As inspiration I will take some
words from an advertisement in an in-flight magazine I read on a VLM flight last
week. In the advertisement new brand agency Korero say “We make sense of our
world and our place in it through stories. It’s the same in business. Your
brand story is the core idea or truth behind who you are as a company. A good
story stirs the soul, makes the complex simple, inspires your customers and
encourages them to connect with you…” For sure there is marketing speak in the
statement, but is the core of it not true?
Companies
that engage with social media (the blogs, the forums, the personal web sites) can
understand the stories that surround their brands and create new ones that breathe
life into their products and services. In a way not just measuring and
monitoring conversations but listening and writing (rewriting) stories.
In
practical terms stories about companies can often come from the employees themselves, company
bloggers discussing what it is really like to work there or giving their take
on the products and services from the company. As an example when Robert Scoble
wrote from inside Microsoft you got a better sense of what it was like to work
there, the humanity of day to day at Microsoft, when the image had been “Borg like” in the past. Other sources will be satisfied and dissatisfied customers, suppliers and
retailers telling stories about their experiences about services and products.
