How Do You Cure Generic Content Disease?

Scott: Thanks for joining me today, Matt Locke is one of the directors of StoryThings.

A content marketing company based in Brighton, England that helps B2B brands that want to stay human.

Matt founded StoryThings in 2011 after 20 years of working in digital content and organizations like the BBC and Channel 4. He is an expert in digital content and innovation with a deep understanding of audience behaviors across multiple platforms. He also specializes in how to design effective media projects for new platforms.

I first learned about story things when director Hugh Gary shared a graphic carousel on LinkedIn. Entitled, How to Avoid Generic Thought Leadership Disease. So, obviously I had to look at that because it's very consistent with the type of things we talk about here.

And they've got a zombie graphic at the bottom. This zombie peeking his head up from the bottom of the graphic. And they open this up by explaining some of the symptoms. of generic thought leadership disease and they include every blog post starts with in today's fast paced digital landscape, regularly publishing top 10 industry trends.

that everyone else has already covered, citing the same McKinsey Gartner reports as everyone else, and using stock photos of people pointing at screens or shaking hands. And the antidote really focuses on your ability to stay human, in ways that won't cost you a lot of time or money. One of the things you can do, they say, is find sector symptoms.

Some clichés are universal, But some are specific to a sector. Find a sample of 12 or so of thought leadership articles from competitors, and then look for the symptoms that are common amongst all of them. And let me just say, this is a pandemic. If we're talking about disease, you know, or something spreading, turning everybody into zombies, this is a pandemic.

I see this everywhere, and back when I was working as a copywriter and a content specialist, I begged companies to do this very thing. And we would end up doing the opposite. We would write content that leadership had picked out, saying we need to talk about this or feature this. And we were probably just the latest example of content that talked about that, usually the same way.

As everybody else in the industry. There was nothing new or unique about the content. There wasn't anything in it that people probably didn't already know, including prospects. But we did it because we just saw it as, well, we're in this industry, what do we write about? Well, this makes sense.

So, that's what we wrote about. So, this is already great advice. Another thing you can do is don't bore yourself. Write down your own list of cliches that you're bored of seeing in thought leadership articles because if you're bored writing them, the audience will be ten times more bored while reading them.

Number three, write about humans. Don't write about reports or trends, write about people. If something is happening in your sector, who will it affect? How will they feel about it? Number four, focus on the action. When you're talking to humans about how trends are affecting them, ask them to tell a story about something that explains or illustrates the impact.

What is happening to them? How will they respond to it? We are hardwired to find stories about people and action interesting. So ask people to tell their story.

So I reached out to StoryThings and I had the pleasure to talk to Matt Locke, who is also a director at StoryThings.

And one of the first things I asked him was what he thought about just how many different ways we see examples of generic thought leadership disease. Or just generic content disease out there. And sometimes it's not just people, but it's also people using AI to do the same thing.

Matt: So first of all, I'll put my hand up because I've been writing this series on what we call B2B zombification for the last, it's a seven week series and I'm kind of five weeks into it. And as I'm writing every single one, I'm realizing that I've made the same mistakes. So I just want to kind of say that none of the stuff that we're writing is coming from a place of, of kind of harsh criticism.

It's just recognizing stuff that we all do. Um, and particularly in B2B comms. I think one of the biggest challenges that people have when they're writing B2B comms is they kind of think that there's a separate mode of attention that we go into when we're in a work context. So maybe we're kind of trying to find information for an upcoming project, or maybe we're kind of looking at information for a new strategy or.

Starting a buying process. I think we all assume that there is a special mode of attention. That means that we don't have to be interesting. And what people want are just boring, dry facts. And that's just really not the case. And that's really what we're trying to get at with our series stay human.  

Scott: This is a really good place to start because really when it comes to developing content that stands out and then connects, it really does start with self awareness. And in this case what he's saying is that self awareness of realizing that when we start writing content and we're in a work frame of mind, marketing frame of mind, content frame of mind, industry frame of mind, whatever, that we, we get in this like business serious, frame of mind that causes us to create content that's boring, uninteresting, or in this case, Repetitive, because our competitors are in that frame of mind too, because they think that's the way they're supposed to write, hence the zombie thing, hence the spreading thing, right?

So, first step in all this, , is recognizing What's repetitive and recognizing what we're doing before we even take the first step in that content creation or write that first word in the copy. And the other thing he points out is also really important, and it's probably more relevant depending on how long you've been in marketing.

I mean, if you've been in marketing dating back to when audiences were more captive and everything was more one way communication, broadcasting, you know, TV, radio, and Consumers really didn't have any role in the gatekeeping,

even when the Internet changed all that you were still in that frame of mind. And what's happened is those people have gone on to teach others who have stepped into the digital marketing arena that that's how this works because they haven't noticed yet that no, it isn't. Or they hadn't figured out a way to evolve with how things changed once it became more about two way or omnidirectional communication or when just consumers took the power away from us.

Matt: That really comes from the background of, of the 3 of us who are the directors and all of our creative talent and story things.

My background is, is at BBC and Channel 4, uh, two of the public broadcasters at the UK and I've been working in digital for about the last 25, 30 years. And the 1 thing I'm really, really geeky and obsessed about is attention and audience attention and how. We make decisions as audiences and the big thing that's changed in the last, particularly the last 15 years or so since the start of the smartphone is we've become the schedulers of our own attention.

So it used to be that gatekeepers, TV schedulers, magazine editors, newspaper editors. They used to organize our attention for us. They would decide what we could see every day and how much of it we could see. And first of all, with the internet, and then particularly with smartphones, we now have access to as much stuff as you could possibly want to see at any point of the day, whether that's reports.

From something to do with your work, whether that's a trailer for a new Netflix series, whether that's a podcast you're listening to, whether it's a Slack message from one of your colleagues, we're just inundated with it. So the big challenge for us as storytellers is that your audience is constantly making decisions about what do I give my attention to?

Scott: They're the ones that schedule their attention. Um, and so your competition for attention is not just other work stuff. It's everything. So if you're a B2B marketer, you can't just assume. That people are going to give you their attention because you're in a work context.

This is a really great point, because it makes me think about the first time I saw Chris Brogan, who you might know as another, digital marketing thought leader, uh, expert. When he decided to expand his content from just blogs, which he became very popular writing and then speaking, but then he was going into video.

Scott: And at first he had to be kind of talked into it. And One of the things that helped him realize why he needed to get into video back then was when he took into account just how much text people are reading every day. And when you're in that work context that Matt's talking about, and you're, you're thinking about getting this piece of content out that you're hoping your audience is going to read, you, you might not only forget to consider Certain aspects of what's already out there, but you also might need to take time to realize just how much text all of us and Content all of us are inundated with day in and day out because he had this number It was this incredible number of just how many words people are reading a day. And that included everything from content to text messages and things they were writing and reading in all these different places.

 So his point was, give them something else. You know, stand out from all the words. Talk to them in a different way. And once he did that, it was game changing for him and it's been game changing for a lot of people that have gotten into video.

Part of this self awareness aspect of content creation and content strategy is thinking about the experiences of our audiences.

Matt: I think what happens, and it happens in all sectors at various points, is I think you get too far away from your audience. So actually when I started, um, my career in broadcasting, I joined the BBC in 2001. And before that I used to work in commissioning kind of weird digital art and net art in the late 90s.

 And I was obsessed with the audience and did a lot of research about how people were using at the time, even things like text messaging and SMS, anything that people were using on the street that was digital, I was obsessed by it. And I was really curious about the audiences. And then I joined the BBC, you know, huge, massive public broadcaster.

And what I found is that people were just not curious about audiences at all. They measured ratings. They looked at ratings numbers and that was it. And they just really didn't care. As long as the rating, as long as that one number was going up, they didn't really, they weren't curious about audiences at all.

And it's that lack of curiosity that leads you into those kind of more mundane behaviors. So the first question you have to ask yourself is, do I really understand my audience? Have I spoken to my audience? Am I, am I doing this for them? Or am I doing this for my finance officer that needs to see a certain kind of performance metric go up?

Or am I doing this for an algorithm on a platform? Or am I doing this because we've got a workflow that means that, you know, everything has to be seen by seven, 17 different people across the organization before it goes out. So who are you telling stories for? Are you really telling them for your audience?

And do you really understand what audience wants? Or have you become divorced and separated from your audience? And are there now, like, four or five steps in the way between you and that connection. And if that's the case, then you really have to try and remake that connection with your audience again, and try speaking to them directly and getting that direct feedback back.

Storytelling is all about call and response. It's all about saying the message. The problem is, the reason why people got divorced from the audience at the BBC is radio and TV didn't have a feedback loop.

The only feedback loop they had was. what you call in American Nielsen ratings, what we call Barb over here. I remember vividly at Channel 4, the other public broadcaster, the first meeting I went to where somebody said, people were talking about our show on Twitter last night. And I was like, hallelujah, finally, the voice of the audience is coming into this commissioning meeting.

But other than that, they didn't have the voice of the audience. And that's the challenge is that we can become too cut off. from our audiences to cut off by process, by budgets, by the need to impress internal stakeholders rather than really reach the audience. So you've got to try and find ways of getting rid of all that cruft and just reconnecting to the audience again.

Scott: Couldn't have said it better myself. So when we think about What Matt just said, and we consider some of the things we've discussed already about having this self awareness about why we're doing something and what are we considering about our audience, what about that component of self awareness.

Generic thought leadership that involved citing the same McKinsey Gartner type things that everybody else has shared.

Even in my own attempts to do research to help back things up that I'm writing, I have found, you know, a certain stat that 15 people have also shared.

And I, and you have to think, well, maybe if I share this, is it really going to resonate with anyone? Because they've probably seen it somewhere else. And then, of course, the other thing I have to check is, how. How far back was that statistic or that insight shared? Because, you know, if it came from 2011, there's not only probably a lot of repetition, but it's really old.

Matt: I mean the deep irony of a lot of thought leadership is that there's not any new thoughts in it and there's no leadership because you're just quoting the same reports as everyone else. So one of our biggest clients is, is ADP, uh, global payroll leaders across the world, I think one in like seven paychecks in the U.

1. is paid through ADP, they're absolute giants. Um, and they brought us in because they believe that payroll is like the most human connection between companies and their employees. You know, if you don't get the paycheck right, people are going to get angry pretty quickly. But also there are so many stories.

Behind paychecks. So we ran this quarterly for them for a while, uh, called rethink that's tied to their annual event. And we wanted to tell the human stories. We didn't just want to do all of the usual reports about, you know, the world of work that you get from all those big industries. So we looked outside of that sector.

And one of the things we found that was really interesting about pay is that actually. A lot of employees, particularly migrant workers, send money back to their home economies. It's called remittances. You know, you might move from Mexico to work in the U. S. or you might work from, you move from, you know, Sub Saharan Africa to kind of France or Germany or the U.

1. and you might send money back to your home country, to your family. And we found out from World Bank statistics that Something like four to five times as much money goes into emerging economies from remittances, from people paying back their wages to their families, than all global aid put together.

So there's this remarkable story about this money traversing the planet, from employees to their families. , there are some countries where remittances is like, 30 or 40 percent of the entire GDP of the country. So this is incredible amount of, of, of data about all of this money coming back.

Now, if you're running payroll, you can make a really big difference to your employees because a lot of these remittances have to use very, very expensive. Transfer systems like Western Union and stuff because people are unbanked or because they can't kind of send foreign payments using their banks and stuff like that.

So you could actually help your employees with that. So we just looked outside of that bubble of the payroll sector to look at something slightly different in that case, you know, well, bank, I mean, we're talking about really serious statistics here. This wasn't a kind of, you know, dodgy Internet site, but just taking.

Statistics and stories from another sector and bringing it back into theirs made a really, really big difference to that story. And it was a story that we weren't seeing any of their competitors telling.

Scott: Isn't that not only a great insight, but a great story? And how they went out and found stories to find the statistic to then develop another story. I mean, I think that's such a great example because one of the things I wish thought leaders did a little more often when they talk about storytelling and how you have to create stories.

And it's all true and all the stuff behind that about why we're fine tuned to pay attention to stories and get emotionally invested in stories. All make sense to us as marketers, but, you know, you get into some of these more challenging industries and maybe payroll is one of them, you have to think, where the people that work for that company hear this and they go, yeah, agreed, agreed, but how the heck do we do that? 

Matt: We did a whole episode, a whole previous series on attention matters on the difference between story finding and storytelling. So there's a lot of really good resources out there on how to structure and tell a story. Lots of stuff about the hero's journey and Robert McKee's book, The Story, and all this stuff that you can learn from script writing and stuff, which is great.

That's all really good. It helps you understand how to structure a story, but the art of really good storytelling is not story structure, but story finding. You've got to find something that's really unique. We have two tips that we give people if they want to be great story finders rather than just storytellers.

And the first one is. Always start a story with a question that you don't know the answer to. The problem with a lot of thought leadership is that it's kind of handed down to you. Like, here's an issue. Here's something that we're doing. Here's a kind of thing that the company believes in. We just need to get it out there.

And so you're starting from a perspective where you know what you want to say and you're just repeating it. You're like a teacher reading from a book. And it's very hard to tell a compelling story. All compelling stories have a kind of momentum to them. They have a, they have some, they have a quest that kind of drives it.

A search for knowledge in some way. So even within a framework like that, if you've been handed something down from your bosses saying we need to tell a story about this. Just spend a little bit of time thinking, what do I not understand about that? What's the thing that, that's confusing for me about this?

Because if you can start your story with a question, your audience are going to enjoy the journey that you go on as a writer. My English teacher used to say to me, if you found something boring to write, It's a hundred times more boring to read. And I think that's really true. So if you go on a little journey in a quest, then actually people are going to go on that journey with you, and they're going to find the story way more interesting.

So that's our first tip, is start exploring that subject with a question. So we did that with that remittances story. Somebody mentioned remittances in a meeting with ADP, and we were like, what are these? We don't really know what they are. And then we went and found out, we found all this World Bank data, and suddenly we had a whole story unfolding in front of us.

So always start with something you don't know the answer to. The second one is find your unusual experts. Most of the voices that you can speak to for a story are going to be c suite level people in your business. They all want their voices in the story. They want to be the ones that are kind of featured in the think pieces in financial times or, or, you know, whatever.

Um, but sometimes the people who have got the most compelling angle on an issue are the people who are really at the At the coalface who are really kind of like thinking about it. So we did a project for experience. Um, and they wanted to do something about the challenges of unbanked populations in in Central and South America, people who haven't got access to banking and therefore don't have credit records, which obviously is what experience does.

And experience actually do a lot of really good work in those regions, helping people, you know, start businesses and build their credit reports that they can get. You know, home loans and stuff like that. So we worked with a documentary filmmaker in that region and we found a group of people who were really, really brilliant.

Their life stories were really great illustrations of those challenges. So one of them was in Colombia for years, the government was fighting a group of terrorists called F. A. R. C. Um, and it was like a, you know, part of a massive kind of ongoing, um, guerrilla war campaign in Colombia and that ended ages ago.

and they came to accords, and the people who are in those groups are now reintegrating into society. And we found a group of ex FARC guerrillas who were starting a brewery. They were wanting to start their own brewery. But when they go to a bank and want to get a loan, and they ask for their CVs, it's kind of tricky.

Because how do you say, oh there's a period of my CVs where I was basically in a guerrilla group? That's the case, you know, these things change and society changes and these people are coming back in society. So we told their story and we told the story through their voices. So they're the two tips that we have.

I mean, that last one is a particular extreme example, but they're the two examples. They're the two tips we have. If you want to be a great story finder rather than a storyteller, one is. Start with a question you don't know the answer to, because that's instantly going to take you to places where you find new stuff that you're excited by, so you're going to be more excited telling the story.

And then secondly, find those unusual experts. Find people who aren't necessarily the highest people in the organization, but who really are experiencing the issue that you're dealing with on, on the ground.

Scott: Again, great example and a great way to stand out because I think about how this also is kind of a trap we can fall into as content creators. Right? Let's just say, for example, we're doing a podcast, or maybe we're doing some sort of video or, or blog series that involves talking to other people, and sometimes we might get a little bit selfish about, you know, hey, well, if I get this person on, you know, everybody knows this person, they're a Big name and I'm going to get them on the show or I'm going to get them as part of this series and that'll get all kinds of eyeballs on me.

And that might be true to some degree, but let's remember something, you know, when you talk about unique stories and unique questions, you better be asking some if that's even possible because people like that have been on a ton of podcasts. And have done a ton of things where they've made a lot of the same points over and over and over again.

And people have heard them make those points or tell those stories. And some of those can still be very, very valuable and those people are good to have. However, there is value in digging a little deeper and finding some people that are on the ground out there dealing with things that Matt's talked about.

And maybe those are people in your industry. Those people don't always get to talk about it, and they have very unique stories to tell, or there's an expert out there on something that maybe they wrote a book, or maybe, you know, you see something on social media that they wrote, and you reach out to them, and you have a larger conversation, and that might very well have been their very first time on a podcast , and your audience is going, Wow, they were really, really good.

I'm so glad I got to hear that on this show. And part of being able to think that way is what? Again, like we've said today. Thinking about the audience. You know, we may internally think about all the benefits that may come to us about having that big name on sometimes, but then if we start thinking about the audience and how many times they might have heard that big name on another show, which is probably likely in a lot of cases, we start to think, oh, well, how can I make my show stand out or be different?

And that is finding unique stories and unique voices.

And maybe it's a situation where you've had a podcast and you've only tried to reach out to the big names and now you're thinking, well, maybe it'd be a good idea to do something different. And that is another big challenge we've talked about when it comes to differentiating content, getting out of some of those automatic habituations and processes that we get locked into while we're at work.

Matt: And I think that's one of the biggest problems there is that, you know, there are probably a number of formats that you have to do.

Every year there might be annual reports, there might be quarterly reports, there might be kind of newsletters you send out once a month, you know, there might be stuff in internal communications that you kind of have to do. And the sheer relentless cadence of those formats means that you just end up telling the same stories time and time and time again.

And that absolutely is why you should just step back and just maybe pick the last three versions or the last, you know, if you've been running a particular content format for a number of years, just pick three or four versions of it. Over the, over the last couple of years and just look at what's the same, like what are you always saying, what doesn't change?

And then think why are we re, why are we retelling that story in the same way every time? What, what new angles can we get on it? How can we tell that differently? Can we kind of like make that an evergreen piece of content that sits somewhere else so we don't have to retell? Like what are the things we can do to kind of break out of those really tight?

Let's do the same thing we did last year, kind of patterns that a lot of marketers fall into, particularly in B2B, I think that's really, really common in B2B, because we tend to think of the work that we do as being tied into these business cycles and these kind of annual cycles of the companies we work for.

And it's really tricky to break out of that. But yeah, you have to be aware of your own cliches and your own, your own kind of patterns as well.

Scott: You might have heard me talk about this idea of changing terminology that we use in marketing departments, things that just by their definition put us in the wrong mindset when we need to be human or stay human, as Matt says, you know, the word marketing, for example, can cause an issue.

I mean, if you just look at the definition of marketing, you see the word sell and promote already in that definition. No wonder we're an a selling and promoting mindset and we're not thinking about the audience first sometimes when we're in that marketing frame of mind. So since we've already kind of had that discussion, I thought about another thing I've talked about, um, changing, and that's B2B and B2C. Now, I guess B2C might be a little safer, but I asked Matt if you're a B2B company, since he has uh, talked a lot about that in our discussion already, , is the term business to business already dehumanizing the way we think about marketing because we're thinking business to business?

Matt: I think definitely, I think it's part of that distancing that I talked about earlier that makes you not see your human, see your audience as real humans with challenges for their attention and competition and busy lives and all this kind of stuff. You kind of assume that you're really like, oh, we're trying to reach our buyers and those buyers are these companies.

But they're not, they're just humans that people like me and you seeing on their laptops, you know, maybe worrying about something they're going to do this weekend or looking forward to something they're going to do this weekend and thinking about their mortgage and thinking about all those things. And yeah, you have to connect with them at a human level.

 I think there's 2 things that we forget. 1 is we forget that buyers are humans. And the 2nd thing is in B2B, because a lot of it is measured according to. Attribution metrics, you know, how did this lead to a sale? And the last kind of 10, 15 years, the shift has really been towards, you know, down the bottom of the funnel towards performance marketing, which is kind of insane, that makes a lot of sense in B2C where somebody is making an instinctive decision about whether to buy a pair of Levi's or an Uggs boots or whether to drink Coke or Pepsi.

It makes absolutely no sense to focus on performance marketing where you're dealing with. a software decision every five years that might be 10 to 20 million pounds. You know, that's not the kind of decision somebody doesn't get a LinkedIn ad and suddenly switch their behavior around a buying decision that they might have spent six months working on.

So the really interesting thing about B2B buying and there's some brilliant research from Jan Schwartz at the LinkedIn B2B Institute about this. Is that most business buying groups, so buying groups for start, who you're trying to reach, or you're reaching a group of people who are going to have to have conversations with each other to, to agree on both a short list and then a final buyer.

So that's humans having conversations. They have to tell each other stories about why they think buyer A is better than buyer B. If you haven't landed those stories with them in advance, you're really, you're not even going to be on the list. There's some great research that shows that 81 percent from this LinkedIn Jan Swartz research.

81 percent of buyers already know the brands or the suppliers that they're going to have on their short list before they issue RFPs. So if you've got a performance campaign that's trying to reach people when they make a decision, you're just not going to affect that decision. They've already made a decision based on what they know about you as a company that's probably been built up over years.

By your brand, and if you're not front of mind, it's the old kind of, um, you know, Byron sharp, how brands grow stuff again, if you're not front of mind, when they're starting to make that buying journey process, then you're not going to be at the end to win it. You know, you can't kind of come in at the end of that process as a completely unknown entity, something like only 4 percent of brands.

Basically, who are unknown to most of the buyer group ended up winning the work. So if you're not building your brand, if you're not positioning your stories, if you're not creating mindshare in your target audience, free, really engaging content that speaks to the values of your brand, not just your products, but that, but what you stand for and why you are interesting.

If you're not interesting enough to be getting attention from your buyers, sometimes months or years before they make a buying decision, then you're just not even going to be in the starting gate. Um, so the idea that you can reach somebody with a highly targeted ad campaign that converts somebody at the point of buying is actually For my money, that's that's completely ludicrous.

Scott: Speaking of audience. It also sometimes is an overlooked component of a social media strategy, which has always been kind of bizarre to me because it is a social platform. But again, the problem becomes people see it as a promotion channel or a broadcast channel where it's, you know, we'll just post stuff out there and hopefully people will, you know, think it's fascinating like we do.

I used to work for a company and it would make me cringe every single time we would have a discussion about social media for the week because it would just be this meaningless stuff that was only important to the company and was going to mean nothing to people that were out maybe trying to solve, you know, our industry's problems.

And it would be about, an award that they got or someone said they were awesome in a top 10 list and they were like, Oh, this is perfect for social media. And I wanted to go perfect. Do you hear yourself? , the most engagement we got were from people from our own company.

 And when you hear Matt, uh, talk about the way they approach, um, social media strategy, , it's not uncommon for people to frame what they're looking for as a client to be a strategy around the platform and not the audience.

And they tell people that's not how we're going to look at this.

Matt: So we, we never let clients say to us, what's our TikTok? What's our LinkedIn strategy? We always say, what's your, what's your audience strategy? Like what's your, you know, who are you trying to reach? What are their needs? And the other thing we talk about a lot is, is how are you going to create value for them?

And as we were talking about earlier, there's no shortage of things for people to give their attention to. So how do you change? The way that people engage with your content from something that they just see as a driving by their, their streams to something that they actively seek out because it's valuable.

Because if you create valuable content, then not only are they going to subscribe to it, build a relationship with you, as you said, build a relationship with you around the value that you're creating for them, but they're more likely to recommend you. So they can create value with their peers and your organization.

So you're going to get that kind of organic sharing rather than the kind of algorithmic sharing that a lot of people focus on on platforms. So one of the things that we do with our clients is we use the value, proposition framework, uh, which is a kind of subset of the business model canvas, which is a model that a lot of organizations have been using.

So we use that value proposition framework, but we do it for content, not business proposition. So we say, what is the value, what are the needs, what are the jobs to be done? for your target audience. What are they trying to do? What are they trying to solve? What are their pains? What are their gains? And then how can your content meet some of those?

So we work backwards from the users jobs to be done and then work out what content the organization can create rather than going from inside the organization out. And broadly, broadly, we kind of say that there are three things. If you want to be very, very schematic as a way of starting to think about this, there are three types of value you can create for your audience with content, you can create, so you can tell new stories that they can't get from anyone else, not generic thought leadership that just looks like the same, you know, reports about the same Gartner reports and stuff like that.

So what are the stories that only you can tell? So you can create new stuff. You can curate and that's really valuable. So curating kind of news and reports, curating interesting links, making it easy for your audience to access a lot of information about their sector in a way that's very useful to them.

Curation is a very, very valuable thing that you can do. Most of us subscribe to newsletters that curate information about our industry for us because it's hugely useful and valuable. And you can convene, you can bring people together to share perspectives and get different angles on an issue in your sector in ways that maybe only you can bring together as your, as your company.

Maybe your company has a particular kind of reach, maybe you're multinational, you can get people from different regions of the world to discuss the same issues from different perspectives. So we always start thinking about value and we try and help our clients think about those three things.

What can you create? What can you curate? And what can you convene?  

Scott: The idea of curating content is something we've heard a lot about for some time, so I wanted Matt to kind of expand on that a little bit, so I asked him when he talks about making that part of a strategy, a content strategy, social media strategy, is he talking about finding content, sharing it, and putting the companies, or someone in the companies, their specific stamp on what they think about what's in that content?

Matt: It needs to feel like it's coming from a human to be really valuable. Um, so I subscribe to, you know, we're just looking at the rise of Substack over the last couple of years. Substack is all about writers as creators, as people that we want to hear from and people we want to hear their perspective from.

And it's the same with curation. If you're doing a list curation as a format for your B2B audience, don't do it as the company. Give it a voice, give it a name and a person. Encourage whoever's doing it in your company to add their own spin to it, to intro and write about why they found these things interesting.

So we've been doing a weekly Friday newsletter at StoryThings. For most of the 14 years that we've been running now and it goes to around 10, 000 people and me Hugh and Anjali the three directors we each take it in turn to do one every week.

And we always introduce ourselves. And say, hi, you know, this is Matt. This is what we're up to at StoryThings. Here's the 10 links. And then every time we add the link, we add a little paragraph underneath about why I found it useful. It might be a quote. It might be something in the article that really stuck out for me, but we just kind of said, this is it.

This is, this is why I'm sharing this because this is, this is the thing I found insightful. So you need to add that human layer to curation formats and then people really, really get interested in. You and the, and the voice and the kind of perspective of that person, because that, again, we're connecting as humans.

We're not just connecting as a, as a template, we're connecting as, as actual humans as well.

 None of your competitors has the same employees as you. So if you've got people there who are voices that are going to stand out in the sector, build on that, you know, encourage them to be voices and encourage them to develop their kind of personality and their, their voice in the comms that they do.

Scott: So I really think Matt has given us a lot to think about, and if you have listened to the conversation today, or what Matt has had to say today, and you've thought, oh yeah, we've done that or we're doing that . And by the way, remember at the very beginning of this, Matt admitted, I've caught myself doing these things, and I can tell you as a creative, I've caught myself doing these things.

 If we're really focused on trying to have some of this self awareness, think more about audience, uh, stay human, you know, I said, what, what is kind of the first step if,

people are listening to us talk today and go, all right, I think this is something that we can change at our organization. Where does that all begin?

Matt: Find your own problem that you want to solve, you know, don't try new things just the sake of trying new things, but try and solve a problem with it. So, you know, have you seen a downturn in engagement on a particular form of your comms? Is there a new audience that you're trying to reach?

Are you trying to reposition part of your company? Try and identify that problem and use that as an opportunity to try and test some of what we're doing. ADP started because they do an annual event called Rethink where they get, you know, a few hundred of their lead clients from all over the world together in one place to hear some brilliant presentations and, and to hear from each other.

Um, and in 2020, of course, they couldn't do that because of COVID. So they needed to come up with new formats and ways of reaching the audience. And that's when they came to us. And that's when we started working with ADP and we're now five years down the line and we help them with their event and we do monthly podcasts and all sorts of content for them.

But the opportunity came because they couldn't do the thing that they normally did, which was, you know, this big annual event. So find those opportunities either because there's a problem or there's because there's an opportunity to do something new and try that. The other thing that we always, always, always say the big difference between the media world where I was for years at the BBC and Channel 4 and the world of marketing and B2B comms in particularly.

It's a simple thing, and that's a pilot, like we never commissioned anything from any company without making a test first and just seeing what it worked, you know, did it work or not, because if you're going to make something new, you often need to make it a couple of times, like when you try a new recipe, you need to make it a couple of times before it gets good.

The problem is, is that people try something new. The first version they commission, they throw out to everyone. And if it doesn't work, they're like, Oh. Well, that didn't work. We'll try something else. So the secret to being really, really good at innovating with your comms. Is to not publish everything, make cheap, quick versions, paper, prototype them, find ways of testing it.

When we do workshops on new formats for clients, we always end by saying, can you make a version of this for less than 10 in under an hour, it might be that if it's a podcast, you just record somebody in the office rather than hiring a studio, you use your phone, or if it's a written thing, you phone someone up and interview them and then get a translation app to transcribe it and edit the transcription.

But we challenge you to make a version of a format for. Less than 10 in less than an hour. And you can do pretty much with modern phones. You can do video formats for less than 10 in an hour. So it's almost impossible for you to not be able to make a version of a new format, no matter how kind of low fire is to just test the structure and to test the idea as quickly as you can, because most innovation stops when people come up with a new idea for a new content format.

And then realize that they're going to have to go and get tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of pounds to try it. It's going to be a production process. It takes six months. And by then the whole thing has got so important that if it fails on the first one, you'll never get to do it again. So start small, pilot, build a few prototypes.

Test them with your internal audiences. Don't publish them. Don't put them out into the world yet. Do a few tests internally, kind of see how it's working, get feedback from people, show it to your friends and family, see what they think, and just use that prototyping phase that we did. We absolutely relied on in the media industry, use that prototyping phase.

To basically test the form before you go public.  

Scott: So there you have it.

As you can imagine, Matt and his partners at StoryThings are very busy, but if you've enjoyed today's conversation, there's a lot more you can learn from them,

Scott: and there's a lot more ways they can help.

Matt: We absolutely love talking about this and helping people become great storytellers. Um, and that's what we do. We do make stories for clients, but we also try and leave them as better storytellers, um, than when we started working with them.

So yeah, we would love to talk to anyone that wants to see how they can become better storytellers. We have Lots of newsletters, we have free newsletters, Attention Matters, which is really about understanding attention, um, Formats Unpacked, where we go deep and get really nerdy about content formats and why they work, and then our weekly StoryThings newsletter every Friday, which is 10 creative links to give you inspiration for your own storytelling. 

We work across the globe. We work with clients in the States, clients in the Europe. Uh, we're currently working, uh, with a nonprofit in India and sub Saharan Africa. So we're always really, really happy to hear from people who want to help becoming much better storytellers.

Scott: Okay, let's look back on some key takeaways from today's episode. Avoid generic thought leadership disease. Recognize common cliches, like in today's fast paced digital landscape and citing the same reports everyone else uses. Instead, analyze 10 to 12 competitor articles to identify overused patterns to avoid.

Audiences are human schedulers. People now control their own attention, choosing what content to consume moment by moment.

Your content competes with everything from Netflix to personal texts. It's not just other industry content. 

Start stories with questions you don't know the answer to. The most compelling content follows a journey of discovery. When you're genuinely curious to find an answer, your audience will be engaged in that journey too.

Find Unusual Experts. Look beyond C suite executives to people experiencing issues firsthand. Unique voices create more compelling and differentiated stories.  

Use the create, curate, convene framework. Create original stories only you can tell, curate valuable industry information, and bring people together to share diverse perspectives on industry issues. And make that curation personal. When sharing others content, add your own perspective and voice.

Explain why you found it valuable, rather than just distributing links or information without context.

Focus on value over platforms. Build audience strategies, rather than platform strategies. Instead of asking what's our LinkedIn strategy, ask what value can we create for our audience and which platforms best deliver that value.

Use the value proposition framework for content. Identify audience jobs to be done. Pains and Gains, and then design content that addresses these specific needs, rather than starting with what the organization wants to say.

And pilot content before full launch. Test new formats with small, quick prototypes before investing heavily. Refined through internal feedback before making public, just as media companies pilot shows before commissioning.