The Power of Storytelling for Content Marketers from Robert Rose

In this video post, Robert Rose, co-author with Joe Pullizzi of ‘Managing Content Marketing,’ discusses what brands can learn from big-screen storytelling, as well as from Joseph Campbell: creating ‘heroic’ content that speaks to your audience.
Via www.contentmarketinginstitute.com

This past September, I was honored to speak at Content Marketing World. My talk was called “Storytelling Secrets From Hollywood.” Since that time, I’ve had a few people ask me for the slides. Inspired by these requests, I’ve been having some fun learning about video-editing programs. So here, I thought I’d go one step further and develop a little video for CMI readers.

The video embedded below is the basis of my presentationat Content Marketing World 2011.  I’ve since added some more visual elements to the storytelling — including clips from some of the movies I reference. (Hopefully, I’ve made them a little more fun to watch). Of course, if you’re interested in viewing the on-demand version of my talk, it’s available here.

Watch Robert’s video below:

Read Robert’s complete article here: Content Marketing Storytelling: Secrets from the Big Screen 

Via Scoop.it – Content Marketing Now

Sally Hogshead’s video explains the 9 second rule. Grab them fast or lose them. Keynote speaker Sally Hogshead is the author of FASCINATE, teaching audiences how to persuade and captivate in a world with a 9 second attention span.

Listen to Sally and You’ll Begin to Understand Why You Need to Buy Her Book: Fascinate.

More on this fun, fabulous, and yes, fascinating read:

Why are you captivated by some people but not by others? Why do you recall some brands yet forget the rest? In a distracted, overcrowded world, how do certain leaders, friends, and family members convince you to change your behavior? Fascination: the most powerful way to influence decision making. It’s more persuasive than marketing, advertising, or any other form of communication. And it all starts with seven universal triggers: Passion, Mystique, Prestige, Power, Rebellion, Alarm, and Trust.

Fascination plays a role in every type of decision making, from the brands you choose to the songs you remember, from the person you marry to the employees you hire. And by activating the right triggers, you can make anything become fascinating.

To explore and explain fascination’s irresistible influence, Sally Hogshead looks beyond marketing, delving into behavioral and social studies, historical precedents, neurobiology and evolutionary anthropology, as well as conducting in-depth interviews and a national study of a thousand consumers, to emerge with deeply rooted patterns for why, and how, we become captivated.

Hogshead reveals why the Salem witch trials began with the same fixations as those in Sex and the City. How Olympic athletes are subject to obsessions similar to those of fetishists. How a 1636 frenzy over Dutch tulip bulbs perfectly mirrors the 2006 real estate bubble. And why a billion-dollar “Just Say No” program actually increases drug use among teens, by activating the same “forbidden fruit” syndrome as a Victoria’s Secret catalog.

Whether you realize it or not, you’re already using the seven triggers. The question is, are you using the right triggers, in the right way, to get your desired result? This book will show you.

Via www.youtube.com

Unless You Address This Top of Mind, Unspoken Question, You are Out of the Game

Imagine for a moment, that you are looking out at a hoard of your customers in an actual or virtual audience and that each and every one of them is wearing a hat.

And, on each and every hat, are the words "so what?"

Essentially, that’s what they’re thinking when you are talking, sending them an e-mail, inviting them to your website, sharing an eNewsletter, mailing them a brochure or presenting them with an advertisement.

They want to know what’s in it for them. If you can’t tell them, you are out!  You are out of consideration. You are out of their trusted information resource database. You are out of their purchase plans. You are being tossed right out of the game.

My thanks to the late Dave Hagenbuck, sales trainer extraordinaire for this metaphor. He was teaching us about effective sales presentations in a pre-Internet era. But, his metaphor and his advice applies just as much, if not more today.

If you are ready with customer-centric answers to the unspoken ‘So what?’, you’ll be in good shape whenever and however you connect with your customers.

Your Content Marketing Must Make It Easy for Your Customers to Understand How You Benefit Them

You may not love Apple or Steve Jobs or their groundbreaking series of  iPhones first launched in 2007 Conversely, you may love much of what Microsoft has brought us in terms of operating systems and office productivity applications.

But, it’s hard not to love the way Steve Jobs keeps it simple and compelling as he introduced the iPhone 4 at their Worldwide Developer Conference in June 2010.  And, it’s hard to find much to love about Steve Ballmer’s own recent presentation on their upcoming smartphone strategy.

So, when you present information, I recommend emulating the Jobs’ simple and graphical approach: Few words and powerful images.

He begins his introduction of the iPhone 4 by saying that it has more than 100 new features but that "I get to cover eight of them with you." He says it simply and colloquially. He doesn’t use gobbledygook speech, as Steve Ballmer does below. Behind Steve initially is the giant word "iPhone" which then segues into his first point, "the first one: all new design."

To reinforce each of his points, the screen behind him shows huge images of the iPhone and of its specific features.

Basically, you have a very smart guy explaining in a non-highfalutin way why we would be crazy not to buy the new iPhone 4.

Microsoft: Complicated Visuals and Convoluted Explanations, Oh My!

Contrast that with some slides that were part of Microsoft’s recent analyst’s conference.  There is a awful lot going on with both his slides and his explanations

This is the Windows Phone 7 Slide

Huh?

Here is Steve explaining some Microsoft strategy elements:

Part of what we’ll be doing is driving kind of integrated set of thinking, branding. We’ll be really aggressively marketing Windows Phone. Both Windows PCs in all form factors and Windows Phones will get pretty aggressive marketing support, if you will.

Huh?

If you think I’m all way off base, you can watch Steve Ballmer’s analyst presentation.

Admittedly, he did have to address a complex set of product  issues. Nonetheless, he could have used more, but simpler slides so that viewers would walk away with a clear understanding of the core elements of Microsoft smartphone strategy. For example, in the Windows Phone 7 slide above, it has no headline and no clear focus. I have no idea what to take away from this slide. Imagine how much explanation would be required to clarify what this slide actually meant.

By contrast , I’ll bet that most viewers of the iPhone 4 presentation will remember specific visuals and most of the eight new features on which Steve Jobs focused.

The key to content marketing–and presentation–success is to keep it simple, make it visual, and focus on the most important and memorable points that will be beneficial to your customers.

On the other hand, to paraphrase an old aphorism about advertising that may well apply to Microsoft , " If you can’t create a compelling presentation for your product, you have a product problem, not a presentation problem.”

A New Edition of the Timeless Book, Presenting to Win, Explores the Content Marketing Component of In-Person Persuasion.

Whatever audience you must persuade, you need to engage them with compelling content in the form of stories. That’s easy to say, but hard to do.

As Jerry Weissman, author of Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story, puts it, "The problem is that no one knows how to tell a story and no one knows that they don’t know how to tell a story."  Fortunately, you’ll come away from reading this book armed with the necessary tools to tell those all-important stories brilliantly.

Presenting to Win, in its new expanded edition, teaches you to communicate with a purpose–whether you are convincing employees of the need to change, persuading prospects that you have the best solution to a problem or leading skeptical community groups to support your cause.

Presenting to Win overflows with practical advice on how to engage an audience by telling your story with a focus on what’s important to them. You become an "audience advocate," showing concern for your listeners’ needs that puts them at the heart of your presentation. By following Jerry’s detailed roadmap, we can learn how to tell stories that move and motivate listeners by keeping them engaged, from a compelling start to a big finish.

Jerry’s first career was as a Hollywood producer and screenwriter. His friendship with venture capitalist Ben Rosen led him to his second career as a presentation guru. In 1988, he launched a business that taught high-tech executives to move from feature-laden, techno-speak dissertations to engaging, listener-centric presentations. Yahoo!, Intuit, Cisco, Microsoft and Intel are among his clients.

Jerry offers plenty of real-world anecdotes, how-tos and helpful graphics that convey ways to grab and keep your audience’s attention. His "opening gambit" concept typifies his own story-telling approach in the book: He offers a rationale, supports it with multiple success stories and describes a broad range of gambits.

An opening gambit must pull the audience out from a possible state of disinterest or suspicion about you and your presentation. Posing questions to an audience is one of seven strategies discussed, and Jerry cites an experience by Scott Cook as an example. In 1993, Cook, founder of Intuit (maker of Quicken and QuickBooks), faced a jaded audience of investment bankers. Rather than launch into a feature-packed discussion of a new product, he asked two questions: How many of you balance your own checkbooks? How many enjoy doing it?

After a round of chuckles, he continued, "You’re not alone. Millions of people around the world hate balancing their checkbooks. We at Intuit have developed an easy-to-use, inexpensive home-finance tool, Quicken." With this "aha" moment, Cook was off and running.

Equally insightful chapters on presentation essentials provide a level of detail and clarity that leaves nothing to chance. Jerry demonstrates that even those of us who aren’t presentation naturals can present to win.

Learning what he recommends requires significant effort because his approach contains a broad range of interrelated elements that can vary, depending on purpose, topic and audience. You’ll need to devote time and effort to perfecting his method, but as leaders of Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, Intuit and Yahoo! have learned, your effort will be well worth it.

Click here to buy it on Amazon.com. You can also get the Kindle edition.

Nick Morgan’s great book, Give Your Speech, Change the World, not only teaches what it takes to become a great speaker. His lessons apply equally to effective content marketing.

Poor presenters and mediocre marketers share certain traits.

• They cannot explain concisely why their audience should care about the information and services they provide.
• They lack focus.
• They do not understand their audience.
• They are more focused on themselves then on their audience.
• They fail to engage in dialogue with their audience.
• They don’t urge their audience at the end of their presentation to take specific next-step actions.

It might seem obvious that speakers who exhibit the traits above would do poorly and probably bore their listeners to tears.  But, as marketers, we too often exhibit the same bad behaviors.

Here the six content marketing lessons we can take from Nick’s book, “Give Your Speech, Change the World.”

1. Develop an elevator speech that drives all of your marketing, branding, and content creation efforts. Most of us have a vague idea that an elevator speech is what we use to introduce who we are and what we do in the time it would take to ride up 10 floors on an elevator. That’s good as far as it goes, but Nick puts us on the right track with an anecdote illustrating the need for every speech to have an “elevator speech”.  He was riding in an elevator with a fanatic golfer on the day of his speech.  The golfer noted that there was a great golf course nearby and asked, “so tell me, why should I attend your speech?” Nick answered,
   “Because if you attend my speech, you will learn how to give presentations without fear, presentations that move your audience to action every time.”
   Perhaps, another way to think of the elevator speech is that it’s your brand promise–what your customers can and should expect from you.  That needs to be simple, relevant, and compelling.
2. You have to understand your audience in order to communicate effectively with them.  Nick insists that it’s vital that you learn everything you possibly can about your audience before attempting to communicate with them.  Too often we begin with a feature set that we assume is important to our customers without having done the necessary research to know what they really care about.
3. You must forget about yourself and be focused intently on your audience. Thus, great speakers pay attention to their audience and lose their self-consciousness.  They continually observe their reaction to the presentation so that they can continually adjust and reengage their listeners.
   The same continuous listening is a fundamental component of content marketing.  Fortunately, such tools as “Google alerts” and Twitter let us monitor in real time how our customers are reacting to us, to our products, and to their top issues and problems.
4. Use compelling stories to engage your audience on an emotional level so that they will remember and repeat what they heard. From our earliest bedtimes, we have loved hearing wonderful stories–and have learned from them. Decades after college, I can still remember wonderful stories my favorite history professor told that kept all of us engaged throughout his classes.
   We need to wrap our messaging in great stories that our customers will love, remember, and repeat.  Our customers may not remember every benefit our products provide, but they will remember well-told stories about how one of their colleagues solved a problem, saved a fortune or found the perfect solution.
5. Engage your audience in dialogue so that your presentation is completely interactive. Your listeners want to be more than listeners.  They want to be active participants. 
   This applies equally to 21st-century marketing.  Our customers want to engage us in conversation.  They do not want to be unwilling recipients of one-way product-focused communication.  Moreover, these two-way conversations enable us to improve the quality of what we sell and how we sell.
6. Conclude your presentation with action items for your audience. Don’t let them leave the room after a long drawn out Q&A session.  Instead, finish your presentation by getting your audience to take specific actions that will begin their journey toward solving their problems. 
   Of course, this is equally important for online content marketing.  It is vital to encourage your Web visitors to take an action that will move them toward a solution to their critical problems–and ultimately lead them to becoming customers.  These actions might be subscribing to an eNewsletter, downloading an e-book or white paper, or signing up for free webinar.  Each of these actions brings them closer to a solution and to you.

Nick Morgan’s book, Give Your Speech, Change the World, is must reading even if the only presentations you give are inside your company.  If you follow his superb advice, you will have an excellent shot at changing the world around you.

Also, be sure to check out Nick’s blog for ongoing advice for all of us who need to communicate effectively in public.

It is so hard, but so important to explain what it is that you do and how it will benefit the person to whom you are communicating. Not at length.  But so concisely that it can be communicated in less time than it takes an elevator to go up a few floors. And, so compellingly that your listener will remember and repeat it to others.

Actually, Nick Morgan is even more precise than this.  He says your elevator speech must be a single sentence.

I have just begun to read his wonderful book, Give Your Speech, Change the World. It is absolutely must reading, even if the only speeches you give are internal presentations within your organization.

Nick is the founder of Public Words, a communications coaching company. So he gives speeches–and teaches people how to give speeches–for a living. It’s obvious from reading his book that he is a very, very good at it. Listen to what he has to say about that all-important elevator speech.

To communicate the importance of an elevator speech as the core of any presentation, he imagines a scenario in which he is in an elevator with a convention attendee who has the choice of spending an hour listening to Nick’s talk or spending quality time in the sunshine with his golf clubs.  In response to this golfer’s imaginary question: “I’m a golfer, and there is a PGA class golf course outside.  So tell me, why should I attend your speech?”

Here is Nick’s response:

Because, if you attend my speech, you will learn how to give presentations without fear, presentations that move your audience to action every time.

Unless this golfer is a complete loser, he will be attending Nick’s speech.

As Nick explains it, there are three essential elements to this and every effective elevator speech:

1. it must contain a benefit for the potential member of the audience, that is, his imaginary elevator companion.
2. It must contain the word you, meaning the audience.
3. It must contain some reference to emotion, because emotion is more engaging and memorable than intellectual information.

The power of his elevator speech formula is that it conveys a genuine benefit to the audience in an engaging and compelling way, but then it all forces you to focus on one idea and one idea only.

Excellent Elevator Speech + Great Content = Intense Customer Engagement

Nick is right about speeches.  But I’m convinced that his advice applies equally to our content marketing efforts.  Our customers are always asking (even if it’s subliminal), “What’s in it for me?”  In answer to their question we need to be ready with content that is driven by a tightly focused brand promise that can be distilled into a Nick Morgan-style elevator speech.

Of course, if you want to learn how to become a successful speaker, start by visiting Nick online at: PublicWords.com

London Times editor delivers online slide show to put you on the right track

Tom Whitwell’s headline “How to Write Awesome Headlines” might be better than mine.  However, they both have something critical in common: Each tells you exactly why you should read the article that follows.

How important is a great headline versus a poor headline? 

According to Tom, it’s not a few percent, it can mean 10 to 20 times greater readership.  That’s why paying careful attention to your headlines is vital.  They are the single most important element of your online articles.

Tom points out that a critical reason that headlines are so important today is that they are frequently separated from story content on the Internet.  That means your readers may not even see the lead paragraph to your story when they see your headline.

He sums up the task of writing great headlines succinctly:

It’s working out what the story is, what your reader will respond to, and how to squeeze all the goodness into 68 characters.

The following slide illustrates what great job he does with his own headlines and with compressing a lot of content into a few words.

More social media lessons from Tom’s slideshow

I learned about Tom Whitwell because he commented on my recent post,  How to Avoid the Five Bad Headline Mistakes That Can Torpedo Your Blog Readership. His comment was compelling enough that I tracked it back to look at his slideshow. By taking a few minutes to write a relevant comment, Tom now has the opportunity to expose his presentation to hundreds or perhaps thousands of additional viewers.

Tom takes everything a step further by using Slideshare which makes it very easy to share presentations Web wide  via Facebook or Twitter, for example.

Slideshows are a terrific way to communicate information visually to make it both more understandable and more compelling for your readers.

Be sure to check out Tom’s presentation so you can learn more about great headlines and great slideshows:

How to Write Awesome Headlines

Helpful? Copy, Paste, then Tweet it!

Take 5 Minutes Now to Learn How to Write Great Headlines…http://snipurl.com

Transform In-Person Content Marketing into Online Content Marketing

If you are selling complex products and services, text and images may not take your visitors where you want them to go.  That’s why so many companies are providing video presentations on their websites.  These tools do a great job of walking your prospective customers through lots of information in a logical and compelling way.

Adding videos can be very effective, but they may be time-consuming and often expensive to produce professionally.  This is especially true if your organization is very small.

There is a great free alterative approach.  Be visual without video. Simply repurpose a great sales presentation that you would normally give in person into a self-guide online sales tool. You can make this happen with a combination of Microsoft PowerPoint and Google Docs.  And, if you don’t have PowerPoint, you can use the Google Docs Presentation software.  There is almost no learning curve for you–and none at all for your visitors.

Transform Your Time Specific In-Person Content Marketing Presentation into a 24/7 Global Presentation.

Here’s what to do:

Prepare the right kind of presentation for the web

• Review your best presentations to make sure that they are current
• Make sure that an interested visitor will come away believing that you understand their problems and have the ability to solve them
• Minimize bullet points and maximize visual elements
• Make sure the presentation(s) is aimed squarely at visitors who will really benefit from your products and services
• Make it long enough to tell your story, but not so long as to numb the mind

Get it ready to go online

• Keep the file size reasonable; it can’t be bigger than 10MB for Google. Hint: Use these great tips from Microsoft to shrink the size. I dropped from 10+MB to 3+MB
• If you don’t have a Google Docs account, sign up. It’s free.
• Use the Upload a file command.
• Publish the Presentation.  It will live on the web so you can point folks there or email the link if you wish. 

Put it on your site

• Choose an appropriate dimension from small to large
• Create a destination page on your site or place it in an appropriate spot on an existing page
• Paste the html code generated by Google Docs into you web page. You have to do this in HTML editing mode.

This Repurposed Content Marketing Presentation Shows What You Can Do with Some Extra Effort–and No Extra $$

Here’s a presentation that I gave in February 2008 to the SW Florida Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America.  Although, I haven’t taken the time to rework it to be web specific, I think you can follow pretty easily where I wanted to take the group of PR Pros in the audience: To an understanding of the content marketing Tsunami that is beginning to over take us. And, why we all need to change the way we think about marketing.

In my case, this could also serve as an inexpensive way to introduce organizations that needed speakers to the kind of content I convey.

You’ve spent a lot of time creating effective presentations that perhaps only a few dozen prospects have ever seen.  With a modest effort and the power of the web, why not go global and 24/7? 

Love ‘em or Hate ‘em, You Can’t Forget ‘em.

“Where’s the beef?”

“So easy even a caveman could do it.”

What is it about these phrases and accompanying images from Wendy’s and Geico commercials that make them so memorable?

In Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Chip and Dan Heath explain brilliantly why such “sticky” ideas escape the dustbin of history and provide a framework that enables us to communicate more effectively.

“Regardless of your level of ‘natural creativity’ … a little focused effort can make almost any idea stickier [and] more likely to make a difference,” they write.

The Heath brothers have written a very sticky book that will improve your ability to be truly memorable–online, in-print or in person. Click here to read our full review in Gulfshore Business.

Buy ‘Made to Stick’ on Amazon.com