Why Listen to Rob Campbell Explain Story Funnels to Buckstops at Word11, August 27 Toronto
Post by Robert Campbell on Aug 20, 2011
Saturday August 27 will see a great many blog friends and social media marketers gather behind CSI in the parking lot south of Honest Eds at Bloor St and Bathurst in Toronto.
Word11 has been conceived as a 24hr blog media event, and hopes to be the first in a long series of annual 24hr events. It emerged from a minor kerfuffle between Cg6 and WordCamp, the details of which remain unclear. Some refunds were issued and are still the subject of excellent blog discussions and tweets.
The event was preceded by something called Prefix which took us all by surprise.
I ask you… Will WORD11 be the first occurrence of an annual social media festival? or will this be the only one? Whatever the case I’m sure we’ll make memories, and I reckon it will be rather historic day and night and day again.
I intend to use this opportunity as a speaker, on stage at 3pm on Saturday afternoon, to share my vision of the emerging online economy of ‘social relevance’ and how its become much more than just SEO link building (although incoming links are still the base currency in the economy of relevance). I’ll define the role of the Relevance Producer and how Lenzr photo contests can help build up the ‘social capital’ of business URLs very effectively, and very affordably, in a remarkably short period of time.
STORY FUNNELS TO BUCKSTOPS
I see stories everywhere. The elements of story are in everything we do; they are core to our existence because human brains need stories like human bodies need food. People who have boring jobs generally watch a lot of television after work because they need, enjoy and have become addicted to those stories. If they didn’t have that outlet they’d fill the taverns and converse with each other and about each other or listen to bards’ songs that do the same. Television is a modern ‘story restaurant’ with a 56 channel menu full of drama, comedy and adventure for human brains.
The internet is a story supermarket, but you have to cook the food yourself and interact with others to get the goodness. The stories come with some assembly required, and are digested in different ways.
This is a golden age for storytellers because never before has it been so easy to affect hundreds, thousands or even millions of people. But we have to tell the stories differently. The best relevance producers engineer an ‘orchestra of participation’ around their brand idea both inside and outside their companies.
Here at Lenzr we like to fragment each corporate message into several mediums and compel participants to move from one platform to another, putting the story together in their own heads -that’s a powerful branding exercise. True social media is the mad clicking between blogs, and discussion forum threads, viewing pictures and responding to tweets where # of followers doesn’t matter, and search engine result pages are part of the experience. Good stories compel people to keep clicking, looking for more and more juicy little details.
Story Funnel to Buckstops is how we tell stories at Lenzr Corp
Intelligent social media marketers that are ‘in the trenches’ distributing messages on articles, blogs and discussion forums, Facebook and Twitter soon come to realize that it behooves them to execute each campaign in a certain order, with a preordained pattern of digital venues that support and boost the credibility of each other, and bring traffic and other people’s ideas into the mixture. This grows a campaign. At Lenzr we start by taking or securing original pictures, and then by hosting our media on 3rd party photo / video hosting sites; we use Flickr or Fotki or YouTube and post pictures and videos first, because we know we’re going to need these resources to embed into all of our upcoming articles, blog and forum posts.
We start at the top and write great original stories, and then work our way down a long list of To-Do media until we find ourselves at the bottom of the funnel, and there we instigate a switch post and use it to build content that we’ll need to start all over again. Every node has a different language and different social values. Every replication of the story is not a duplication, but rather a different telling from a different perspective of the same message / links.
A good story funnel compounds the relevance created in the original featured media, and magnifies the value of all links back to the client under perfect keyword anchor text.
It also excuses and makes wholesome other links back to the client in other supporting articles blogs and forums that link to the featured story and to the buckstop.
The buckstop is the engine where the ecommerce happens, or where you wrangle more Twitter followers, or Facebook likes or Flickr friends, etc – this is a participation harvesting mechanism. The buckstop of this blog post would be you registering for a ticket to see me speak at Word11.
I’m marketing Lenzr at Word11, and this Smojoe blog post Is the featured story in a story funnel I’m composing to promote that upcoming presentation. I have posted the pictures you see above on Fotki where I have linked to the Word11.com website, and I will bookmark this post on Digg, Delicious, Reddit and Zoomit etc StumbleUpon after I publish and proofread. Next I could truncate this message and leave a quick blog on Young Entrepreneurs, or I could guest blog it, or seek out local social media forums like League of Kickass Business People (is that still around?) or Toronto Forums esp UrbanToronto.ca and of course Facebook and Twitter. This post is made to be linked beside #Word11 #Toronto on Twitter. Then, and this is the true beauty of live events, while at the conference I could discuss these marketing actions on and off stage with people and learn which parts of this story funnel they encountered / remembered while surfing about trying to decide whether or not to attend.
The Grasscutters, Solar Generator – David Shephard donated a solar powered generator from his eco friendly property maintenance company and earned lots of points with the organizers. TM Mahdi gave him a sponsorship button and some free tickets to the event, and I managed to get Lenzr button linked up as a sponsor too, just for being in the middle of the deal. Truth be told I also helped the Word11 committee secure sponsorship from Absolute party rentals and Its My Potty portable toilet rentals which are long standing friends / clients of Lenzr corp.