You may have never seen a movie by Alfred Hitchcock, but most of us will know that he had a fantastic ability to scare us in his movies.
Alfred Hitchcock was an English film director and producer, widely regarded as one of the most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema. Known as “the Master of Suspense”, he directed over 50 feature films in a career spanning six decades, becoming as well-known as any of his actors thanks to his many interviews, his cameo roles in most of his films.
We may not be like Alfred and we may not have the ability to write stories like he was able to. However we all are walking stories ourselves. We only have to be good at telling our own story.
Recently I attended a business event, where there were 3 keynote speakers and then those speakers were joined by another 2 business people to form a panel, which allowed us to ask questions of them.
I noticed that during the keynotes the speakers were very formal, business orientated and quite frankly boring.
But during the panel Q&A session they seemed more relaxed, were more authentic and actually often very vulnerable. They appeared more human, more real and not so fake.
Sorry, yes, their keynotes were fake and in fact most keynotes are fake. When you’re invited to do a keynote, you immediately feel that you have to impress the audience, share something so great about yourself so that the audience ‘buys’ you.
Actually being more human, authentic and vulnerable means the audience buys you instantly. Sure add some suspense like Alfred did, make them suffer a little, but do it in a way that’s real.
A Dutch bike, other may call it a sit-up-and-beg bike.
I cycled to the shops to collect something and buy some groceries. As I was packing up my groceries in the panniers on my bike an elderly gentleman walked past with his trolley. He was walking quite slowly as if he struggled moving his legs. He paused by me, had a big smile on his face and said ‘oh wow, she’s beautiful’.
Obviously he was talking about my Dutchie.
He continued to share with me that he loved cycling when he was younger and cycled from Kidderminster to Pontypridd, some 100 miles in one direction and also cycled back the next day taking a detour and cycling 140 miles back.
It certainly brought some memories back for him. He then shared with me that he would love to cycle again but that the roads were just to dangerous these days. I agreed with him, the roads in the UK are so scary to cycle on. I shared with him that as a lot of drivers in the UK have never cycled on the roads, they have very little or maybe even no empathy with cyclists and will regard them as a nuisance and in the way.
I certainly experience a lot of scary incidents on the UK roads with acts of road rage, horn noises and cars racing past too close for comfort, just needing to get past in a hurry. Really what are they rushing back to?
Anyway the gentleman continued to share that he was in quite poor health and suffers with Parkinson’s disease and he wasn’t actually very long for this world. My response was, actually we’re all not very long for this world. He suggested that he would be ahead of me, to which I responded, well someone has to lead the way.
He smiled, laughed and looked for his wife and went on his way.
It was a wonderful interaction that I wanted to make a record of. It always pays to pause and have a chat with a stranger.
You may have heard it before. ‘You are the biggest storyteller in your life’. And most of it are lies. Lies about the people around you, lies about the world around you and most importantly lies about yourself.
Our mind is incredibly creative but it’s also very stupid. Because of your own conditioning, you believe the lies you have been telling yourself. Those lies become your truth because you have been thinking them over and over.
And this is how the media, advertising and politics work. Say something over and over and eventually it becomes hard wired in your neural pathways, a physical connection is made between your neurons that eventually become your truth, your beliefs and now you behave and act upon those new beliefs (lies) you have been exposed to, either by your own thinking or someone else’s thinking.
You (and I) believe we have free will and of course we do not. Free will disappeared when they invented the mortgage. Landowners (call them banks) realised that if they gave you a loan to buy some land (house) then basically they can determine your behaviour and actions to ensure you pay back that loan.
Queue the Bank of England and now you have removed free will in the minds of the world’s population.
You believe you are the hero in your life, when in actual fact you are just a character in a script which has been written by the over lords (and ladies) that own you.
I wouldn’t wish to presume of course, I can only go by the fact that I’ve never heard anyone talk about it or even hear anyone consider assessing it.
Picture the scene.
Marketing lay out their stall for the forthcoming year. They present their plan to the board of directors and show them a multi-million dollar spend on advertising, inbound marketing, posters, flyers, influencers, social media ads, SEO, PPC etc, etc.
Queue script writer/storyteller and video director. They present their video episodes, which includes a story about the founders of the business, the early pioneer clients, their current clients, their staff and their own individual stories in life and work and best of all an episode about why the organisation exists, their passion, value proposition and their why.
Which one sounds more interesting to you? And which one will have longevity in the minds of viewers, investors, customers, brand fans and kids?
Yeah, I thought so. Why isn’t everyone doing it then? Why does everyone on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn promote their crap and I’m only calling it crap because as we all know adverts suck!
When it comes to storytelling, we make it too complicated. We hear stories, narratives and anecdotes all the time, but we don’t turn around and say, ‘ah, that’s a story I am listening to or oh no, that’s a narrative or anecdote.
We just are engaged by what we’re listening to and we connect the dots in our brains in relation to what we have experienced previously. It’s almost impossible to create new neural pathways without referencing older neurological pathways that already exist.
For example whilst you are reading this, you in theory are creating a new neural pathway just with this short article. However the article can not exist on it’s own because you would not have any way of bringing it up from your memory. It has to be connected to something else that exists in your brain. You already have a neural pathway established which knows something about storytelling. For example when your mother or father told you a story, it’s likely that you will be able to recall what one of those stories were. Therefore you have some beliefs and opinions about stories already established. The neural pathways may be a pit rusty, but because you are receiving potentially new information about storytelling, you brain will attach the new information, the new neural pathway, to the old rusty pathway and refresh that part as well.
So now you have created more relationships to do with storytelling in your brain, which means whenever you hear, read or see something that mentioned storytelling you will be able to recall the whole lot in one go.
Clever or what?
But it’s the job of the speaker, writer, presenter to invoke this inside of you.
Without either a story, narrative or anecdote, which for me are all the same, you don’t have a chance to make the connections and therefore it will be totally forgettable.
I have been a volunteer with Crisis UK in Birmingham since February 2017. I am very impressed with their research and campaigning to end homelessness in the UK. They have a fantastic learning programme to help ‘members’ (our term for homeless individuals) get off the street, out of hostels, B&B’s, sofa surfing, stop sleeping in cars and other places and back into employment and a decent house to live in.
I am creating this blog post with a series of links to reports and resources to assist anyone to understand homelessness better. This way I can just share this link and you can learn more by downloading the reports or listen to the radio programmes, watch the videos etc.
I hope the resources will prove useful for you and your friends and family to better understand the plight of the homeless and maybe you can share a few minutes to create awareness in your network and community, donate a few pennies, spend a few hours per month donating your time for the many charities that exist across the UK. I appreciate your interest and curiosity to learn more. I will continue to add further resources as I become aware of them, so make sure to bookmark this page.
I have been a volunteer with Crisis UK in Birmingham since February 2017. I am very impressed with their research and campaigning to end homelessness in the UK. They have a fantastic learning programme to help 'members' (our term for homeless individuals) get off the street, out of hostels, B&B's, sofa surfing, stop sleeping in cars and other places and back into employment and a decent house to live in.
I am creating this blog post with a series of links to reports and resources to assist anyone to understand homelessness better. This way I can just share this link and you can learn more by downloading the reports or listen to the radio programmes, watch the videos etc.
I hope the resources will prove useful for you and your friends and family to better understand the plight of the homeless and maybe you can share a few minutes to create awareness in your network and community, donate a few pennies, spend a few hours per month donating your time for the many charities that exist across the UK. I appreciate your interest and curiosity to learn more. I will continue to add further resources as I become aware of them, so make sure to bookmark this page.
No Second Night Out (NSNO) was launched on 1 April 2011 as a pilot project aimed at ensuring those who find themselves sleeping rough in central London for the first time need not spend a second night on the streets.
In 2018-19 there were 8,855 people seen sleeping rough in London. Of these, 5,529 people slept rough for the first time in 2018-19. Our aim is to ensure there is a rapid response to new rough sleepers, and that they are provided an offer that means they do not have to sleep out for a second night. Other projects exist to support those already rough sleeping and living on the streets.
Tour de France Geraint Thomas — #weeklycartoon — Michael&Josh
A case of mistaken @Twitter identity. Geraint Thomas (Lecturer in Visual Effects at University of South Wales), became overnight famous when @GeraintThomas86 won the Tour de France 2018. He started a #hashtag campaign #imnotacyclist and the whole story inspired our latest cartoon.
Whenever I hear the word ‘marketing’, I hear ‘advertising’. And we all know that advertising sucks. Well it does in my world, nobody truly love the adverts, they are an interruption to your browsing or watching experience and possibly 99% of them are not interesting, they are brainwashing of the highest order.
Ever found yourself buying something you then realise you didn’t actually need after all? We’re exposed to maybe 5000 ads every single day, whether it be on TV, Radio, Web, Podcasts, Billboards, Posters, Bags, Product Placement and many many other methods that we may not even realise are there. They all effect our subconscious mind!
Unfortunately advertising works, because otherwise they would have stopped it a long time ago. Further bad news for the marketers is that the discerning browser and watcher is now switching off from the constant bombardment of ads and switching to places where there are no adverts, Netflix may spring to mind. We’d rather pay for a service we can enjoy instead of getting a free service we don’t enjoy.
In our house if we’re interested in watching a show on TV channel that has adverts, we record it. When we watch it back, our remote allows us to hit the speed play button three times and it skips the 3 minute ads interlude. I can tell you we were overjoyed when we found that button!
So why do marketers continue with the ads instead of sharing stories. The temptation is there I know, everyone is doing it so you have to join the bandwagon for fear of missing out.
Truth is, stories work even better, just look at the movies. They are all stories and we love them. When they write the script they don’t think, where can I fit in an advert or product placement just so the viewer can get distracted.
You can still feature your product or service in your story, but a word of warning, don’t be tempted to explain every single detail, your story is there to make someone curious. Curiosity is so much more effective then telling the viewer or reader everything that you want them to know. They won’t remember anyway, just share a story that is relatable and will make them think a bit further. Leave it up to their own imagination, let them feel and imagine like they are featuring in your story.
Trump receives football — #weeklycartoon — Michael&Josh
#DonaldTrump and #Putin finally met to celebrate their master plan. Putin had a gift for Donald. It was a #WorldCup football. It made me wonder what was in it and inspired our latest cartoon. Well after all he had been asking where the server was.
Allegedly 550k marketers on LinkedIn list ‘storytelling’ in their profiles. And yet creating content, case studies, adverts on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest does not qualify you or me as a ‘storyteller’.
I’ve worked with advertising/marketing agencies and they still ask me to create animations that are explainer videos instead of stories. Bizarre and they’re supposed to be the ones that are good at storytelling.
It’s not just about the story either, it’s about how you dress it up. I am a follower of minimalism and one of The Minimalists, Joshua Fields-Millburn did a webinar on writing a few months ago (June 2018) and he explained it the best way I have ever heard it.
The first sentence you write is to make the reader want to read the second sentence, the second sentence you write is to make the reader want to read the third sentence, the third sentence you write is to make the reader want to read the fourth sentence…
You get the idea, every sentence has to be your best sentence in order to keep someone hooked. So when you’re writing a story script it would be a great suggestion to keep that in mind.
Put some characters into the story, real names, real personalities with a life and a mission. Make it relatable to the viewer, know your audience, you have to know your audience, better than they know themselves. If you don’t yet know enough about them then go and find out, lots of them are very happy to talk about themselves.
This question comes up regularly for me and when I received the following message twice in two different social media inboxes, I am convinced they probably are.
Hi. I feel honoured and humble that I have been nominated for ‘the Most Inspirational Person of the Year Award’. The winner is selected by the public and the public vote is now open until 20th July. I would be grateful if you could please vote for me.
Please click the link and it will take you to the voting page then select, ‘the Most Inspirational Person of the Year Award’ and vote for me. Please ask your friends, family and contacts to vote for me too. Thank you for your support.
I was especially astounded with the last sentence.
Ask friends, family and contacts!
What?
Not only are you asking me to vote for you, when I have totally no idea if you are in fact ‘The most inspirational person of the year’ and then you ask me to get my friends, family and contacts to vote for you too?
You really can not be serious, can you?
Totally serious, this is how business awards get awarded. Get yourself nominated and then go after your connections and beg them to vote for you.
I will never believe another business award again. In fact I’ve never believed them or taken part for this very reason. In fact I know of organisations that will even ask you to fill out a questionnaire to nominate yourself. Nominate yourself and then collect votes.
So I have concluded that business awards fulfil two needs, number one, the organising event or organisation needs more publicity for themselves and number two the actual individual needs more publicity for themselves. Basically they both need more recognition and appreciation from the public. In a word they need more love.
By getting complete strangers to vote for you, it actually is no different from wishing that people clap, like, comment or heart your content.
As humans we will never self-actualise on the basis that we’re always looking for something outside of ourselves.
My wish for the awards business is to start awarding teams, not individuals, not for the good they do in society or our communities but for the good they do for themselves. Teams that have successfully reinvented themselves despite the hardships they’ve had to endure in years gone by. Real hardships not some made up award category like ‘The most inspirational person of the year!’.
Just be ‘The most inspirational person of the year to yourself’ and avoid needing other people’s endorsement to say so.
I’m all for creating a positive vibe on the web but I’m astounded by the amount of good news messages that are littering the place. I am not suggesting for a moment that they are fake, but once we’ve witnessed when our contacts are sharing countless selfies, group colleague pics at conferences and award ceremonies, you kinda get the idea.
They just become more content we automatically zone out from.
We must become better all round storytellers instead of content junkies and with junkies I mean addicted to the need to post content. Less is more and so what if people are not active when you’re posting, post when you think of it and ditch the scheduler. Some of you may even be spending good money on those schedulers as I did too. Yes I’m totally guilty!
Now I’m more mindful about what I’m posting, more thoughtful about adding to my overall story, creating a narrative, sharing maybe small insights to my overall mindset and thought process, allowing my connections to get a better insight as to who I am.
But that’s just me, you must do what all the content sheep are doing, read all the books and download all the free content as to how the so-called gurus are doing it.
I totally know that my way is not necessarily the right way, it just suits me to be more authentic, honest and deliberate or on purpose.
Probably not. More like an hangry (combination of angry and hungry) browser. Not hungry for your marketing content though, nobody cares about you. Harsh? But true…
Every marketer is out to put their stamp on the internet. To imagine this, let’s imagine a non-digital world, no internet, no computers, just a stamp, an ink block and a stack of paper.
And all she (he) does is go through that stack of paper at lightening speed and put their stamp on it, stick them in envelopes and send it to prospects. And the prospect would just put them in the bin.
My guess is that when the same marketers do this on the internet, they are just stamping everywhere they can, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, Google, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube BeBee, WooWoo, Thingymedo etc.
Yes I was guilty, did it work? Maybe a little on Instagram, but I’ve now stopped all Facebook lookalike platforms, thanks to me cutting down and the excuse I’m using in relation to the Cambridge Analytica mistrust scandal.
Actually they didn’t, but I heard someone say this. They were so surprised that they were stopped on the street when recognised by a complete stranger (stalker).
Is that what we’re looking for?
Plastering our happy face all over the web, so someone will walk up to us and say; ‘Hey, aren’t you the girl/guy who talks rubbish on YouTube?’
Surely not? Surely yes!
Most of us on Social would love to achieve that recognition at some level. It’s an endorsement of all the hard work you’ve been putting in day in and day out, just so that a random person somewhere points at you (I’d be quite scared actually) and shouts out to you that they actually know you. And of course they have no idea who you are, all they’ve seen is an alter ego of you on the web, very likely talking complete non-sense.
A few years ago, I would have been super impressed with this top 10 list and would be looking for ways to be implementing it asap, in fact some of it I did do, today, I just roll around laughing my head off.
I am visualising all the content marketing experts, taking this list to the head of marketing, who has to take it to the board and ask for big spends to deliver this list.
She will be asked what will she actually deliver when she implements this list and actually, she has no idea.
‘It’s difficult to measure’ ‘It works very impressively for (drop a brand name here)’ ‘We need to do this to compete’ ‘If we don’t we’re going to miss out’ ‘Everyone, literally everyone seems to be doing it’ ‘Well the top brass in Google say they have evidence’ ‘The sales team say they need us to do this too’ ‘Customers nowadays expect it’
And here we go again, spending millions of dollars, standing still.
Hundreds of thousands of us are now creating content, whether it’s cat pictures, birthday pics, holidays and weddings or seriously hard hitting journalism, blogging, clickbait articles or wishing to come across as a serious leading thought leader
It’s never ending…
Does it even matter?
Nope it doesn’t, we’re all living busy lives, I’m sure you agree and I love the falling tree analogy. Very few of us have ever witnessed a tree spontaneously falling over in the forest and of course they definitely do.
The same is true of all the content that’s being posted. It is very likely that this short post won’t be seen by anyone at all, never sees the day of light, it just fell over in the forest and nobody was there to witness it.
First lady Melania Trump wore a jacket that caused a stir on Social Media as she boarded a plane to Texas on June 21 for a Mexican border visit. She’s starting a new range of jackets and we’ve had an early alert about the next strap line for it. Well you would do the same if you felt like she does, being married to the most powerful man in the world?
Those of us that are digitally active, dream of the day when our content goes viral. But what does viral actually mean? Does it mean our desire for fame, fortune and celebrity status or does it mean getting noticed by your prospects and achieving more sales for your business?
The dream could also be about how can you make people’s lives better by sharing your content, so it potentially could make a difference in their lives?
We are all the same, we have a need to be loved and that need shows up in many places. It could be that you desire love from your parents, your spouse, your kids or your friends and colleagues and then in the past 9 years we’ve moved that desire to the digital world.
Now we desire love from total strangers, in some way wishing to reach celebrity status in our own world, believing it will makes us happy. Have you witnessed what happens on social media with famous people? They get trolled, abused, harassed by those complete strangers that we wish to be loved by.
There is another word for this, it’s called ‘suffering’.
