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

I'd like to talk about how storification can lead to interviews. Storification, and as we like to think of it as a 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. I want to focus on the first part of that which is Storification. I was listening to The Business of Story, which is a brilliant podcast by Park Howell in America. Park Howell recently wrote a book entitled Brand Bewitchery. On The Business of Story, I've been interested in 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. I was also fascinated to hear a lady, Candice Frazer, who works for company called TTI Success Insights, say that at TTI Success Insights, they have developed a personality test. This in itself isn't new, but it seemed to be really quite well evolved. It's based on the original German psychology theories by Eduard Spranger. In 1928, he wrote a book entitled Types of Men. In this book, he identified six universal attitudes and value systems through which individuals will observe and experience life. 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. What Candice was saying is that in 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. They're basically saying that the same words will have different reactions to different people. This is highly significant 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, the article, or the interview that's being given out by a company. In this research, TTI identified some 12 driving forces and then they summarized those. They say that people are instinctive or intellectual, and that's 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 in how they feel about others. They could be collaborative or commanding, which is their attitude to power. They can be receptive or structured, which are the methodologies that they might adopt in life. Interestingly enough, through these six forces that Eduard Spranger had identified of knowledge, utility, surrounding, others, power, and 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's research is this idea of acumen. 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, the stories, or the articles that they read from a certain standpoint. Therefore, it will affect the way that we give our story as well as the language and the words that we're going to be using. They identify three dimensions of

people are intrinsic, they're extrinsic, and they're systemic. Their feeling is intrinsic, their doing is extrinsic, and their thinking is systemic. What TTI Success Insights is saying is that, drawing on research from the 1920s from a German psychologist, 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. Candice explained that the language that we use changes. For instance, if we're talking to people that are 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 maybe be 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. 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 different profiles. In our Storification element on SPEAK, we then move on to P which is Personalization. In personalization, what we look at is, who are the people that we're going to be talking to? In our stories, in our press releases, in our articles, in our videos, and in our 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 medium for individuals to take the language and translate it into their own language. 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 also why, when we're looking at the location for our stories, they need to be in different channels. For example, I've been using Instagram and that seems to be one picture or a few pictures, possibly with some text. It goes out to a younger audience, the 25-35 year old demographic who hop online, see one thing, scroll, versus, for example, SlideShare where I also share information, but where people are looking for knowledge. 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, Facebook, and LinkedIn in terms of the graphic size, but also the people and the way they're going to accept my information is different. The talk on this excellent The Business of Story podcast is moving around this idea of ABT which is a process developed by Randy Olson. He says in one of his talks on TED that most executives communicate, and care but bore. The opposite, therefore, is to use this ABT narrative framework, which he suggests is really the framework for all great Hollywood stories, and this is the framework to make our audiences and customers sit up, listen, care, and not be bored. In the framework, A is for "And," which is what we want; this is the broad vision. B is "But"; this is the current state that we're in. 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 of this ABT narrative. One 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 "And." That's the teeing up the big issue that, "Oh, 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. 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. This idea of ABT is very powerful. It's simple, but very powerful, like so many tool sets that we're going to cover. 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. 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 love it when..., " and the logic is because these facts mean that you can or cannot, 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. This is one of the direct marketing movements that I've been listening to and talking to other people about. Coming back to Randy Olson and the ABT, here's another one, this idea that there's the, "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 I can see that we're facing, but I'm over there. Therefore, if we move together over there, we'll solve that problem collectively." Here's another example from the Randy Olson TED Talk, "Online citizen science has been around 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." This idea of how we get more public relations traction is to look at stories. 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. In SPEAK|pr, we talk about the importance not of just having messages, but also of having data to back those up. A story is, in essence, the basis of the media pitch. The interviews are going to be your chance to share your story with the audience. The best way of doing that is to share your vision, and another way of looking at that is the And, But, Therefore. Just to give you another idea, "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 melting because of the loose coordination of disparate bodies. Therefore, we're creating a gateway that unifies all researchers in one place." The challenge in public relations and in storification is to define the narrative, the one thing that's going to be the hook. 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. I started off talking about how we have different personality types. 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 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. 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 start with ourselves and not with the audience, and we often talk in our own language, rather than thinking about which language is going to be best received by those people. As the Spranger research shows, there are six 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 in our press releases. By doing this, we should get more public relations coverage, and we should get, ultimately, more interest in our business and in our products.