How to make your company as exciting as a holly/bollywood blockbuster? ABT Storification is the scr

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. This is the podcast for businesses who want to get noticed for what they do. And today I'd like to talk about how storification can lead to interviews. Storification, and as we like to think of it as digital storification, is all about getting the narrative right for your audience. In our Speak PR program, we talk about Storification, personalization, engagement, amplification, and knowing. So today I'd like to talk to you about the first part of that, which is storification. Now, I was listening to The Business of Story, which is a brilliant podcast by Park Howell in America, and Park Howell recently wrote a book entitled Brand Bewitchery. Now, on his podcast, I I was also fascinated to hear a lady called Candice Fraser, who works for a company called TTI Success Insights. Because on this business of story, I've been interested at what really makes a narrative, what makes a public relations pitch work, and what makes one not work. What makes a press release appealing and not appealing? Now, what Candice Fraser was saying that at TTI Success Insights, they have developed a personality test. Now, this in itself isn't new, but it seemed to be really quite well evolved. It's based on the original German psychologist theories by Edward Sprenger, who was alive from 1882 all the way through to 1963. And in 1928, he wrote a book entitled Types of Men. And in this book, he identified 6 universal attitudes and value systems through which individuals will observe and experience life. Now, the reason that is important is because as we build our story and narrative, it's going to be listened to in different ways depending on the life story evaluation and the different attitudes that people have to life. So what Candice was saying is that their American company, they had actually found that people are quite literally wired to respond in different ways to the same words. It makes sense really. I mean, what they are saying is that the same words will have different reactions to different people. Now, of course, this makes an important difference when it comes to creating public relations for interviews and for stories. The driving forces which motivate and engage an individual in work and life will naturally condition the words that they are listening for in the story or the article or the interview that's being given out by a company. So in this research, TTI identify some 12 driving forces, and then they summarize those. I'll just share those with you, but I'll also put them in the show notes. So they say that people are instinctive or intellectual, and that's their— if you like, their knowledge driver. They can be selfless or resourceful. That's their utility. They could be objective or harmonious. That's about their surroundings. They can be intentional or altruistic, how they feel about others. They could be collaborative or commanding, which is their attitude to power. They could be receptive or structured, which are the methodologies that they might adopt in life. So interestingly enough, through these 6 forces that Edward Sprenger had identified of knowledge, utility, surrounding, others, power, methodologies, this is the construct by which all audiences, or all of us, listen to stories and information. The next part that I thought was very interesting about TTI research is this idea of acumen. Now, acumen is important because it's viewed as the indicator of the lens that people will use to filter information. It will then determine how they process the events or the stories or the articles that they read from a certain standpoint, and therefore it will affect the way that we give our story, but also the language, the words that we're going to be using. They identify 3 dimensions of thought. People are intrinsic, they're extrinsic, and they're systemic. So this is their feeling is intrinsic, their doing is extrinsic, and their thinking is systemic. So what we're saying here is that, or rather what TTI Success Insights is saying, drawing on this research, from the 1920s from the German psychologist is that each and every person will respond differently, but we can be categorized according to how we view the world and what's important to us. And so what this lady was saying in her talk, Candice Fraser, was that the language that we use changes. So if we're talking to people that are in essentially worried about their feelings, we might use more emotional words. If we're talking to people who are very practical, maybe engineers, we'd be maybe using more extrinsic or doing words. If we're talking to people that are more worried about the systems and the processes, we might be thinking along the lines of more procedure and formula and rules-based languages. Now, the reason then that stories become important is because we need to be talking to groups of people. Sometimes these groups of people will have differing profiles. Now, in our storification element on SPEAK, we then move on to P, which is personalization, because in personalization what we look at is Who are the people that we're going to be talking to? And in our stories, and in our press releases, and our articles, and our videos, and infographics, thinking about how people are going to receive the information is often as important as the information that we would like to send. Stories then are a way of creating a common narrative, and in a way I like to think of stories as a way of individuals taking the language and translating it into their own language. So stories are important because what we do is we buy into something bigger, into a higher purpose, into something that our own imagination kind of takes over and says, oh yeah, I know what they mean. And that's why we see advertising that is evocative of a place, Or a feeling or a result. So stories are ways that we start to create narratives around brands and companies, and why also when we're looking at the location for our stories, they need to be in different channels. So for example, I've been using Instagram, and that seems to be you know one picture, possibly with some text on top, and and going out to I know a younger audience, the 25 to 35 year old kind of. Hop online, see one thing, scroll versus, for example, SlideShare, where I also share information, but where people are looking for knowledge. And it's a different profile of people who are looking on SlideShare. And I'm finding I'm having to adapt my posts, whether I'm sending it to Instagram or to LinkedIn, because not only is the file size different on Instagram and Facebook in terms of, and LinkedIn in terms of the graphic size, But also the people in those platforms are different, and the way they're going to accept my information is different. So then the talk on this excellent Business Story podcast is moving around this idea of ABT, which is a process developed by Randy Olson. And he says in one of his talks on TED that most executives communicate and care but bore. So the opposite therefore is to use this ABT narrative framework, which he sort of suggests is really the framework for all great Hollywood stories. And this is the framework to make our audiences and customers sit up and listen and to care and not be bored. Now the framework is A for and, which is this is what we want. This is the The broad vision. But this is the current state that we're in. And the T is therefore, this is what or why I want you to follow me in my vision to do this. I'd like to give you a couple of ideas then of this ABT narrative. So one, for example, he had was that wildfires are amongst the most devastating hazards in California as well as to the rest of the world. That's the, the and. That's the teeing up the big issue that we'll go, aha, yeah, I get that. I've seen that on TV. I've got friends who have suffered from it. I understand wildfires are a big problem, but there's a need for a cyber infrastructure platform that can integrate all the security and testing and data models. That's the— this is what we're not doing now, but what we could do to solve those problems. Therefore, the Wildfire Lab develops integrated infrastructure and systems for natural hazard monitoring, simulation, and decision report. So I'll go through another one, but this idea of ABT is very powerful. It's simple but very powerful, like so many tool sets that we're going to cover. So if we start thinking of our own company story rather than our product or our balance sheet or our corporate ethics, we want the organizational goals to seem approachable with the paradigm that the audience also understands. Because as I've mentioned, all these different audience groups will actually understand information in different kinds of ways. So what we're looking to do is to create a focused story that the audience can take on board, get into the state of mind that we're in, and then get them to want to buy into doing that with us. Some people now are writing about having emotion, logic, and fear. The emotion is, this is what I want you to believe. Wouldn't it be great if— imagine if Won't you? Won't you love it when? And the the logic is because these things one, two, and three these facts mean that you can or cannot. And the fear is if we don't change this, if we don't do that, if you don't do this with me, this will happen. So this is one of the kind of direct marketing sort of now movements. That I've been listening to and talking to other people about. But coming back to Randy Olson and the ABT, here's another one: this idea that there's the you know I hear you, I'm with you, we're all in this together. This is our big and. But I'm over here. This is the problem that that I can see that we're facing. But and over there. Therefore, if we move together over there, we'll solve that problem collectively. So here's another example from the Randy Olson TED Talk. Online citizen science has been around for almost— for most of the 21st century, and it's benefited thousands of researchers. But setting up an online citizen science project is expensive and time-consuming. Therefore, the Zooniverse has built a free and open platform that enables anyone to build a project quickly. Okay, so this idea of how we get more public relations traction is to look at stories, because if we're not getting interviews, it's because we're not sharing a concise and compelling story with data to illustrate the nature of the problem. And in our Speak PR, we talk about the importance not of just having messages but also of having data to back those up. So a story is in essence the basis of the media pitch. So the interviews are going to be your chance to share your story with the audience. So the best way of doing that is to share your vision. And another way of looking at that is the and, but, therefore. Another one, just to give you another third idea, was the study of ice sheet melting is a multidisciplinary game, and we know that multidisciplinary studies require a unified approach, but this isn't happening for ice sheet melting because of The loose coordination of disparate bodies. Therefore, we're creating a gateway that unifies all researchers in one place. So the challenge in public relations and in storification is to define the narrative, the one thing that's going to be the hook. So there was the book The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results. Written by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan. It comes back to the old Pareto principle that 20% of the effort will derive 80% of the results. So I started off talking about how we have different personality types, and they're going to receive information and be stimulated by information differently. So part of storification is about making the narrative Broad enough to be meaningful, but narrow enough to get to that group of people who together will find your and but therefore compelling enough to make change. We need to then find the media, the address, or the medium, the channel that addresses that particular audience, so that when you're defining your one thing, the one problem that you'd like to solve with the business, the planet, the community, that the people listening to that are receptive to it. And that then is going to be the basis for your public relations. So we have to start with PR by being focused on the problem and the obstacle, and then on our vision for the solution. Too often in PR, we start with a We have launched this. We are opening this. We often, too often, start with ourselves and not with the audience of who. And we often talk in our own language rather than thinking about which language is going to be best received by those people. And as the Springer research showed, there are 6 different views of the world, narrowly categorized perhaps. But if we can start to think about the kind of people that we're talking to and where they're at and how they interpret information, it can change the language that we use in our pitches, in our interviews, in our articles, and our press releases. And by doing this, we should get more public relations coverage, and we should get ultimately more interest in our business and in our products. So thank you for listening to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James. If you've enjoyed this, then please rate it or subscribe and listen to other podcasts. We also on our website have articles like this and a weekly newsletter called Cognition at eastwestpr.com. In the meantime, I wish you the best of health. I wish you a profitable business. And that you keep telling great stories.