CHAPTER 12

Share Stories (They’re Your Social Currency!)

Matthew Weiss, founder and CEO of New York traffic-ticket-fighting law firm 888-RED-LIGHT, told me the following story:

       I had a client—let’s call him Jack, as in Jack Rabbit—who was charged with going 140 miles per hour in a 55 zone on the Ocean Parkway near Long Beach, New York. He was driving a Porsche Turbo Carrera late at night when he was pulled over by a Nassau County Highway Patrol Officer.

           When we first discussed the case, I told him to bring his toothbrush with him to court. He asked why, and I explained that he could be checking in to the Nassau County Correctional Facility. You see, in New York, a traffic court can impose up to 30 days of jail time for excessive speeding. At our first court appearance, it was readily apparent that this was no ordinary ticket. The Nassau County Traffic Violations and Parking Agency handles over 300 cases a day, many of which are speeding tickets. But it is a rare occurrence to have such a high speed. One jaded court officer whistled in disbelief when he saw what Jack was charged with.

           We had no choice but to take this case to trial, as this court does not plea bargain speeding cases 31 miles per hour or more above the limit (let alone ones like Jack’s … 85 miles per hour over the limit). In preparation for the trial, Jack started to explain to me the details of his case. He adamantly insisted that he wasn’t going 140 miles per hour. The following colloquy ensued:

               Jack: I was definitely not going 140 miles per hour.

               Me: Are you sure?

               Jack: Yes. There is no way I was going that speed!

               Me: But the officer is going to testify that you were going that speed.

               Jack: He is 100 percent wrong!

               Me: Well, how do you know he is wrong?

               Jack: Because I was actually going 160 miles per hour!

           Without hesitation, I responded that I would not be allowing him to testify at the trial.

           Fortunately, an eloquent plea and a reasonable judge allowed Jack to escape with just a fine and points (keeping his liberty intact). Clearly, though, Jack’s explanation of going 160 miles per hour (not 140 miles per hour) qualifies as one of the funniest “defenses” to a traffic ticket I’ve ever heard.

Weiss’s entertaining story wasn’t just told to me. It was told to thousands of people through his blog Confessions of a Traffic Lawyer. The blog, updated weekly since 2009, is, according to Weiss, “the best storytelling tool I’ve got.” Storytelling, through Weiss’s blog, Facebook, and Twitter use, is what is driving his 22 percent increase in business year to year.

WHAT’S YOUR ORGANIZATION’S STORY?

I was sitting in a diner one day in late 2005 with my then-recent fiancée, Carrie, when we began talking about our wedding. I wanted a large one—huge, in fact, as I’ve always been a public guy, and I hoped to share my big day with as many people as possible. But New York weddings are highly expensive. We both had extensive experience working in marketing and promotions, however, and Carrie came up with a genius idea: we decided to create a promotion around our wedding.

We’re both big baseball fans, so we called up the Minor League Mets affiliate team, the Brooklyn Cyclones, and we pitched them the idea of getting married at home plate following a game. We’d secure sponsors to cover the costs of the wedding, and each sponsor would have a part in the promotion before and during the game. Sponsors, and the Cyclones, would likely benefit from the amount of buzz that was sure to surround a wedding with 5,000 guests at a baseball game.

The Cyclones loved the proposal and gave us a shot. The florist 1-800-Flowers.com loved it too, and the company gave us flowers for the event. Then Smirnoff got on board, as did David’s Bridal, and a dozen other companies. In July 2006, I married my wife at an amazing wedding in front of nearly 500 friends and family and 5,000 strangers (see Figure 12.1). We raised $100,000 from sponsors to cover costs and a $20,000 contribution to the Multiple Sclerosis Society.

FIGURE 12.1 Carrie and Dave Tie the Knot

The event generated a lot of buzz. Our sponsors and we were featured in the New York Times, on CNBC, CBS’s Early Show, and ABC’s World News Tonight, as well as hundreds of other linear and new media outlets. We ended up with not only a dream wedding, but a dream promotion.

A few weeks after the event, we began getting calls from our wedding vendors, thanking us for all the promotion and buzz they received and asking what we were going to do next. Since we couldn’t get married again, we decided to start a company around the concepts of word-of-mouth marketing—theKbuzz, now known as Likeable Media, was born.

STORIES BRING YOUR COMPANY TO LIFE

When you hear the story of how a company was born, or you hear a story about the impact an organization has had on a customer’s life, or about the unique experience of a group’s staff member or partner, you feel an emotional connection with that company. Social media, especially blogs and online videos, allow you to share your stories with your customers, prospects, and the world, further building powerful connections. In the past, storytelling to the masses was expensive and could be accomplished only through television advertising or a public relations executive pitching a major newspaper. Now, storytelling is free, or nearly free, through social media.

Said attorney, entrepreneur, and blogger Matt Weiss, “People love hearing stories. It goes back to primitive tribal times when we used to sit around the campfire. With social media, consumers are in full control the whole time. If you’re not captivating, you can lose them at any time. I use storytelling as a vehicle to get people to pay attention and then keep paying attention.”

Every company has at least one story to tell, and most companies have lots of them. Ask yourself the following questions to generate some ideas:

  •   How did our company get started?

  •   How did we survive the toughest of times?

  •   Who are some key customers we’ve had?

  •   What kinds of funny or interesting things have happened involving customers or staff over the years?

  •   What employees’ lives have been changed as a result of working for us?

  •   What charitable organizations have we supported?

Stories humanize brands and make them talkable, online and offline. Stories can be told with text, but they are often best told through pictures and videos. They can be told by customers, employees, or managers—they just need to be authentic.

How You Started

No matter how large your company is today, when it started, it was just your founder or founders with a dream and a plan. Every organization has humble beginnings, and by reminding people of this, you connect with your customers, and you keep them from considering your group as a faceless giant, too “corporate” for them to relate to.

You can spend millions of advertising dollars to buy television commercials to tell the story of how you got started, or you can produce gorgeous full-color brochures and mail them out to the world. Or you can tell this story online, using your website, blog, or any social media channels, for little to no cost.

What You Do for Your Customers

If you share stories that are less about you and more about your customers and the emotional experiences they have with your brand, you will create big wins. Consider how your customers have benefited from using your company. How have they grown, and what have you meant to them? How does your product make them feel? Remember, it’s not about you. It’s about your customers.

At a Word of Mouth Marketing Association conference I attended two years ago, the topic of discussion was creating buzz-worthy, talkable customer experiences. One woman stood up and said, “My company is a storage company. We’re totally boring.” A man raised his hand, and he replied, “Quite honestly, storage has kept my marriage going strong. You see, I keep everything, and my wife usually throws everything out. If it weren’t for storage and my ability to keep all of my old baseball cards and Garbage Pail Kids out of sight and mind, things would be a lot tougher for us.”

Everyone laughed but took it to heart as well: what’s boring to one person might be deeply meaningful to another. Any successful company, no matter what products or services it offers, has lots of stories to share about happy, inspired customers. Whatever your company does or sells, it solves people’s problems somehow. You just have to think about what emotional connections your customers make around these problems and how your products or services have truly helped them. By the way, that storage company, Extra Space, now has more than 56,000 fans on Facebook, and it has been successfully using social media to drive leads for three years.

Your Key Staff

The third source of great stories is the staff at your company. Maybe it’s a senior executive, or maybe it’s someone in the mailroom. It could be someone who worked her way up while going back to school and raising a family. Someone who works for you overcame adversity in his personal life to become a productive member of your team. A staff person who always has a smile on her face when serving customers is a story in itself as well. Maybe it’s all of the above.

Your organization, no matter what you sell or what service you offer, has people behind it, and each person has a story to tell. You need to find the compelling stories and share them—through social media. In August 2009, a Facebook fan group popped up entitled “I Love Mary @ McDonalds/Chandler” (see Figure 12.2).

FIGURE 12.2 Mary at McDonald’s

The group featured the description “Mary works at McDonald’s and is the sweetest ever!” and a picture of Mary. Dozens of wall posts and more than 1,400 fans later, the group is still going strong, with comments such as, “I just met Mary today! Yep, she is everything everyone says. She complimented my eyes. What a woman. I wish everyone was like her.”

A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS, AND A VIDEO IS WORTH EVEN MORE

You’ve heard the saying, “A picture’s worth a thousand words.” When telling stories online, pictures and photographs are incredibly powerful tools. A huge reason for Facebook’s explosive growth over the past five years is its addictive Photos product—because people naturally love to view and share photos that have been “tagged” to include themselves and their friends. Pinterest and Instagram have also grown into leading social networks thanks to the popularity of pictures.

As an organization, you should harness this feature on Facebook by tagging and sharing photos of customers, staff, and management. Many Facebook pages recognize a “Fan of the Week,” for instance, through which one customer’s picture is featured on the page, and his or her story is told. In addition to making the Fan of the Week feel special, many selected fans choose to share the news with their friends, thereby increasing the organic virality of the page.

As valuable as pictures are, there is no better storytelling tool than video. Online videos ranging from 30 seconds to two minutes can captivate audiences in ways that only television advertising could in the past. Start by using a flip cam to film short clips of staff, customers, and senior management sharing their stories. If you capture 30 seconds of video from five people in each of those three categories, you’ll quickly have at least a few usable videos to share on Facebook, YouTube, and your blog.

One unique feature of Facebook videos that are shared by company pages is that viewers can click inside the video to like the page that originally produced it. When you encounter a great video telling a story you want to share, you do so with your Facebook friends, who then have the opportunity to connect to the company that created the video at any point while watching by clicking Like.

CREATING A STORY WHEN THERE ISN’T A NATURAL FIT

Drawing from the three categories of how you started, staff experiences, and customer experiences, you should have lots of great stories to share. However, if you’re in a highly regulated industry, such as financial or pharmaceutical, or if for whatever reason you can’t find stories that you think will build an emotional connection with consumers, you can always create new stories to tell through your activities and partnerships. Charitable partnerships, giveaways, and promotions are all great ways to create new social stories. Just keep in mind that if they’re not core to the customer experience, they’re not as valuable.

JPMorgan Chase was the first major corporation to create its own charitable story on Facebook, in 2009. In a program called “Chase Community Giving: You Decide What Matters,” it gave Facebook users the chance to support their local charities by voting for them and encouraging their network of Facebook friends to do the same. Users got to choose from the bank’s list of more than 500,000 charitable organizations that work on an operational budget of less than $10 million. These nonprofits could make a huge impact in their respective communities performing the good work they do, but they don’t have the resources to go around lobbying for grants.

The program was a huge success, garnering millions of supporters on Facebook and sparking hundreds of thousands of conversations about Chase. Since that program, several other major brands have followed suit with charitable voting programs to create stories that drive social buzz. It’s a safer way for the brands to go because it creates positive stories worth talking about with little to no risk of anyone saying something bad about the brands. However, there may be less long-term impact as well, because the conversation is not central to a customer’s experience with the company. In other words, a bank giving away millions of dollars on Facebook won’t make up for practices such as excess fees, poor responsiveness, and bad customer service.

NO MATTER YOUR COMPANY’S SIZE, YOU HAVE STORIES TO TELL

No matter if your company is large or small, new or old, well established or barely known, using stories through the social Web will help garner attention for your organization. Even if your brand has been essentially telling the same story for years, bringing this story online and into the social media conversation breathes new life into it. And if your brand is, well, brand-new, creating a fresh story around your company attracts customers and can invite them to be a part of this narrative. Consider the following two examples.

Auntie Anne’s Rewrite: Auntie Anne’s Pretzel Perfect Stories

Auntie Anne’s, the beloved hand-rolled soft pretzel chain, got its start in 1988 when Anne (yes, there’s a real Auntie Anne) Beiler bought a stand at a Pennsylvania farmer’s market. After perfecting the hand-rolled pretzel, Auntie Anne took her techniques to over 1,500 locations in 48 states and 31 countries. Today, the company’s social communities are over 1 million strong. Regardless of how big it grows, it’s always about where the company started. The brand continually goes back to its roots and shares with its community how it started, where the company came from, and what values and philosophies go into every store opening and every twist of dough. Whether it’s #tbt posts on Instagram highlighting the first signs and machines used to start the business, or it’s Facebook and Twitter trivia contests that feature questions about the brand’s history, or it’s a massive campaign involving the community in the newest story in 2014—Auntie Anne’s makes who it is part of what it does on social media every day. Fans are encouraged to learn and live the brand, not just eat the pretzels.

In May 2014, the brand turned the table on storytelling and encouraged its community to start doing the same. With the launch of the Mini Acts Mighty Impact initiative, Auntie Anne’s and its community celebrated everyday heroes whose actions made a difference to those around them. Auntie Anne’s has always shared with its fans that one woman starting a pretzel stand made a difference, and so it has created an opportunity for its fans to share their own stories of success and inspiration. During the campaign period, over 60,000 votes for the mightiest act came in for nearly 400 stories.

Dr. Copeland and the Tooth Buggy

Dr. Jerry Copeland is one of the most likeable dentists I’ve ever met. Dr. Copeland is a pediatric dentist in Tampa, Florida, whose mission is to introduce dentistry to children in a pleasant atmosphere. He and his staff work tirelessly to teach good lifelong dental habits while entertaining their patients. Dr. Copeland doesn’t call his patients “patients,” however. To Dr. Copeland, they’re his friends. Every week, Dr. Copeland tells his friends’ stories.

Dr. Copeland gives each of his patients a “Tooth Buggy.” The Tooth Buggy is a postcard with his logo on it—a happy red car shining its pearly whites. Dr. Copeland and his staff encourage the children to bring the postcard with them on their family vacations. In August 2014, Dr. Copeland told the story on Facebook of his eight-year-old friend who took the Tooth Buggy on an amazing European vacation. His album The Tooth Buggy Went to Europe! read:

       My friend took the Tooth Buggy on an amazing vacation to Europe. I think next year I will have the Tooth Buggy stay in Tampa and work while I go on the same incredible vacation. How many places can you name in this album?

The album got great engagement, and Dr. Copeland inspired more of his friends to share their stories. One of those “friends” even referred a new patient to the office!

SO, WHAT’S YOUR STORY?

Do you have a story well articulated yet? You’ll need to determine and polish interesting and enjoyable stories about your company. Then, you’ll need to figure out the most effective ways to present your stories on the social Web so that others will digest, enjoy, and share them with their friends. If you use a compelling format to share stories and connect with your customers, you can expect your company’s story on social networks to have a very happy ending.