When most of us first start to dabble in storytelling, we fall into the trap of what I’ll call “and then” storytelling.

How many copywriters write corporate scripts that are nothing more than a list of talking points, brand promises and market-researched language? “We value the customer, AND we always respect your budget, AND we have on-time delivery, AND…”

We’ve all seen way too much of this.

That kind of writing is not storytelling because there is no causality. There is no cause and effect, no action-reaction. To quote Badass Digest blogger and “Screenwriting 101” author Film Crit Hulk:

“Stories are defined by cause and effect. Perpetually. Constantly. Vividly. Stories are built on that simplest of mechanisms. This causes that and that causes this and so on and so forth. It’s about setups and payoffs. It’s about action and reaction. It’s about information followed by dramatic consequence. Cause and effect lend meaning to events. They link scenes together. They give wholeness to seemingly separate ideas. Cause and effect are the linking of your chain. They make a story a story.”

South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have developed a simple rule to help you avoid the trap of “and then” storytelling. Watch them in the video below.

Trey Parker also explained this rule in the Comedy Central documentary “Six Days to Air,” about the making of an episode of South Park:

“[I call it] the rule of replacing “ands” with either “buts” or “therefores.” And so it’s always like: This happens and then this happens and then this happens. Whenever I can go back in the writing and change that to: This happens, therefore this happens, butthis happened; whenever you can replace your “ands” with “buts” or “therefores,” it makes for better writing.”

Take a look at something we produced to see how this works in practice:

Von was living a happy life playing pool and raising a family, BUT one day he got laid off his job. He felt he couldn’t continue to live the life he wanted to lead without going back to school, THEREFORE he found Herzing University. He quickly found that the instructors at the law program of Herzing University were currently employed legal professionals, THEREFORE he feels more confident going into his own career than if he was taught by teachers with no law experience. Von’s son watched him go through this whole adult education experience, THEREFORE his son now wants to graduate from college.

You’ll notice that I only have one “but” compared to three “therefores” in my above synopsis of the video, and this will be a common tendency in a lot of brand storytelling. But never tell a story devoid of “buts” because then you will be telling a story without any obstacle to overcome.

Traditional corporate video producers’ refusal to respect what causality brings to a brand message is a large part of the reason why you’ve never really seen a “corporate video” that you liked so much you’d bring home to show your family or share with friends on Facebook.

Trey Parker’s principle of “buts” and “therefores” is a safety net. It is something you should always apply to any story you’re writing, whether for entertainment or business. It will ensure that your story adheres to causality, which will lend your message meaning. If you fall into the trap of “and then” storytelling, as Trey said in the video, “you’ve got something pretty boring.”

The post Storytelling Tip: The Principle of “Buts” and “Therefores” appeared first on StoryFirst Media Website.

StoryFirst Media was founded in Wisconsin, and as such, we are Green Bay Packers fans (another clue would be our 2012 award-winning documentary Last Day at Lambeau).

This past Sunday, the Packers completed the biggest comeback for a win in their illustrious 94 year history.

The game was against the Dallas Cowboys, and the Packers’ season was on the line. In all likelihood, the team would have to win all of their remaining games in order to make the playoffs.

The problems: their all pro quarterback was out with an injury, their defense was a sieve, and the Cowboys had their playoff future to play for as well.

At halftime, the Cowboys led 26-3.

The stakes were incredibly high. In the locker room, head coach Mike McCarthy told the team that they were facing “the biggest adversity situation that we’ve been in in our time together” and that “our season’s on the line.”

To keep a long story short, the Packers came back out in the second half and rallied to a magical 37-36 victory.

Needless to say, my dad and I were jumping up and down and high-fiving like mad. It was an incredible amount of emotion, and despite all the problems we saw in our favorite team in the first half, some small part of us actually started to believe they could go on a playoff run.

Why was this game so emotional for us? Because we knew how hard/unlikely it was for the team to come back and win!

So where is the brand storytelling lesson? Here it is:

In the story of your brand/product/service, showing how you went down 26-3 in the first half is every bit as important as showing how you rallied for the second half comeback.

The amount of positive emotion we feel is directly proportional to the amount of negative emotion we feel. To face overwhelming adversity and succeed in the end inspires us to believe that any hardship can be overcome.

In football, when your favorite team destroys opposing teams without much of a struggle, it can actually be kind of boring. There’s no jumping up and down, there’s no sitting on the edge of your seat, and there’s no yelling at the top of your lungs. Those games have no stakes, no suspense, and they go down easy by the fourth quarter.

If you’re selling a product, your amazing new feature means nothing until you show me the problem the world faces without that feature (even better – show me the hardships your R&D department faced while developing the feature. If you struggled and had to invest a lot of time and resources into the project, it means it must be pretty important).

Showing your audience how hard it was for you to accomplish your goal, build your product or develop your service teaches them that you have the drive and ability to overcome any challenge. Dramatically speaking, the steeper you can make that mountain you had to climb, the better.

All stories are metaphors. Stories say “life is like this.” Stories live in our hearts forever because they allow us to make sense of our challenges, to feel we are not alone, and to believe that anything is possible.

But you’re only telling a story when you invite your audience to traverse your challenges with you and feel a part of the struggle to bring your product/service to the world.

Because after all, if it wasn’t hard to achieve, it must not be worth much. Show us how hard it was to achieve your goals and you will become a better storyteller for your brand and your life.

The post A Brand Storytelling Lesson from the NFL appeared first on StoryFirst Media Website.

In 1994, astrophysicist Kip Thorne wrote the book “Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy”.

The title of the book sounds daunting. One would assume it to be filled with scientific theories and language that would surely alienate any readers without a degree in astronomy or cosmology. So Mr. Thorne opened his first chapter with a story.

The story put the reader in the role of captain of a spacecraft commissioned with exploring the black hole called “Hades”. Your mission: study the black hole and radio back your findings.

As your spacecraft approaches the black hole, your sensors detect evidence of the hole’s presence. “The atoms of gas that sparsely populate interstellar space, approximately one in each cubic centimeter, are being pulled by the hole’s gravity. If something isn’t done, your starship too will be sucked in.”

Kip Thorne didn’t decide to open his book with a story just because it’s fun (though it is!). There is very deliberate purpose behind this. By opening with a story where the “reader as spaceship captain” is teetering on the brink of a black hole, he has put the audience in the position of needing to know how the story ends – how the captain maneuvers around the black hole. In essence, the reader is now asking for the science of black holes.

This is the essence of purposeful storytelling. By telling stories, we create a gap – a void – that the audience desperately wants to fill in, and the answer to their call – the thing that will satiate their desperation – is your data, features, messaging, facts, etc.

In Thorne’s book, the power of drama compels the audience to seek out how black holes work in order to find out how the story ends. Without the story, many readers would have a hard time just dryly learning the facts. The story gives the facts meaning – a place of momentary priority in their lives.

As brand storytellers, we spend a lot of time talking about the differences between traditional advertising and storytelling. Sometimes it’s easier to articulate what storytelling is not.

Storytelling is not:

–       a list of features and benefits

–       product specs

–       data

–       a mood

–       a style

–       a sequence of events

–       a slice of life

–       your brand messaging

In business, storytelling is the art of making your data, features, benefits and messaging vital to the lives of your audience. This is not a foofy, soft, or intangible thing. It’s grounded in a series of straightforward, practical principles and human psychology.

You want your audience to care about your message, your product specs, or your data. Fair enough. Ask yourself, “When in my day-to-day life do I crave information?”

Human beings seek out information when there is a gap of understanding, resources, or knowledge that they need to fill. So as storytellers, our job is to create that need – a carefully crafted absence of information that begs a solution.

In storytelling, you craft a narrative with a turning point that causes the audience to subconsciously ask for your information. So what is a turning point?

World-renowned storytelling guru Robert McKee believes there are four components to a turning point:

–       Surprise (“Wow! I didn’t expect that to happen!”)

–       Curiosity (“Wait… why did that happen?”)

–       Insight (“Ahh… that is why it happened. And here is how I can avoid this obstacle in the future.”)

–       New Direction (“With this new information, I will take this new action moving forward to make sure I avoid this obstacle in the future.”)

If we revisit Kip Thorne’s short story, what if in the next moment, the starship is sucked into the black hole and everybody on board dies? The reader would first experience surprise. “Whoa! I didn’t expect that to happen!” The very next thought would be, “Why did that happen?”

And with that question the reader is right where Mr. Thorne wanted them. They are now asking for his scientific theory.

This is the major boon of brand storytelling, for how else do you get your audience to consciously ask for your data?

The post How Storytelling Creates a Need for Your Data appeared first on StoryFirst Media Website.

On January 24, 1978, Steven Spielberg was sitting in a writers’ room with George Lucas and Lawrence Kasdan. They were hard at work structuring a story about a pseudo grave-robber in the 1930s who searches for the Lost Ark of the Covenant.

That story would eventually become the first Indiana Jones film.

At one point in the conversation, the three filmmakers were struggling to craft a simple communication of an important plot point. The point they had to get across to the audience was how multiple broken pieces of ancient metal Indy finds could fit together to form a staff.

“One of the things is to demonstrate, not talk about it,” Spielberg remarked.

What did he mean?

Well, one way to communicate a complex idea to an audience is to literally talk about it, or have a character explain the thing in explicit terms. But Spielberg is a brilliant visual storyteller, so he knows that cold exposition is never very engaging.

So he proposed an example of how they could communicate this idea.

“Like a beautiful vase on a table, that is worth a complete fortune, and they’re all looking at this, and a man carefully puts his glasses on, looks at the vase, takes a hammer and breaks the thing. He divides the pieces up to be shipped all over the world, and sold. ‘I hate doing this. I hate destroying great art, but it’s a living.’ Bam. Crash. You realize this is what happens to all great works of art to make more money for the greedy bastards. And the audience realizes that is why the staff is in several pieces.”

Audiences will always respond better to demonstrations of your idea as opposed to explanations of your idea.

So, how does this figure into brand storytelling?

We encounter this all the time at StoryFirst Media. In an interview for a brand in the sales industry, the interview subject will complement his colleague with the following line:

“She’s great. If someone asks her a question and she doesn’t know the answer, she’ll find the answer.”

That’s all well and good as a complement, but it’s incredibly boring for an audience who very likely does not personally know the “great” colleague in question.

Instead of talking about the colleague in a positive way, what if the interview subject had given a positive demonstration of her efforts? What if he’d told a story?

“I remember this one time my colleague we presented with a very challenging question that she did not have an answer for. This question came from a client that needed an answer by the end of the day, and my colleague’s calendar was booked for the rest of the afternoon. By five o’clock, she had managed to clear her schedule just enough to find some extra time to investigate the issue and get the client what they needed on time. Also, the meetings she had to reschedule to make time ended up working better for those other clients than the originally scheduled time, so everyone was happy.”

While this is a vague hypothetical, you get the point. A story like this presents the audience with the dilemma the colleague was facing and forces them to acknowledge the professional manner with which she navigated her way through it.

Your audience will thank you for allowing them to make up their own damn minds about what your point is, and if you tell the story right, they will commit your message to memory far more frequently than a cold statement.

Don’t talk about things. Demonstrate them.

The post Demonstrate. Don’t Explain. appeared first on StoryFirst Media Website.

The human brain is hardwired to receive information in narrative form.

If you wake up looking forward to wearing your new outfit to work and spill coffee on it, this thought might cross your mind: “My day just got off to a bad start.” This thought in itself is your brain taking the inherently meaningless event of coffee falling on your shirt and placing it in the larger temporal context of “your day.”

When you’re watching a football game, you see the running back take the ball two yards before being tackled. But that is not what your brain sees. Your brain interprets this single, inherently meaningless event as but one point in a larger sequence: the drive.

Three years after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, many people were irritated by Hollywood’s desire to produce two 9/11 films. There is an ethical argument to be made there, but the impetus for the storytellers was to bring meaning and context to what appeared on its face to be meaningless death and destruction.

Emma Kafalenos defines narrative in her book Narrative Causalities as “a sequential representation of sequential events.” Narrative provides context and perspective for meaningless facts.

This is why it is actually not a good idea for brands to lead their marketing efforts with facts, figures, features and benefits. Each feature is important and places your brand in a good light, but only when received by your audience in the context of the narrative you have constructed. To hang naked, dry facts out there is the riskiest choice of all.

For example, Google has on its website the following quote describing ideal prospective employees: “Other companies screen for intelligence and experience in potential recruits. But Google also looks for “‘Googliness’ – a mashup of passion and drive that’s hard to define but easy to spot.”

This naked statement is dangerous because it could either be interpreted as an invitation to the ultimate go-getter career or as an ominous indication that Google will expect you to work excessively long hours. Google has ceded the ground of narrative and is allowing its audience to interpret its statements however they will.

Clothe your naked statements in the robe of story and your audience will receive your facts, features and benefits in exactly the way you want them to.

The post Humans Interpret the World Through Narrative appeared first on StoryFirst Media Website.

When was the last time you actually enjoyed watching a traditional corporate video? If you’re like me, it’s been a damn long time (if ever). So why do we keep making them?

I’ll define what I mean by ‘corporate video’. A corporate video (in the traditional sense) is a piece of video that forgoes an authentic, emotional connection with the audience so that a company can squeeze in as many message statements, facts and data as they can.

Brands have messages that need communicating. There’s no doubt about that. The thought of communicating these messages through video sounds like a fun alternative to a white paper or memo – and it is! When you make a video for your company, you’re thinking your audience will enjoy receiving your message this way because it’s like a little movie — and who doesn’t love movies?

But people love movies when the filmmakers’ goal is to connect with and move the audience. The goal of traditional corporate videos is to dress up and stylize a brand message. See the difference?

Video alone won’t do the trick. As we all know, there are plenty of booooring videos out there. Video is not inherently “fun.”

Boring corporate videos are typically made when brands take their white paper copy and dryly put the words into the mouths of on-screen faces. For example, if your brand message is “We Value Our Clients,” it is a boring decision to put your company’s president in front of a camera and have him utter the words, “we value our clients.”

Instead, show your audience that your company values its clients. Make me care about what you do.

Anything you can capture visually through action will speak a thousand times louder than the words “we value our clients.” Did you have your clients to the office holiday party? Did you join hands with your clients at a recent charity event? Even better – is there a specific problem you solved for your client that reflects the core values of your brand?

Now, if you stopped here you would be fine. You will have taken your brand messaging out of the black abyss that is traditional corporate video. But if you want to add that little extra sauce to make your communication even more authentic and impactful, resist the urge to say “we value our clients” after showing that you do.

I know it’s hard. You want to make it explicitly clear how awesome your company is. But it’s good to let the actions on the screen speak for themselves. Your audience will appreciate it. Why?

What if every time your friend did something nice for you he then said, “I value my friends”? It’s like patting yourself on the back, and nobody likes someone who only does things for the recognition.

This is all about respecting your audience. While every brand has something to communicate, the method of communication must start with listening to your audience. How can your video actively contribute to your audience’s lives? How can you show them you understand them? How can you overcome the natural human resistance to “being sold” so that your audience will listen to your message?

Take a cue from Hollywood and make the goal of your video connecting with and moving your audience.

If you truly listen to your audience with an open heart and mind (don’t just wait for your turn to deliver ‘the message’), finding the best way to connect with them in a relevant way becomes clear. Traditional corporate video will never be the most effective approach.

And then we can all live in a world without traditional corporate videos. I’ll drink to that.

The post Stop Making Corporate Videos! appeared first on StoryFirst Media Website.

Making and distributing good B2B video content takes time. It isn’t a quick process to arrange a video shoot, edit video and then upload it to the social web. This work though can come with a substantial pay-off if as a B2B company you understand how to do the little things to maximize the effectiveness of online video.

When it comes to online video several issues exist. Search engines don’t index the content of video well. People can’t always watch video at work because of firewall issues and out of date software. Today’s tips are to help fix some of these issues and to make sure that ROI of online video is maximized.

7 Online Video Tips Every B2B Marketer Should Know

1. Always Include URL In A Video Description – This first tip is so simple but so many businesses don’t do it. Most video sharing sites including YouTube, allow the first 30 characters of a video description to be an active URL. Not only does it make it easy to generate leads back to your site from videos, but this links also count in Google’s PageRank system. Meaning if you publish a lot of video and put links in each of them your organic search ranking in Google will be improved.

2. When Blogging A Video Include A Text Summary – This is a tactic that may add a little more time to getting your video published, but is completely worth it. A good example of this is what the folks at HubSpot TV are doing. Under each of the video is a series a bullet points that summarize what the video covers. While this is great for people who can’t watch the video it also provides text for search engines to better index your video blog posts. Adding text with video is a valuable inbound marketing opportunity.

3. Three Short Videos Are Better Than one Long Video – People have short attention spans when it comes to the web. As marketers providing content it is important that we understand this. Online videos should be short, ideally around 3 minutes, or even shorter. If you have a 10 minute interview, then break it up into smaller interviews. Besides improving the chances that more people will watch it, it also provides the opportunity to focus headlines that fit with different messages within the video.

See the remaining tips at: Social Media B2B

The post 7 Online Video Tips Every B2B Marketer Should Know appeared first on StoryFirst Media Website.

By Roger Dooley
I tend to be more of a consumer of public relations than a creator. I’ve done my share of press releases and media interviews, but I’m bombarded with many times that quantity of public relations messages — news releases, book review requests, story suggestions and so on. Sadly, most of what I see is ineffective.

Want to craft a public relations message that engages the recipient? Use our understanding of the human brain to create that message. While there are many ways to play to brains of those readers, likely the most effective single technique is to tell a story.

Stories have a special appeal to human brains. The ability to process information from fellow humans was an important evolutionary advantage to our early ancestors. While they learned from direct experience like other creatures, they could also learn from the experiences of others. Whether this involved avoiding the lair of a dangerous animal, or locating a source of food, being able to readily absorb this second-hand information made these early communicators far more efficient than other species.

This preference for stories affects the way we process information, even in today’s high-tech environment. You can read statistics about the reliability of Toyota cars in reliable publications like Consumer Reports, but if your neighbor recounts a detailed horror story about a transmission problem and how he made three trips to the dealer to get it fixed, that one story will outweigh all the numeric data.

Our brains learn far better from specific examples than abstract information.

Brain scans show the potency of stories, even when they are merely text on a page. In a post about the efficacy of stories in advertising, I describe research showing that stories actually activate the parts of our brain related to the content. If we read about pedaling a bicycle up a hill, our brain will mimic that activity even if our legs remain still.

Never underestimate the power of text when it tells a story. One of the top-rated ads of this year’s Super Bowl was Google’s “Parisian Love” commercial. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS4Lb-ie4Lc]As I described in my post, “Power of Text,” there are no actors or CGI animation, no cute animals, no zooming cars, nothing but a series of words typed into a search boxes and their search results. A “neuro-engagement” study using EEG brain scans placed the Google ad in the top-five, ahead of almost all of the big-budget productions. This ad’s secret of success was that it told a compelling story.

One remarkable characteristic of spoken stories is that they actually synchronize the brains of the speaker and listener. If the listener is following the speaker’s story, his brain activity will become almost synchronous with that of the speaker.

In short, whether your goal is to inform or persuade, you first have to connect with your audience by engaging their brains. Statistics and dry facts won’t do that. There’s simply no better way to initiate and maintain that engagement than to present your message in the form of a story.

The post Engage Your Audience With Stories appeared first on StoryFirst Media Website.

Successful online advertising isn’t just about the channel — from search to display to video — it’s about storytelling. When ads incorporate narrative elements, they increase interaction rates and the audience’s willingness to consider the product, react, or even move towards a purchase. Savvy advertisers know that nothing tells a story better than video. I would propose that the power of storytelling through sight, sound and motion is the reason why video is the fastest growing form of online advertising. eMarketer estimates that online video ad spending will grow 48% to $1.5 billion this year and hit $5.5 billion by 2014.

It’s now easier than ever for advertisers to choose online video, whether they’re national retailers or political candidates at the local level just beginning these efforts. The issue isn’t why use online video to tell your story, but how online video should tell your story. Even more important, how do you use online video to further your marketing strategy, tell a great story and generate concrete results? Let’s start by agreeing that not all online video advertising is created equal — or equal to every task — and start to build a holistic online video advertising strategy. Storytelling should move your audience emotionally and logically through the purchase funnel. Understanding how video works across that funnel and where to apply your resources at each stage is the key to unlocking that value.

Introduction – Create Awareness. The beginning of a story should grab viewers’ attention and introduce them to new places, characters, and concepts. At this stage, your video advertising must be disruptive and impactful. In-stream video is most effective in this case because it takes a short time to introduce and create awareness of your product or service. Much like television, the ad is presented in the course of viewing. So, if you are introducing a new product, then focus on driving awareness via broad in-stream buys. The goal is to disrupt, be brief, and be broad-based. And how do you know if you were successful? Research can clearly show when audiences exposed to your advertising have a higher awareness of your product than those who saw nothing.

For the rest of this article, click HERE.

The post Tell Me A Story: How Video Ads Can Drive The Best Results Online appeared first on StoryFirst Media Website.

However telling stories via video is what we do at StoryFirst, and you’d probably expect us to say that. So, to support our story of “the power of web video” – here are ten top statistics from research findings of recent industry studies. We think you’ll agree that these statistics make quite a compelling case for web video to tell your stories!

1. “Brands using online video have seen lifts of 20% to 40% in terms of incremental buying, with conversions that are twice the rate of other media.” (1)
2. 21% of retail web video viewers make a purchase online. (1)
3. 26% of retail web video viewers visit a store. (2)
4. 21% of retail web video viewers request more information. (1)
5. Video landing pages generate four to seven times higher engagement and response rates than static image and text landing pages. (3)
6. Well-optimized video is fifty-three times more likely than text to appear on the front page of Google. (4)
7. 68% of the top 50 Internet retailers use web video. (5)
8. 71% of Internet users watch video. (1)
9. 65% of all videos are viewed between 9am and 5pm, Monday to Friday. (1)
10. 33% of middle managers under 50 view work-related videos every day. (1)

SOURCES:
(1) Chris Crafton, CMO, eCorpTV.com, reported by Target Marketing at a Philadelphia
Direct Marketing Association networking and breakfast meeting.
(2) BIA/Kelsey User View study data, February 2010, reported by Turnhere.com.
(3) SearchEngineWatch, February 2010.
(4) Forrester Research, January 2010.
(5) Internet Retailer, July 2010.

What are your experiences with using video on your website and to tell your stories? Please share with us!
And, if you’d like to talk further about how web video can help you or your organization in Madison, give us a call – In Madison, WI 608-576-0174 or Austin, TX 512-782-9992.