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What Tim Tebow Teaches Us About Content Marketing

Posted on January 15, 2012 by Robert Rose

So, over the weekend, I went back and re-read Seth Godin’s All Marketers Are Liars (it was subsequently retitled with the words “tell stories”). Also, like I’m sure a good many of you, I watched the NFL playoff games. But something struck me as I watched the Denver game, the coverage and the steady stream of Facebook posts, Twitter updates and overall restaurant conversation over the weekend.

Tim Tebow is a damn good content marketer.

Marketing As Storytelling Is Powerful

So, big shock – I believe in this wholeheartedly. Now, Seth Godin said it much better in his book than I ever have (he says just about everything much better) when he wrote in the forward:

If you think that (more expensive) wine is better, then it is. If you think your new boss is going to be more effective, then she will be. If you love the way a car handles, then you’re going to enjoy driving it.

That sounds so obvious, but if it is, why is it so ignored? Ignored by marketers, ignored by ordinarily rational consumers and ignored by our leaders.

Once we move beyond the simple satisfaction of needs, we move into the complex satisfaction of wants. And wants are hard to measure and difficult to understand. Which makes marketing the fascinating exercise it is.

Okay, so – at this point, I’m watching the Denver Broncos get decimated by the New England Patriots – and I see the discussion about Tebow start to roll in – both pro and con. And there’s no wavering here – you’re either “thank god he got his come uppance” (pun intended) or “okay, he’s not winning, but I still think he’s still amazing”.

By some estimates, when he and his team surprisingly beat the Pittsburgh Steelers in overtime, brand Tebow generated more than 9,000 tweets per second. Now, they’re getting creamed – but even in defeat there’s something joyous about Tebow. It’s inspiring some – and annoying the shit out of others.

So, what has Tim Tebow done to create such a viral brand with so many brand subscribers so quickly? It’s simple: he’s telling a powerful story that has an emotional connection.

It’s Not The Real You – It’s The Amplified You

See here’s the thing. People aren’t engaged by the real us – or the reality of our brands. No one buys the shiny gadget that is produced a million times over by guys in white coats in China. They buy magic held in the palm of Steve Jobs hands and set to a funky beat. This is true for personal brands as well and Brian Clarke over at Copyblogger said this extraordinarily well back in August.

What's the story?

It’s the same with content marketing and storytelling. People don’t want real stories. They are vey much like Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire when she says: “I don’t want realism, I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don’t tell the truth, I tell what ought to be truth.”

Think about your favorite crime drama for a moment. You know the scene – they’ve just found some obscure picture of the perp or sub-strand of his hair. Then through the magic of one of the coolest and most beautiful computer interfaces you’ve ever seen, the computer flashes through thousands of faces, and automatically finds exactly who they’re looking for.

The real truth of that scene won’t engage. Can you imagine watching a real computer – someone typing command line searches into an ugly green screen interface – and then sitting back as it grinds through a minutes or hours long search through a mainframe computer database. No, in real life we don’t catch crooks that way. But, dammit – it oughta be that way!

No – the truth is real – and real is rarely engaging.

It Ought To Be The Truth

But (and this is important) – real doesn’t mean it’s not genuine. A genuine story is what “ought to be truth”. We’re not trying to trick our brand subscribers. We are simply being an amplified version of our unique selves – because otherwise we’re just… well…. just like everyone else.

Tim Tebow is telling a genuine story. Whether you love him or hate him – he’s passionate about the story he is telling. And, as I discussed in the “secrets from Hollywood” piece – he really knows what he does. He’s got a much bigger story that he’s telling – and football is just simply one channel to tell it. As he has said himself “‘I’m using football as a platform for bigger and better things.”

It would be easy for Tebow to keep that “real” and undifferentiated. He could avoid painting John 3:16 or Ephesians 2:8-10 on his eye black (pictured). His dramatic, and now famous, pose could have simply been him thumping his chest twice and pointing to God (as many athletes do). He could have gone the traditional post-game interview route of saying “it’s a team sport and we came together as a team” and left it that. But he didn’t.

He is an amplified version of his genuine self. And love it, hate it – or think it completely irrelevant – it’s generated a nationally recognized consumer brand and generated more discussions about the story he’s trying to tell than I’ve seen in years. The night he and the Broncos beat the Steelers “John 3:16″ was the most searched for term on Google. It didn’t hurt that he actually threw for 316 yards – and because he threw 10 completed passes – his average was 31.6 (mysterious ways alright).

Our Lesson As Content Marketers

I deal with many clients – especially in the B2B and technology space – that don’t believe that their brand is particularly interesting. Their stories commonly rely on just relaying facts and figures and speeds and feeds. In short, they are relying on “the simple satisfaction of needs.” And the “wants” of our customers are where the emotional connections can be made.

As Seth says: “wants are hard to measure and difficult to understand.” And here’s the thing – when we can connect to them, well that there is some powerfully magic stuff. If you want to see how Tim Tebow has done this in six months – here’s a great article on ESPN that I think captures it well.

As Joseph Campbell says in Hero With A Thousand Faces: “The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with nature.”

It doesn’t matter who we are – and what we’re selling – using the stories we tell and the way we market to connect emotionally with our constituencies is what will make us successful. And in telling stories.. Well, it just might be our Tebow time…

Context Aware Content Marketing – Somethin's Got A Hold On Me

Posted on January 11, 2012 by Robert Rose

So, I’m the guest speaker at a Webinar hosted by the folks over at Hippo today. When they asked me to speak – they wanted me to put some thought into how “context” was going to play a role in changing the process of content marketing. Okay – Context Aware Content Marketing. That’s cool. I got it.

Now for some strange reason – As I wrote this post – I felt the need to put on some music. And what hit me was Etta James’s Something’s Got A Hold Of Me.

I have no idea what this has to do with marketing (other than… well it’s Etta – and it’s just an awesome song) – but I’m not one to ignore my gut – so there ya go. So if you want the same context I had while I wrote this – turn on Etta there on the left – and then read the rest of the post as it plays.

I’ve put a bit of thought into it – and as I look out to the future of how context is going to change what we’re doing from a content marketing perspective – I see 4 evolutionary steps over the next three to five years (see image).

Four Evolutionary Steps For Context Aware Content Marketing

Step one is Channel Aware
(” …sometimes I get a good feeling”)

This is where we found ourselves last year as we started scrambling to manage Web content for all these different channels – mobile, social, landing pages, global web sites etc… It’s simply a realization that it’s not about just dumping our content into these different channels. Publishing the entirety of our Web content onto a mobile site is easier – but it isn’t terribly productive. We’ve got to change our content marketing processes to reflect an awareness of the context of how and (more importantly) why our audiences are consuming our content through different channels. When the CEO asks us to put the whole Web site into a Mobile app – we have to say “no”. It just doesn’t make any sense. The feedback loop here is mostly manual. Our Google Analytics, reports in content management systems and manually creating CSS for the design of our content is all done as we’ve done it for years – iteratively as a process.

Step two is Attribute Aware
(“…something’s got a hold on me…”)

This is where the feedback loop becomes slightly more automated – and is a step I think a good many marketers will start to take this year. Look at many of the CMS vendors out there – and look at their move to “managing the experience” and you can tell it’s one they are certainly hoping you take. This is where we start to use attributes that we can glean from our audiences to optimize the content for context. Think here how we might automatically detect what KIND of mobile device you’re using. Or, how we can start looking at explicit attributes like your title, your name or your preferences and optimize the content dynamically to be more relevant based on that information. The technology is already here to deliver this (and has been for years). But this is something (much to the contrary of what you read) is something that most marketers just aren’t doing in practice. Maybe now it’ll start to take hold… Etta’s startin’ to get to me…

Step three is Real Time Aware
(“…somethin’s got a hold and it won’t let go”)

The technology will need to catch up a bit here to make this easier for the average marketing team – but this is where we can start to optimize content using interaction happening in real-time. For example we want to optimize our visitor’s content experience based on choices they make in real time – watching clicks and optimizing content based on that behavior (maybe watching the speed of the connection to offer abstracts or a slimmed down version of the site).

Step four is Contextual Integration
(…“I don’t know what it is but it sure feels good”)

Out a few years (my guess is by 2015) we’ll start truly integrating content as a service – and interfaces themselves will adapt to the context automatically. This is where I might pull in multiple data sources in real-time to help optimize content for a particular audience. For example, if we’re a product company selling software to businesses – and a visitor hits our site – we might be able to match attributes (device, location, company, time of day) with real-time awareness (what the visitor clicks on in the site) and pull in third-party data (information about the visitor’s company) to help contextualize their experience.

As Soon As We Get A Hold On Who….

These steps are evolutionary… and certainly I may be overestimating or underestimating how fast we’ll get there… But this much I know – applying context to our content marketing strategy starts with WHO. We’ve got to understand who we’re talking to – and then what, where when and (again maybe most importantly) why they want our content through different channels and in different contexts.

I’ll update with a link to the webinar after it’s archived… Until then… Etta and I are out..

La La la la….

Twas The Night Before A Nutty Christmas – My Wishes For You!

Posted on December 23, 2011 by Robert Rose

For those that have known me for some time – you’ll recognize this as what I used to send out as my yearly email card.

A little fun just before Christmas – celebrating the year that was. This year, I thought I’d move it to my blog. So – without further ado – I give you…

Twas the night before Christmas – My wishes for you….

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through our nation
no candidate was comfortable with the pre-caucus situation.
All our hopes were hung by the chimney with care,
in hopes that things might be less nutty next year.

Charlie Sheen and two goddesses in the beginning -
tigers blood, trolls, warlocks and – Winning.
For months the Ma-sheen seemed to blow on and on
Then came the maid and the illustrious Strauss Kahn.

Candidates rustled, nestled all snug in their base,
it seemed like everyone – even Trump – might enter the race.
And Perry in Cowboy ‘hat, and Bachman in denial,
basically anyone but Romney and his Ken doll coiffed style.

When out on the news there arose such a clatter,
Everyone sprang to their browsers to see what had just shattered.
We blogged, we tweeted, Liked and cried to the skies
Bin Laden was taken out – score one for the good guys.

But Tweets turned to cheats and notorious hunks
Edwards on trial – and Weiner tweeted his junk.
And what to wandering eyes should appear,
but Arnold’s love child and one possibly for Bei-beer?

But then, with a flash, so lively and quick –
We were inspired again – with something other than… (okay not going there)
He was more rapid than eagles, or a Khardashian Marriage,
He whistled and shouted and called from his carriage:

“Now Dasher! Now Dancer!
Now, Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! On, Cupid!
On, Donner and Blitzen!
Now Friday! Friday!
Gotta get down on Friday!”

And he came, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof
the prancing and pawing of each little hoof.
As I drew in my head and was turning around,
down the chimney St. Steve came with a bound.

Dressed in black turtleneck, and jeans on his legs,
his clothes were untarnished from the ashes and dregs.
Wiggling fingers upward and twinkling shiny blues
He winked when he said “I’m here to occupy your news”

His eyes–how they twinkled! His dimples, how cute!
His sleigh simple, clean, emblazoned with a fruit
His glasses were round – the lenses just buffed,
and the beard on his chin not too much just enough.

He walked when he talked and went straight to work
and filled all our stockings, then turned with a jerk.
“Just one more thing” he said, pointing finger aside
“If you love what you do in life – it’s how you’ll be satisfied”

He sprang to his sleigh, and to his team gave a hoot,
That sounded suspiciously like the Mac when it boots
But I heard him exclaim, ‘ere he drove out of sight,
“Happy Christmas to you, and to all a good night!”

As his light disappeared I wondered what he’d left
So, I opened the stockings and peered at the gifts.
And to what my curious eyes did I see?
The stockings were filled with love, hope and peace.

See it’s easy to wonder in this world of “more”.
Like Rick Perry thinking in threes – it can make our puzzlers sore.
Like before in who-ville and this year in our-ville
I hope your Christmas is about love, laughter – and just being still.

Your joy, your success, your friendship is what matters
All the rest – while entertaining – is just oblivious chatter.
Now, you’ll excuse me as I go prepare for my feast –
I celebrate you all as I go myself – carve the roast beast.

I wish you nothing but the most hopeful new year
I know mine will remarkable as long as you’re all near.

Who’s Your Villain – You Know, You’re Not So Different

Posted on December 16, 2011 by Robert Rose

The scene is the dark smoke-filled and seedy Mahala bar in Cairo. Indiana Jones sits sullenly; crestfallen because he believes Marion, the woman he loves has just been killed in an explosion. The patrons of the bar – mostly Egyptians sit in groups talking loudly. Indy sits at the bar finishing off his bourbon. He’s drunk.

Suddenly, the bartender hands him a bottle of expensive bourbon and says, “the gentleman in the corner would like you to join him.” Indy looks around and sees his mortal enemy, the Frenchman – Belloq. Drunk and infuriated – Indy threatens to kill him right there in the bar saying “these Arabs won’t care about our business”. He sits. Then, after they talk a bit – Belloq says to Indiana:

“We have always done the same kind of work you and I. Our methods have not differed as much as you would pretend. I’m a shadowy reflection of you. It would have taken only a nudge to make you the same as me, to push you out of the light.”

You’ve seen that same scene in countless other movies. It’s a very common storytelling device. Whether it is Luke, seeing his own face under Darth Vader’s mask; or any James Bond villain telling our favorite English spy that they both “kill for a living” it’s almost clichéd at this point. In fact Austin Powers has some fun with this in the third movie.

The key is that, at some point, our hero must confront the fact that the villain represents an alternative side of the same journey. It’s the presentation of the complete conflict that our hero must ultimately go through; both internal and external. It’s a critical part of the transformation of our hero and their journey.

Every Brand Needs Its Belloq

This is true of our Brand Hero as well. We need our villains; the Windows to your Mac – your Pepsi to their Coke – his Democrats to her Republicans or even their GreenPeace to whatever corporate entity has upset them recently.

But the challenge and risk to us as marketers is that we tend to oversimplify our villains. We are, many times, afraid to realize that our competition may actually have a reasonable point about their product, or our product – or the world in general. We too often scoff at their p.o.v. and ridicule it. And by painting our villains with a broad brush, we risk turning them into caricatures – and this pulls away from the emotional engagement, and the fulfilling part of telling our stories.

Engaging, Emotional Conflict Is The Engine To Our Stories

Creating conflict is a central part of an engaging and emotionally connected story. And when we want to craft a story that sits apart from all others – one that differentiates our brand and our product or service from all others – we MUST understand the conflict and all of the points of view in exquisite detail. And that means understanding how our villains are so much like us and how they represent US in the larger sense of our bigger story.

Four Ways To Look At Conflict

You’ve heard the saying “one man’s revolutionary is another man’s freedom fighter”. This is the key. Our competitors are someone else’s heroes. And so, when we are preparing to look at our villains and a conflict to fuel our content marketing story – we can look at four different perspectives to conflict:

The “I” Conflict – this is YOUR singular perspective on the conflict. This is Indiana’s viewpoint. His p.o.v. is, of course, transformed over the course of the movie (this is the transformation). He starts by seeing it as the “treasure hunt of all time” to a quest to save his former love, to ultimately a quest to save mankind. See his arc there? From completely self serving – to saving the world.

The “You” Conflict – the opposite of “I” – how is the conflict viewed from the opposite point of view. This is Belloq’s view of the conflict. And, in his mind he has a perfectly reasonable point of view. He wants the Ark of the Covenant because it’s a “phone to God” (that’s pretty powerful and could even be it’s own story). He’s made a deal with the devil (in this case the Nazis) to get it. Under other circumstances we might even actually understand and agree with his point of view.

The “We” Conflict – how do people we relate to view the conflict. In the case of Raiders, this might be the Germans, and/or Sallah (Indiana’s friend). Salla warns Indiana that the Ark is “not something that was meant to be disturbed. It is not of this earth.” Indiana doesn’t believe in any thing that’s not “scientific” – but of course in the end this “belief” in the Ark’s immense supernatural power and man’s inability to even handle “looking at it” is actually what saves Indiana’s life.

The “They” Conflict – the surroundings. How will the market view the conflict? In our Raider’s example, this might be the other Arabs in the bar, or of course the US Government that hires Indiana in the first place. From their point of view, the Ark is simply a potential “weapon” And Indiana is simply a “professor” that can help retrieve it. They don’t really care what happens to anyone.

See how all of those points of view are conflicts that Indiana has to resolve through his journey?

So, to put this into our brand hero’s perspective – when we are looking at creating a content marketing “story” we need to look at these perspectives and ask ourselves a few questions:

What will THEY say about this story… Will the market care? What have we told them in the past that would make us think we are even capable of accomplishing this?

What will WE and our existing customers and partners think about this story? Will they believe – and how can they influence us?

What will YOU, the competition think about this story? Are they right? Do they have a point? Is their p.o.v. valid? What are they saying that’s right? What are they saying that’s wrong? How are we DIFFERENT from them?

Who am I! How is my brand supposed to be different and transformed as we tell this story? What will the brand have to face?

Villain FAIL

When we fail to take into account ALL of these perspective – we tend to draw conflict and our villains into broad caricatures. Or, even worse, we make them unworthy to our challenge. Both of these can lead to ineffective and unsatisfying stories.

Who are they trying to convince?

Take for example, the RIM Playbook. By all accounts it was a failure. And there are, no doubt, multiple reasons that it failed. But from my perspective one of the keys to the marketing ineffectiveness was a key failure in creating a fully engaging story and conflict about the competition. Clearly RIM didn’t understand (or care) about anything but the “I” conflict. And, candidly, even that was muddled.

And they clearly didn’t understand what the YOU conflict would be (How Apple might view it) the “We” perspective (how current BBerry users might view it. Would they believe?) and how “They” (consumers that didn’t have a tablet) might view it. Clearly no one believed it. The marketing launch was a muddled “Me, Me, Me” fest. Headlines claimed “amateur hour is over” and an ad that ridiculed the iPad’s lack of Flash. They basically launched a superhero story where the main “super villain” was made out to be as capable as a high school bully. No one wants to see that movie.

Compare this with how Amazon has been able to completely differentiate its tablet. By focusing in on all perspectives – understanding the conflict from ALL levels of detail – they have been able to construct an engaging and emotional connection to the Kindle – regardless of how good the Kindle really performs.

This commercial for the Kindle Fire says it all for the story we’re telling: “for years we’ve been placing the things you love at your doorstep. Now, we’re placing them at your fingertips”. See Amazon realizes that….

Beating The Villain Doesn’t Always Mean They Lose

When we differentiate – we manage to tell a DIFFERENT story than our competition – not the same one incrementally better.

Finding your villain – and understanding THEIR point of view – in context with the story you are telling – and how you REALLY ARE like them in many ways will help you ultimately BE DIFFERENT. But additionally, you need to know all the in’s and all the out’s of the many perspectives in your world. When you do, You’ll create a much more engaging, competitive and richer story – and when you win – it’s that much bigger of an achievement.

As a bonus – watch this amazing scene from the movie Heat – where Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro both discover how similar they really are; all while understanding they are mortal enemies.

Conference Sessions – Telling Stories With Pictures

Posted on November 1, 2011 by Robert Rose

Last week I was invited to speak at the Urban Land Institute’s event here in Los Angeles. My topic was on “big ideas” from the world of Social Media that developers of Master Planned Communities could take back into their worlds.

It ended up being a quite successful talk – but really that’s not important. If you’re a frequent reader of this blog – or just know me you know exactly what I said. The thing that reallystruck me was an extraordinarily innovative idea put together by the conference organizers. Instead of just recording video of the conference session, or photographing it (which they also did); they also employed the use of a “visual note taker”.

Just before our session was to begin, Michelle got a start on recording it.

This was just amazing – and I took the opportunity to introduce myself to the “reporter” who recorded our session.

Her name is Michelle Boos-Stone and she works through an organization called Sunni Brown. The amazing thing that she told me is that she “thinks in pictures”. She has an MBA – and so understands many of the concepts of the conferences she helps to record. She volunteered quickly that she isn’t an artist – and this just isn’t true. She’s quite an artist – and an extraordinarily talented storyteller.

Telling Stories In Pictures

If you’re like me you often struggle with that last minute PowerPoint design. You try and find just the right image to convey and illustrate the points you’re trying to make. And, of course, using pictures to tell the stories in our marketing is critically important.

If you’re planning an offsite, or a conference – or heck any kind of presentation – you might consider engaging these folks to tell your stories in a picture. If I could – I’d employ Michelle every single time I go to a conference. Wouldn’t it be amazing to just film her instead of the PowerPoint – and use her finished work as the session notes.

Here's Michelle's take on my session. Click on it to see the larger version.

Full disclosure – there is none. I have nothing to do with Michelle’s business or Sunni Brown. This is just something I thought was really filled with all kinds of awesome – and that you should know about.

And so now you do….

Better Marketing Starts With Violating Expectations

Posted on October 19, 2011 by Robert Rose

There’s a scene in the movie Adaptation when Nicholas Cage – playing a screenwriter struggling with telling his story – is in Robert McKee’s renowned story structure class. He asks McKee about stories where “nothing happens”. He wonders if telling these stories are actually more like “real life”.

It’s a wonderful setup because it’s a question so commonly asked. What about those movies, or books or stories where “nothing happens”. The sitcom Seinfeld was even self-aware enough to express this explicitly. Jerry would commonly say that the show (and the fictional show he created with George) was “about nothing. But of course that wasn’t true – because Jerry violated our expectations every time.

But back to McKee and the movie Adaptation. Watch McKee’s brilliant (NSFW-language) response here:

Okay… if you’re at work.. Or didn’t’ feel like watching the clip – basically McKee flips out and says – if you’re going to tell me a story where NOTHING happens – why are you wasting my 2 hours.

Having taken McKee’s class twice (which I can’t recommend highly enough) – I can tell you that the scene is largely based on fact. Inevitably in the class there is always a student that asks about creating stories where “nothing happens”. The reaction you see in the scene above – is basically the same hell that he brings on any student unlucky enough to ask that question.

What’s Happening In Your Story

What McKee is really talking about in storytelling is that you must violate expectations in order to keep an audience involved, engaged and interested in hanging around. You must make interesting things happen.

For example – let’s look at the outline of the beginning of two stories.

Story 1 – Guy wakes up, he brushes his teeth, he gets in his car and drives to work – walks through the parking lot, drops his keys, picks them up – and walks into his office building.

Story 2 – Guy wakes up, he brushes his teeth, he gets in his car and drives to work – walks through the parking lot, drops his keys, and as he bends down to pick them up he notices his boss stuffing a bag with a human arm hanging out into his trunk.

Which story are you more likely to continue reading?

This holds true in everything we’re doing in marketing. Let’s take B2B marketing for a moment. If you frequently give or receive overview/sales PowerPoint presentations for customers – let me predict how most sales presentations are ordered:

Slide 1 – Who we are – why we’re a great company. We’re awesome. We’ve been in business for X amount of years. We’ve won awards.

Slide 2 – Here’s our products – and the awards they’ve won. Did I mention that we’re awesome?

Slide 3 – Logo Slide – here’s all the customers that have bought from us – and wow aren’t we impressive that we’ve closed all these big deals.

Slide 4 – Case Study – here’s one of those customers and a quote telling you why we’re so awesome.

And so on…..

What if instead…. This company’s overview deck went a little like this.

Slide 1 – Picture of a man. Let me tell you a story about this man. Normally you might think I’m going to tell you a case study. But this guy didn’t buy from us and he is NOT a customer.

Okay… I’ve already violated the audience’s expectations. I could go on from there and tell the audience how we pitched this guy – and even though he wanted to – he wasn’t able to buy from us. He was forced to buy a competing product from a “safe” vendor. They had a horrible time with it. In fact, he now works as our Director of Marketing – because he was so taken with our solution that he wanted to work for our company.

Now when we show that logo slide and we tie it into how our solution has changed the direction of all these companies - it starts to mean something very different than simply “we’re awesome”.

Start Watching For It Everywhere

Every single movie that you love – every single scene you think is great – and every single book that you can’t put down uses the violation of expectation to keep you engaged.

A few examples:

The classic scene in Good Will Hunting when Ben Affleck is trying to woo Minnie Driver in the bar. The arrogant Harvard student goes to embarrass Affleck’s character by talking about “the economy of pre-revolutionary America” and your expectation is that they’re going to fight. Instead, Will (Matt Damon) comes over and mentally obliterates the arrogant student with more knowledge than he could ever know.

Or… this classic scene from Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade where Indiana and his father have managed to get into Berlin to retrieve the diary – a book that the whole German army is looking for. As they’re trying to escape they manage to bump into Adolph Hitler… And… he signs the book like it’s an autograph.

Or maybe the best example of all – there’s this amazing scene from Casablanca; where almost every single line of dialogue violates your expectations; starting with the lines “what’s your nationality?” Rick says “I’m a drunkard”. It’s just amazing writing.

As a side note – if you take the McKee class – I guarantee you that after you experience his day-long analysis of Casablanca if it doesn’t become your absolute favorite film – it will be top five.

So…. if you’re a marketer – and you’re going to start to use content to help power your strategy – start to exercise this muscle… Watch a movie, read a book – and watch for the turns, the violations of expectations…

You may even surprise yourself where it will take you….

Oh… by the way… how many of you noticed that the picture for this post is the earth “upside down”…. Remember – there’s no rule that says North is up….

Leadership Is Storytelling – Congratulations Leadership Chat

Posted on October 10, 2011 by Robert Rose

This post comes as a celebration of the one year anniversary of #LeadershipChat – the gathering hosted by Lisa Petrilli and Steve Woodruff that happens on Twitter each week on Tuesdays – and one that I’ve been honored to be a part of for the entire year.

So – back in 1997 – the amazing book The Leadership Engine was published. If you haven’t read it – it’s still amazingly relevant today. In a Fast Company article back in 1998, the author of that book Noel M. Tichy said something that sticks with me to this day (I have the article printed out and filed away). He said:

“leadership is about change. It’s about taking people from where they are now to where they need to be. The best way to get people to venture into unknown terrain is to make it desirable by taking them there in their imaginations.”

The Tuscan Table Of LeadershipChat

For the last year, I’ve been privileged to hear and participate in the storytelling around the “Tuscan table” of Leadership Chat. There have been:

Stories about:

Creating leadership in a virtual environment. Where there was a lively discussion and stories from Ann Handley about how she has worked virtually with a team and created the success that MarketingProfs enjoys.
Some “enchanted” evening. Which was a wonderful set of stories from Guy Kawasaki – and how he works on enchanting customers.
A true balance of head and heart – discussing Military Leadership with author Wally Bock.
Discussing and sharing stories of “killing giants” with guest author Stephen Denny. What an inspirational evening that turned out to be.
Sharing stories of failure – yes failure with Les McKeown and how we can learn from it and become better for it.

All of the gatherings have been wonderful – and the stories shared from the profound to the mundane (like the running joke of cannoli and beverages of choice) make for evenings I don’t like to miss.

And certainly for anyone who feels overwhelmed, challenged or in any way inadequate of true leadership – the gathering that Lisa and Steve provide is the true manifestation of Noel Tichy said in that Fast Company article. Leadership chat is an approachable way to get us to venture into the unknown. It feeds the imagination – and really helps us all to tell our stories.

I look forward to another year of telling tales around the Tuscan table.

The Adaptive Marketer Has Adapted – The Mythic Marketer Lives

Posted on October 9, 2011 by Robert Rose

If you haven’t noticed – I’ve been a bit lax over the last couple of weeks about updating my blog. But the reason is that I’ve decided to re-launch The Adaptive Marketer with a new title and a new focus. Three things have really guided me here.

The first is that after the launch of Managing Content Marketing – the book I wrote with Joe Pulizzi – the idea of helping marketers tell their stories more effectively has just continued to resonate more deeply every day. The second is that my experiences at Content Marketing World have made me extraordinarily passionate about how the idea of story structure, narrative and bringing our “unique selves” to business strategy can have a fundamental effect on our success. And, finally, it’s because in each of my client engagements over the last few months, I get such a positive reaction to talking about shaping content, marketing and storytelling as a part of marketing. And, I’ve personally seen real, actionable and measurable results come from it.

We Are All StoryTellers

In his wonderful book The Power Of Story – Dr. Jim Loehr says:

“your story is your life. As human beings, we continually tell ourselves stories – of success or failure; of power or victimhood; stories that endure for an hour, or a day, or an entire lifetime.”

We are all natural storytellers. Think about it. You do it every day. You make your friends laugh with the story of your crazy weekend. You put your kids to sleep with stories either told or read aloud. You regale the dinner table with your exploits at work – and the weird, wonderful, hateful, lovely, bitchy, funny, admirable people with whom you spend 40 hours a week. And, beyond telling these stories verbally, you post shorter versions of them like marks on a cave to Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and elsewhere – drawing your life for others to comment on, like, admire or wish they had your life.

But if we are so good at telling stories – why are companies so bad at it?

It’s because we don’t believe we can.

Organizations are so rarely in alignment with the people that populate them. It frequently happens early at startups – and we personify the company with the entrepreneur. We think of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook as one story. Or, we look at Jason Fried and 37Signals. And, on rare occasion it happens with larger organizations as well. Of course there’s Steve Jobs and Apple, Bill Gates and Microsoft and Richard Branson and Virgin. But those are uncommon stories from iconoclastic entrepreneurs – and most of us don’t have the luxury of such visionary heroes for our organization’s story.

No – for most organizations – we can and must find the powerful, engaging stories that are unique to US in order to succeed in today’s noisy, tribal chaos. We must find the uniqueness in our organization – and the power to tell a story that engages, creates demand and succeeds over time.

And, as Dr. Loehr also says in his book:

“if alignment of stories, yours and your company’s is to be achieved – then it’s ideally generated both from the top down (the company side) and bottom up (the worker’s side). But let’s not get carried away. For our purposes, we’ll presume zero input from the company. It is, after all, corporate culture. That means the burden to change stories is on you.”

The Mythic Marketer

The name comes from my admiration of Joseph Campbell and his work with telling stories. Campbell was a believer in the “ritual” of storytelling. He absolutely believed that participation in that ritual would put you into the experience of mythic reality.

And, so too do I hope to help create a ritual of storytelling into the practice of marketing. Whether we call it Content Marketing, Social Marketing or even the Brand Story isn’t as important as the doing of the thing -building the ritual into our marketing process.

And that’s where I want to spend my time – and whatever talent I have; thinking, writing and creating about helping organizations to build this ritual into their process. I want to help organizations tell their stories, build it into their process and achieve exponential marketing success.

It’s the beginning of a new journey… and hopefully you’ll come along from time to time and take it with me…

P.S.> If you’re subscribed to the Adaptive Marketer you’ll continue to get the updates for The Mythic Marketer for a little while. But I’ll make a permanent switch in a few weeks. I hope you’ll consider subscribing to the Mythic Marketer. It should be fun ride.

Netflix & Qwikster – When The Story Starts Without You

Posted on September 19, 2011 by Robert Rose

I woke up today, rolled over and grabbed my iPhone to check what happened overnight – and there was a long email from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings in my inbox. It was basically a blog post – a long mea culpa saying that Netflix had “lacked respect and humility in the way [they] announced the separation of DVD and streaming and the price changes”.

So, to rectify that – they had decided to change the name of its DVD rental service and start to also rent video games. The name of the new service would be Qwickster. I immediately said to myself “wow, I’ll bet their customers are coming unglued at this.”

Sure enough – I roll out of bed and go to look at the blog posts – at the writing of this post there are more than 11,000 comments…. 11,000!! And it’s only just now rolling through the Pacific time zone.

I’m not sure what Netflix is thinking – or even if they are – but this is a classic case of letting the story start without you.

In our book, Joe Pulizzi and I pose the hopeful notion that we should be building “subscribers” to our brand. We suggest that this is the way to keep consumers fully engaged, long after they initially become “customers”.

This move by Netflix flies right in the face of that move. Regardless of the intelligence of the business decision to move the DVD service to a different structure; and there are many (including me) who actually think that’s a necessary positive move for the company – this is a marketing (and storytelling) blunder of epic proportions.

I mean seriously – building “subscribers” is EXACTLY what Netflix Does for a living!!!

Three mistakes right from the get-go

Throw the consumers right into the second act. Their customers had no time to adjust to this. This is basically telling their DVD customers “we’ve sold you out to a “sub-brand” and we don’t value you as much”. Do you think Star Wars would have been nearly as compelling if Obi Wan had found Han Solo to take him to Alderaan and then said to Luke “yeah, I’m going to leave you here to fend for yourself. You’ll do well working in this bar – sorry about your family and all”.
No research into their channels. Netflix either didn’t care – or didn’t bother to check the Qwikster Twitter account. It’s apparently run by a guy who cares more about scoring a dime bag than movies.
Not Honest. In the end, consumers can sniff this out a mile away. We all KNOW why Netflix is trying to get out of the DVD rental business – it doesn’t scale. Painting it up with a fancy logo and throwing it out to the curb just doesn’t cut it.

It’s early days for sure – and we’ll see how this plays out over time – but my early take is that this will be a content marketing #Fail case.

Announcing My New Book – Managing Content Marketing

Posted on August 31, 2011 by Robert Rose

Next week I’m headed to Cleveland to Content Marketing World to experience how content, marketing strategy, Rock & Roll, and more orange than I ever knew existed can be mixed together. And, I’m particularly excited to launch something that Joe Pulizzi and I have been working on for the last few months.

I’ve been blessed to spend the last two years working with amazingly renowned global brands on content marketing strategy and execution. Over that time, both Joe and I have seen some of the same things coming up again and again, including certain challenges, tools, solutions and processes that just simply work.

So, Joe and I got to talking about how we could write a book that was the “owner’s manual” for content marketing. We wanted to accomplish two things. The first was to relay things that really worked – in real client settings. And, the second is that we wanted the book to be fresh – and not based on 18 month old data.

So, we scrambled, gave up Weekends (and I gave up Video Games) and let our passion for Content Marketing take over. This book emerged over the summer. Managing Content Marketing – The Real-World Guide for Creating Passionate Subscribers to Your Brand, is designed to tell marketers exactly how to put content marketing to work with a structured, repeatable process.

As Jeffrey Hayzlett, the former CMO of Kodak and author of the bestselling book, The Mirror Test: Is Your Business Really Breathing, said in his very kind forward:

“What gets me fired up about this book is that these guys have it so right. Their book provides the vital steps required to navigate this new path called content marketing.”

You can certainly learn more about the book here. But we’re very proud to announce that, due to the herculean efforts of Newt Barrett and the editing team at CMI Books, we will have a limited supply of preview copies for sale at Content Marketing World, and online sales will follow very shortly in mid-September.

My HUGE THANKS go to my co-author Joe Pulizzi – the godfather of Content Marketing and very dear friend – and the team of people who helped put it together including Newt Barrett, Lisa Murton-Beets, Joe Watson and Neal Lorenzi.

At Content Marketing World, we’ll have four full days of talking content marketing. We’ll learn so much about how the power of story can work for our business. The process is new. We need to be okay with that. The budget allotted for new content creation is going to become a significant part of our “new media” budget. And subject matter experts in our organizations are going to have new responsibilities. It’s a transformative new process, and it won’t happen overnight. But it can, and should, happen.

Get Content Get Customers, showed us the light, but there’s been no book to show us the way.

Until now.

I hope to see you in Cleveland.

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