Tag Archives: conversations

Geschichten als Gestaltungsräume für moderne Marken.

20 Saturday Feb 2016

Posted by in Business Story, experiences, StorycodeX, Storytelling, Storytrain, What is STORY?

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Vor gut eineinhalb Jahren hatte ich Freude und Ehre, im Rahmen der Vortragsreihe “DACS Show and Share” der Münchner Architekten Dina Andersen und Christian Schmid zu sprechen.

Es war ein heißer Juliabend, der erste heiße Abend nach vielen Wochen ungewöhnlicher Kälte und Regen im Juli. Das war cool. Einerseits, denn die die Atmosphäre im Hinterhof der Türkenstraße 21 in Münchens Studentenviertel war an diesem Abend mediterran, einladend ausladend, ausgelassen gelassen, geschichtenträchtig. Andererseits hingegen, was macht man an so einem heißen Sommerabend in Minga, gerade nach einer gefühlten Eiszeit? Genau: Biergarten. Dem geschuldet (so nahmen wir selbstsicher an) kamen statt der angemeldeten 80 Gäste gerade mal 35…

Enttäuschung? Nur im ersten Moment. Denn die, die kamen, wollten’s wirklich. Setzten erfreuliche Prioritäten, nahmen kurze wie längere Wege auf sich, um beim Vortrag “Geschichten als Gestaltungsräume für moderne Marken” über das immerheiße, immergrüne Geschichtenerzählen (neudeutsch: Storytelling), Bedeutung und Chancen für Imagebildung, Imageschärfung, Dialogfähigkeit und Geschäftsunterstützung moderner Marken (erfolglos) der Hitze zu entfliehen. Verschmähten Hoibe und Brezn, tauschten sie gegen Flaschenbier und Hirnschmalz, eingerahmt von Bob Dylan, Tracy Chapman, Mr. Jones und Guy Clark. Ein Traum von Sommer in der Stadt.

Screen Shot 2016-02-20 at 23.23.58.png

Warum denke ich gerade jetzt an diesen Abend zurück? Sicher, weil’s draußen grad mal wieder eklig regnerisch windet und in schwachen Minuten gar schneit. Aber auch, weil mir folgendes Video, das im Vorfeld dieses Vortrags entstanden ist, zwar nicht in die Hände, aber doch virtuell zufällig vor die Augen fiel, als es schüchtern aus seiner Verbannung hinter den Gittern von Vimeo heraus lugte.

Alles noch so wahr wie damals, so wahr wie gestern und vorgestern, so wahr wie heute und morgen, so wahr ich dort stand):


<p><a href=”https://vimeo.com/99722916″>DACS_Storytelling_Tobias_Dennehy</a&gt; from <a href=”https://vimeo.com/user6666630″>Christian Schmid</a> on <a href=”https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a&gt;.</p>

 

Und wen’s interessiert, so fand’s die tapfere Teilnehmerin Susanne Kleiner:

“Starke Marken erzählen starke Geschichten”

 

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Wonder Why Your King Content Performs Like a Wicked Jester? The answer is simple …

06 Monday Apr 2015

Posted by in Business Story, experiences, Ideas, StorycodeX, Storytrain

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Ever since I made my first professional walking attempts in the digital world (20 years ago that must be #feelslikeyesterday), I heard this mantra everywhere in the pre-dotcom bubble euphoria of Cluetrain afficionados, would-be Internet prophets, and notorious panjandrums:

CONTENT IS KING! They all said.

Wicked Jester

I had been studying Storytelling for five years, long before I even knew it was Storytelling. Back then they called it literature. So it seemed a little odd to hear these Internet geeks regurgitating their royal mantra when I had just meticulously learnt about the history, structure and perennial powers of stories told by early-day classics like Homer, Cervantes, Dante or Boccaccio, classic classics like Goethe, Schiller or Lessing or modern classics like Grass, Mann or Böll. Admittedly, I was also getting carried away by this millennial the-end-of-business-as-usual atmosphere of imminent change. Felt somehow audacious to dust off the venerable Germanstik patina in favour of some fresh … ehem, content?

It was only many years later, after necessary detours through the fires of corporate Mordor, that I realized one ring, I mean thing: The business world was (sorry: IS!) overly attracted by the glare of technological possibilities and features, fanatically prone to wanna-be-first- and because-we-can-itis. And thereby narrowly and one-sidedly interpreting the word “content”, neglecting other, much more elementary facets – facets that become clearest in the three different German translations the word “content” offers.

Back in the late 90’s, corporate content creation had nothing to do with journalistic research or writing talent. Its creators literally were content “managers”, i.e. project managers for pieces of content that they 1:1 transferred from paper to HTML and pinned to the newly discovered digital blackboard called website. Period. Their job was simply about the most general interpretation of content: words and pictures on a screen, publishing material. The (most probable and wide-spread) German translation for this aspect of content would be:

INHALT.

Or: “Something that is to be expressed through some medium, as speech, writing, or any of various arts … something that is contained.” (dictionary.com)

But it this Inhalt automatically something meaningful? Something that goes deeper than letters strung together by punctuation marks? Something that links beyond the surface not to just another succession of trivialities and soulless pixels, but to true substance? Mostly not. This is where in recent years (in continental Europe) or maybe decades (in Anglo-American dominated countries) the bandwagon of storytelling has already been able to do a lot for the greater good of meaningful content. If understood well and deployed according to the storycodeX of Expectation, Surprise and Change. The (a lot less wide-spread and more rarely spotted) German translation for this aspect of content with substance would be:

GEHALT.

Or: “Significance or profundity; meaning” (dictionary.com)

But interesting: Gehalt also means “salary” in German. So maybe in the end all just about the dough, be the content meaningful or not. Surely, what did you think? Now let’s once and for all get past the naïve, childish, even insulting notion that any one corporation on this planet has a different purpose than making money. And the more they want you to believe that they’re sustainably trying to save the world, “do something good” on the side with CSR and foundations, a little like a Hollywood actress doing charity, the more they’re deceiving you.

The labyrinth of linguistics … Whatever. What I actually wanted to say was: Meaningful content with substance is a good thing. But is it enough? No. Not today anymore, that’s for sure. Inhalt and Gehalt were a great, successful and sufficient, but nevertheless rare combination in the pre social media age. When the third facet of “content” didn’t really matter. It was the age of broadcast after all, old-school Shannon-Weaver style.

Bad news: those days are over. Interactivity, ubiquitous commentaries, likes and forum discussions have changed the recipient side practically over night (in a historical sense of time).

People and the conglomerates they form called audiences (NOT users!) will no longer be satisfied with consuming content-turned-into-great-stories and commenting on it in a more or less intelligent and fruitful discussion with fellow audience members or members from other audience groups. They will first of all want to be able to dig deeper behind your story, deeper into the spider web, find proof for your story, get in contact with the heroes of your story, and maybe some day also with you. If they’re not disappointed on their journey.

But, even more substantial, they will want to become an active part of a company’s business story and stories, not as actors or heroes, but as co-authors. After all, they are the other half of the corporate truth, the devil on the corporate shoulder, internal versus external perception. Devils who might become angels when they turn into a renowned and emancipated member if a brand’s story creation team. Only then will they be what the third, most vital and rarest facet of German translation attempts hints at:

ZUFRIEDEN.

satisfactionOr: “Satisfied with what one is or has; not wanting more or anything else … Archaic: willing.” (dictionary.com)

Yep, content is also an adjective, not only a noun.

And the central question is: Who is it that you want to satisfy with your content? Yourself? Your bosses? Your bosses bosses? Or maybe, only very maybe … your customers? Your customers’ customers? Your audiences? Maybe even a targeted small portion of your audience? Certainly, your answer will be: Of course my customers! Of course my audiences! Plus the fact, now I have all these big and massive and powerful data, I now even know what my audience wants before it knows that it wants it! Ha! There you go, eat this!

I’m eating …

Only: Lies are hard to digest. And all the easier to unmask. As written in the world’s most successful example of purposeful storytelling: “Thou shalt not lie!”

Which brings me to the answer of above-asked headline question: As long as you betray yourself and thereby the people you are apparently creating your content for, there will be no sustainably successful content! Take all your pig data, winnow the refuse from the valuable gold nuggets, take an honest and disarraying look at them, shuffle your cards anew, do away with your organization’s and your management’s old shibboleths, dare, launch a pilot, let go, and see what happens.

There is an even older mantra from our economy’s service sector, way back from the days when storytelling was still literature, when relevant content didn’t need to be called king, when it in fact was a rarity due to its scarcity, not due to its abundance. Back then, the saying went:

Der Kunde ist König. The customer is the King.

Aha. So, so. Let’s try that for once, what do you say?

I can’t get no satisfaction, he says? All the better; let that be your stimulant.

Will Transmedia eat itself for lunch? Or is it the end of Storytelling as we know it?

08 Friday Aug 2014

Posted by in experiences, Ideas, StorycodeX, Storytrain

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S T O R Y T E L L I N G …
probably mankind’s oldest communication megatrend.

T R A N S M E D I A …
probably one of the most used communication megatrend buzzwords in mankind’s recent history.

T R A N S M E D I A  S T O R Y T E L L I N G …
probably the most promising combination of communication megatrends for the future.

Some may ask: “WTF’s that supposed to be again???”

Here’s an attempt from The Source of Internet Wisdom:

“Transmedia storytelling (also known as transmedia narrative or multiplatform storytelling) is the technique of telling a single story or story experience across multiple platforms and formats using current digital technologies.

From a production standpoint, it involves creating content that engages an audience using various techniques to permeate their daily lives. In order to achieve this engagement, a transmedia production will develop stories across multiple forms of media in order to deliver unique pieces of content in each channel. Importantly, these pieces of content are not only linked together (overtly or subtly), but are in narrative synchronization with each other.“

 

A lot of story stuff involved, so I tend to like it, naturally. But also a lot of (digital) technology, channels, platforms. So, really something new? Or just an evolution version of our oldest megatrend, a Storytelling x.0?

Let’s take a look at where the concept stems from:

Transmedia as an idea of collaborative, multi-platform creation and narration origins in the 70’s and 80’s of the last century, in the area of telematic art, where artists experimented with collaborative narration and defined the idea of transmedia.

It soon moved on to the gaming industry, creating so-called Alternate Reality Games (ARG). These are  games that, based on the Internet as a main hub, use(d) multiple other technological platforms like telephones, email and real offline mail to tell and simultaneously create different parts of the game’s story in those medial habitats relevant to the players. So not just transmedia telling,  but transmedia engagement that requires interaction from every gamer in order to bring the game’s plot to the next level. In other words: “Players interact directly with characters in the game, solve plot-based challenges and puzzles, and collaborate as a community to analyze the story and coordinate real-life and online activities.” (Wikipedia) An early example being Ong’s Hat.

The next transmedia stop was cinema, bringing the whole idea of alternate realities not only to the screen itself (where we had long been used to getting immersed in alternate worlds), but also connecting these to our real, every day lives. The most prominent example certainly being 1999’s “Blair Witch Project”:

 

This was not only a mocumentary, i.e. a piece of fiction pretending to be documentary, but also accompanied by a variety of additional, supporting pieces of content such as faked diaries, police reports or interviews that in itself engaged the audience in a captivating manner, adding to the cinema story’s apparent verisimilitude.

That was 15 years ago, and just the beginning …

Since a couple of years, also the commercial world of business communications has started to smell the rat? As always, the more consumer-oriented businesses are on the fore-front here with pioneers like Nike or Lego, but it won’t be long before the so-called B2B world will catch up.

So what could all of this mean for business communications and marketing? What can we learn from arts and entertainment?

I recently read this article on transmedialab.org that instinctively made me want to caution a “because we can” attitude that often pairs with technological advancements. The article basically was about the next big thing in cinema and henceforth modern storytelling. Not an R&D future project, but already on the audiences’ threshold.

The article begins with a short analysis of the film “APP”. http://www.indiewire.com/article/watch-now-exclusive-trailer-for-app-second-screen-thrillerAPP is the first-ever movie that was written and produced with a 2nd-screen experience in mind, regularly adding content to your phone app while the of the film’s content unfolds on the traditional 1st cinema screen, and thus interrupting the movie’s actual narration.

Hmm, I thought.

Do I like this? Not too sure.

I’ll have to find out…

 

The article moves on with a glimpse into the labs of Disney’s experiments. These are currently limited to 2nd-screen “content interruptions” to back-catalog films like “The Little Mermaid”, but plans are to integrate the transmedia storytelling idea into the initial screen writing of future film productions.

http://www.transmedialab.org/en/the-blog-en/cinema-and-second-screen-applications-focus-on-the-film-app-and-the-disney-second-screen-experience/

Hmm, I thought, again.

Ambiguity crawling in …

The angel (or is it the devil?) on my shoulder says something like Yalda Uhl who states that “it is very important to engage children in a narration, and that is very difficult to do nowadays with all the distractions and stimulations that surround them. Adding a distraction in cinemas will definitely not help studios to achieve their goal of creating value or attracting an audience that will return to the cinema in the future”. Yes, says the angel (or devil)! REDUCE the distractions! Foster concentration spans! Concentrate on true narration and storytelling to immerse audiences in your story! Don’t just do stuff, because you technically can, audiences will soon get tired and will want to go back to good old traditional storytelling! Transmedia will eat itself for lunch! I knew it!

Then there’s this devil (or angel?) on the other shoulder talking about “story engagement” instead of boring one-way “story telling”. Making it clear to me that the potential of transmedia entertainment and the disruption of handed-down reception models is not only exiting, but in fact the only way to go. For entertainment as much as for business communications, both of them dealing with humans in the end. That today’s young and thus tomorrow’s adult generation will continue to literally gag for regular interruptions in their lives’ routines … and that linear, beginning-to-end storytelling is over, that no one will listen anymore, if there’s not more interactive engagement, audience involvement and multi-channel disruption.

Listening to both of them I begin to see, as with many things, there will be developments that we can’t stop, that will simply happen (because we CAN and because we as humans will simply WANT it), whether I personally like them or not.

Maybe the following

THREE COMMANDMENTS OF TRANSMEDIA STORYTELLING

can help steer technological developments into the right direction:

1. CONCENTRATE ON A GOOD STORY (ALONG THE PATH OF THE STORYCODEX).
Not matter which medium, no matter how many of them; not matter how fragmented and scattered:  A well-told, convincing narration offering a high degree of the “Like Me” effect will always work. It doesn’t have to be chronological, but it needs Expectation, Surprise, Conflict and Change. What will change is the people who will create this expectation, add the surprise and conflict spice, foster the narration’s change – this will not be a classical narrator instance anymore, this will be multiple parties engaging in different parts of a story from different angles and perspectives, in different places. But a story it will still be.

2. DON’T LET TECHNOLOGY LEAD THE WAY OF A STORY.
No matter what technological developments the future holds, no matter what devices will surface: Technology is simply an enabler, an easer, a multiplier, distributer, a vehicle. The true power lies in the human nature of communication, conversation, and storytelling.

3. TURN STORY TELLING INTO STORY ENGAGEMENT.
Do listen to, observe your audiences, and maybe(?) realize: The age of (traditional) story TELLING could be over. Never the age of STORY itself, but maybe tomorrow’s audiences will really want fragmentation, want to be stimulated from multiple sources and in multiple places. Of course, THE CONCEPT OF STORY will and cannot change, it’s genuinely human, but: Maybe the future is indeed more about story ENGAGEMENT, involving audiences actively in plot creation or character development. This would radically influence scripting, e.g. by taking devices and reception environments into consideration when writing a story’s various chapters.

Again, all of this holds true not only in arts and entertainment, but also in business, along the infamous, much recited “customer journey”, a journey that is getting more and more complicated, but – if you listen and truly get involved – ever more rewarding for all story and hence conversation participants.

Devil or Angel. Angel or Devil. Both?

Exciting, to say the least.

Hmm, I say.

Again.

What if Giving up Control were not a Threat, but an Opportunity?

04 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by in experiences, Ideas, Storytrain

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Copyright: article.wn.com

 

Let’s admit it: We’re all losing control.

First of all, in the part of life that we call private life.

Where the day starts with an always-charged, smart-ass smart phone coldly grinning at me, relentlessly turning Beethoven’s wonderful “Klavierkonzert Nr. 5 Es-Dur” into my own personal groundhog-day experience. Gladly, this hasn’t spoilt my love for this concerto yet: For years now, I prefer being carried from the land of peaceful sommeil et rêves to the gates of daylight by Ludwig’s silent power than by Steve’s awful ringtone selection or distressingly well-tempered radio hosts.

Still, Beethoven aside, that’s the first loss of control of the day. Over my morning. A control (I thought) I used to have, at least before my own school days when there was just me and eternity. And also after school’s early-bird-my-ass 13 years, at university, when I could freely decide whether to get up for some early-morning lecture, or not. Probably that was an illusion, too … Aaah, whatever!

But now control’s definitely gone, along with the good-night’s sleep from pre-children days that used to precede the alarm bell’s toll.

The rest of an average day just goes with a flow that doesn’t seem to be mine (or ours, more correctly) anymore: Shower, tooth-brush, razor. Wardrobe, kitchen, espresso machinetta. Wake up kids, dress up kids, breakfast kids. School, kindergarten, metro. First mails, social channel check, maybe a little Spotify or FM4 on the train, blocking the rest of the underground world with my on-ears. Then it’s on to the office with its own very special affluent of Outlook, multiple phones, meetings, inter-desk chats, occasional join lunch breaks and … social channel checks.  Metro back home, social channel check, more in a rush than in the morning. Dinner, kids to bed, cleaning up. 2100 hrs sharp: time for twosomeness, music, movies or … maybe writing a blog post?

But then: Swoosh! In comes this invisible force from out of nowhere, hangs leaden weights to my eye lids, message clear: Don’t fight it! You’re tired! Go to sleep … maybe last chance for a social channel check, then … zzzzzz.

OK, I may be overegging the pudding a little, but the point is clear: Life has taken control of me, not visa versa. But it’s never too late to fight back!

If only I weren’t so tired … 🙂

TIRED

 

Then there is this other part of life that we call business life.

And I’m not speaking work-life balance here, that’s an outdated, unrealistic concept anyway in the age of smart iDevices (not “i” as in internet, but “i” as in “i am the device and the device is me”).

I’m talking about the life of a business, of a company, of a cooperation, call it what you like.

Whereas I personally admit to the fact that I’m losing control and maybe have slight hope of escaping as time goes by, (most) enterprises actually still believe they are in control – a control they have literally already lost, and will never get back. In control of the products they produce and sell (Henry Ford’s many heirs still alive, producing cars in various shades of black: Shut up, eat your spinach, it’s good for you!). In control of the people they can hire, retain, or fire. And (this is most obviously the biggest heretic belief) in control of their brands, their reputation, their communication efforts.

Will anybody out there please wake up, open your eyes, put an oversized espresso machinetta on the stove, extra strong, and realize that the times they are a-changing, or better: have already a-changed???

Read a brief history of the Internet, then come again. It’s been a long time coming …

… So: What does this mean?

“Companies that don’t realize their markets are now networked person-to-person, getting smarter as a result and deeply joined in conversation are missing their best opportunity.” (cluetrain.com, Thesis 18)

Opportunity is the right word. Not threat, as many still see it. Challenge maybe, yet a threat only for companies who decide to remain lonely regents of Shannon-Weaver Island. But opportunity for those who recognize that the sender-recipient model has served it’s time.

In private-life situations where networked kids are getting smarter, no longer just say “SIR, YES, SIR!” when you tell them what to do, but – like it or not – want to understand, want discourse, want dialogue, want to be taken seriously, and embark on a life-long conversation journey with their parents. And this is quite admirable, actually.

And in business-life situations all the same holds true for companies and their “kids”, which they disparagingly call stakeholders, users, target groups. But they’re actually people, human beings. Employees, customers, investors, journalists, bloggers, talents, politicians, etc.etc.etc. And as my kids are getting smarter by the day with their own real-life Internet (still very offline, gladly), so are a company’s kids, aided by the powerful global conversation that has begun through the Internet, “getting smarter – and getting smarter faster than most companies.” (cluetrain.com)

Whereas the Cluetrain Manifesto was at the time (very far-sighted, considering it was 1999) describing what was going on in a (compared to nowadays limited) community of Internet users and how this would need to impact the way corporations talk and act towards these networked, conversation-driven markets, I would like to take this notion a step further:

What if the future of companies, corporations and brands is a future, in which their brand story and their image no longer belongs to them?

What if these networked communities would not only co-create campaigns or isolated contents for companies (as they already do increasingly often today), but co-create and co-develop entire brands, communicatively manipulate a brand’s genes, its DNA? Co-write their history, story and stories?

What if reputation management wasn’t a thing a company could do by itself or have an expensive agency do, but something that is taken over by its “stakeholders”?

And now, while this still sounds like a threat, like a mob raging outside my fortress walls, here’s another thought:

What if … the above were all things a corporation would DELIBERATELY do?
Meaning: Go from telling “Who We Are!” to asking “Who Are We?” or “Who Should We Be?”

Imagine the outcome!

Imagine the level of relevance, content (as in “Zufriedenheit”), and respect you could harvest!

Imagine that you couldn’t imagine who you would be as a brand in, say, 50 years!

Imagine you could build a business not on ROI (Return on Invest), but on ROT (Return on Trust) or ROL (Return on Love)!

“And in the end, the love you get is equal to the love you give.” (The Beatles, “The End”)

Gee, scary thought.

The recipient would become the sender, the sender the recipient. The crowd would become part of the communications, marketing and brand department, and corporate comms would diffuse in the crowd. True emancipation, the foundation stone for every lasting relationship that makes love and trust its pillars.

Taking Poe’s “Man of the Crowd” to the next level: The follower doesn’t simply watch his target vanish into the crowd, but would actually follow. Dive into a kind of Great Link like DS9’s Odo and his fellow shape-shifters, a place where sender and recipient, comms department and target groups, brands and stakeholders amalgamate, for the benefit of both …

Copyright: treknews.net

Freakin’ esoteric stuff!

So let’s better round this off with something more down-to-earth.

With the famous words of Robert Zimmerman:

“Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown

And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you
Is worth savin’

Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'”

 

Thank you, Bob! Right on!

11 Ingredients for a Successful Business Story

06 Sunday Apr 2014

Posted by in Storytrain, What is STORY?

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Here are 11 ingredients that will get you to your successful business story.

It’s a lot of hard work, but it’s worth the effort. It needs determination, honesty, and courage. The willingness to introspect, listen, experiment, learn, and optimize based on what you learn.

These ingredients, or tips, don’t necessarily need to come in the below order, nor does it suffice to go through all of them just once, over and out, success here you come! There’s a lot of inevitable repetition in these efforts, a kind of “perpetuum mobile of business story”.

Here we go:

 

Listening1. It’s listening time, the age of attention and conversation. So: Listen to your audiences. Find out who they really are. What they really need, what they want. And where and how they want it.

 

Competition2. Observe your competition. Don’t be a “Me Two”. Be different. Be authentically you.

 

Big Story3. You can only be you, if you know who you are. So: Find your big story, your identity, your character, your DNA. Again, this can only be achieved by listening. To yourself, your own organization from top bottom, left to right. To your audiences (or target groups, as you might call them). See where the delta is, where it matches, where it doesn’t. And somewhere amidst that cacophony of data: there’s your big story. Once you find it: stick to it!

 

Small Stories4. Continuously search for all the stories within and without your organization that fill your big story with proof and bring it to life – credibly and authentically, verifiably and true. No matter how small or irrelevant they may seem: They are the only currency you have that differentiates you from your competition. Messages, Brand Ambitions, Visions, and all those bullshit-bingo Whatchmacallits are interchangeable, just hot air, written by expensive agencies to make you feel special. What truly makes you special are your stories, and your people or the people who make up your target audiences, for they are your stories’ heroes. And nobody else!

 

Formula5. Become Sinatra, find your way, and then do it your way. If you believe in your idea’s brilliance and capability to tell all your stories great and small, the stories that in the end all make your big story, the accuracy of fit to your character, then go for it! Always follow The STORYCODEX of Expectation, Surprise and Change … and eliminate the taste factor. Nothing worse than management killing an idea just because they can. Because they have a position within your hierarchy that demands of you to ignore or tolerate that they don’t have a bloody clue what they’re talking about. Oh and: If these grey-suited folks demand of you to make their product the hero, remind them of the Ninth Commandment, the one about lying and false witness. A product can NEVER be a hero, and thou shalt never attempt to do so, thou will fail!

 

Pilot6. If your idea, your concept is truly brilliant, unique, something different, maybe even a little crazy: There’ll be armies of Bedenkenträger in their trenches, armed with “Buts” and “We’ve never done this before’s”. This should encourage you, not the opposite: You’re probably on the right track. To get past the army of doubters, call your project a “pilot”. Management feels comfortable with pilots, has a finite touch, limited risk and all that crap.

 

Windmills7. Once your pilot’s taken off, make no casualties, no compromises. Be resilient and consequent. The windmills of doubt and Schadenfreude will be blowing into your face from all directions. Don’t let them stop you. And find yourself a trustful companion who will stick by your side, even if one or the other of the journey’s adventures turns out to be a failure or at least different than expected. If this companion is also willing and able to tell your story and stories, a good and true storyteller, who doesn’t necessarily need to be an experts in your field of business, all the better. He (or she) just needs to understand you and be able to translate your management brand identity mission-vision-value-proposition messaging bullshit into stories somebody actually wants to hear.

 

Jacko8. Even if you’re out (or in) there alone, all by yourself: Be consistent, stick to who you are, what you believe in. Work on your own little moonwalk and surprise audiences and critiques, leave them awestruck.

 

Measure9. How do you convince critiques and Benkenträger, prove them wrong? Right: through hard facts and figures they can’t neglect or deny. Seriously, anything procurement sharks, engineers or sales guys trust more than numbers on a paper or screen or power point? So give em what they want: Develop objective KPI’s, measure every customer’s every movement and interaction with your story, present the results in a comprehensible and comprehensive way, and then: Poke your tongue at them, or – if the figures suggest so – have the guts to admit they were right, and it didn’t work.

 

Trust10. All along the way, every second of your adventure of finding yourself, understanding your competitors and your audience(s), finding all your stories great and small, finding your formula, pulling it through and sticking to your idea like Jacko to white socks … make sure you do it with someone you trust. Someone on your wavelength, with the same vision, as well as balls and management position to back you up when the FBI is up your fundament to shut your business down.

 

Invest11. Last, but oh so very not least: Every truly unique, innovative and successful business story needs … investment. Not only of money, although it needs a lot of that also, make no mistake; investment in the stories themselves, of course, but also for the stories’ marketing, as nobody is really waiting for your corporate story! But you mainly need to invest a looooot of time, and need to give your story project time to grow, like a tree: from seed to graft to full-grown plant. In a nutshell: You need Herzblut: belief, commitment, passion, and stamina.

Good luck!

The End of Advertising is the Beginning of Content Co-Creation

03 Thursday Apr 2014

Posted by in What is STORY?

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In 2009, Nike’s Simon Pestridge said:

“We don’t do advertising anymore.
We just do cool stuff.”

Of course, these words sound more far-reaching than they actually are, and Nike’s marketing activities since then imply that Pestridge was actually referring to classical “one-way” advertising only. Still: It’s a bold statement and I admire him simply for making it. And I second the way his quote from this interview with marketingmagazine.co.uk continues:

“Advertising is all about achieving awareness, and we no longer need awareness. We need to become part of people’s lives, and digital allows us to do that.”

It’s great, if a company can say that. Not too sure, if it is ever really true, that a brand doesn’t need awareness, but whatever: bold statement, deliberately and successfully provocative. But what is true (not rocket science, but a truth long evident, yet still hidden to blindfold marketers from the last century) is the fact that digital is becoming more and more important for leveraging a company’s brand awareness and reputation. One day, it may become the (main) place, but it’s not yet.

Digital in the 21st century, digital in the so-called 2.0 age of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and all the many platforms around today (and the unknown one’s that will pop up tomorrow) is not about broadcasting, about messaging, about patronizing uneducated audiences. It’s about interaction, about engagement, about openness, verifiable authenticity, and consequently about conversations. The end of the age of broadcasting and (classical one-way) advertising has long begun, as has the beginning of the age of shared content creation with audiences. Audiences meaning people, human beings with emotions and opinions, with maybe better ideas closer to your product’s true core than any single person in your marketing department could have.

This power of the crowd and its potential is still heavily unused and underrated, like diamonds laying out in the open and mistaken for plastic accessories, apparently worthless, of minor quality, maybe even dangerous. Oooh, scary!

Nike has made this move very consequently, as David Moth kindly summarized last year at econsultancy.com. The people who experience the brand (in marketing speech: target group) and wish to interact with the company and its people, are not only allowed to do just that, they are actually encouraged to do it. To become part of the brand and even help create its future perception by being an inventive part of what it does today. And not only in the digital world; Nike’s effort cross the borders of online and offline, as their audiences do, too.

Here is one of my favorites from Moth’s collection, mainly because it does exactly that: bridge the artificial gap between digital and analogue:

 

The true power of tomorrow’s communication with (and not marketing for!) people takes place everywhere where these people are, regardless of online or offline, above the stupid line or below it, internal or external, blue-collar or white-collar, or whatever artificial distinction we have made up for decades to pigeonhole he stuff we do and the people we do it for. [By the way, Nike does not limit its co-creating approach to marketing and communications, they also integrate customers in the creation process of their actual products, see here.]

Apart from having the right people with the right visions and insights around at the right time to create such a shift from glossy TV and print broadcasting to customer-engaging digitally crowd-sourced advertising, Nike has or at least claims to have one massive advantage compared to other companies, especially in the B2B area:

“We know who we are. We know what we want to achieve and we go for it 100 per cent of the time.”
Says Pestridge, again.

If only that were true for more brands. How much more courageous, engaging and entertaining would advertising and corporate communications be.

I truly believe that THIS is THE CORE and foremost homework any company needs to do: find out who they are, what their BIG STORY aka their identity is. That’s a massive undertaking that requires quite some investments, both time and budget-wise. Sometimes this undertaking is a tedious one, as it requires a lot of relentless self-reflection and open, honest introspection.

But also a great deal of listening. To people in touch with your company, it’s products, its people, its communications – everything. And once you’re through the results of these listening exercises into one data bucket, analyze them and put your cards on the table, you’ll see: It’s worth it.

Finding your BIG STORY is the prerequisite to purposeful storytelling about your brand, your people, your products – and to any truly and sustainably meaningful conversation, the best-case result from good storytelling. All corporate stories that don’t follow a company’s big story, its identity, its DNA, are just meaningless debris in the vast web space of content overload.

This is NOT a story #1: The Dylan Chrysler Experience

10 Monday Feb 2014

Posted by in This is NOT a story

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Sometimes, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. And sometimes, the world actually takes notice. Sometimes even a little too much. As in the case of Mister Robert Zimmermanns’ latest coup in a lifetime effort to alienate his lovers, re-assure his haters, and simply do everything possible to not fit into one of those boxes that our world so loves to create to get a grasp at the ungraspable: Life.

I’m talking about the new piece of advertising Dylan has allowed US car manufacturer Chrysler to produce using him as a mighty testimonial:

…

I’m neither going to chime into the (ridiculous and so 1965-Newport-Folk-Festival-like) fundamentalist fan mob’s “OMG! He’s selling out to commerce” outcries, nor will I (at least not yet, that is…) offer any half-baked analysis of why Bob is such a genius, why he’s never there, always the passenger of a slow train coming with no direction home, always already part of a new morning, heading for modern times, leaving blood on the tracks while his worshippers are still marching on desolation row towards the Gates of Folk Eden. No, others have done that before, probably better than I ever could.

Which is why it does indeed surprise me that he still actually manages to surprise, at least some, with his ambiguous “it ain’t me, babe” smile on his face. If it were up to me, he could advertise Pepsi refreshments or Victoria’s Secret ladies garments, I’d still not stop to admire the Zimmermann Phantom and his many ways of deliberate and couldn’t-care-less fanielation. Oh, he already did??? Ahh, whatever. 😉 Those two were at least entertaining, somewhat intelligently composed, and equipped with some more Dylan-esque “in-between-the-line-ness”.

No, what this here is about is my bewilderment by the fact that the Chrysler spot simply is a poor piece of pathetic advertising – and story-wise plainly sucks, because it isn’t a story, but pretends to be. And that a man, who has created himself a well-earned reputation as a musical storytellers of and about his time, agreed to be its centerpiece (I won’t call him hero in this respect, as it’s neither heroic what he’s doing or saying, nor in any way dramatic in the Aristotelian sense to make him deserve this title).

Why Chrysler is doing this, and exactly in this fashion, is clear: It’s an American company, more up-to-date American never than here, appearing desperate and back-to-the-wall-ish, seeing hopes dashing in many an economic sector; automotive, for example. They draw the marketing card of desperation (by the way: already Act II of the company’s Drame du Deséspoir after Act I where they threw Dirty Harry into the ring two years ago): Take a well-known, respected, but still a little controversial celebrity (you know they’ll love or hate him for this!), use clichemotional imagery of what makes America’s nerves shake (no way to err with cheerleaders and cowboys on horses in slow-mo, a little stars and stripes and historical analogies, babies and hard-working factory laborers!), polarize and tease your rivals a little (not too much, just a little to add spice to the saltless soup and give the regulars’ table something to talk about), and end with the all-too-expected “Wir sind wieder wer!” message stolen from se Germans in 1954. Oh, and not to forget: Pay millions to place this ad in front of the world’s eyes at the Super Bowl finale – where reach really still means conversion and conversation. About what, that’s another question.

Why Bob Dylan is doing this, Alias knows. Maybe to escape from the burden of being witty, erudite, convoluted, and the role model of more than one generation all the time, into the shallowness and immediacy of corporate advertising every now and again? Maybe just for the fun of acting while actually being an actor and not a singer-songwriter? Maybe for the dosh? Maybe, maybe, maybe … who cares? I don’t.

But what I do care about being insulted by bad ads and videos and films that pretend to be stories. Why do I think this one is so bad, may have become obvious above, below and in between these lines so far, but a friend of mine recommended I add a kind of management summary at the end of my posts to avoid the feeling of “Wow, that was interesting, but, err, what was it about again?”. So here it is, my dear Performance Passionist: 😉

  1. Nothing’s happening. Nothing’s changing. It’s simply boring. I wouldn’t want to watch it to the end without all the media fuzz about and Bob Dylan in it. I would leave the latest after 30 seconds.
  2. No surprise. No one manages to surprise me here, and seems like no one even wants to. The surprise of seeing Bob Dylan make-up-ed and hair-dyed after 18 seconds is the only surprise you get – and I’m left with the fear that the analogy of Dylan not holing any ball at the end might have a deeper meaning. A message triangle gone video.
  3. No hero, no plot. There is no hero, only a narrator narrating through a non-existent plot. But actually narrator Dylan ain’t telling, he’s just talking, saying things that only scratch the surface of America’s story and the story of every American shown in these two minutes. Shallow and predictable. And don’t mistake the narrator for the hero, neither the story-immanent one nor the one you think you’re seeing. It’s only Bob (whoever that is) playing someone else.
  4. No expectation. Neither within nor without this advertisement am I expecting anything, let alone more – and arousing no expectation is the worst mistake being made here. The fact that nothing is happening could, however, be countered by the tension and expectation of what might happen AFTER the short scene just shown. As it was actually quite successfully attempted in Dylan’s Victoria’s Secret spot in 2009, or in last year’s Louis Vuitton spot with David Bowie. Both not stories per se, but the beginning act of a potential plot continuation, a story teaser, making me expect more to come, wanting to know, if and how this scene continues. Not so with The Chrysler Boredom.

The only chance this spot has for a longer-term success and more sustainable, content-based conversations (beyond the “Have you seen the latest Super Bowl ad with Dylan?” reflex) about the big theme the ad is suggesting (“The people of America and their love to manufacture something with their own hands that provides a living for their families and a sense of pride to be giving the world something it wants, needs, and maybe even copies”), is a prolongation of this mere advertising pretension into the digital space.

A prolongation that includes every little story of every single potential hero in this two-minute film. The young lady wrapped in the Stars and Stripes at second 0:08. The grateful-looking old man at second 0:14. The waitress serving him. The mother with her(?) child at second 0:54. The factory worker at minute 1:04. Or any of the men standing behind the pool table like tin soldiers at the end. These stories, if indeed they exist, would prove that the above big-story suggestion is not just advertising bullshit, that the company able to pay so much money for production and airing of this ad actually is capable of lighting the spark of pride in these peoples’ hearts. That it maybe even manages to help improve their lives. Most importantly, this would prove that they’re not all just casted models for a seemingly authentic TV spot.

… And then there would be the story of this old man with the dyed hair who wants us to believe that he is who he seems to be, that he is actually someone we know, someone like you and me, and not just some Alias playing a role in innocent Billy the Kid’s endless fight against the unjust hands of some imported Pat Garret imitation …

That would be a story. A completely different one. One that many have tried to tell, but no one really knows.

The Storytrain Manifesto: the end of corporate messaging as usual.

04 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by in Ideas, Storytrain

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15 years down the virtual road, it’s time to take the Cluetrain Manifesto to the next level.

cluetrain wordle, created by Tobias Dennehy on wordle.net

Back in 1999, it predicted “the end of business as usual”, caused by “a powerful global conversation [that] has begun through the Internet.” Talking a lot about why “markets are conversations and getting smarter”, “markets that consist of human beings”, conversations that need to be “conducted in a human voice [which is] unmistakably genuine [and] can’t be faked.”

About the fact that these “markets [actually] want to talk to companies.” And about the genuinely human constituents of these markets who will only talk to any company or institution on one condition:

“If you want us to talk to you, tell us something. Make it something interesting for a change.”

Tacitly accepting the risk of redundancy and repetitiveness here: I truly believe that this “something interesting” is the core of the Cluetrain Manifesto. A core without which the conversations that these markets are about, would be impossible.

Why?

Thesis 75 not simply states or claims something, or tells corporations what to change, which many of the other theses do in an at times slightly patronizing way; it actually hints into the direction of how to solve the corporate dilemma posed by the internet and social media paradigm shift.

This “something interesting” is, has always been, and will always be: STORY.

The right story told to the right people at the right time and in the right way will create open ears, open minds, loyalty and stickiness on the sides of the people you’re talking to. Even if it’s just one single person who is more open and susceptible to what you have to say than before you said it, and that’s the one single person you want to reach – isn’t that a beautiful thing?

I mean, let’s be honest: It’s not always about the mass of anonymous, meaningless Facebook friends or the 10 million views on your YouTube video that makes communications efforts successful – even though we all love to pretend otherwise in our “Oh my project was such a great success” power-point attacks on human intelligence. It’s what happens AFTERWARDS that proves if there’s any meaningful outcome to what we said, wrote or showed. [Side note: Do you know how long you need to watch a video on YouTube before the platform counts your action as a ‘view’? FIVE seconds. So much for that as a relevance KPI! Ha!]

So, what does it take to make your train of stories not only leave the station on the right platform and the right track, but also pick up passengers along the way who really like the direction you’re going and actually want to follow you?

A Storytrain that ideally never reaches its final destination, but gathers many a compelling story and fellow storytellers and passengers along the way?

A Storytrain that never returns home, but bit by bit is actually driven by its passengers to destination unknown, merely aiming at never-ending on a dead-end track?

Find it out when you jump on the bandwagon of The Storytrain Manifesto RIGHT HERE at storytrain.org.

Become a passenger, blind or seeing. Be my guest. My co-pilot. My chief guard. Help me make this work! Thanks. 🙂

Markets are Conversations are Storytelling

21 Saturday Dec 2013

Posted by in Ideas

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It’s already a couple of years ago that I was taking my kids to the „Deutsches Museum“ in Munich, Germany. Of course, the attraction for little girls is less the impressive planes or ships, let alone any technical innovations of the past or present. The burner: The interactive technology experience playground down in the basement. After hours of deafening children’s screeching and soaking wet from these lovely water games, I announced: “Now it’s time for some REAL culture!” taking them up to a special exhibition about life in the 1950’s.

Old cars, vespas, vacuum cleaners and washing machines, strange dresses and shoes and sun glasses … all nice, my girls giggling, me becoming Mr. Nostalgia. BUT the following scene from that day is what made this exhibition so rememberable for me: A roughly 12-year-old boy standing on front of this ancient TV screen, massive with a greenish screen and classic wooden shells, when I overheard the following dialogue:
Boy: “Wow, they surfed the Internet with these things?”
Mother: “That’s a TV, back then, there was no Internet.”
Boy: “What do you mean: There was no Internet???”

Interesting. A generation that was born when the Internet was already mainstream standard. A generation that can’t remember having to walk to distant telephone boxes in the freezing cold to speak to your girlfriend, back then when there was no Skype, no What’s App, no Facebook or phone flats. Only 20 years ago. A generation that was born just before the 2001 .com bubble crash, around the time when four fare-sighted guys /Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger) from the U.S. hammered their 95 commandments to a digital wall named www.cluetrain.com.

cluetrain.com

What this has to do with storytelling? Everything. Let me mark out just a couple of Cluetrain theses which I believe significantly direct business humans working in and for corporations and especially in marketing and communication departments in the right cardinal point, directly to the power and inevitability of story in the social web age:

“Markets are conversations.” (Thesis 1)
The boiled-down essence of The Cluetrain. Meaning: “Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.” (Thesis 2) Meaning: Target groups, clients, users, readers, viewers are humans. Not some alien, abstract mass of lemmings waiting for a message to follow. And these markets (or humans) are constantly engaged in conversations, with each other, with other corporations – and conversations are meta level of stories, or vice versa: stories are the molecules of conversations.

“People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.” (Thesis 5)
If that is so – and it is –, then corporations can’t talk, can’t tell stories, can comment, can’t post, chat, respond or share information, only their employees can. And no products, no solutions, no services, no companies can be heroes, only people can – and in the sharing web that finally really helps Kant’s Aufklärung blossom, corporate fake will be unmasked in the tweet of an eye. And “as a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally.” (Thesis 10)

“A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.” (Thesis 75)
There’s nothing to add here, they wrote this in 1999, and look at many companies, especially in the B2B area: They’re still lagging behind on the smartness front like ever before.

Last but not least, the bulls-eye thesis for the importance of storytelling in the technically interconnected world:
“If you want us to talk to you, tell us something. Make it something interesting for a change.” (Thesis 75)

And this “something interesting” is an interesting, relevant, credible, authentic, true story.

And what IS a real, true story? And what ISN’T?

The story goes on … here … soon.