Telling stories is an acquired skill. It means learning what makes audiences think critically and laugh heartily. But, most importantly, it means making them part of your stories.
Knowing audiences and approaching them successfully is what makes a good storyteller. Not surprisingly, it is also what makes a good marketer. That's the first lesson that emerges from this week's top five news stories on InboundMarketing.com:
Act as a storyteller whether you are delivering public speeches or producing other content. In order to engage an audience, you need to offer high-quality content with ease.
Nick Morgan, author of Trust Me: Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma, suggests you accomplish this by getting passionate about your subject, adopting purposeful action and gaining storytelling skills. Content in all its forms is remarkable, he argues, when it "informs and entertains at the same time."
2. The Marketing Myth of "Free" Social Media
Author: Tom Foremski
Lesson: Pay The Price of Social Media
If you want to enhance your online footprint in the social mediasphere, you have to make a commitment. Actually, four of them:
- Time. It comes in the form of spending time instead of spending money.
- Expert. It takes a brand champion to deliver creative content.
- Measurement. It might get costly to measure ROI.
- Research. It requires relevant research for producing original content.
These points demonstrate that social media requires a lot of input. Become aware of the work associated with maintaining social networks and make the necessary commitments.
3. Blogging Is Dying; Twitter Is to Blame
Author: Joseph Jaffe
Lesson: Choose Words Carefully
Become selective with word usage to produce quality content. With its 140-character limit, micro-blogging platform Twitter demonstrates the importance of word choice in expressing ideas. If an idea can be fully expressed in less than 140 characters, would it be worth blogging about?
Micro-blogging makes us more creative when picking blogging ideas. You discover new topics and learn to prioritize them better. In this sense, Twitter is enhancing blogging, not killing it.
4. E-mail Spending to Grow to $2 Billion by 2014
Author: Dianna Dilworth
Lesson: Bridge Email to Social
Make a strong connection between your email marketing and social networking efforts. According to a new Forrester Research report e-mail marketing spending in the U.S. will increase to $2 billion by 2014. "While social media has primarily been a tool for personal communications, marketers have to figure out how to bridge the conversation from the e-mail inbox to the social inbox," said David Daniels, research VP and principal analyst at Forrester Research.
5. Bing Keeps Growing
Author: Josh Catone
Lesson: Be Truly Remarkable
To compete with industry leaders, you need to be truly remarkable. No matter the size of your marketing budget, people won't be interested in your product unless it brings them real change. Users are actively looking for such change in Microsoft's search engine Bing.
Though Bing is growing and currently has 16.7% searcher penetration, it doesn't offer a legitimate incentive for people to drop Google. "Switching search engines is painless, but if there is hardly a difference in results then why switch," comments Eric Ungs.
Photo Credit: armadillo444
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