Children shed light for Dr Shelley James on the need for simple, new and context sensitive content

How often have you been creating content that you're convinced is brilliant and found that it fell on deaf ears? Well, tonight I was on a panel with a group of 11, 12, and 13-year-olds here in the UK, listening to their feedback, having watched some videos that I've been making with my sister, Dr. Shelley James, on the impact of light. And these kids are our sample survey. And what they shared with us was fascinating, but the insight that they gave us really was even more important. And that's what I want to share with you today on this episode of Speak PR. Now, in the Speak PR program, I talk about storify, personalize, engage, amplify, and to know. And today, the panel that we had to review these 30-second, what we're calling edumercials, they're educational infomercials. What we had on our agenda today was to share with these young people these explainer videos about the impact of light on their well-being. And for example, that we all need to go outside for light at least 60 minutes a day, and that the sunlight is 1,000 times more powerful than even the brightest bulb inside. Now, that's just 2 facts that Dr. Shelley James is sharing in her series with a character that she's created called Luna Go Lightly. And in the process of trying to animate these characters and explaining to young people the impact of light. There have been several iterations. Now, first of all, we started with animated characters and we went to some studios to design these, but the costs actually became prohibitive. We're talking $5,000, $6,000, $7,000 per 1-minute episode. Now, we've got some sponsorship money from some large lighting companies, But the budget was all going to go on production, and it really needs to go on the distribution, on building awareness so that the children get to see this. So we have started to use Lumen5, which is a platform that I had found just recently and found it extremely easy to use. And with Lumen5, in less than 6 minutes, we've been able to create really passable 30-second videos. In fact, the video platform itself will make you a 1-minute video in less than 6 seconds. It's fantastic. So we set about a storyboard and creating the stories that we believed young people would like to hear and be willing to watch and to take away information that would be good for their health about light. And in there we have one about myopia, for example. We have another one about the need to go outside in order to help your eyes and your eyes to grow properly, to forestall myopia. We have another one about why the vegetables When you see them outside look better than they do in the kitchen, and it's to do with the quality of light. And we had another one about how when you go to sleep at night, your brain is actually doing the processing. So if you go to bed, turn out the lights 2 hours before you want to go to bed, then you will get better sleep, and actually your homework will be done whilst you're sleeping. We've got lots and lots of interesting facts that are all there to help young people, and we've limited ourselves to 30-second spots. And we've got a routine that we are talking about, which is 8 words per frame will be the maximum. Each frame will only be 5 Seconds. And 3, which is that we will deal with 3 elements in each episode. That is the situation, the issue, and the solution. And this comes from the storification part of the Speak PR program. Now, we thought that we had been quite tight in creating this content, and we showed this today to this group of young people. And we got some interesting feedback. One was that they, they liked the music. We took some quite upbeat music. Another was that they thought 30 seconds was about right, but the text moved too quickly for them. Now, we had limited ourselves to 8 words per frame, and a frame could be 5 seconds. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Now, to us, we had assumed that reading 8 words in 5 seconds should be possible, but they said actually it was moving too quickly. One of them then questioned why in one of the pictures we had a dog. Now, obviously the answer was because we wanted people to pay attention, but what she said was that the dog was distracting. Now, In another one of the episodes, we had a dog but with glasses on, and they didn't comment on that. And one of the young lads said that the text is great and the images are great, but they have to match one another. Because when we had, for example, the dog that was nothing to do with going outside, it didn't make sense because the dog was inside. But when we had a picture of a teenager on their mobile phone outside chatting to friends but lying in a hammock, and the words were about you could tell your friends about it while you're outside, then it made sense. So intuitively, these young people are telling us that there needs to be a correlation between What we are seeing as pictures and what we're writing as text seems a basic parameter, doesn't it? And we've got that fairly correct, but even if we got one picture wrong in a sequence of 7 or 8 pictures, the children picked up on it. They also picked up on the text moving too quickly, and they said they didn't have the time to both read and to process the information. We were giving the information to them at a pace that we felt was important to get it all in, and in fairness, because we were trying to reassure the sponsors that the information that we had said we would share with the young people would be shared. And needless to say, the young people who are the audience are saying, you're sharing too much, we can't absorb it all. So there are a couple of lessons in here for me, really. In the Speak PR program, under Engage, we talk about the engagement— creating content that is simple to understand, that is new, and is context relevant. What these young people were saying was these are new information about light, and they were saying that it was in one or two of the videos that we made, simple to understand. And thirdly, they were saying the pictures that you send and share, for example, of a dog indoors, when you're talking about going outdoors, our brain quickly will latch on to the fact that those two images and texts don't resonate. And we talk about that in other podcasts about the dual coding theory, how images and moving images especially benefit from the picture superiority effect. In other words, if there are pictures on the screen and text, the mind will look at the pictures and interpret those. The text, if it's not aligned with the image, will simply be a distraction, and the brain will use up some brain power to try and understand why it's there. Under personalization, which is Obviously the second part of Speak PR, we talk about the need to make our avatar, our audience, the hero. So in each of these videos, we had children of the age of the ones that we showed the videos today. Again, it's important that when we're creating content, we're thinking not about who we are and our company and what we want to tell people, But who it is that's going to be listening to it, who's going to be watching it, and if it resonates for them. Now, we're creating this content because during lockdown, many, if not all, children and all adults are suffering from this enforced enclosure. And these children were all saying that they are hating lockdown and they're hating being indoors. Now what we're trying to do is create some reason for them to encourage themselves and maybe their family and their friends to go outside. So I asked the children, would they share these videos online, which was part of our amplification part of Speak PR, is creating content that's so engaging that people would want to share it. We think that we've done a good job. They said it's simple, they said it's new and fresh, and that it's context sensitive. It's relevant, it deals with issues that they're facing now. But they all said that they would not share the videos, but they would tell their friends about the need to go outside. Now, I thought that was quite interesting and asked why. It turns out that actually it just wouldn't be cool To send out information that's kind of telling other people what's good for them. Now, that's an interesting point. So they said if this was seen at school, then everyone would watch it, and that they would then be able to tell people, "Hey, did you see this? What is it? What do you think? It's a good idea, right?" But if they were to see it on social media, they might like it. But they probably wouldn't reshare it. So that makes a difference to our distribution strategy, of course, because part of what we're hoping for is to get kids to like it and share it. But they're not going to share it because it's not trendy to share. I asked them what they would share. They said we'd share Black Lives Matter, for example, Greta Thunberg, environmental issues. So there are some issues and some pieces of information. And I guess some social media stars have tapped into this that can be shared readily. But sharing about learning and about health, ironically enough, or interestingly enough, is not one of those for these early teenagers. So we learned a lot today from our 1-hour session with this group of 11 through 13-year-olds. Above all, I learned just how intuitive people are when it comes to looking at content. These are school kids using Zoom, watching videos on YouTube, and giving immediate feedback which is amazingly accurate. And I think one of the dangers certainly that I've fallen into is to overworry the content that I think I would like and spend too little time on thinking about the people that are about to receive the content that I'm about to share. A message that came back resoundingly from all of the children was that they needed the information to be simple. They needed it to be simple and in bite-sized pieces. And I think about how often we send out press releases that are loaded, for example, to the brim with facts and figures. How we have clients that want to stand in front of people and tell them hours of information, and in reality, most audiences doing us a service to listen. Now I talk about three audience groups in Speak PR: our own staff, our partners, and our external clients and potential clients on the grounds that staff have to listen. They're paid. Partners have a vested interest in listening, but external don't really have to listen. So if we don't take into account what they want to listen to and how they want to listen to it, in what format, then we're going to lose them. Now, we asked the children afterwards if they would like to have more information about light and how light works as a PDF file. And they all came back immediately saying, "No, that would be dull. Who would want to read that? They'd like to see more videos." So I'm sharing this because we often work in isolation, especially now. But our audiences still people may be suffering with certain degrees of anxiety and certain circumstantial stress right now. If we're issuing information to these groups, what are we doing in order to ensure that it's simple, that it's new, it's context-sensitive, that it's actually helping them to move forward so they can accomplish their goals, their journey? Because when we talk about personalization in Speak PR, we talk about personalization being about making The individual, the hero. The company, the organization is not the hero; it's the facilitator. It's the parent. It's the teacher. And talking with these young people today about the struggles that they've got and about how light, positive light outside sunlight can be good for them, you could see that they got a sense of enthusiasm and a bit of hope and a bit of direction about what they could do differently. And for all of us that have got products and services to offer for free or for money, we want to have our customers, our partners, our staff feel as though we can create a better future for them if they participate and work with us. And that's really what we were trying to do today. So I'm sharing on this podcast today how we're trying to do that so that if you're creating content, you will think about who it is that you're sending this to. And if you get the chance, have them in a focus group. Now tonight I'm using a new software called Descript for recording this podcast. Now I won't go into much detail about it, but whilst I'm speaking and recording this, the Descript software is creating an automatic transcript. Now, I usually use a software called Hindenburg, but I decided to download this new one because it will enable me to edit my podcast as if I'm editing a Word document. So I'm going to be seeing how this works out because it could be that it makes editing a podcast extremely quick and efficient. So I'll let you know how I get on with that, but in today's message It's just to say I hope things are going well for you. If you are able to get outside for at least 60 minutes and encourage all of your family members and friends to do the same, because that direct sunlight outside may just be the best thing that you can do for yourself under COVID at this stage. Thank you very much for listening. My name is Jim James. This is the Speak PR podcast. And I wish you the best of health, a sustainable business, and that you are getting outside for a little bit of sunshine.