This post is based off the Digital Campfires talk that the ever insightful Frank Chimero gave at Webstock 2011. I’ve taken some of his main ideas and put them in the context of social media because, well, this is a social media blog.
Tell me a story
I wrote last month about how brands should frame the content they share as a story to make it warmer and more relatable. This is only one half of the battle though. To get interaction online, you can’t just tell stories yourself, you gotta get your users to tells stories as well. How do you get them to do that? Ask them to.
Frank Chimero argues that every form on the internet is a question asking for some kind of response. As in much of life, a good question begets a good response. A bad question begets a bad response. As brands and marketers looking to get our users talking, we need to learn how to ask good questions.
Bad Questions
Bad questions are questions that don’t give the user a direction. One example is also one of the most common questions we see in social media: Tell me about yourself. This is also known as the “Bio” question. How do you even begin to answer that question? It’s not easy to boil your entire existence into a paragraph. To overcome this people usually fill the box with a list. “I’m a father, husband, photographer, shark wrestler and all around imaginary person.” That is a good list of what the person does, but it doesn’t really tell you about who the person is. Bad questions are vague and open-ended, making it hard to get people to tell their stories.
Good Questions
Most of our stories are based on our experiences, so we want people to tell us about their experiences. Good questions encourage that by being specific or capturing someone’s immediate thoughts. “Tell me a story about something that happened to you,” is an overwhelming question, it’s too vague. “Tell me about that delicious cheese burger you’re eating,” is a question that is going to capture that persons immediate experience. This is how we want to approach questions for the brands we work with. Remember the Facebook status from Ford that I talked about last time, about Mandy and how her three dogs love to go for a ride? They followed that with this questions:
Ford fans, how often do you bring your pet along for the ride? Which seats do they like the best?
This is a great question. It’s specific and brings to mind memories of man’s best friend and his floppy-eared antics. The status has 65 responses of people telling stories about their dogs… and their Fords. Ford asked a good question and got good responses and engagement.
The Skinny
Getting your followers engaging is what social media is all about. Telling stories is how we relate to one another, how we share our lives and how we describe who we are. Stories are the key to successful social media. As marketers we need to frame our content as a story to make it relatable. If not, we sound like robots spewing updates like we’re solving math problems. That’s only the first step though. Once we get people interested in what we’re saying we need to get them talking. Asking specific and personal questions will prompt users to share their experiences. Stories are how we relate and now your users are relating to your brand.