storytelling

I’ve been doing the short-form intro version of my “Last Pitch Standing” workshop pretty frequently of late. Here are PDFs of the two handouts – they can get you started on opening your comedy writing chakras. If you’d like some personal coaching, you know who to call! MightyCaseyMedia’s Comedy Writing Tips Mighty Casey Media comedy worksheet Make ’em laugh!

Ever hear of a little company called Google? What are they famous for? How about the Mayo Clinic? What are they famous for? What’s your company famous for? If you’re not sure – or worse, your answer is something like “technology solutions” or “IT services” – I can help.  Mighty Casey Media helps you create content that tells the remarkable stories that make you & your company famous. Content that tells the stories about the value you deliver in the marketplace. How do you paint a word picture, or script a video, or build a presentation that effectively tells your story? How do you construct a content library that draws in prospects and helps retain customers? You need a remarkable story that rides on humor, and humanity. A remarkable, human-focused story is the foundation of all your business communication content: web copy, marketing materials and campaigns, public relations, presentations, blogs, webinars, podcasts, the whole business-storytelling enchilada. Make your story funny and you really stand out from your competitors. Your human story also at the heart of how you develop strong relationships with your customers. Your story is how you build and maintain your brand, how you manage your reputation in the market, how you influence and direct market response to your products and services. It’s also the only way to build an inbound marketing strategy – that “pull, not push” approach that pulls in your target customers, that sells them on buying from you before you have to “sell” them. Making them laugh will put them in the  mood to buy, if you make them laugh in a way that focuses on you, and your value. If you need to create compelling content, if your company is struggling to make sense of social media, if you’re getting asked to speak frequently…

Mary Foley (author of “Bodacious Woman: Outrageously In Charge of Your Life & Loving It”) & Susie Galvez (author of several books, including “The Thrifty Girl’s Guide to Glamor”) have a new radio show, Girlfriend We Gotta Talk, in metro Richmond VA, Thursdays @ 5:30pm on WHAN 1430. Not in metro Richmond? You can listen to the podcast on Fridays on their website. If you listen carefully, you can hear the Mighty Mouth herself – I provide the intro and outro voice-overs for the show. That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it…

I just watched the July 1 edition of The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch, and I just stopped jumping around and cheering. Hey, I’m an enthusiastic girl – what can I say? Why the excessive enthusiasm? Every single person on the show said that there was one fail-safe tool that was always part of their sales approach: STORYTELLING This was an E ticket ride, panel-wise, too: Lisa Robertson, Joe Maloof,  Michael Port, Donna Flagg, Kendra Scott, Michael Port, Guy Kawasaki, Dave Lakhani, and Janine Driver. They all spoke of the power of storytelling in business. So did Deutsch, who as an advertising legend certainly knows the power of a great story better than anyone. Want to warm up a first meeting? Tell a story. Want to show the power of your product or service? Tell a story. Want to communicate your value better than any set of features and benefits? Tell a story. I’ve been heard in these precincts since Day 1 saying that your story is one of your most powerful business tools. I’ve also said, several times, that sales is a seduction, and you’ve got to take the Sheherazade approach: tell a compelling story. It will certainly save your business – maybe even your life! That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it…

Over at Ford Motor Company, all sorts of great stuff is going on – first and foremost, the car company that started an industry made a profit for the first quarter of 2008. This is good news indeed for Ford, who has seen its revenues slide, and its losses slide further, every year in the 21st century. Ford is probably the most emblematic American company of the 20th century. Henry Ford created the assembly line, offered profit-sharing to his workers, reduced shift hours to eight (from nine), and turned the US, and the world, into car nuts. That story – the story of Ford’s dominance in the auto industry – rolled on like thunder, until the sun of the rising Japanese auto industry started casting a shadow over Detroit in the ’70s. Since then, Japan has risen to dominate the market in every sector but trucks, with Ford and the rest of Detroit struggling to compete. A story coming out of Dearborn – by way of Vegas – gives some real hope to Ford fans, and investors, in what feels like the nick of time. James D. Farley, the marketing whiz-kid who put Toyota’s Scion line on the map, who understands that the voice of the customer must be part of the story any company tells – Ford stole him away from Toyota. And he’s determined to make Ford’s story a 21st century success story. Farley’s dealing with an old-world corporate culture at Ford, and it looks like the new sheriff in town is making some real progress. Ford’s ‘Drive One’ ad campaign was created after Farley spent time with dealers, listening to their passion for Ford’s products – asking people to ‘drive one’, to see what Ford has to offer, is storytelling at its simplest and most effective. “We…

Retail. Look at it this way: the current crop of presidential candidates are marketing themselves wide, via the national news media. They’re also marketing themselves locally (particularly in Pennsylvania, where I am very glad I do not live this month), tailoring their messages to local concerns. National political messaging, tailored to a locality-based group of voters, requires that the story be tweaked to make it fully resonant with the target audience. Local = retail. If you’re a company with national presence – say, for example, you’re Microsoft, with a global presence – it is, of course, important that you tell a consistent, authentic story to your world-wide marketplace. For Microsoft, that’s always been some version of ‘we’ve got what you need’. As a company that currently produces what many people believe is the only OS available (they’re wrong, but Bill Gates isn’t going to tell them that, is he?), they’ve built a pretty impressive market presence and penetration. However, what – and who – really sells their products? Their partners. Those partners are the engine that really drives the company’s continued presence, and expansion. Those partners tell the MS story, but they also must tell one of their own, developing their own relationships and trust with the customers they serve with MS products and services. Retail, baby. Some retail is purely transactional, like MickeyD’s and BK. If you hit a drive-thru, you aren’t looking for a relationship with the store. You just want a #5 combo, and you know just where to get it. If you’re in a transactional business, you still have to tell a story: that your customer can rely on getting exactly what they want, when they want it, at the price that they want to pay. Still retail. Still tellin’ a story. I read a piece…

What if your story never gets told? Impossible, you say? What if you were a woman in the 17th, or even the early 20th, century? What if you were black, in the South, in 1930? Or black in the projects in the South Bronx, or the South Side of Chicago, today? This question has been rolling around in my head for a while, and became a sharper internal inquiry after hearing a lecture this last Saturday night by Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard history professor and editor of the first encyclopedia of African and African-American history, the Encyclopedia Africana. The stories in that 2.5 million word encyclopedia are, in large part, being told for the first time outside the small family, church, civic, and cultural circles that lived them. How can an entire race of people take their full measure of place in the world without a full understanding of the fullness of their history? I don’t think they can, and I also think that’s one of the legacies of that great American original sin: slavery. That a scholar of the repute and reach of Dr. Gates has pulled off an achievement that W.E.B. DuBois conceived of in 1909 is good news, for every person in the U.S. Children who learn a full picture of history have a better chance of finding their way, and their place, in the world. The current state of race politics aside, failure to educate all our children is a guarantee of both economic havoc and electoral ignorance. Long ago and far away, I was a young grade-schooler who learned that women and people of color weren’t as important as dead white guys. I carried that with me until college, and started to break free as women’s history began to bubble up from the…

The word “story” and the word “lie” – or, less in-your-face, “prevaricate” – are often thought to be synonymous. They often ARE synonymous. The marketing & advertising world is full of all sorts of examples: skin lightening creams; all the, um, “enhancement” products for one’s “masculinity” that keep spammers in business; bait-and-switch electronics ads in local papers; anything that says “new & improved”; decades of “cigarettes won’t hurt you” ads. The list is almost endless. This isn’t a recent phenomenon, either – H.G. Wells famously remarked, “all advertising is legalized lying.” Given the perception that all marketers are liars (a shout-out to one of the smartest dudes on the planet, Seth Godin), what’s a poor marketer to do? Here’s a revolutionary idea: tell the truth. It will set you, and your customers, free. This will have a payoff in traditional marketing. And it will be a huge plus in online/social media marketing campaigns, because that’s where the truth will out in a NY nano-second. SXSWi, the interactive media conference that’s part of the annual South X SouthWest festival, went so far as to offer up awards for the worst social media campaigns of the year, Suxorz 2007. Some of the nominees? Wal-Mart, for the heartwarming Jim & Laura/Wal-Marting Across America blog, written by a couple who was criss-crossing the country, blogging tales from the road and spending their nights in their RV in Wal-Mart parking lots. A great idea, full of great stories of the great folks who work at Wal-Mart. Problem? Wal-Mart paid Jim (a professional photog) & Laura (a freelance writer). So much for truth in heartwarming… HP, who paid a Chicago mom $1000 to have her kids smash a digital camera with a hammer, on video, because “it wasn’t an HP camera”, and post it to her…