Ask any PR or advertising professional about the value of having a story to bring a campaign to life and it’s recommended that you be seated comfortably, ready to listen, with a very sympathetic look on your face.

Whereas authors and journalists have the pleasure of starting with the story and then working towards a conclusion, communications professionals often find themselves with things presented the wrong way around.

The time-old tale of creating a campaign will play to something along the following lines:

Enter client, stage left.

“Here is our latest [project, product, service] and we want it to become the next best thing since… well, our last [project, product, service.]”

The goal is simple and clear-cut, elementary really: “stimulate desire!”; “amplify awareness!”; “change perceptions!!”

As the script inevitably goes, the next question is how?

• What is the compelling hook that will make people want it?
• What is the pitch that will change peoples’ minds?
• What is the story that people will tell for ages to come?

Exit agency, stage right, not to be seen again until act 3.

Fast-forward several months and, ultimately, the campaign does exactly what was intended. Measurement – key performance indicators… numbers – prove exactly how well the campaign delivered. How perceptions were changed and how it all affected the client’s bottom line.

But, what about the story? Unlike authors who can measure the “value” of their story based on book sales, the value of a PR story has only ever been indirectly measured by the global success of the campaign. If the campaign was a success, then the story must have been great.  The fact is, though, calculating the unique value of a story was simply never done before.  Until now.

Joshua Glenn, Taking Things Seriously: 75 Objects with Unexpected Significance, and Rob Walker, author of Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are, have been able to measure the value of a story through a quasi-anthropological experiment, based on the hypothesis – “Narrative transforms insignificant objects into significant ones.”  The experiment is called Significant Objects and their conclusion is quite astounding:

The value of a story is 2,776%. Why percent and not Dollars or Euros? The answer is in the experiment itself:

• They bought objects considered to be of little to no value from garage sales, thrift stores and eBay.
• They then asked a selection of writers to bring each object to life create in the form of a fictional story about the object’s past.
• The object is then put back up for sale on eBay with the fictional story written out instead of a factual description.
• The lucky purchaser is shipped the object and a hard copy of the story that sold the object and the proceeds go to the author.

With a story by Susannah Breslin, the Necking Team Button went from 50 cents to $36.88

How did they reach 2,776%? SO v1 – the first batch of 100 objects – were bought by Significant Objects for $120.  Through a complex price adjustment scheme over 19 weeks to neutralise Duration Factors, the final profit on all objects sold came to $3,612… for a total mark-up of 2,776%.

As far as quasi-experimental experiments go, this is an incredibly heart-warming example. And it may also go a long way to helping communications professionals in recognising, if not calculating, the value of their own stories.

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Taking a look at the evolution of social media as a communications tool over the past year, it is clear that one thing in particular has changed, businesses now take it seriously and include in their communications strategy.

Brands now automatically lose their shine with customers if they do not allow for direct communication between customer and company. This shift in expectation has lead to the growth in the number of managing directors asking where the company’s Twitter feeds, Facebook pages and YouTube channels are and why can’t we have thousands of fans tomorrow?

With a view to providing a glimpse under the hood at some of these changes over the last twelve months, we have put together our Social Media Lens. The document launches today at Marketing Week Live! For your own copy just click here, all we ask are a few details about you.

We have been very lucky to have some of the UK’s leading practitioners in the social media space support us with the production of Social Media Lens; presenting real world examples instead of last year’s theories. The collection of articles provides a unique view on what has changed, what works, what doesn’t and a variety of tips and tricks for getting social media activity up and running.

Articles in the ebook cover a whole raft of different insights, advice, trends, what is new and coming up in social media as well as some secrets from marketing professionals from major brands including: Sony, Paddy Power, Oracle, Santander and more.

Once you have had a chance to take a read do come back and let us know what you think.

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In this day and age of social networking, many PRs are now beginning to rely too heavily on email and instant messenger to sell-in their stories to the media. Gone are the days of the telephone and the hour long lunch briefing. Now it seems, we are becoming guilty of broadcasting our messages through round-robin emails and Tweets.

Is there any talent involved in sending an email? Is this really PR? Surely PR is about building relationships and connecting with influencers? But, how can you build a rapport with a blogger if you only contact them via email? Aside from the dreaded ‘are they going to feature your story?’ question, what else do you really know about that person?

Email is great as a follow-on platform, but it should not be the central tool that we use to build relationships around. Phone calls and face to face meetings help us build personal connections with journalists and bloggers. It is these things that help us get to the heart of what types of stories and assets truly ‘turn journalists on.’

Remember the famous BT ad slogan ‘it’s good to talk’. Well, BT got it spot on! Picking up the phone and talking to influencers is a vital part of building long-term relationships. As an agency, we try wherever possible to pick up the phone and talk. We even developed a ‘following our call’ day, FOC for short. This went down a storm in the office and helped incentivise people to get on the old dog and bone instead of automatically using email to make media approaches. FOC has helped us nurture a whole database of influencers within technology, marketing and consumer fields.

"It's good to talk" BT advert starring Maureen Lipman

What’s more, we have even setup our very own blogger meetup group! Our first event is scheduled for 29th June at Marketing Week Live. In between serving up our delicious immediate future cupcakes and tea, we will be networking with all types of savvy bloggers, tweeters, forum owners and Facebookers to find out how we can help them.

It’s not just a one way street when it comes to communicating with influencers; we believe in giving bloggers information that they need and want. So, during our meetup we are going to be discussing the art of engagement and the online relationship between influencers and brands. The exhibition itself will also be full of seminars showcasing the latest tools and technology to help bloggers make their websites more effective.

Talking is the best information gatherer we as PRs have at our finger tips. Social media is a fantastic resource to use and one that we should all implement within our influencer relations, but it needs to be married with traditional relationship building skills. It’s good to talk and as PRs we don’t seem to be doing enough. So why don’t we all have a FOC day!

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As we all know, for some time now, media-savvy companies have been taking full advantage of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, for a combination of brand-building, direct sales, customer service and PR. This has left us all wondering what will be the next big ‘thing’.

Could it be the controversial Chatroulette? For those of you that have had your head in the sand for the past few months, this is a video dating/exhibitionism site, started at the end of last year, which randomly connects users from around the world, enabling them to communicate using webcam, text and images. On closer inspection, users share webcam footage with each other and much of it is of a rather dubious nature – and that’s putting it mildly!

Despite what its critics say, the site is growing massively by the day and according to comScore, Chatroulette drew 960,000 U.S. visitors in February, up from 109,000 in January.

So, how can brands benefit from such a strange, sometimes obscene, phenomenon?

With the general user-base being made up of people who want to expose themselves, people looking for nudity, and curious/new users, there aren’t a lot of brands that would knowingly market themselves to digital exhibitionists, but its growing attention does present an opportunity for brands. In light of this, surely brands should ask themselves a question before trying out any new medium — especially one with a shady reputation. What do they hope to get out of it?

One brand has bitten the marketing bullet and dipped its toes in the murky waters of Chatroulette. French Connection is currently using the site to run a competition where men are being asked to set up a real date with a girl on the site. The bloke not only gets a date but also £250 worth of French Connection vouchers. The competition is part of French Connection’s The Man, The Woman campaign launched in February, which aims to draw more attention to its men’s range of clothing.

Personally, I’m not entirely convinced. Is this merely a case of social media bandwagon hopping? Brands who want to be perceived as edgy simply jumping on to the hot new thing in social media? And do we really want to see the naked truth?

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This week the Guardian online posted a blog on the rise of social media as a relevant source of information for journalists, as revealed by a recent US survey which claimed that 56% of reporters view it as an important tool for producing stories. The research carried out by Cision and The George Washington University, showed that over 89% of journalists make use of blogs while conducting their online research, with two thirds turning to social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

But, is this a good thing? Are journalism standards slipping?

There is certainly a strong advantage to using social media as part of journalistic research. Its global reach and speed means that stories can be documented and sourced as they are taking place – the New York Hudson River plane crash is a great example. Ferry passengers were able to tweet about the accident before TV crews even got to the scene.

However, social media shouldn’t be used as the sole source for stories, but rather it should sit alongside public relations – providing interviews and access to sources and experts to help paint a fuller picture. It still begs the question as to why the media is so obsessed with social networking?

Phenomenon! Everyone loves to be in the middle of a newly discovered craze and social media is currently it! Flick through the national papers and there will undoubtedly be a story relating to social media. As a PR professional, I have been told by numerous news desks and news agencies that stories relating to Facebook or Twitter stand a much higher chance of being selected than those that don’t.

Why? Because social networking provides that much needed human interest angle that the media loves, especially tabloid papers. The fashion designer, Alexander McQueen died tragically last week but rather than lament on the fashion world’s loss guess what the papers chose to write about…the string of ‘weird’ Twitter posts that he had left during the run up to his death.

So, celebrities and politicians be afraid. It’s no longer what’s lurking behind your closet that matters but what’s lurking on your Facebook and Twitter page!

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I’ve always been intrigued by the use of competitions as a PR tool. How effective are they in reaching the right people for your brand, and do people take notice of much else other than the prize on offer?

With this in mind, I wanted to look at Twitter and how it’s currently being used for competitions in online PR. Search for the word ‘competition’ and you’ll immediately come across a number of different ways that they are currently being hosted and talked about. Three such examples are:

Retweeting or following to enter, often asking you to include a web link or similar

Asking a question or for an opinion – the answer being your entry into the competition

Announcing a competition initiative hosted elsewhere i.e. company website

Obviously, they all demand a varying degree of involvement and as such the ‘RT and win’ option seems to spread most effectively around the Twitterverse. The obvious problem with this is that the competition host isn’t providing much reason for potential entrants to engage or remember them, apart from the one or two people that actually end up winning!

It raises the question as to whether it’s better to build up a large number of followers using these tactics, or whether you invest in a competition idea that gets followers interacting with you (hopefully creating brand advocates in the process).

There’s bound to be many examples of those who have reaped rewards with both methods but I think it’s important to keep in mind the following when deciding on the best way to use Twitter competitions for your brand.

What is your long-term social media strategy? If you’re using a competition to boost follower numbers, have you thought about to maintain these numbers and ensure they stay engaged and interested.

Is the prize relevant? Countless competitions on Twitter lure in entrants and followers by offering iPods, mobile phones and other desirable products. Think about the message the prize you choose conveys, is it benefitting your PR image or Apple’s?

How creative or thought-provoking is your competition? If you come up with something quirky and unusual, you may find it inspires discussion outside the competition itself.

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