Who Moved My Story?

Dear “Who Moved My Story,”

I’ve been there.

You’re there now.

Every human being who writes for a company as part of communicating to the outside world has experienced the frustration of seeing his or her copy pruned again and again … and again.

Forget trying to humanize the narrative. You’d be happy if the finalized copy sounded better than an FTC complaint form.

Before going further, I would be remiss if I didn’t address your use of the verb “mutilate.” Yes, the boss has wrecked your copy. One might even say the boss has neutered your copy. But “mutilated” brings with it a premeditated act to mangle beyond recognition. In the spirit of being fair, the action is not premeditated. The boss, however misguided, genuinely believes the changes improve the copy.

Good.

Glad we got that squared away.

Moving along –

The dynamic described in your letter is a tricky one. Let’s start with what the pros from the world of TQC (total quality control) would call “root cause”: Why do the stakeholders who approve your copy exhaust so much energy suffocating the conversational language?

There’s no easy answer to this question.

For the over-40 crowd – I’m in this club, so it pains me to say this – many have been grounded in “me marketing,” convinced the narrative should espouse only the virtues of the company. Some believe audiences compartmentalize, so leave the entertaining to Steven Spielberg and his ilk. Others are simply risk-averse. God forbid you deviate from the corporate-speak handbook, twisting a cliché or crafting a half-way interesting participle. Even a touch of emotion in business communications can scare the beezeezus (and other “stuff”) out of many with sign-off power.

Regardless of your situation, do not feel defeated.

I appreciate this is a tough one. Watching your creative scrubbed week after week after bloody week, it’s easy to tumble into the trap of “delivering what people want” as opposed to what will make a difference. Don’t give in.

The time has come to fight for your storytelling. This doesn’t mean that every line must become the Battle of the Bulge (which didn’t turn out so well for Allied forces). Especially in the early going, pick the spots where you feel very strongly that your path is the right path.

Use these interactions as an opportunity to educate your stakeholders. Share the context that frames your thinking. Even stakeholders from the old school recognize that communicating the same points the same way as your competitors is wrong. Let them read for themselves, again with context, how you’re striving for a differentiated voice.

More than logic, emotion must also be part of these discussions. Allow your passion to come to the fore. Strength of conviction can often be the most persuasive way to win someone over. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been called worse things than obstinate.

That’s half of the equation.

The other half calls for the person who oversees the content creation, the CMO or VP of marketing or perhaps the director of creative services, to champion the storytelling cause with the stakeholders who control copy signoff. He or she should be meeting with individual stakeholders, explaining the “why” behind the storytelling mentality. There will also be times when it makes sense for the content boss to join you in talking with stakeholders, to hear first-hand what you’re up against.

Look, there’s no magic wand that with a single wave everyone lands on the storytelling bandwagon. Like any form of diplomacy, it takes time and a series of interactions – and even then you’ll have one or two stakeholders who refuse to budge.

That’s OK. Don’t allow them to intrude on your happily ever after.

Accentuate the positives.

Celebrate your victories.

Be brave.

Your writing deserves it.

Sincerely,

Lou

You Don’t Need New Hampshire to Find Your Voice

After Hillary Clinton won the New Hampshire primary back in 2008, she stood at the podium and uttered the words, “I found my own voice.”

“Voice” is tricky.

It’s always there.

Yet, it can be tougher to find than Waldo in bad lighting. And when you do find it, success is not guaranteed. (Just ask Hillary.)

Anyone standing on a communications pulpit yearns to be described by qualities such as insightful, entertaining, helpful, amusing, witty, pure, empathetic, engaged and committed. Voice goes a long a way toward determining whether others view your pulpit as worth their time.

I’m not just referring to politicians. The same holds true for entertainers, leaders and your garden-variety writers.

After blogging at the intersection of storytelling techniques, digital communications and PR for precisely five years and one day – yesterday, July 10, 2008 marked the publishing of my first post – I’ve been thinking about the journey in shaping my own voice. I gain satisfaction from a sense of discovery, teaching and advocating. If I can manage to conjure a touch of levity, all the better.

Of course, none of this matters if no one is paying attention. Obviously, sensationalism and polarizing voices sell. How else do you explain the popularity of Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh?

Regarding my own voice, I’m sure some have found a post (or two) to be snarky. While I’d prefer to stay out of the snarky quadrant, it’s inevitable that between a strong point of view and a bent sense of humor, I will periodically push things too far. Hopefully, I never come across as mean-spirited.

Even without applause emanating from New Hampshire, I’d like to think 466 posts have honed a voice I can call my own.

It starts with a belief that there should be a fun dimension to business and specifically communications. Bringing forth the absurdity in communications plays into this. And I do enjoy a good language tug-of-war.

I think my mom put it best, “You were a smart ass as a child. I thought you would grow out of it.”

For those who have taken the time to drop by my neighborhood, thank you.

It’s no fun taking a journey by yourself.

Storytelling Techniques Tie Tractors to Uniting a Country

Consider this quandary.

Caterpillar makes heavy machine equipment like hydraulic excavators, tractors and the ever-popular backhoe loader.

Pushing dirt from point A to point B doesn’t exactly conjure drama.

Recognizing this point, Caterpillar developed a series of videos that do tell compelling stories by connecting the company’s equipment to a human element.

My favorite involves Caterpillar’s role in uniting the country of Madagascar which previously had no roads to connect the island’s 320,000 people in the rural north with the rest of the country (we can assume vanilla beans comes from the south).

With the help of European Union (EU) support, a 300-kilometer highway was constructed that for the first time gave the “northerners” access to schools, hospitals and the capital city of Antananarivo.

The connection literally changed a nation.

Yes, Caterpillar has a vested interest with its equipment used in building Route Nationale 6, but check out the video noting the amount of time allocated to bulldozers and the like.

Talking about a story with humanity (doesn’t hurt that the voiceover is James Earl Jones grade).

Here’s the key.

Caterpillar was savvy enough to understand its equipment should take a supporting role in the story. In fact, the section of the video devoted to the Caterpillar dealer and machinery lasts a grand total of nine seconds.

That’s all.

Nine seconds.

Because the power of the story comes from changing the lives of the people of Madagascar.

The interviews with people like the taxi owner deliver the perfect close.

“It used to be I have too many cars and not enough customers. Now I have too many customers and not enough cars.”

I have a hunch the taxi owner is about to discover another aspect of business … competition.

One final point –

The total video last 130 seconds.

Media expert Sam Whitmore shared a study with us this week that shows shorter videos can actually have greater recall than longer versions.

More isn’t necessarily better.

Caterpillar gets this point and more.

Reverse-engineering UPS Story on Training

Any company would prize 20 column inches plus a photo on the front of The Journal’s Marketplace section.

That’s exactly what UPS enjoyed in the article titled “UPS Thinks Outside the Box on Driver Training.”

The piece makes for a good mini case study on the type of storytelling that plays in the business media.

Note the absence of a news release.

This is a one-off feature.

While the writer packages a phantom news hook in the lead graph around what appears to be a recent problem – a large percent of driver candidates wash out of the traditional training – we learn later that the solution to the problem commenced in 2007.

This is not new, and that’s OK.

But the lead graph does illustrate the power of a “negative” in storytelling:

Vexed that some 30% of driver candidates flunk its traditional training, United Parcel Service Inc. is moving beyond the classroom to ready its rookies for the road.

Most companies wouldn’t release a statistic that reflects poorly on its performance, even if it’s in the rear-view mirror.

Yet, UPS recognizes the negative stat creates the door-opener to the story.

As discussed in previous posts, without being open to sharing what’s been done in the past, the reporter has no context to understand the significance of what’s been achieved in the present. The larger the distance between “what was” and “what is,” the greater the drama.

In the case of UPS, the new training has reduced the washout number to 10 percent.

Further showing an understanding of storytelling, UPS delivers (couldn’t resist) access to The Journal reporter so she can see with her own eyes what goes down in a training session.

Again, most companies would take a pass on this technique; i.e., what happens if the reporter, God forbid, sees a mistake?

Well, the reporter did see a mistake:

Mr. Byrnes hopped back in and started up. “Stop! Stop! Ugh!” yelled Mr. Keys. He picked up the cone. “This is a kid who was playing football around your vehicle and went to get his ball.” Mr. Byrnes looked shaken and slapped his forehead. The lesson stuck: At the next stop, he checked for cones.

And you know what? It’s OK.

If anything, it brings a realness to the story.

Of course, The Journal needs to remind folks that it devotes features to topics, not companies; hence, the obligatory paragraph on other companies testing novel training, including UPS archrival FedEx, which offers this amusing comment:

FedEx Corp. says it, too, has moved toward more hands-on learning in the past five years, although it adds the change wasn’t prompted by a high failure rate among trainees.

Ouch.

It’s always a compelling read when a relative unexpectedly throws a dart.

Still, the article quickly reverts back to the topic at hand and leaves the reader with a positive feeling about UPS.

I didn’t conduct exhaustive research, but best as I can tell the last time UPS played the training card was back in 2007 in Fortune when it first introduced Integrad:

On Sept. 17, UPS opened its first-ever full-service pilot training center, a $34 million, 11,500-square-foot, movie-set-style facility in Landover, Md., aimed directly at young would-be drivers and known as Integrad. The facility and curriculum have been shaped over three years by more than 170 people, including UPS executives, professors and design students at Virginia Tech, a team at MIT, forecasters at the Institute for the Future, and animators at an Indian company called Brainvisa.

So while the innovative UPS training does sit in the public domain, the new hard data – 1,629 trainees have completed the program with a 90 percent success rate – allows The Journal to revisit the topic.

The David-Against-Goliath Story Never Goes Out of a Style

There’s an enduring dimension to the David-against-Goliath story that resonates with people.

It brings out a fundamental of good storytelling, the unexpected.

No one expects a David to beat the proverbial Goliath.

The same technique makes for a compelling read in the business world.

That’s why when an accomplished mathematician surfaces to challenge Google, an avalanche of stories appears in media properties ranging from The New York Times to Search Engine Land. In fact, the Computerworld story led with:

“A David has just arose to take on the Goliath that is Google: Wolfram|Alpha, a search engine which serves up formatted answers to questions rather than provide just a list of links.”

One of my favorite writers, Malcolm Gladwell, recently penned a piece for The New Yorker entitled, “How David Beats Goliath.”

As you would expect, Gladwell’s storytelling builds off of a wonderfully contrarian premise:

“David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.”

But Gladwell doesn’t numb our senses with Arreguín-Toft’s statistics and market research.

He frames the story with a subplot that anyone can relate to: a youth sports team, in this case a 12-year-old girls basketball team coached by the CEO of software company TIBCO, that demonstrates effort and smarts trumping expertise. Think Bad News Bears in pigtails (although it’s tough to visualize TIBCO CEO Vivek Ranadivé playing Morris Buttermaker instead of Walter Matthau).

To provide context on Ranadivé, Gladwell needs to explain TIBCO’s business. Take a look at the TIBCO boilerplate found at the end of each news release:

TIBCO’s technology digitized Wall Street in the ’80s with its event-driven Information Bus software, which helped make real-time business a strategic differentiator in the ’90s. Today, TIBCO’s infrastructure software gives customers the ability to constantly innovate by connecting applications and data in a service-oriented architecture, streamlining activities through business process management, and giving people the information and intelligence tools they need to make faster and smarter decisions, what we call The Power of Now.

Not exactly a narrative that works in a New Yorker story.

Instead, Gladwell inserts Ranadivé’s example again built around something that everyone has experienced, lost luggage from air travel:

“You know, when you get on a plane and your bag doesn’t, they actually know right away that it’s not there. But no one tells you, and a big part of that is that they don’t have all their information in one place. There are passenger systems that know where the passenger is. There are aircraft and maintenance systems that track where the plane is and what kind of shape it’s in. Then, there are baggage systems and ticketing systems and they’re all separate. So you land, you wait at the baggage terminal, and it doesn’t show up.”

Everything bad that happens in that scenario, Ranadivé maintains, happens because of the lag between the event (the luggage doesn’t make it onto the plane) and the response (the airline tells you that your luggage didn’t make the plane). The lag is why you’re angry. The lag is why you had to wait, fruitlessly, at baggage claim. The lag is why you vow never to fly that airline again. Put all the databases together, and there’s no lag.

Sticking with the basketball metaphor, Gladwell dips into the collegiate ranks and comes up with the time a spunky team from Fordham beat the dominant University of Massachusetts led by none other than Dr. J – Julius Erving by transforming the game into 48 minutes of havoc.

But the basketball vignettes are contrasted by the “Davids” through history who chose a conventional path and were promptly squashed: the Peruvians against the Spanish, the Sri Lankans against the British and the list goes on.

The simplicity in language comes out in Gladwell’s punchline:

We tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is the commodity. It’s the other way around. Effort can trump ability … because relentless effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coordination.

Furthermore, what Gladwell calls “the insurgent’s creed” involves not only outworking Goliath, but a second advantage:

They will do what is “socially horrifying.” They will challenge the conventions about how battles are supposed to be fought.

Now there’s a phrase that grabs one by the scruff of the neck, “socially horrifying.”

Back to the big picture.

Gladwell uses the “how” as the vehicle to tell the story of a person, company, army and girls basketball team succeeding when the circumstances suggest it shouldn’t play out this way.

The same principle can be applied to telling a company’s story.

Companies, especially in the technology sector, leapfrog the status quo on a daily basis.

Unfortunately, the typical company wants to jump right to the punch line instead of capturing the “how” in all its storytelling glory.

Those anecdotes, numbers, obstacles, perspectives emotions, derailments, etc. bring out an entertainment value that elevates the accomplishment (even by us mortals who don’t have Mr. Gladwell’s gift).

By the way, Ranadivé’s basketball team made it all the way to the nationals where their slingshots failed them in the third round.

Applying Storytelling Techniques to Owned Media

I had the pleasure of speaking at Compass USA’s communicators’ conference in North Carolina this morning.

As one of the largest food service companies in the country, Compass has a good story to tell.

With all due respect to my technology brethren, it was liberating to discuss storytelling in the context of banana bread, grilled salmon and all things food.

It turns out that Compass and its various brands have already spiced up their content – sorry, couldn’t resist – through storytelling techniques.

During the discussion, I highlighted the following example of owned media from the Wolfgang Puck brand.

The format draws from the same journalistic approach one would find in a magazine.

Notice that Scott Drewno isn’t trying to weave the company’s messages into his answers.

Just like a journalist interview, the idea is for the answers to spill out naturally.

sriracha Along this line, Scott comes across as genuine, perhaps even looking to trigger a reaction on the part of the reader:

Q: What’s your new favorite ingredient?
A: Chicken feet

Does the vignette tell a story by the truest definition: A hero overcomes a quagmire for a happy ending?

No.

But applying storytelling techniques like anecdotes, the unexpected – Scrapple in his fridge – and fun with language leaves you feeling like you know Chef Drewno and through him, the company.

You can’t personify a company through a pork dumpling (even with a dash of Sriracha).

Fortune Journalist Cuts to the Core of Storytelling in Business

In a time of gnat-like attention spans, few publications still practice long-form journalism.

Fortune is one exception, and Patricia Sellers is one exceptional storyteller.

If you recognize the name, it’s likely because Sellers took Fortune’s annual feature, “The Most Powerful Women in Business,” and transformed it into franchise with its own brand cachet.

The Stanford Business School recently interviewed Sellers starting with the question: Why is storytelling important for entrepreneurs?

Not exactly an alert-the-media moment as she highlights social media as the means for startups to tell their stories without depending on journalists.

But what she considers “the best stories” is worth highlighting. While she doesn’t call it a story arc, that’s what she lays out. Using her words, we’ve drawn it out below:

She closes with this punch line:

“If failure isn’t part of the story, I’m not that interested.”

Think about this for a moment.

If the story doesn’t show struggle, things going wrong and ultimately failure taking hold, she won’t pursue the story.

Because these elements generate the drama.

You can watch the interview with Sellers below

Is This the Future of Newspaper Video?

Journalism — particularly newspapers — has been trying to shift to video for years, often sputtering like a ’57 Chevy with a bad carburetor.

And for good reason.

The inverted pyramid still figures prominently in J schools across the country.

If you’re pounding out news stories for the Daily Planet, the inverted pyramid serves you well. But applying the inverted pyramid to video isn’t going to hold the viewer’s interest, much less prompt hey-you-gotta-check-this-out sharing across social channels.

The skill set for video is different.

The mentality — a spoonful of entertainment helps the storytelling go down — is different.

Equally important, video calls for the journalist to take a collaborative approach to the storytelling. It’s not enough to think in terms of visuals and actions that advance the story. The journalist must team with producers, videographers, graphic designers, audio engineers, illustrators and other specialists to bring video to life.

The New York Times gets this concept. Back in February, NYT Executive Editor Dean Baquet shared in a note to the staff:

In ways large and small, the newsroom is experimenting and adapting as we move into our digital future. We are revamping our video unit. The news hub is beginning to free desks to focus on coverage without being consumed by print deadlines. We have begun a desk-by-desk digital training regimen. We have gone from being largely unaware of our audience’s changing habits to making them an integral part of our daily conversations. In our news meetings we talk of coverage, regardless of platform. More and more we discuss how to highlight all kinds of stories — video, multimedia, the politics desk’s great voices feature — that are more digital than print. We debate openly and freely as we experiment with new ways of telling stories.

What really brings this home is the recent NYT video, “How China Is Changing Your Internet.”

It’s a great example of the convergence of serious journalism and entertainment.

The opening narration lays down the serious tack:

If you’re sitting in the United States or Europe right now, you probably have never used a Chinese app. But the reality is if you want to know how the Internet will develop, China, the land once known for its cheap rip offs, has actually become a guide to the future.

But the rest of the video harmonizes the words, visuals and sound track with the production value of an HBO special. As the narrator explains “… that means there is no Facebook, no Twitter and no Google.” We see the logos of three social media Goliaths for a split second …

… before an off-screen bazooka eviscerates the three logos, complete with sound effects.
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The bulk of the video centers on WeChat described as a “super app.”
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The pace of the storytelling quickens during the hypothetical scenario of WeChat that goes something like this:

1. Couple at home with a dirty corgi

2. Let’s change this

3. Man shows up to shampoo the corgi

4. Pay for corgi shampoo

5. Post photo of clean corgi

6. Friend sees photo and hires same man to shampoo her poodle

7. Pay for poodle shampoo

8. Friend says thanks and let’s meet at new hip noodle joint

9. Order taxi

10. Order food

11. Pay for food

12. Pet cleaner invests his take in a wealth management product

13. Noodle joint knows when you arrive

14. Posts a review on overcooked meat

The point being, all these varied actions occur within WeChat.

The New York Times video also weaves touches of levity into the story, like calling out the friend who likes Hello Kitty and works at a boring office job as a slacker.
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You’ll note that the video’s byline carries the names of Jonah M. Kessel and Paul Mozur. While anyone who tracks China on the NYT is familiar with Mozur, Kessel’s name likely won’t ring a bell. He comes from the visual world.

In other words, while the NYT is doing its best to bring its traditional journalists up the visual storytelling curve, the paper is depending on experts in video and filmmaking like Kessel to create industrial-grade video like the one on China changing the internet.

Can we expect this to be the future of newspaper video?

Doubtful.

The reality is that most newspapers don’t have the resources of The New York Times.

Side note: For more on video as a communications tool, I published “Creating a Company Video That Actually Tells a Story” last week.

Levity is the Killer App for Business Storytelling

Notice I said “levity,” not “funny” which is a much higher bar.

Still, it often takes guts as much as creativity to bring levity to a brand’s storytelling. And if you can tap into a recent happenstance, you’ve got the makings for a story to reach the masses.

I’ve come to call this “improv marketing” with one of the best-known examples being the Oreo tweet during the Super Bowl blackout.

It’s one thing to be nimble in serving up a clever tweet.

It’s another to create a mini campaign with levity in less than 48 hours to leverage a breaking news story. That’s exactly what Zappos pulled off after Kanye West’s beat down of Zappos CEO Tony Hseih during a podcast with author Brett Easton Ellis on Nov. 18. The next day E Online reported on West’s cathartic moment:

“I got into this giant argument with the head of Zappos that he’s trying to tell me what I need to focus on. Meanwhile, he sells all this s–t product to everybody, his whole thing is based off of selling s–t product,” West stated.

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I think we all can agree this isn’t a key message for Zappos.

Twenty-four hours later, Zappos went live with a new product line inspired by Mr. West:

Put yourself in the shoes – cue the groan for the bad pun – of Zappos’ brand shepherds. They had two obvious choices:

Do nothing: Name calling from Kayne West isn’t going to torpedo Cole Haan sales.
Call some friendly journalists: Zappos and Tony Hseih could have made a withdrawl from the media karma bank, sharing their side of the story and perhaps offering West a “buy one pair of shoes, get a second pair of free of charge” coupon

Instead, they recognized that “improv marketing” could actually turn West’s harsh words in a brand-building exercise. And it took guts to execute on this campaign because any time you push the envelope, you are going to alienate a percent of people.

Like this guy/gal who counseled the Zappos CEO to grow up:

Imso A
from United States

“Get a life, Tony Hsieh. You’re the CEO of a huge company, it’s time to act like it. This is severely immature and I will be sure to never purchase anything from your company again.”
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The campaign reflects the Zappos ethos – this is a company that calls out “create fun and a little weirdness” as a core value – so if some are turned off like “Imso A,” Zappos probably figures they’re not the target audience anyway.

Effective branding is often a polarizing force. It’s the dull middle you want to avoid.

And nothing cuts through dull like levity as demonstrated by the branding work from Zappos last week.

Five Business Storytelling Lessons in a 75-second Video from Canal +

I came across this video “Never Estimate the Power of a Great Story” back in 2009.

Even knowing the ending, the humor still slaps you across the face.

After a recent watch, I realized the video delivers a few pain-free lessons in business storytelling.

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Sure, the protagonist manages to escape death several times — machine guns, a cut-down tree, a waterfall that looks like Niagara Falls and a circular saw — but there are some classic storytelling techniques at work:

1. Creating drama calls for bad stuff to happen to the main character: Naturally, companies struggle with this one. Communication professionals are schooled in telling positive stories and when “negatives” do surface, the work goes into how to diffuse, not accentuate, the “negatives.” Yet, without the bad stuff, there is no drama.

2. Exaggeration: Whether it’s words or visuals, exaggeration catches the viewer’s attention. I think of these as “what the hell” moments. When the protagonist in the video is hugging the tree and you hear the chain saw scream to life, you’re thinking “what the hell.”

3. Incongruity: The dictionary defines this word as “strange because of not agreeing with what is usual or expected.” I love this storytelling technique. When the video shows the protagonist down to his boxers being engulfed in some type of wooden box, it’s definitely incongruent. By the way, this technique is particularly effective in the B2B world where elements from everyday life are often incongruent with a given industry.

4. The unexpected: As you wind your way toward the conclusion of the video (second 54), the last thing you expect is our boy rationalizing to the husband how he ended up in the closet.

5. Levity: As shared before, I view levity as the killer app for business communications. Because companies tend to take themselves so seriously, giving the reader/viewer/listener a reason to simply smile is a winning action.

It’s true that the production quality of the Canal+ video also played a role in the narrative. Filming a guy dodging bullets takes serious money.

Still, the techniques in the video hold relevance for business communicators.

Like the bad things encountered by the main character in the video, the negative occurrences in a company offer opportunities to share narratives that the outside world will care about. Have you ever watched a movie or read a novel where everything went according to plan?

Of course not.

Perfection bores people.

For PR types and brand builders, it’s a matter of teasing out those negative occurrences in stories that have happy endings. For more on this topic, check out “The ‘F’ Word in Business Communications.”

The Backstory on This Microsite

Who Moved My Story?