Content Fusion: How Stories Are Shared in a Social World

Filed under Uncategorized by Aaron Pearson on 28 October 2011 at 13:13 {no comments}

It’s become apparent for some time in the world of professional communicators that traditional ways of thinking about how we package and share content – or, stories, if you will – are inadequate for the Web. One of the very best videos to articulate the problem, Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us, is now several years old. It also pointed to the solution.

Issues: Online, people simply do not consume much of their information in linear form in a singular format in a singular vehicle the way that you might have consumed a traditional printed newspaper or sat down and watched the network evening news on television. Hypertext destroyed linearity, encouraging us to jump from story to story and to share stories more easily with each other. XML separated the form of a page from the content of a page, which meant that suddenly content could be syndicated in many places and be presented differently in each place. Witness Flipboard. Social media growth means most often the content I consume comes from friends or organizations I trust rather than traditional news sources, even if it was nevertheless created by those traditional sources.

Weber Shandwick, my agency, has introduced a new model for online storytellers, which every organization should consider themselves to be. It’s called Content Fusion, and it harnesses and works with this new freedom to separate content from format and channel.

Here’s the way to think about it: Every company has stories. Think about the stories you have to tell first.

Then, think about format. Some stories are better suited to text, some to video, photos, audio, or some combination.

Then choose content vehicles. Only now do we start to say, “Should this be a news release?” Or a white paper, a blog post, a podcast, a presentation… Probably a combination, because different people respond differently to different content vehicles.

Okay, now consider communications channels. They may be branded channels, like your website. They may be “earned” channels like the opportunity to place your story with traditional media, online or off. They may “shared” channels like Facebook, where you have some control, but you share it with your audiences.

Finally, prepare for and encourage conversation. Not only do your stories travel farther when shared by others (witness the power of “friends of friends” on Facebook), but they carry more credibility. Plus, the content can be reshaped in new and unexpected, mashed-up ways.

Watch the YouTube video and tell me what you think.

“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.

We’re All Publishers Now

Filed under Soap Box by Aaron Pearson on 4 October 2010 at 19:04 {no comments}

Well the advertising and PR worlds are abuzz with the news of Forbes’ new AdVoice offering, which enables corporations and other organizations to blog under the Forbes banner under some sort of paid arrangement.  The two primary takes by industry watchers so far are that the sky is falling and this is the end of journalism and a great journalism brand or that this is nothing more than an incremental variation on advertorials.

Pontificating on whether this spells the doom of journalism and forever tarnishes the Forbes brand is probably a little outside the scope of this blog but I will say that it is hard to see much of a fundamental difference in principle from advertorials. Moreover, in many ways, Forbes is not the first publisher to take this step. We have noticed our clients getting increasing requests to blog on trade media sites already, and those publications aren’t even asking for compensation!  (Though there is a presumption that we’ll avoid overt production promotion in the blogs.)

Photo Courtesy Matt Miller, Flickr

Similarly, let’s take what’s probably the top and most respected consortium of enterprise tech bloggers, the Enterprise Irregulars. Sure, many of them are industry analysts and other traditional pundits. But Anshu Sharma, VP of Force.com platform product management at salesforce.com is also an Irregular, as is Craig Cmehil, senior product specialist at SAP AG.

In other words, the bigger observation for B2B marketers is that AdVoice reinforces what’s been a growing trend towards companies becoming media publishers. The fact is that in the social media world, good content is good content as long as there is transparency around conflicts of interest and who the real authors of that content are. It doesn’t have to come only from members of the professional journalism community.

Former Financial Times reporter Tom Foremski writes about Silicon Valley business trends and the intersection of technology and media. An excerpt from his post at www.EveryCompanyIsaMediaCompany.com:

Our media has also become much more complicated — more fragmented. We used to have “mass media” where a small set of media companies and channels, in TV, radio, newspapers, trade press — hosted much of our media communications.

Those days are gone. The reality is we now live in a multi-platform, multi-channel, micro- media world, and the trend is moving towards ever greater media fragmentation — vidcasts, podcasts, blogs, micro-blogging, Twitter, etc.

It is no longer possible to operate a business the old way — such as sending out a news release on Businesswire and briefing a handful of journalists, and sitting back.

Today you need to do that … and more, much more. Every company needs to master these media technologies, and the best media practices, of a rapidly fragmenting media world.

Traditional media relations opportunities are ever-fewer, especially for smaller or niche brands.  Yet conversely, the Web creates compelling long-tail opportunities to connect specialized audiences with specialized content in exciting ways, with video, slideshows, podcasts, tweetchats, e-books and blogs.  If you’re Apple or Google, you might not have to do this – though you should. If you’re almost anyone else and you want to connect effectively and consistently with your target audiences, you must consider yourself a media publisher.

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Curious George Goes to the Office

Filed under Discussion by Allan Schoenberg on 18 February 2010 at 03:17 {3 comments}

Who doesn’t love a good story? I’m particularly at my best reading these Curious George books to my kids at night. There’s always something about George getting into trouble and learning a lesson that I enjoy — but I think my kids just like how I goof around and tend to get creative with the plots each time I read them.

While the enjoyment is spending time with my kids, the challenge is always trying to make the same story interesting again and again. Does that challenge sound familiar at your job?

I was lucky enough to speak to a group of Northwestern Univerity IMC graduate students a few weeks ago on this topic of storytelling. I started my discussion by asking a simple question — what are the two things that every business does? The first answer was easy — sell. Obviously to exist companies need to make revenue and they do this by selling. The second took a little longer to get, but as you can tell by the theme of this post the answer is — tell stories.

That’s it? Sell and storytelling? In my opinion, yes. We just don’t call it storytelling. Words like differentiation and branding come to mind as do tactics like case studies and third party influencers.

But those words and tactics are parts of the story. So what is storytelling and how do we use it? Here’s a great post by Kevin Dugan on the topic. You should take a look at what he has to say.

I like stories for a few reasons and try to use them as much as possible. Here’s my line of thinking:

1. Stories make your organization come alive. Telling stories gives depth and perspective to the products and people of your company. While you only make “widget123″ there is a reason you make it, people who make it and customers who buy it. Providing background on how it “widget123″ was invented, examples of how customers use them, and why they are important to your industry (and perhaps the economy) gives your product and company life.

2. Stories give you credibility. While fact sheets and statistics are nice and get to the point they rarely get you anywhere on their own. Stories can demonstrate why there is a need for your company and the things you do. And face it, facts and figures do support your stories — not the other way around. I don’t think I’ve ever had a reporter write a story about my company or clients based on a fact sheet, but giving them a story — buttressed with facts — makes my pitch that much stronger.

3. Stories differentiate what we do. While competition can drive us all bananas (Curious George pun intended) it only forces us to tell better stories. The next time you’re stuck in a competitive situation start asking your product teams about the stories they can tell. You may be surprised at how many ideas you can generate to really stand out from your competitors (and hopefully they’re not reading this post).

Now it’s your turn. How do you develop stories for your company? What stories work for you? And of course if you have any children’s book recomendations I’m open for ideas (so are my kids).

Use Storytelling to Draw In Customers

Filed under Uncategorized by Aaron Pearson on 2 October 2009 at 10:18 {no comments}

storytellingI realize that a business purchase is supposed to be a rational decision driven by the need to maximize net present value or achieve a high internal rate of return or return on investment or whatever. Sure, it’s just economics.

It’s not really that simple. For one thing, everyone has their numbers, so as a buyer, what gets my attention? Try telling stories.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is a Harvard-trained and published neuroanatomist. How exciting do you suppose a lecure from Dr. Taylor would be on the mental and physiological effect of a left hemisphere brain hemorrhage?

You might be surprised. Watch this TED video.

It’s about 15 minutes long and you won’t want to turn it off.

Let’s take a look at why that is. First, it turns out that the subject having the hemorrhage is none other than Dr. Taylor. Our expert is suddenly vulnerable, a regular human being, not just a super-genius scientist, so we can relate to her. There’s very little jargon in her language (“A blood vessel exploded in my brain.”). There’s tension. A life is on the line. There’s even humor. Our hero pulls through and we learn something from the experience. Wow, awesome stuff.

If Dr. Taylor can make neurological disorders come to life for you, surely, surely you can find a way to make your software/business service/manufacturing system compelling.

I spent part of an afternoon this week watching some customer case study videos remarking on how hard it is for us in practice to employ storytelling techniques. Too often the formula is like this: 1. Business challenge. 2. Selected Vendor X for various reasons. 3. Implementation went well. 4. Business benefits.

That’s a very sensible, rational way to make a grounded business argument to invest in your product or service. But it’s dreadfully boring and won’t get anyone’s attention. Here are a few suggestions to get you started:
1. Make a person the hero of your story, not an institution. It’s hard to feel like a multinational corporation is just like you. But that CIO or finance manager or supply chain manager is a human being. He or she has good days and bad days, loves the job sometimes and dreads it at other times. We can empathize.
2. Remember the setting details. It may not seem all that relevant when you’re collecting the information for your story, but noting the little things – like what the weather was like or what they ate for lunch or how people were behaving – can help pull readers into the story.
3. Tell the bad, then the good. You can’t jump right to the glorious solution. You have to make people worried at first that the bad guys might actually win. Just how grim was the situation? Suddenly, your solution looks like a glorious dawn after a horrible night and your audience will find themselves wanting to be a hero just like your customer was.

There’s certainly art to this, not just science, but principles of storytelling have stood the test of time and can be used not just by communications professionals but also by marketing and sales teams. In fact, we’ve trained scores of folks on how to get the most out of storytelling. Give it a try yourself, or give me a buzz if you need help.

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