to an internal enterprise.
If you are unclear about social scoring systems and what they attempt to measure, it might be useful to start with this blog post about Why Klout Matters. Like a credit score, let’s assume that companies like Klout, Kred and Appinions are beginning to measure something that correlates to an individual’s social media effectiveness.
I had an opporunity to test some of these ideas last week when I conducted a social influence workshop with a global services company in the UK....
It was nothing short af a revelation to these top executives. Here are a couple of observations.
[Valuable read on influence and social measurement - JD]
...In a business climate obsessed with PowerPoint presentations, complex graphs and charts, and lengthy reports, storytelling may seem to some like a soft way of getting hard stuff done. It’s anything but that. Steve’s experience with storytelling is, in fact, supported by the data.
Research shows that when leaders want to communicate standards, stories are a much more effective means of communication than are corporate policy statements, data about performance, and even a story plus the data. Information is more quickly and accurately remembered when it is first presented in the form of an example or story....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Another Jim Kouzes quote: "Stories are a powerful tool for teaching people about what’s important and what’s not, what works and what doesn’t, what is and what could be. Through stories, leaders pass on lessons about shared values and get others to work together."
...I agree that content curation is often misunderstood and, therefore, misused as a shortcut to thought leadership. And I have no quarrel with the point that you need to create your own content that articulates your vision in order to establish thought leadership.
However, I would say it differently.
Thought leadership is about demonstrating clarity of vision and in order to establish it you need to create content that expresses that vision. But you also need to show that you can recognize that vision in others. To my mind, thought leaders both articulate their own vision and identify it and tease it out of other people’s work. It’s not an either/or proposition....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Really thoughtful look at curation and thought leadership by Jay Palter.
"Psychologists and psychotherapists have long relied on the power of narrative storytelling to help their patients make sense of their world. In fact, it's been said that we are our narratives. For evidence that this may be true, pay attention to how people shape their stories about themselves. As it turns out, there is a big difference between the way we narrate events that have really happened to us and those we've invented."
Image by prosotphoto (Shutterstock)
Love this article! We now have a storytelling lie detector kit. As storytelling rises in popularity in a whole host of business applications, keeping our antenna sharp for fabrications is going to be important.
Remember these 'tells' and let's keep on focusing on authenticity.
Thanks Gregg Morris @greggvm for finding and sharing this article!
This review was written by Karen Dietz for her curated content on business storytelling at www.scoop.it/t/just-story-it ;
It's just not right. Every person is created equal, right? As such, everyone's opinion should count equally.
Unfortunately, that’s not the case and I caught myself falling victim to influence checking. Part of my job is to monitor the social media interactions that happen for various business social media profiles and pages. The Klout plugin, for better or for worse, makes it easier for me to know when to respond thoughtfully and when to dismiss people. I’m not proud to admit it, but it happens. When one of the profiles receives a Tweet, for example, from someone with no followers and a low Klout score, my response to them is quick and simple, almost dismissive. When an “influencer” engages one of the profiles, it’s time to get into a conversation for them and all of their followers to witness.
It wasn’t always this way. There was a time not too long ago when everyone got equal treatment. It took a silly public conversation with someone to make me realize that there are times when you just shouldn’t push it. Privacy prevents me from going into details, but I made the mistake of getting into a public Twitter argument with someone trolling one of our pages. I kept it professional, of course, and had a 4 or 5 Tweet conversation with someone who wasn’t happy with one of our clients. It wasn’t until after the discussion that I checked more closely and realized that the person who was trolling had just created the Twitter account, that it had 4 followers, and that had I ignored it other than the initial apology, that nobody would have seen the conversation. Instead, I broadcast the conversation to a one-sided audience: out client’s....
Twitter cofounder and board member Ev Williams on Monday suggested that the microblogging site de-emphasize users’ follower counts in favor of some better algorithm for measuring their influence, according to Buzzfeed.
"The thing I think would be more interesting than followers is... retweets," Williams said, adding that a simple follower count “doesn’t capture your distribution.” He went on: “The dream metric is how many people saw your tweet.”
But why stop there? After all, people might see your tweet and ignore it. Or they might see one tweet but not the next, because they don’t follow you. Or they might be influenced when you tweet about one thing but ignore you when you tweet about something else. What Twitter is really after, as it tries to woo advertisers, is a way to objectively measure users’ true influence on the site. Unfortunately, that leads to a game of whack-a-mole. Every time you try to measure one thing, something else pops up that you’re not adequately measuring.
Take the example of Klout, a startup that was already trying to do what Twitter might try to do now. After working for more than two years to try to get a bead on people’s online influence via Twitter, then Twitter and Facebook, then Twitter and Facebook and Google+, it remained dissatisfied that Justin Bieber outranked President Obama. So it began trying to incorporate offline influence into its ratings as well, drawing on sites like Wikipedia and LinkedIn as proxies for real-world stature....
[Trying to read the tea leaves of online influence - JD]
I love this article and am using its tips and outline this week for several presentations I am doing. While it is focused on sales, this post follows the same pattern I use when teaching my MBA students on business communication and influential presentations.
Keep this article/outline handy because it works!!
This review was written by Karen Dietz for her curated content on business storytelling at www.scoop.it/t/just-story/it
[A must read for storytellers and content pros - JD]
Right answers to wrong questions virtually guarantee failure. Innovators betting on "out of the box" thinking or "faster, better, cheaper" innovation paradigms for success all too frequently find themselves — and their customers — disappointed.
Hey folks -- this is a pivotal article about biz storytelling. Why??
Because it addresses the most neglected aspect of effective business storytelling -- the story about the future that you and your customers/clients are creating together.
What I love about this article is its twist -- the level of biz storytelling these days is mostly focused on how to authentically share stories about your products/services, people, or founding to capture the hearts and minds of propsects and build loyal customers. That is OK as far as it goes.
But there could be more. Way more.
Instead of asking, "What do our customers want [and how do I share a story about that]?" how about asking, "What do our customers want to become [and what is the story I can share about that]?" What a fundamentally different -- and better -- question!
Org story advice for crafting 'Future Stories' is typically "Write a newspaper article about your company 5 years from now & the awards you are receivng" or some such version of that. Not bad. But there could be more -- way more.
When we start asking ourselves the questions posed in this article, whole new worlds start opening up. 'Future stories' are really about the future we are creating together with our customers/clients -- it is the call to be part of something bigger than ourselves.
Go read this article -- quickly! You will be glad you did because it will get you to fundamentally shift how you think about and share about your business, and the stories you tell about it.
And if you need a really great example of a company doing this, then check out this latest Nike video.
And if you want to review a written form of this, then check out my Manifesto on my website. The Manifesto is still a work in progress, but you will get the idea. http://www.juststoryit.com/FutureStory ;
Enjoy this short article -- its insights, questions, and a different kind of conversation we can have about business storytelling.
This review was written by Karen Dietz for her curated content on business storytelling at www.scoop.it/t/just-story-it ;
A couple weeks ago, I'm sure you noticed Cision published a list of the top 50 PR and marketing blogs.
These kinds of lists are a dime a dozen–I should know, I create a bunch of them. But, this one had a bit of process behind it as Cision used its proprietary Cision Influence Ratings to create the list. I would imagine that tool takes some kind of algorithm of unique visitors, comments and social scoring into consideration before giving a blog one of the “scores” we see in the list (note: I have never used the Cision tool).
But, what I didn’t see the last couple weeks was a lot of discussion about this list. If this list had come from an independent blogger (like me, for example), I probably wouldn’t bat an eye. When it comes from an organization like Cision, I take a closer look.
So, I took a closer look. Here’s what I found in terms of facts....
[An interesting look at influencers by Arik Hanson - JD]
Influencer targeting is one of the cornerstones of the agile engagement framework. To learn more about how to make agile engagement work for your organization, download our free white paper, The Dawn of Agile Engagement....
[This terrific infographic speaks for itself - JD]
Online influencer outreach is a big part of the social media playbook, but we confuse audience and influence, and overlook advocacy. Here's how to reconfigure.
Trying to convince online influencers to tweet, blog, instagram, or pin nice things about your company is the post-modern version of celebrity endorsement, but with less impact.
Public relations firms and/or in-house communication apparatchiks take the same concepts and mechanics of celebrity endorsement and bring them online, using Klout scores in lieu of celebrity Q scores, and blogger ID software like Group High in place of Hollywood agents.
The idea is that once drafted into the cause and compensated in some way, online influencers will spread the word in social media to their acolytes, increasing sales for the brand. But these programs often prove ineffective at driving behavior beyond social chatter.
There are two reasons for this....
[Jay Baer offers great insight into REAL online influence - JD]
In our experience, it's rare for a diverse group of headstrong Executive Education participants from around the globe to agree on anything. Our research has shown that more and more leaders — from organizations that range from computer-networking giant Cisco Systems to Hindustan Petroleum, a large India-based oil supplier — are using the power of organizational conversation to drive their company forward.
I love this article! Why? Because it reframes leadership, organizational change, and employee engagement as a conversation. Finally!
The authors don't directly mention storytelling, but if you are going to have a meaningful conversation, you know that storytelling is going to be a part of it.
Actually, promoting conversational storytelling is what I've practiced for years in my org development work. And it's a natural for anyone connected into business storytelling.
This notion fits perfectly with the emerging recognition that stories -- and stories told in conversation -- are the path to change, effective leadership, and engagement.
I like the research the authors shared, also. This article lays the foundation for where and how to engage in conversations/storytelling that make a difference. And don't forget to read the comments at the end of the post -- there's lots of good info there, too!
Last spring Sam Fiorella was recruited for a VP position at a large Toronto marketing agency. With 15 years of experience consulting for major brands like AOL, Ford, and Kraft, Fiorella felt confident in his qualifications. But midway through the interview, he was caught off guard when his interviewer asked him for his Klout score. Fiorella hesitated awkwardly before confessing that he had no idea what a Klout score was.
The interviewer pulled up the web page for Klout.com—a service that purports to measure users’ online influence on a scale from 1 to 100—and angled the monitor so that Fiorella could see the humbling result for himself: His score was 34. “He cut the interview short pretty soon after that,” Fiorella says. Later he learned that he’d been eliminated as a candidate specifically because his Klout score was too low. “They hired a guy whose score was 67.”...
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Thoughtful look inside "real" social media to influence...