What Thomas Pink Can Teach Us About Brand Storytelling

Before my wedding earlier this year I went down to London's Jermyn Street to get a few items for my big day. Jermyn Street is specialized in shirts, very much what Savile Row is to the world of bespoke suits. The shops are all next door so it's a very handy destination for comparing some of the best shirtmakers in the world. After about an hour I strolled into Thomas Pink's shop and found the perfect formal white shirt to go with my morning suit. It wasn't cheap but hey you only get married once (hopefully!) so I splashed out a bit.

The time came to pay up and next to the till I noticed these A5 cards saying THE PINK STORY. I was so impressed with this that I had to take a few cards and even write a blog post about it. We hear so much about storytelling these days and here is a company that has actually done it, they tell their story in less than 30 seconds. I don't know about you but I immediately bought into the heritage of Thomas Pink and was of course happier with the premium pricing.

As consumers we buy into a story, an experience and an association with a brand just as much as the actual product. This can of course be translated into personal branding, where people buy into you and who you are just as much as what you do. Whatever it is you're selling, remember that Story Telling is Story Selling.

As it happens, the company was only set up in the 1980s by three Irish brothers. They were clever enough to name the brand after a well-known taylor from the 19th century and thus inject some history. Most people aren't as anal as myself and won't check Wikipedia and dig stuff like this out, most will be very happy with the story and buy into the whole concept just like I did in the store.

What do you think of the Pink Story? I still like Pink eventhough I know it's not really the classic brand it makes out to be (and because I have a nicely overpriced dress shirt in my wardrobe).

In our Personal Branding workshops, we cover storytelling as a vital component to your successful brand.

Filed Under: Marketing, Monthly Tagged With: ,

How I Got Interviewed in The Times Newspaper

Would you or your company like to get a nice mention in the press? Look no further, here's how I got a mention in one of Britain's oldest and best selling newspapers, The Times. I will explain how you can put yourself in the line of a journalist looking for their next story.

It all begins with hard graft

The hardest part about being mentioned in the newspaper is actually doing all that work that leads up to a reporter finding you somewhere – no surprise there! It certainly helps to stay visible and on the radar of key influencers that might have connections with the media, but any PR person can tell you it's nigh on impossible to get a reporter from a respectable publication to write about you, just for the sake of it. All you really can do is to keep putting out valuable and interesting information in the ether and hopefully it will be picked up. I wasn't looking for a mention in the press but I was obviously doing something interesting enough to stand out a bit.

I do quite a lot of blogging, lots of tweeting and I'm fairly active on social networking in general. This didn't actually help me being found, what worked was organizing an event and listing it on LinkedIn…

The LinkedIn London event got picked up

We run this bi-monthly meetup called LinkedIn London which is a place for us to spread the gospel around LinkedIn and its many uses in business. As we deliver regular LinkedIn workshops to companies I tend to get many similar questions on how to use LinkedIn properly, this meetup is where I can share the best practice to anyone who is interested. The event is listed both on the Meetup site itself and I always make sure to list it on LinkedIn.

The reporter from The Times was surfing in the Events section on LinkedIn (see the clipping below) and stumbled across the meetup. He sent a message to me asking if he could come round and see what it was all about. I said yes of course, but be aware that it's a free meetup held upstairs in a Holborn bar so don't expect anything too fancy!

The interview was carried out

The reporter and photographer turned up on time for the event, we had a good chat about what the meetup is all about and what people come to learn. The angle they were looking at is the fact that this meetup takes LinkedIn networking full circle; it's face-to-face networking that was initiated online. Most people at the event were interviewed and two or three got mentioned in the article in the end. I found myself asking the man from The Times lots of questions about the winds of change in journalism, how reporters work on their personal brands and of course how they use social media. That will be a blog post for another week…

The article was published

In order to actually read this article I had to get an online subscription to The Times as they are behind a paywall nowadays. So I found myself looking out for it every other day and after a couple of weeks it was up. The article is very well written by Mike Pattenden and here's an extract of my mention:

You can read the article in its entirety over at the Link Humans blog.

The results

I have of course made sure to send this article to quite a few people who all agreed it's great PR. We have had a number of enquiries and pieces of business as a direct result of this article, clearly indicating the power of being mentioned in the traditional media. Not only is being mentioned in 'old' media useful, it also reaches another demographic – people that read the paper instead of checking Twitter on the train in the morning for instance. So all in all, a very interesting experience and I hope this has inspired you to get a mention somewhere in the media, it's really worth it!

What are your best tips to get a mention in the newspaper?

To learn more about how to get visibility for your event on LinkedIn, check out How To Promote Your Meetup on LinkedIn.

Filed Under: Jorgen's Life, Monthly, Press Tagged With: ,

How to Use LinkedIn Polls to Market Your Business

linkedin polls for marketing

Did you ever use the LInkedIn Polls feature? It’s another tool you can use to poll your network on any question that you deem relevant.

LinkedIn Polls haven’t exactly taken center stage in my LinkedIn homefeed since 2007. It was one of the first applications but it has gradually lost it’s prominence. The problem with Polls in my experience was that they were fairly stagnant and hidden away on your profile, you’d be lucky to get more than ten responses.

LinkedIn Polls revamp

Therefore I am glad to report that the big L have revamped the interface and added more sharing buttons to it. The idea of the new Polls is that you create it at LinkedIn and then share it with your network there of course, but also across social media and any other online presence you have such as a blog or website. This is obviously another clever move by LinkedIn as non-users might just get sucked in to the shining path as it were.

Let’s check out the application, make sure you are logged in to LinkedIn and click on the LinkedIn Polls application.

Ask your question

Just like the old Polls application, you enter your question in the free text field. Be sure to ask something that is relevant to your audience and network. Bear in mind that what you ask here is part of your reputation building or personal branding on Linkedin, the level of your question will showcase your expertise in your field.

Spread the word

This is the main upgrade in my opinion, whereas before you had to email your network and ask them to visit the page – you can now simply share you Poll across all major social media platforms. It’s interesting to see that LinkedIn have included Facebook here, an obvious attempt at pulling people off the ‘social network’ to the ‘professional network’.

Even more useful is perhaps the fact that you can embed your newly created poll on your blog, just embed the code and it will appear. This means LinkedIn have now created a reach beyond their network and could be creeping in to company websites over time which is an interesting development indeed.

Measure the results

Like with all social media and indeed marketing in general, you will want to measure the results of your poll very carefully. Apart from the results of the poll, you can see a few demographics as well such as age, seniority within a company (based on job title) and gender.

How do you create a great LinkedIn Poll?

Check out this presentation from GrowMotor, they recently did a big old poll and came up with some useful ideas on how to structure things.

Do you use LinkedIn Polls for marketing? Please share your best tips as well in the comments!

Filed Under: LinkedIn, Marketing, Monthly Tagged With: , , ,

Introducing Link Humans Social Media Consulting and Training

As some of you may have noticed already, my business has changed ever so slightly. I have gone from being a solopreneur in the social media and personal branding space to setting up a limited company together with a business partner. The company is called Link Humans and for me it’s a natural progression of what I have been doing for the last year or so.

What is Link Humans?

Link Humans is a social media strategy and training company based in London. Our purpose is to enable and empower companies to run social media themselves. We do this through analysing and auditing where they are now, what the competition and target audience are up to, working out a clear strategy, policy and guidelines to implement. We train the individuals that will be responsible for social media and we ensure that all results are measured and monitored.

The business is run by yours truly and Laurent Brouat, who is a social networking (in particular LinkedIn) expert and blogger. We believe that social media runs best when it’s human, authentic, credible, sustainable and above all simple.

What is the story behind Link Humans?

Laurent wrote a post the other day called Link Humans, Zi Story! about how we set everything up. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel here, just to say that we started doing social media workshops and trainings together and noticed that there is a demand for our services off the back of seminars.

Instead of consulting and training as individual freelancers, we wanted to create something bigger than the sum of its parts and a platform for growth. A few months later we have everything (well, most things) in place and business has really taken off in terms of clients and bookings.

What’s the name all about?

After weeks of trying to generate a name that wasn’t taken, we came up with Link Humans which we think represents what we do fairly well . Link as in connection and humans as in people, all about man and machine in other words. At the end of the day, social media is only an extension of human communication as a wise man once said.

The fact that the word Link is also included in LinkedIn obviously doesn’t hurt our positioning.

How are you guys going to market?

We are taking a multi pronged approach here. Being a members of a few networking groups, we are able to ‘soft sell’ to our target audience in person. Both Laurent and I do regular talks at meetup groups, networking events and business schools. We have created our own Meetup community called Social Media London which is free and obviously helps to get our name out there.

In addition to that, we are of course very active online and on top of our personal networks we use Twitter and LinkedIn to engage with our target audience. We decided to set up a brand new Twitter account which will be all about quality as opposed to quantity, staying more aligned to what Link Humans represents. Follow @LinkHumans on Twitter for the latest updates.

We will be blogging on the new site and also writing longer white papers and e-books that will be free to download and share – all in the spirit of giver’s gain or karma if you will.

What next?

Now I would like to ask for your feedback and help in spreading the word. Feedback of the website and upcoming blog posts and sharing the love by telling friends about what we do, online and offline. Laurent and I are very passionate about what we are doing and we really value any input you might have for us.

Did I hear something about a party?

Yes you did! Although we have been going for a while we are throwing a launch party in London on Friday the 26th of November. It will be at Just St. James near Green Park and you are more than welcome to come by for a drink or two – see more details at the Link Humans blog. We are expecting about a hundred people but there is plenty of room for more so hopefully see you then! And if you don’t live in London, just a tweet with the #linkhumans event hashtag would be lovely :-)

Filed Under: Jorgen's Life, Monthly Tagged With: , ,

What’s Your Small Business Social Media Strategy?

 

I have seen it time and time again, small and medium sized businesses (SMEs) who think they ‘master social media’. They have rushed into setting up a Twitter account, a Facebook Page and even a group on LinkedIn. Their updates are intended for ‘anyone that has money to buy our products’ and they are plugging themselves like they were god’s gift to enterprise.

Funnily enough, this approach doesn’t work. SMEs have a tendency to forget about social media strategy and planning. This could be explained by the fact that they don’t have a dedicated marketing department, oftentimes you see the founder or the intern clicking the social media buttons – neither of which are particularly well suited to be doing it.

Where are the results?

After having tweeted aimlessly for a month, someone (possibly the finance director) asks what the return on investment is. If the business has a decent CRM system, they will be able to track enquiries and sales derived from social media. After a month of shooting from the hip in cyberspace, they are very likely to be disappointed with the return on effort.

Guess what, the company now reckons social media is a waste of time and stops the updates altogether. This is what will happen to most businesses without a social media strategy and planning.

How can you put a strategy together?

There are a few questions you can ask yourself, just like with any marketing plan you have to think about what you are selling, to whom and why your offering is better than others. Answer these questions before you start crafting a strategy:

• What are your goals with social media (enquiries/sales/awareness/social proof)?

• What is your target audience (demographics, location, B2B/B2C)?

• Who are you looking to connect with and why (direct customers, agents, suppliers)?

• What tools are they using (you should be too)?

• Where are the discussions happening (forums, blogs, platforms)?

• What is topical and how can you add to the conversation?

• How can you measure results (what metrics do you use in your current marketing)?

There are plenty more questions like these that will be more relevant to your industry, the point is that it’s vital to get these right before launching your social media marketing.

Bottom line

I work on these strategies together with my clients and I’ve found that they need tweaking every three months or so. The social media landscape is ever changing and technologies come and go but the underlining strategy of your marketing has to aligned with your business goals to achieve success.

What is your strategy? Happy to critique it if you let me know in the comments!
 

Filed Under: Marketing, Monthly, Social Media Tagged With: , ,
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