How Storytelling is (Still) Critical to Communications in the Blogosphere

As companies try to figure out how to use blogs and other social media tools to engage with customers, successfully participating in the blogosphere remains a bit of mystery to many marketing and PR professionals. Social media initiatives can't be spin, but companies must have a compelling story to tell about their brand, culture, products, and customers in their online activities. At the heart of every communications effort must be a story. Storytelling can be an organic process that comes from open dialog with customers.

What are the models? Who is doing it well? What are the lessons learned from the past few years? How do you find your story ? especially if you have lost it and must re-define it? How do you craft it to get a targeted reaction? What is the balance between authenticity in your story and making money, and how much of your story is determined by you versus your customer?

This discussion aims to address and answer some of these questions. Specific models to be discussed include examples from healthcare, high-tech, and consumer products. Bring your own examples to discuss!

While communications professionals must adapt to new media as they become viable, best practices must always revolve around the fundamentals: offering a great product or service to solve customers' needs and telling a compelling, creative and differentiated story.

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About the Speakers

Elisa Camahort

Elisa is a co-founder of BlogHer LLC (http://blogher.org) and its President of Events and Marketing. A marketing executive with 16 years of experience in Silicon Valley, Elisa opened her own high- tech marketing consultancy, Worker Bees, after a successful career in the cable broadband sector, managing multiple product lines, senior product management staff, and multi-million dollar budgets. Her most recent corporate position was Senior Director of Product Marketing at Terayon Communication Systems, where she was nominated for an SCTE (Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers) Women in Technology Award. She has been published numerous times and has extensive public speaking experience, focusing on Building Online Communities and on the What, Why and How of Blogging. Elisa was at the vanguard of professional and business blogging, and currently contributes to no less than eight blogs regularly. Elisa is Fellow and advisory board member of the Society for New Communications Research.

Kathy Klotz-Guest, MA, MBA

Kathy is a marketing executive with over 15 years of experience launching successful high-tech products and services. She has launched products and driven messaging for SGI, Dataquest, Gartner Group, MediaMetrix, Excite, Excite@Home, and Dow Jones to name a few companies. In addition to her deep expertise in product management, market research and strategic messaging, Kathy has also written and performed sketch comedy for years (most recently with MoronLife). Her passion for humor, storytelling, and creativity drives and shapes her work. Kathy is the founder of Powerfully Funny, a marketing consultancy that designs compelling marketing strategies with a creative edge to help clients ?stand out? from the pack. She has an MA in Multimedia Applications Development and an MBA in marketing from UC Berkeley, and is currently working on her MLA thesis at Stanford University. She served on the board of the Silicon Valley chapter of the American Marketing Association for five years, and is on the board of directors of the Society for New Communications Research.

Update: This month we are meeting in San Francisco at ShineSF. The topic will be the Social Media Release and our guests will be NMRCast Regulars Tom Foremski, Chris Heuer, Shel Holtz and Brian Solis who will be recording their first podcast of the year live from Third Thursday! http://tinyurl.com/y52nun Their guests will be Joel Tesch who is Regional Sales Manager, Northern California for Business Wire, Jen McClure of the Society for New Communications Research and ALL OF YOU!

The topic will be the State of the Release - where have we been, where are we and where are we headed. If you don't yet know about the Social Media Release, or don't understand it, or dislike the idea, here is your chance to find out why so many leading PR professionals think this is such a game changing development for the industry.

So join us in San Francisco for this very exciting Third Thursday!

PLEASE NOTE: Unfortunately we had some venue problems with F&A being closed for rennovation work and no other good alternatives were available in Palo Alto. So this month, we are testing out a new venue in San Francisco which both Stirr and Creative Commons have used previously with good results. So its off to Shine SF and the infamous Flickr Photo Booth. http://www.shinesf.com/

THANKS TO: Kristie Wells of Social Media Club for securing the venue for us and everyone else who worked hard on making this happen this month!

-Third Thursday organizers + New friends

Speaker Update: Asa Dotzler, community coordinator for Mozilla, will be replacing Erik Kokkonen as our guest speaker at this month's meetup. We'll be talking with Asa about his work on the Spread Firefox project.

http://www.spreadfirefox.com/

As usual, we'll be kicking the discussion off at 7PM, back patio of F&A's.

We look forward to seeing you there.

To the uninitiated, it sounds a lot like a haphazard cultivation method. However, podcasting has become one of the most intriguing -- and most misunderstood -- media distribution vehicles to arrive in recent memory.

And arrive it has. In one case, a podcast from two Virginia moms netted six figures of sponsorship from one of the country's biggest brands.

The voice of Edelman PR (at least insofar as he hosts their earSHOT podcast) will be leading this special edition of Third (technically "Fourth") Thursday.

The speaker linup includes:

- Aaron Burcell, Podshow
- Barbara Anthony, Palo Alto 360
- Jarah Euston, FresnoFamous
- Amy Gahran, writer and consultant

Looking forward to seeing you there.

Interested in speaking? Suggestions for topics?

Contact us via: http://publicrelations.meetup.com/79/suggestion

For our next Third Thursday meetup we've assembled a solid panel of corporate communicators from B2B giants, Cisco, Network Appliance and Ingres to cut through the new media rhetoric and talk candidly with us about what it *really* took for each of them to bring their corporate blogging initiatives from concept to reality, including all the hoops and headaches they encountered in the process.

This discussion, lead by Third Thursday co-conspirator Jeremy Pepper, will also dig into the behind-the-scenes mechanics and the day-to-day operations of a corporate group blog, as well as an executive blog, and what it takes to successfully oversee these projects from a PR and marketing standpoint.

This is a must-attend meetup for corporate communication folks that are in the early stages of blogging projects and could benefit from practical peer advice and group discussion.

We'll be on the outside patio of F&A's again and will start the discussion at 7PM, so come early to mingle and snack and stay afterward to do more of the same. Also, please note that while Third Thursday is a free event, participants will need to pay for their own food and drink. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Interested in speaking? Suggestions for topics?

Contact us via: http://publicrelations.meetup.com/79/suggestion