INBOUND Bold Talks: Emily Olson LaFave "The Art of Telling Someone Else's Story"

Yes. So I'm going through the identity crisis of changing your name on the Internet. So you'll see me as Emily Olson. Emily Olson Lefebvre. But nice to see you all here at 4 o'. Clock. This is usually when I get my snack attack. So if you're hungry, I apologize in advance that I. I'm telling stories about bacon and burgers. So today I'm talking about the art of telling somebody else's story, because you should stop telling the world about your features and start telling the world about how it actually connects to somebody. So back to that whole burger thing. So I was reading all these blogs about this burger. This was back in 2009, and I had to get my hands on it. This burger. The lure of this burger was it was slathered with this magical, smoky, salty, sweet bacon jam. Bacon jam. So I went on a road trip up to Seattle, I live in San Francisco, to get my hands on one. And found the Airstream Skillet street food was running up in Seattle. And I got my burger, that's actually my burger. And it was amazing. And I told Josh, the owner of Skillet Street Food, you have got to put this stuff, this bacon candy spread thing in a jar. And I want to tell your story. So why was I so qualified to tell their story? Well, I basically eat good food for a living. That's my job. I invented that job for myself. I'm the co founder of a company called Foodsy, as Laura Shared, which is an online marketplace for artisan food makers and a monthly subscription. We sold it about a year ago. But going all the way back in college, when I realized food was my thing, I was putting off all my chemistry homework to cook and I was reading all these food magazines and I realized that I wanted to be the editor in chief of a food magazine. So I got my journalism degree. I minored in food and nutrition. I started a food column and. And by the end of college, I realized I was horribly inefficient at writing. But thankfully, the food part stuck. So I got a job at a specialty food retailer called the Fresh Market. And I was working with all these specialty food products and realized that these artisan purveyors needed a place where they could sell their products online. And that's where Foodsy was born. And my job as the chief taster was to discover all the best stuff. So back to the best stuff. The bacon jam. So when I left Seattle, I came back to San Francisco and it was in the middle of the summer and I realized That I needed to tell this story. And it was the time that all the magazine, all the publications started doing their gift guides. And so I crafted their story. Josh slapped together a couple jars for me that he put some temporary labels that he had just gotten done. We got them out to the magazines and real simple picked it up and featured the bacon jam in their 50 gifts under 50. And things kind of blew up. So this was in October. We started seeing sales of bacon Jam. We had a whole customer service theme dedicated to the bacon jam. And does anyone know how much a ton actually is? Yes. Yay. So we sold a little over a ton. Literally a ton of bacon jam in 8 ounce jars. It's actually also about the weight of the actual air stream that he was selling the burgers in. So this was an incredible success story for the bacon jam folks. In fact, now, three or four years later, they're selling that bacon jam all across the country. Whole Foods. But what was really eye opening to me about this was a couple of different things. First, that people kind of suck at telling their own stories. Josh didn't really know all the subtle nuances. That just lit me up when he told me his story. And I realized that we have a gift to be able to tell someone else's story for them. That was number one. Two was I realized that by finding these stories, this being one of many, I ended up sharing with the community. Different editors at different magazines. I was doing the work for these editors, right? So we know more than ever, publishers are strapped for resources finding these stories. And I would go and find them and craft them. And I became a really important partner in relationship to these different editors. But the last part was realizing the magic of being featured in a magazine. When we would get one of these vendors published, I mean, it was amazing. Like, they would talk about it, their whole family would tweet about it, like all their customers. I mean, it was a big deal. And I realized that, wow, like, why does this really, you know, why does this matter so much to us? And that when someone shares our story, we feel like it just feels good. We all want to be heard, we all want to be validated, and we all want to feel like we matter. And we. When someone shares our story, it feels that way. We also want to make our parents proud. That matters too. But I realized that we have an audience and we know how to tell stories, and we can make them feel heard, and we can make them feel validated, and we can make these really amazing artisan makers feel like they matter. And so this was something that we ended up leveraging as a huge strategy. As I continued to work with all these different publishers, we also started telling the stories ourselves. And we used video and different mediums to do that. But we weren't the only ones using this strategy. Just three different brands that have also been doing an amazing job at telling other people's stories. Warby Parker is doing a class trip right now across the country. They have this yellow school bus that they have outfitted and it's got actually like a whole. You can check out all their glasses inside. And they are going around and they are telling the stories of their customers. And the reason I actually even knew about this is Andrew is my friend. And what happened is Andrew just got a house and he hosted a dinner party at his house with his friends. And Warby Parker sent a photographer to take pictures of of Andrew and his friends. Really beautiful pictures. And Andrew shared those on Facebook. And it was through that I realized that Warby Parker has maybe some new frames that I haven't seen yet. But you know, that was shared through Andrew. That was through Andrew feeling proud that Warby Parker came and take pictures of him and his new. Okay, so if you're saying, yeah, okay, artisan food, that's sexy designer eyewear, what about if I have an unsexy product? Venture capital, not so sexy. First Round Capital, a venture capital firm in San Francisco. They're also New York and Philadelphia. They have done something really interesting where they have just started the First Round review and it's basically like the Harvard Business Review but for startups. And instead of First Round Capital talking themselves, they are now publishing stories of all these amazing entrepreneurs that they work with and this hard earned knowledge that their entrepreneurs have earned and are sharing. And they're touching all of these new entrepreneurs that are now learning about First Round capital through these entrepreneurs. This is a really cool example. I don't know if you're familiar with Mailbox, but sometimes you can actually embed the idea of telling someone's story into your product itself. So Mailbox launched earlier this year to much fanfare. They actually sold to Dropbox for $100 million. And this is a product. If you haven't used it, it's pretty awesome for getting through your email with a couple swipes, you can delete, you can archive, you can postpone things till later. And the magic of mailboxes, they get you through your inbox really fast to this inbox zero moment. And they could have used this moment to just be completely branded to Mailbox. But instead, what they did was they made this a storytelling moment about their users. Behind that M is a photo. This is actually my photo because they featured me, like, four months ago. When you click on that M, a little thing comes up that says, see today's photo. And on the right, the left, your right is actually Instagram. So that is a photo that their team is curating from Instagram. And they told me that they were going to feature me, but I had no idea what was going to happen, which was on that day, I get a flood of notifications. I have all these new followers. I go from 100 likes on most of my photos to over 1000. This was a picture I took in Japan. And in the springtime, they like lots of Zen moments, in case you're trying to get into Mailbox's photos. So this was really powerful because you know what I did? I tweeted to all my friends and I said, oh, my gosh, I'm so proud. Thanks, Mailbox. You picked my photo for Inbox Zero. And anyone that didn't know about Mailbox was like, what's Inbox Zero? What's Mailbox? And they were introduced to the core offering of Mailbox's product through me, through my art, and through my story. Pretty cool. So as you're navigating your company and your world and looking for stories, here are four things to think about. One, look for the story everywhere. Two, find people in the middle. Three, invest in visuals. And four, pick a timely story. So a few examples. KissMetrics, a great analytics product. Maybe you're looking for the story in tweets and customer emails, but also look in your metrics. They might be telling you something that's really interesting. This is what they do. I use publishers as a parallel for a lot of these strategies. And if any of you had a friend that's been listed in the 30 under 30 list, they're sort of brilliant, right? 30 people, 30 stories. Everybody's super proud. You know, you're pushing out to all your friends. They're cheering you on. Well, this is about finding people that are in the middle, right? So not people that are, you know, really don't have a following. But it's not Mark Zuckerberg either. It's people that feel great that they just made it on this list and they're going to share it again. Make it visual. That's how I discovered Warby Parker's story and campaign. They shot beautiful photos of Andrew. And last, make it timely. So the reason that Bacon jam. Part of why it was such a success was that was the heart of the bacon craze in 2009, where I think everything was being baconized. So bacon floss and bacon. Your dogs dressed up as bacon, even bacon coffins. So my wish for all of you is that you, too, learn the art of telling someone else's story. We just need to stop talking about ourselves and talking about our own features and start telling the world about how we connect to somebody. You know, Seth Godin opened this entire conference, you know, talking about this connection economy that we're in, and we need to connect to people. So give somebody the gift of telling their story, and in turn, you will get a connection to them and to their audience. And it feels pretty good, too. Thank you, Sam.