It starts with business strategy and then flows into YOUR Story - are you on target?

Digital Media Storytelling (aka Social Media) -Use storytelling to pitch better, sell faster and win more business using the storytiser methodology

Your actual ‘Brand YOU’ story is something you might not realize you’re missing. When you first started your business, you probably had a long checklist. Things like: Build a website. Find more clients. Secure speaking gigs. Establish your expertise. And set yourself up on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIN and more.If you’re still struggling to describe what you do and who you serve, you’re probably overlooking some aspect of your story. When someone can see themselves in your story — the need to persuade, convince, or sell them disappears.

Everything depends on your story. If your story is not clear to you and to your clients, your business will not thrive. When your story gets aligned with your mojo (finding the magic in what you do), you’ll automatically start playing on a bigger platform. It leads to more sales, better speaking engagements, and a growing pipeline of opportunities.

Telling your Digtal story matters today more than ever. When people Google you, or visit your website – they go straight for the story. If you’re an entrepreneur – your perceived value is directly linked to that personal story. Especially when you’re an expert professional — blogger, author, speaker, coach, consultant, designer, etc. Getting paid what you’re really worth comes down to sharing how you see the world. Remember, people are you buying your ideas and opinions (i.e. your story of how things work).

Get a Coach
The most efficient way to move from dead brand walking to a powerful Brand YOU story is to get a coach who will help you succinctly refine your strategy and identify what story you have to tell. You'll learn to wrap facts up with emotions as stories (human beings are actually biologically hardwired to remember stories), share case studies as stories that people remember and how to tell a compelling story that your customers that compels action.

One that encompasses audio, visual and kinaesthetic positioning. We discuss the relevance of LinkedIN, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, the importance of the Social Website, Blogging, Podcasts and more. It's not about sharing what people 'had for breakfast' but a strategic groundswell of relevant stories you have to tell that fits your business purpose and goals.

Case Study: How Digital Storytelling is being used in healthcare for patient management

Pip Hardy and Tony Sumner founded the Patient Voices Programme in 2003 with the intention of bringing more humanity into healthcare through the creation and sharing of digital stories.

Through its carefully developed methodology, the programme facilitates the telling and sharing of reflective stories of care by all stakeholders. The innovative model of free distribution of resulting stories for use in health and social care education and quality improvement ensures that those voices are heard, and that the investment of storytellers is nurtured to develop maximum social capital.

Some 500 people have participated in workshops to create their digital stories and the model of free distribution of stories via the Patient Voices website has resulted in their use in healthcare education throughout the English-speaking world and beyond.

“The Patient Voices programme aims to facilitate the telling and the hearing of some of the unwritten and unspoken stories of ordinary people.
The goal is that those who devise and implement strategy in health and social care, as well as the professionals and clinicians directly involved in care, may carry out their duties in a more informed and compassionate manner. 
We hope that, as a result of seeing the stories, patients, their carers and clinicians may meet as equals and work respectfully together for the benefit of all.”

So let’s tell a story - Al Pacino signed four –ad deal for Vittoria Coffee on the condition he tells his story!

He never has and he never will. That’s the response Rolando Schirato, sales and marketing manager at Vittoria Coffee and the grandson of the original founder of Australian iconic brand Vittoria Coffee, received when he approached Al Pacino’s management about signing on the Oscar winner to endorse the Australian owned super brand.

Needing to compete against Multinational Nestle who had dropped millions on its George Clooney campaign for Nespresso, and Lavazza who is planning to pay Julia Roberts a cool $1.6 million to flash her smile for the brand, it was important for Vittoria to gain similar celebrity applause and they wanted to something really special for the company’s 50^th anniversary.

Vittoria stuck to it’s guns and six months after the initial knockback, struck a breakthrough when the 70 year old actor agreed to read a brief from the company.

Schirato said he focused on the similarities they shared with Pacino. Vittoria is a family owned company, now in its third generation of family heritage and both families were Italian migrants. Both Pacino’s and Schirato’s families are from Sicilian roots. That fact made Pacino take note and he tried agreed to try the coffee.

Having known the Schirato family personally now for some years I have to add to this story that it is simply impossible not to note the family’s complete passion for their product. It is contagious to just about anyone who meets the family. Les Schirato is known as Australia’s coffee king.

Pacino, a hardcore coffee fanatic, liked the product and as anyone who has seen the ads on television ‘you get that’ when Pacino taps his fingers against the neatly branded Vittoria Coffee cup on screen and simply says, “This is good coffee.” The vocal inflection of sincerity, even for an acclaimed actor is hard to avoid.

What makes this story even more interesting is Pacino signed a four ad deal on the condition that he would develop the scripts himself with the help of Oscar winning director Barry Levison of Diner, Rain Man, Wag the Dog film fame. Pacino wanted to tell the story.

That fitted Vittoria’s ethos generally of avoiding high cost ad agencies and who has built a vast empire by being master of ambush marketing strategies.

The four ads were all filmed in New York’s Greenwich Village in one day complete with four Vittoria Coffee baristas, two coffee carts and five coffee machines all shipped from Australia. The ads went to air in Australian in August 2000 and the results were staggering.

Vittoria Coffee sales reached an all time high by late August (a 20% boost) and the company secured a 67.3% share of the $137-million market in Australia.

Vittoria says whilst the peaked sales were great it was really about brand recognition. The campaign delivered worldwide recognition. On the drawing board are plans for the company to push into the US. They already do a small amount of business there.

Vittoria Coffee’s campaign further used publicity to tell the story of how they came to get Pacino and what happened when he came on set. You can’t make those stories up, they develop naturally.

Not bad for a corporate success story of David and Goliath in business. It’s also a story of family values, of heritage and of a father’s pride in son’s achievements.

How to keep your audience engaged at your next presentation - tell a story!

There are lessons for business to learn from storytelling rather than text heavy
powerpoints that sends your audience to sleep.

Firefighters swap stories after every fire, and by doing so they multiply their experience; after years of hearing stories, they have a richer, more complete mental catalogue of critical situations they might confront during a fire and the appropriate responses to those situations. Research shows that mentally rehearsing a situation helps us perform better when we encounter that situation in the physical environment.

Similarly hearing stories acts as a kind of mental flight simulator, preparing us to respond quickly and effectively.

Stories put knowledge into a framework that is more lifelike, more true to our day to day existence. Being the audience for a story isn’t  passive. Inside of us, we’re getting into the act.

Neurocore tip:
Research, including high tech real time brain scans, is now showing that emotions, triggered in the limbic area of the brain – also known as the mammalian brain – lock a story in memory and that our memories are holistic. The more fully we engage the audience’s entire brain in what we say – the more we get them firing on all cylinders – the more easy our story is to remember. Words and verbal constructions tend to be stored in the left hemisphere of the brain, spatial relationships and visual images in the right hemisphere.

Use storytelliing to add emotion to a fact and embed in audience's memory
Audiences check out after ten minutes, but you can keep grabbing them back by telling them narratives or creating events rich in emotion. In other words your brain has a tendency to tune out after 10 minutes, ignore ‘boring’ subjects and requires a lot of pictures to retain information. Tip: tell a relevant story, or video clip and embed it with emotion. If you’re presenting via a webinar you can use a tool to push a poll or a question to your audience. Plan exercises at ten minute intervals. Conventional text heavy powerpoint should be thrown out and replaced with image rich slides. The brain doesn’t see letters.

Extend your story with digital storytelling strategies
Positioning your organisation as a story telling space, is a smart move. You might have the best ideas in the room but if they are only ideas expressed, you won’t have fully harnessed the creative power of your team. When it is time to make a decision communicate it through a story. That why the idea will be completely understood and absorbed. Telling your story digitally allows you to tap into a variety of compelling mediums allowing the listener to tap into the emotions of the story either via images on Flickr, Youtube videos, blogs, podcasts and many more mediums. If you’d like to learn more sign up for our free teleclass

Learn how to use digital storytelling to pitch better, sell faster and win more business.

"Every great leader is a great story teller," says Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner.

Storytelling relates to every industry and business today. All successful stories have five basic components: the PASSION with which the story is told, a HERO who leads us through the story and allows us to see it through his or her eyes, an ANTAGONIST or obstacle that the hero must overcome, a moment of AWARENESS that allows the hero to prevail, and the TRANSFORMATION in the hero and in the world that naturally results.

The importance and relevance of storytelling in the twenty-first century is demonstrated by the research of individuals such as Donald Norman, Mark Turner and Daniel Pink. Memory is preserved and the dissemination of information enriched through the application. Research, including high-tech real time brain scans, is now showing that emotions, triggered in the limbic area of the brain - also known as the mammalian brain - lock a story in memory.

This is particularly important in a sales story. I will go so far as to say the days of static brochures are dead. Customers want t engage with your business, to hear the stories of your business.

Take for example how your company started? A story usually most employees know and one that is often told and retold to others. Imagine if you could harness those great stories within your business to gain customers, build rapport and turn them into evangelists for your stories too! The viral nature of a story is a compelling argument to learn how to do it.

I've helped businesses tell stories for over 25 years, be that a unique USP, a story of how a certain company offers a product that enhances a customer experience, health promotion even the importance of going green indoors to clean air and aide workplace productivity.

People often confuse story telling with the elevator pitch. A good corporate story is just that, a story that follows the formula of PASSION, HERO, ANTAGONIST, AWARENESS and ultimately TRANSFORMATION. It compels the listener to embed the story to memory.

Photo courtesy of langwitches.org - Silvia Tolisano

Storytelling is undergoing a renaissance globally as thought leaders and corporate entities realise that communication and creativity both in education and the workplace relies on more than just the transmission of information. Storytelling lends itself to teaching languages, social sciences and the arts. Yet, in fields such as business, marketing, engineering and science the art of storytelling can be utilised to inspire, promote an idea and emphasise the human element of a subject. It allows the organisation to collaborate, communicate and connect with the audience in an engaging manner and builds rapport.

Storytelling can give life to a presentation and a lecture. Forget boring powerpoints! Storytelling can be utilised to add the human element to a dataset and a report.

Storytelling can gain the attention of the audience and inspire others to share their stories.

Social Media allows the extension of the corporate story to be told through a range of digital media that can be employed to inspire the individual and enrich the imagination and so set the stage for the telling and re-telling of stories via a digital medium. There are a variety of online tools and desktop applications including Posterous, Comic Life, Picasa, Audacity and VoiceThread that can be used to tell the corporate story in innovative and creative ways.

The rise of corporate storytelling as a compelling USP tool

"It is my simple mission: to help everyone in our company understand the power of a single relationship and how to grow relationships to support our business. In almost every account we have ever lost, if we look back it is due to somewhere along the way we lost touch with the relationship."

These words were written by a social media coaching client of mine, Jane, She is a senior product manager with a major multi-national and her words resonate with the truth of experience both within internal corporate culture and with key customers. Jane is a warrior who loves to move into the trenches with her people and get up close and personal when helping them solve problems.

Jane is focused on the outcome she is seeking and builds relationships not because she is nice, kind, and compassionate. She actually is all of those things. She builds and nurtures relationships because she uses her brain. Jane is a pragmatic warrior who has been through countless battles with competitors, clients and upper management. Her philosophy of relationship building is based on what works. Her strategy will beat out more aggressive, brutish approaches over the long haul every time. But why does her strategy work?

She understands the value of networks, relationships and stories both in the online world and offline world. She knows that telling real human stories and embedding those with her stakeholders will win every time. And she is authentic, she uses story telling in a compelling real manner to boost the product she is responsible for into the mindset of her stakeholders. In short she allows them to participate in her story and that is what works. In this three part series we will explore the power of corporate story telling as a compelling tool and look at whose using it well.

But first let's look at the science of all of this, receent brain research suggests that the human brain is not so much a “thinking brain” but a relationship making brain. Dr. Gerald Huther, who leads the Dept. of Neurobiology at the Psychiatric Clinic of Gottingen, Germany, says “Until quite recently, it was held to be self-evident that human beings have a big brain to make it possible for them to think. However, the research results of the last years have made it clear that the structure and function of the human brain is especially optimized for building relationships. Our brain is thus much more a social organ than it is a thinking organ.”

Our brain has evolved over millions of years and our closest ancestors, the great apes, have much to teach us. Apes will fight and even kill members of other tribes who try to invade their territory. However, when scientists observe these animals in the wild they report that for the majority of time these animals spend much more time cooperating then fighting. Great apes have learned that building relationships increases the chance of success for all members of the community. By cooperating and specializing on essential tasks like food gathering, rearing the young and watching for dangerous invaders, they all benefit.

Jane is using her brain when she pays attention to building these interpersonal networks and she reminds her team that relationships take constant attention. She knows that especially in times of stress, building and strengthening relationships will win out over blame and arrogant behavior every time.

I'd like to give credit for much of this post,to a wonderful book which is well worth the read - The Elements of Persuasion Using Storytelling to Pitch Better. It's available on Amazon.

When was the last time you sat down with your troops and cascaded powerful stories of your USP related to your business into a warm human story? Have you integrated this into your business both offline and online, particularly social media?

Does your company leadership ‘get the business case’ for digital word of mouth (aka social media)?

Social Media Workshops

According to futurist Dr James Canton the top 10 workforce trends necessitate employees commit to continuous learning particularly  up skilling their technological skills if they are to attract the cream of the crop positions in a global workforce.

As the global war for talent heats up, new key skills will be required of the C Suite. ‘Smart Talent’ has been identified as the top driver of competitive advantage. Highly educated, skilled and experienced employees will be in demand.

Finding, training and retaining high-tech skilled employees from a global talent pool will be the greatest challenge for every organization. And that is the dilemma; many C Suites are failing to embrace the fundamental shift in stakeholder collaboration that has dramatically turned our customers into our collaborators with the rise of Web 2. We no longer communicate outside our office walls with linear messages and just the ‘old media’ as the commentator. Our customers are now commentating on our every corporate move, many with powerful followings who can literally make or break a product such as a bad review that can in a split second resonate with their followers and go massively viral.

Learning this lesson the hard way has cost some companies dearly while some savvy CEO’s have identified the business shift that is not an option but, an imperative holistically within the organisation similar to the days when the first PC’s were introduced to all employees desks adding the benefit to the bottom line of improved productivity and labour cost controls.

That same paradigm shift is now once again required of business.

Just as businesses in 2010 are  having to adapt to a rapidly changing world and are embedding innovation into the organizational DNA as a key driver of future competitive advantage, so too is the imperative upon organizations to commit to employee development, continual education and   training in the social media arena, returning to the organisation new skills and new competencies.

The philosophy is very simple, if your customers are in this new social media space and populate it with ever increasing daily time habits, then why too aren’t you?

This business process transformation can’t be delegated to low level functional roles if the company is to reap the true benefit of active engagement with your customers and stakeholders. It must be owned at leadership level. Social media affects the entire business, and should be looked at Board Room and CEO level.

So what exactly is this ‘thing’ called social media? Firstly I like to refer to social media as digital word of mouth. It is easier for C Suites to get their head around that definition and takes away from the often confused recreational image of Facebook and other social networks.

Fact is many C Suites are missing the point entirely about social media and are lagging far behind many innovative small businesses and competitors. I will go as far as saying many of the larger enterprise organisations don’t even allow employees to access their emails using Smart phones. Only yesterday I heard of the frustrations of one young savvy product manager who was frustrated with her organisation’s leadership and understanding of where and how their customers are ‘hanging out’ as she said to me rightly about the 18-35 market. “They are online, not listening to drive time radio.”

To ‘get it’, you must understand, social media is NOT just a marketing activity, it is a fundamental shift in almost every purchase or conversion process. It is the next generation of business engagement. Whether consumer facing, B2B, for profit or non profit, people are turning to people like themselves for the information they need to make smart choices and are talking about products, causes and activities BEFORE they will even consider the purchase process. They form opinions, talk with their communities, share news and more.

The advent of Web 2.0 and the social web is clearly a game changer, on numerous fronts. It is most effective when it is applied in a holistic manner – take the Zappos case study as an example a company growing from Zero - $1.2 billion using social media strategically rather than simply operationally. To illustrate this let’s take a look at the role of Chief Operating Officer which of course differs from industry to industry and from organisation to organisation. However in most cases the COO is responsible for the daily operations of the company.

As we know many COO’s have worked their way through the company holding different positions of responsibility and are now being groomed to take over the CEO position.

Key functions of the COO often include:

1.        Organise resources as set by the CEO with the aim of creating maximum value for the company’s stakeholders

2.       Lead by developing and cascading the organisational strategy and mission statement and aligning personnel with company goals

3.       Plan by prioritising customer, employee and organisational requirements

4.       Maintain and monitor staffing levels and key knowledge requirements that align the organisational goals

5.       Drive performance indicators for the measurement of the organisations results.

Need convincing then consider the following hypothetical meeting.

Here are some thought provokers:

CEO – Is this a PR function OR whole of organisation function? What’s the business case, what are our competitors doing?

CFO –Will this strategy increase revenues and what about costs?

CIO –Network security will be an issue.... all these desktop social applications downloaded by every employee is a nightmare to manage.

Legal – Our risk exposure could be huge. We’ll need to consider procedures, standards, workplace law requirements around social media. Definitely a social media policy is needed.

HR – Are we giving all employees access? Who’s training the whole organisation? Can this be used for recruiting?

CSO – Is this going to generate sales leads or is it just about customer service. Do I need to involve the call centre for customer complaints resolution. How are we going to monitor this?

What are your views? Do you think social media discussions need to take place in the boardroom and with company leadership?