“Our Products Don’t Lend Themselves to Storytelling”

Filed under Case Study by Aaron Pearson on 18 May 2011 at 21:11 {no comments}

Yeah, I don’t buy it.

I’ve always been a big advocate for the stopping power of good stories and the importance of humanizing products and institutions. (So does Allan Schoenberg – see “Curious George Goes to the Office.”) It’s only gotten more important as audiences have become increasingly barraged by content from all sides and their attention spans get shorter and shorter. But the tools and channels for telling great stories have also just gotten better for B2B marketers. Thanks to the Web, social media networks, and the power of content syndication, anyone can be a great publisher of content. But that means using the tools of the craft that journalists have used over the years and setting aside the hard sale.

One of our agency’s “Seven Elements of Storytelling” is to humanize the story. Okay, so let’s consider what would be pretty much an impossible product offering to humanize.

How about glass?  Fancy glass yes, but cold, hard wholesale glass sold B2B nevertheless. Like the products our friends at Corning sell.

In their words, “Corning is the world leader in specialty glass and ceramics. Drawing on more than 160 years of material science and process engineering knowledge, Corning creates and makes keystone components that enable high-technology systems for consumer electronics, mobile emissions control, telecommunications and life sciences.”

Yeah, yeah. But Corning also created one of the greatest corporate overview videos of all-time.
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Called “A Day Made of Glass,” the video shows all the different futuristic applications of Corning glass. Photovoltaic window glass gradually lighting the room in the morning, frameless LCD television glass, touch-sensitive architectural display glass and so on.

The video does an exceptional job of humanizing a product that is the otherwise the epitome of cold and lifeless. It also happens to show that sometimes high product values do matter, even on YouTube. Since it came out three months ago, it has received more than 12 million views, making it one of the most-viewed corporate videos of all time. Amazing.

Predictions for B2B Social Media Use in 2010

Filed under Discussion by Kate Brodock on 3 January 2010 at 19:33 {4 comments}

As the last in my series of 2010 prediction posts, here are some of my thoughts looking forward to the next year in B2B social media use.

  1. Social media use will grow horizontally in the B2B space. This means there will be a lot more industries that will be represented on social media than there have been thus far.  And we’re talking a lot more industries like cementing or manufacturing.
  2. Because of the horizontal and first-time occurrences mentioned above, it also means there will be some industries that will be under-represented in the social media sphere, but that will develop front runners who will get significant advantages within those respective industries.
  3. While being more accepted, there will be more boundaries placed on how many B2B industries us social media.  There won’t be so much “stuff” to play with because implementers will realize that there are particular tools that are more helpful for B2B purposes, and that there are many tools that just won’t work.
  4. Social media will be used heavily for internal use in the B2B space.
  5. There will be a lot more multimedia uses, specifically video.
  6. As for all social media marketing, it will be a question of how to interact with people rather than simply where.  This goes a long with the idea of strategy trumping tactics, but it really emphasizes putting together a fuller picture of what can be done with social media tools in B2B and applying in a more focused way.

What do you think will happen in the next year?

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