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!
In all the sturm und drang over the US health care system in the last couple of years – and the last many decades – one voice seems to be largely missing in the discussion.
We’ve heard from health care providers – hospitals, doctors, et al.
We’ve heard from insurance companies.
We’ve certainly heard from politicians.
We have not, however, really been hearing from patients, unless some disease sufferer with a story to tell to support the POV of a health care provider, an insurer, or a political position gets trotted to the microphone to tell his or her story.
As social media rises as the brave new communication platform for any and all global-village ideas and events, health care is starting, sloooooowly, to dip its toe into social networking as a tool to get their message out. What we have not seen, though, is a lot of listening, other than the usual suspects listening to (and yammering at) each other.
There are a number of community sites that have grown up around specific conditions and issues – Fran Drescher’s Cancer Schmancer community and Lance Armstrong’s LIVESTRONG efforts around cancer spring to mind.
Microsoft has launched MyHealthInfo.com, and Google’s got Google Health.
Patients are out there: on Facebook, on Ning, on Twitter, and other online community sites like SparkPeople.com. However, less than 20% of doctors are currently using technology to manage their patients’ medical records – given that resistance to technology, combined with the strictures of HIPAA (which I swear must mean Health Insurance Paying All Attorneys), it’s easy to see why the health care industry seems to be MIA in the Web 2.0 world.
One of the reasons cited by health care providers for not using web tools to communicate with their patients is privacy concerns. That is a legitimate concern, but I think it’s being used as a smokescreen – there are plenty of security apps and protocols available that would allow a dialogue between doctors and patients without having the conversation become Twitter status updates.
How refreshing, even revolutionary, would it be to have a way to communicate with your doctor and his/her staff online? To log in, schedule an appointment, enter your blood sugar numbers or blood pressure, request a prescription refill, ask a question, get a referral, download your medical records.
The health care sector has been losing the trust of its customer base for a long time – gone are the days when doctors were looked at as elevated beings who knew way more than the average dude (dude, in this usage, is gender neutral).
Doctors can take some of the blame there, since they’re not batting 1.000 on calling out the bad apples in their bunch, and have, as a group, been acting as the supply-chain for the pharmaceutical industry more than is, um, healthy.
The pharma industry takes some heat on the trust gap, too, since they seem to be all about “ask your doctor” and not so much about “you’ll be able to afford this stuff”. And don’t even mention Celebrex or Vioxx…
These revolutionary web-enabled conversations would allow doctors and other health care professionals to start to build those one-on-one and one-on-many trust relationships that could actually bridge that trust gap. Even help us understand, manage, and maintain our health.
Patients need to take the lead here, I believe, because left to their own devices doctors, hospitals, insurers, and politicians will continue to talk at each other, and not listen to the ultimate consumer of health care: the patient.
That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it.
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?
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.
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 and want to make a big impact on your audiences, you’re in the right place.
I can help.
With a solid focus on business-to-business storytelling, and an equally solid focus the technology and healthcare industry sectors, my goal is to make you famous with your customers. To help you identify, engage, and delight them. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Casey is a uniquely creative and talented communicator and public relations advisor. She has mastered every form of media including broadcast, print, and all variants of electronic and social. Her communication skills are exceptional, and her insight has been especially helpful many times.
~ technology sector client
Who am I? Casey Quinlan, a former network news field producer who helped cover breaking news across the globe, and who knows what makes a great story. I have a rotating cast of highly-talented colleagues I pull in when I need their expertise.
Combining my media and presentation skills, a background in theater and stand-up comedy, and some serious storytelling and strategic thinking skills, I can drill in on the essence of a brand’s story, and help craft the language that tells that story effectively: in media & PR campaigns, on the web, in presentations, on the air.
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 needed a transactional campaign where the product speaks for
itself,” said Mr. Farley. “I mean, don’t believe us. Let the product
speak to you.”
That’s a quote from a NY Times piece on Farley, which tells the full story on his Ford story so far. The NYT piece concludes with this:
“What I’m doing at Ford is in one sense a dream come true,” he finally
said. “But it’s also the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Do I feel
comfortable? Absolutely not. Do I try my best? Yes.”
All enterprise, from the behemoth to the basement start-up, needs to look long and hard at the story it’s telling. If the story isn’t working, if it doesn’t reflect reality, if it doesn’t connect with your team and your customers – you need to start telling a better story.
Discovering what that new story needs to be starts within, with what the enterprise is telling itself. Once that story is working, the story you need to tell your customers starts to tell itself.
That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it…
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 in Business Week Online yesterday that says that if your sales are stuck, you must use a script. I say that’s a crock. Scripts are for cold-calls, and if you’re doing cold-calls you’re spinning your wheels. Even if you’re in a transactional business, cold-calls are a waste of time.
Transaction-based business – other than stuff like the drive thrus, and when was the last time you got a cold-call from MickeyD’s? – has, for the most part, moved to the Web. Those businesses still use cold-calls, much of which winds up in your spam folder, or as a delete-after-hearing-one-sentence voicemail.
If you’re looking to sell products or services, and retain those customers, you have to build a relationship with them. One of the best ways to do that is sharing stories: theirs will reveal the problems they have that you can solve, yours will tell them that you’ve got what they need. Using this approach, you’ll build trust in your prospects, and loyalty in your customers.
A number of whom will become the storied ‘raving fans’ – also known as ‘referral machines’.
So, take the retail approach, even if you’re selling globally. Build relationships by telling authentic stories: about why you do what you do, the problems you solve, why solving those problems makes your day worth living.
All business is retail.
That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it…
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 zeitgeist, and every mom’s kaffee klatsch from coast to coast became a consciousness-raising group.
Black history had a zeitgeist moment at the same time, in the late ’60s and early ’70s, yet some of the loudest voices exhorting change muffled their message with political overkill. Shirley Chisholm’s famous epigram, “I’d rather be black than a woman”, became less and less relevant in the following decades, as women – white, black, and brown – rose to the highest ranks in public and private commerce. Women reaped greater lasting benefits from the social change of the ’60s than did African-Americans, and I think that outcome can be laid directly at the feet of a lack of knowledge of the breadth and depth of their own history.
Dr. Gates made several points in his lecture Saturday at the Richmond Forum that black culture must re-embrace being “people of the book” – the keepin’-it-real, if-you-get-good-grades-you’re-an-Oreo embrace of ignorance that’s rampant in black youth culture now is antithetical to any idea of having a voice in the larger world. The second part of that sentence is mine, not Dr. Gates’, but I think if you asked him, he’d agree.
Today, Barack Obama made what might just be an historic speech on the racial divide in America, how it’s affected and affecting politics – and society at large – and how he wants to influence the national conversation on race, which is over two centuries overdue.
Whatever your politics, you have to welcome the fact that someone with some real experience of the issue has opened the discussion while the whole world was literally watching.
Two centuries late, we’ve all got a lot to discuss.
That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it…
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?
There were others, including Molson Brewery for a lame attempt at a Facebook tie-in and Rudy Giuliani for starting a MySpace page for his campaign that unfortunately didn’t allow anyone to ‘friend’ him (um, Rudy – that’s the whole POINT of MySpace, buddy. BUDDIES.)
The winner? HP for the smash-mom pay-for-post big fat paid lie.
Bottom line? When you work on what story to tell, don’t work too hard. Make it real, make it simple…and make it TRUE. The whole world literally IS watching.
Just ask Elliot Spitzer.
That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it…
I’ve been hammering away at this storytelling thing for quite some time, and you might be asking yourself by now why I think it’s so important.
Good question.
Best answer? Stories are how we – and by ‘we’ I mean humans – connect with and make sense out of the world around us, and what’s happening in it. Stories are how we form connections with our friends, our families, our colleagues, even our competitors.
That connection-forming piece is why the 20th century selling approach called A-B-C – “Always Be Closing” – doesn’t work very well in our 21st century world.
First, people are exhausted by all the relentless commercial messages pounding away at them all day, every day. If you’re selling something, you want to get the attention of the folks you want to sell to. Grabbing attention by annoying the crap out of them might seem appealing, and it can work if you’re looking for high-volume sales of low-cost items. However, if you’re selling high-cost products or services, you need to get and KEEP attention by sharing a story with your prospective customers that tells them you’ve got something they need.
Second, all that pounding away at sales resistance that marks the old-school approach just won’t work on 21st century buyers. They’ve seen it before, and they hate it. They see you coming, and fade into the woodwork. Call them, email them, send them your newsletter – you can even buttonhole ’em at a business event and give ’em your best pitch. They won’t catch it, and likely stopped listening within the first 15 seconds.
Sales is a seduction. You can’t shake someone’s hand and then shove ’em in the bedroom, unless you’re looking for a felony conviction. You have to build trust and intimacy before getting them to the point where they’ll put out. Same with selling – build a relationship first. Gain trust, really show value. Tell a story that demonstrates your value, that connects with your prospect’s world-view, that says you have the answer to their business prayers.
This will, of course, require some work on your part – you have to find out what your prospect’s world-view IS, and determine if you could fit into it. Also, you have to look at what you’re offering, and determine if it does indeed have value to that prospect, or if you’re just A-B-C-ing yourself into oblivion. Literally.
Bottom line? You cannot be all things to all people. What value DO you bring? Who would most benefit from that value offering? What’s the most authentic story that connects those two dots?
Like I said, think of it as a seduction – of someone you really feel a connection to. That’s not something you can pull off quick. Well, you can pull off their clothes quick, but that might not have the desired results. You want to solidify that connection, form a real bond. One that will last longer than a one-sale-stand.
So – be like Sheherazade, the heroine of Thousand and One Nights who saved her life by telling stories. Spin a tale that captivates and connects. That’s real selling magic.
That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it…
© 2024 Mighty Casey Media.
