Searching for true value

You can get in touch with your organization’s true value in a variety of ways. Choose one or more of the following processes based on what suits you and your business:

• Ask your customers or clients what you have accomplished for them and what they most value. If appropriate to your industry, ask for specifics, especially in bottom-line terms. They may be more prepared to deliver this information than you think; if you’re a repeat or long-term supplier, they may be quite aware of their ROI (return on investment). For ideas on how to frame good questions, see the sidebar, “Questions to ask your customers.”

• Brainstorm with an internal group. Working with your immediate colleagues or representatives from different departments gives you the advantage of advance buy-in from different stakeholders. Or work with a business-savvy person or two whom you trust. The sidebar, “Questions to ask your team and yourself,” gives you material for this process.

  This “inside route” to identifying your strengths can expand and solidify your ideas about what’s important and what to concentrate on. It also gives you a broad foundation for a communications program. Additionally, the answers can give you a head start on storytelling for your business, which I talk about later in this chapter.

  If you choose to use the inside team approach, consider supplementing it with at least a few outside opinions. Doing so gives you a reality check on whether you’re moving in the right direction and staying aligned with your clients.

• Do it yourself. Ask yourself probing questions — or create a small circle of colleagues from other organizations who can also benefit from exploration within a group setting. CEOs from top companies meet this way to share problems and solutions, and you can, too. Focus on building a core value statement for each of you, one at a time.
• Work with a business counselor. If you’re a one-person operation, a trained business counselor can help you reach productive conclusions. Seek out business development service agencies in your area; local libraries may be able to connect you with free or low-cost services. Local colleges often house business guidance centers or resources for entrepreneurs. Or a growing number of business advisors and coaches can help with paid services.

If you approach clients in the spirit of checking on their satisfaction level and seeking input on how to improve, they’re almost certain to respond positively. Don’t see the research as an imposition, but as a relationship-building opportunity. And don’t be surprised if what you discover differs from what you expected.

Making your case in business terms

Your true value statement must connect with your customers and prospects, and this may take some translation. Reaching businesspeople in their own terms is not really rocket science. It’s often about dollars and cents. Use this truth to make your core message more powerful.

Try This: Start developing your core message with a thorough look into work your company has done that solves problems. Look for ways to show that you can:

• Increase revenue and profitability. For example: Grow market share, retain customers, find new markets, reach a wider audience, make marketing initiatives more productive.
• Cut costs and streamline. For example: Reduce expenses, increase efficiency, cut redundancies, reduce mistakes, redeploy staff, reduce turnover, minimize product returns, cut red tape.
• Improve positioning. For example: Build the client’s or product’s cachet, improve public or customer perception, raise company profile, minimize complaints, increase customer satisfaction.
• Change behavior. For example: Train staff to work in teams or communicate better, promote adoption of organization’s core mission and values, shift unproductive systems and behavior to productive ones.

Important as it is, money isn’t everything. Identify your clients’ pain points and think about how you address those, especially in different ways from your competitors. Perhaps you have evening office hours to accommodate those who work; wash dogs in their homes; train those who buy your equipment; or provide free ten-year warranties. If you’re in business, you probably already offer specific amenities. The idea is to think about value more systematically so you can communicate about it and sharpen your focus.

Every industry is different but all share the same imperatives, though they may take different forms. Increasing revenue for a nonprofit may mean upping donations, sponsorships, or grants, or recruiting more volunteers. A government agency typically wants a larger share of the government pie, which may be achieved by better articulating the need for its service, demonstrating new efficiencies, or increasing client.

Don’t overlook the “good citizen” part of your organization’s message. Most people today, especially the younger generations, value enterprises that support and contribute to good causes in the community and beyond. Are you helping people? Making the world better in even a small way? Nurturing your own employees? These may be important elements of how you do business and deserve to play a role in your communication.

Finding your story

The value of story-telling is in its multitude of uses: You can use them as anecdotes to spark a speech (see Chapter 8) or website, blog, or profile (Chapter 12), but I focus here on the lodestar story — one that epitomizes your business and guides how you think and communicate about it. These stories often evolve over time and must embody the core value idea I explain earlier in “Finding Your Core Business Message.”

Stories can take many shapes, but it’s helpful to think about four basic types that work well for organizations:

• Discovery: How I started my business, discovered my talent or passion, found my mission, developed a way to match my values to my work
• Bumpy road: Obstacles I faced, mistakes I made, weaknesses I encountered, how I overcame challenges and grew the business
• Success story: How I used my skills, product, or service to help someone else achieve what she (or an organization) wanted or solve a major problem
• Big vision: How much better the world will be when everyone reaps the benefits of my service or product — or when a disease is cured, a needy group is helped, and so on

All four story types basically revolve around people. Good stories generally do. And of course, your story must relate to the specific people you want as your audience. If you’re explaining why you’re passionate about your work, it must be work that relates to your readers. A bumpy-road story must have a message your audience cares about — perhaps how you equipped yourself to solve your audience’s problems. A success story should center on somebody just like your audience so those people can relate. A big vision should connect with your audience’s needs — perhaps by promising a solution to an important perceived problem.

Framing your experience and practicing selective memory is legit when you build a story, but never tell a story that is not fundamentally true. First of all, you’re unlikely to tell it well, and moreover, you kill your own authenticity at the outset. Trust that the materials are there.

A good way to build a story is to start with the core message you want to deliver and scan your experience for a piece of history that illustrates it and lends itself to one of the story formats. If you’ve not yet created a core message, this is another good reason to do so.

Building your story

For fiction writers and playwrights, just as for journalists, the hard part is the lead: where to start. Don’t be surprised if your story presents the same challenge.

A good beginning is not usually a chronological one. When you start at the first event and proceed forward in time, a story lacks suspense and doesn’t provoke the curiosity that keeps people reading or listening.

Look for an interesting in. A surprise or a built-in contradiction is a good way to start. The fact that Steve Jobs dropped out of college and built Apple fascinates. Similarly, the story of how Facebook was born in a college dorm, XYZ startup began with $20, and a 17-year-old sold his software for $37 million all grab people’s attention.

You don’t have to blow away your audience. Discovery and turning points in your own life or career make good lead material, too:

• It’s Saturday night and I’m hunched over my only table in my one-room basement apartment. Alone. My cat ran away yesterday. There’s nowhere to look, no windows, always dark. I stare at my last jar of peanut butter. I set it down with a thud on top of 127 publishers’ rejection letters. They’re all I have to show for three years’ work.
• Then I remember this ad I clipped out … .

In effect, the story starts at a pivotal point in the middle of the teller’s personal saga (no, not mine, but a hovering possibility for most writers, artists, and so on). You might then speak to what got you to that low point and then how you moved on and overcame all those obstacles. The same approach works when you’re telling someone else’s success story to demonstrate how you helped.

Recounting a eureka moment where you or a customer learned something vital can work. A colleague who teaches presentation skills workshops opens by sharing her first day of teaching. She felt awkward and uncomfortable, and knew she was not connecting with her students. At the first break, one young woman approached and quietly gave her the magic clue she needed — “just be yourself.” She then briefly recounts how she gradually learned to become a strong speaker and is now equipped to help other people become their best selves as speakers.

Story-writing tips

The following ideas come from the fiction writer’s portion of the writing spectrum, but they can help the business storyteller, too. Use these approaches with both written and oral communication:

• Show, don’t tell. Rather than sticking to straight narrative or piling on the descriptive adjectives, put readers right into your scene so they can draw their own conclusions. Paint a detailed picture of the situation, event, place, or person.

  Try telling the story in present tense rather than past, bringing it more immediate and alive for you as well as the reader or listener. Immerse yourself in the detail and speak from inside the re-created experience.

• Engage the senses. Use vivid, graphic language to activate people’s sense of smell, hearing, sound, touch, and sight and make them feel as if they are there themselves. Research shows that specific areas of the brain light up if you say hands are “leathery,” for example, rather than “rough.”
• Use dialogue and first-hand quotes. Rather than, “My sixth-grade teacher told me I would be a failure,” try, “One day, I’m sitting at school, looking out the window, and I look up and there’s Mrs. Dim, my sixth-grade teacher, staring down at me. She says, ‘Jeremy, when I look at you, I know I failed to teach you — and that you will fail in life.’”
• Be concrete and specific. Take time to pin down details and the right words. Abstractions don’t resonate with people. “I teach people to improve their writing” accomplishes less than “I show entrepreneurs how to create messages that win more hearts, minds, and contracts.”
• Use simple, say-able language. Rely on short words, short sentences, and plain structures. This especially applies to written stories because you’re tapping into an oral tradition that generates its own expectations. Who doesn’t listen up when you hear or read, “Once upon a time …”? Think about that natural story cadence and try echoing it. Or try using the words to spark your brainstorming, and perhaps even keep them in your delivered message: “Once upon a time I put on my first suit and went out on my first sales call … .”
• Stay positive. Highlighting your mistakes and setbacks along the way is effective; people relate to this sharing and may even mentally cheer you on toward success. But be sure your story has a happy ending — one that leaves the audience with a good impression of you. Park any ironic jokes, told at your own expense, at home.
• Know your point. Be sure you know why you’re telling your story and that this moral aligns with the core message you want to get across. In fact, many people write the ending first and then build the rest of the story toward it. You might bring the point home, as in “I know now that following those side roads is what prepared me to set you on the right track.” Or you may decide to let the story make the point on its own. A big-vision story might end, “I see a world where no one has to struggle for clean air and all children are healthy” or “My idea will solve the industry’s data storage problem and save millions of dollars, millions of trees.”

Try This: A good way to explore storytelling is to exploit its oral basis. Identify something that has stuck in your mind, whether an experience or small incident, and then tell that story to someone orally. You may find that after a minute or so, you can immerse yourself in a specific place and time and relive what happened to a surprising degree. See where the story takes you. Because the incident comes to mind, it may shed more meaning than you expect on your career or a particular decision, action, idea. Then create a written version.

Stories are everywhere around us. Develop your awareness of good storytelling techniques in presentations you attend, what you read and what you listen to. NPR and the BBC both have storytelling programs, and it’s especially illuminating to hear well-crafted stories read aloud well. On a more down-to-earth level, take a look at Quora, “the best answer to any question,” at www.quora.com. On this site, anyone can pose a question and have it answered by interested people ranging from “ordinary” to celebrities in their fields. You may be surprised at how effectively popular answers are in setting the stage with a line or two, drawing you in to click on the rest.

Putting stories to work

You may be your own most important audience. A strong story tells you where you’ve been, where you are now, and where you’re going. It solidifies the relationship between who you are, what you do, and where you want to go. That’s why therapists use story-building to help people understand and reframe their life experiences. It’s energizing to recognize that your life and career are still in progress: You can adjust course to change the ending! Stories work similarly for organizations. They communicate a shared history or vision serve as the glue that unifies people and keeps them on the same track.

On the practical level, your own story gives you a versatile tool that can be adapted to:

• The “About Us” section of a website
• Website pages that focus on good-cause accomplishments or needs
• An elevator pitch
• A job application cover letter
• Online profiles
• Pitches for investment or other support
• Brochures and marketing materials
• A speech or presentation opening
• A media feature about your business
• Special event promotions, like a company anniversary
• Posting in your office as a framed piece
• Exhibit handouts for trade shows and other public events
• A blog

I recently saw several good stories told on restaurant placemats. Each basically relates who the founders were, where they came from, how the restaurant was born and evolved, which descendants are running it now, and what makes it so great. These sorts of stories are hard not to read while you’re waiting for your food! Look for suitable opportunities (not necessarily on dinner placemats) to share and tell your own stories.

For nonprofit organizations, stories can provide the entire key to fundraising, volunteer recruitment, and more. They can make the mission real and important, even exciting. Some nonprofits do this through the “founder” story, effective when that person is famous or charismatic. Often, charitable causes tell moving stories about the people who need their help and/or success stories about those they have helped. The most effective ones revolve around specific individuals.

Many nonprofits are good at embodying their sense of purpose and accomplishment in stories. Companies can learn a great deal from them about humanizing abstract ideas to touch people and make their organizations memorable.

Stories can be prime tools for carrying a corporate message about its good works, such as the charitable causes it supports or its efforts with sustainability, green building, and conservation. Demonstrating corporate responsibility is a must for all businesses today, and telling stories is a great way to do that.

Deciding how to use video

Social media services do endless surveys to prove how important images, and especially moving images, are to reach target audiences. The last statistic I saw was that people are 40 times more likely to open a posting with video than without. The statistics boggle the mind. At the time of this writing, Facebook reported it generates 8 billion video views per day. YouTube claims more than a billion users who spend 60 percent more hours watching videos year over year.

There is an unquenchable appetite for video. But most of that is created for entertainment purposes. As with social media, businesses are getting better at producing video that has audience appeal while it promotes their goals at the same time. You can do this, too. Like social media, video is another route to leveling the playing field for small businesses, startups, professionals, and independent workers. The price of entry is more one of time and creativity than big bucks. Here are a few ideas of how you can use video:

• Present client testimonials and stories.
• Demonstrate a product.
• Show your service in action (for example, teaching a workshop, fixing a bike).
• Introduce yourself, your team, your company.
• Deliver a company VIP message to share information or inspire.
• Demonstrate how to do something.
• Demonstrate how you make something.
• Train or recruit staff.
• Create brand identity.
• Record “live” FAQs featuring you, or different staff specialists.
• Support a pitch for funding or crowdsourcing.
• Share expert opinions (for example, review new products in your field).

Any of these basic ideas can be done short (a 15-second customer testimonial) or long (a 2- to 15-minute demonstration). And how you use any of these formats is limited only by your imagination. Digital magic allows you to endlessly recycle your video material, which often more than justifies the time and financial investment. Most of the listed video products can be used on your website and posted on YouTube or another public venue. A product demonstration can be used in these ways and also taken along to support in person sales calls. You can use them to liven up blogs and just about every social media site.

You can go further afield with whatever idea suits your business. For example, invite user-generated video contributions by customers who can speak for the value of your service; live-stream industry events or occasions at your own worksite; produce video surveys by taking your camera to the street or an event to record answers to your planned questions. A man-in-the-street survey of what brands people prefer in your niche market, for example, can give you interesting material that highlights what people value about the product.

If yours is a service business, you might create glimpses of what you do and how, for example. If you run training workshops, clips of the action are far more effective for marketing than endless descriptions. A nonprofit can showcase its accomplishments, focusing on people its work has helped. Heartwarming interviews with grateful beneficiaries can touch viewers in ways that miles of brochures will never do. Needs can be made graphic by showing, for example, victims of a natural disaster, a child in need of financial help, or a ruined landscape calling for remediation.

Video is also a powerful tool for fostering team unity. International organizations use it to deliver messages from headquarters and make the CEO “real” across international waters. One smart communications department produces short features that each focus on a single employee talking about his personal interests and passions. This humanizes the work environment and makes it more collegial. Staff members feel important and appreciate that they are working alongside interesting individuals. Other companies invest in video to showcase their contributions to good causes, and their employees. This promotes good feelings both inside and outside the company.

Using video for marketing

Corporations and nonprofits alike create an endless number of full video “shows” to use in a range of venues, from sales presentations to speeches and special events. Marketing professionals love video because it can bypass customers’ rational side and go straight to the emotions. Even a good 30-second television commercial can do that. However, both commercials and video marketing shows are accomplished through expensive planning, shooting, and postproduction work with large teams of specialists. But today’s technology enables you to do quite a lot to promote yourself and your business, even without the expensive equipment and large team of specialists.

Like every communication format, video is best used strategically. Consider these basic guidelines to orient you for producing useful video for your own purposes, on whatever production level you work with.

• Know what video can do well, and less well. By integrating picture, sound, voice, and at times music, film and video have enormous power to grab us emotionally. But they can be less effective as learning tools. Visually based instructional material can show us how to do something, but it isn’t suited for the kind of detail, or abstract information, that print media can deliver.
• Regard video as one more tool to integrate into your overall marketing strategy. Unless you just want to have fun or produce random bits that might find an audience online, think through how what you want to produce fits into everything else you do, how it can be used to carry your core message, and how it can amplify the power of that message.
• Pre-think all possible ways you might repurpose the video. If you are shooting a customer testimonial for your website, brainstorm other potential uses for the material, such as a marketing piece for your website, blog, or Facebook page. It’s much easier to shoot a little more and cover the extra territory at the same time, especially if you won’t have another opportunity. Don’t underestimate the time that a quality goal-oriented video may demand.

• Script your video before you start shooting. It’s like everything else in life: How can you get what you want if you don’t know what that is? Regardless of production values, video improves dramatically when you use writing as the base.

Even if your final video is purely visual and contains no words at all, you still need them in the thinking and planning stage (called preproduction). Video or film that’s more than a few seconds long requires planning, and I don’t know a way to plan that doesn’t require language. Any medium that delivers a message beyond a general mood, or to provoke an emotion, must first be expressed or imagined in words. Then we translate those ideas to visual form. Completing the circle, the viewer translates it back to language because that’s how we ascribe meaning.

Further, if you’re collaborating with anyone else, you need to write the script so the different specialists are on the same page and everyone involved can contribute refinements based on his or her own viewpoints and expertise.

Scriptwriting is a special kind of writing challenge because it’s multidimensional. The picture must be planned right along with the narration or live sound. This becomes obvious the first time you work on a video project that is more than 15 seconds long. During my first experience, I came to the editing room with 15 pages of carefully written and recorded voiceover and a few days of on-site shooting. The editor laid down the first two minutes of sound and said, “Okay, what’s the picture?” We had only 30 seconds’ worth of relevant footage. Out went the script.

Know what you want to accomplish at the earliest stage and plan based on simplicity. It’s wise not to get overly ambitious. Pick subjects that support your goals and that you can handle with the equipment and know-how on hand. Know your content options.

According to the nature of your project (and budget), content can include:

• Talking heads (people speaking directly to the camera)
• Live action (such as demonstrations of a process or something happening)
• Cutaways (close-ups of models, charts, or details of the scene)
• Secondary footage called B roll, for background and transitions
• Still images, which can be manipulated to give an impression of motion
• On-screen titles, animation, and more
• Archival material from your own files, a customer, or commercial source

Introducing yourself with video

Video of the company leader is a powerful way to liven up a website or social media page, even if you’re a one-person operation. Someone — perhaps you — talking on camera about your business, product, service, or career dream is a much more personal introduction than plain old written copy. You and your business become real to the viewer and he feels he knows you personally.

However, not everyone comes across well in living, speaking media. Video is especially high-risk if you plan a talking-head speech with the camera focused fully on you the whole time. You can work out a simple version of a teleprompter, such as cue cards or pages with notes outside the camera’s view, rather than reading. Be prepared to find this a lot more difficult to do well than you might expect if you haven’t tried it. Coming across as warm and natural without some talent or training is difficult.

Try This: Record yourself for a few minutes speaking directly to a camera and then take a hard look at how you come across on video. Ask colleagues for honest input. If the piece doesn’t show you off to advantage, either:

• Scrap the “Here I am” video for the time being.
• Do a really short version.

Twenty or 30 seconds of video is usually plenty for an introduction. Think of it as an elevator speech with a camera. Your actual elevator speech, which I discuss in Chapter 8, may give you the core of your video message. Also consider drawing on your personal value statement (also Chapter 8), or your personal story, which I talk about earlier in this chapter.

What often works best is to find something about your work that ignites your own genuine enthusiasm or passion. I once reviewed a script for a travel agent that began, “Hello, I’m Viola Smith, and I run a full-service travel agency that takes care of you all over the world.” I suggested instead, “I’m Viola Smith, and what I love about my work is rescuing people from the travel adventures they didn't expect.”

After your lead is in place, the rest falls naturally. Viola went on to give a few examples of extreme rescue, like finding a flight from Afghanistan for a family at four in the morning, and replacing a traveler’s stolen money and documents in time for him to get home for his daughter’s birthday. In less than a minute, the video demonstrated Viola’s problem-solving skills and above-and-beyond service, which connected well with prospects. Who hasn’t had a disastrous travel experience and doesn’t anticipate another? Viola’s message was a reassuring, “Don’t worry, I’ve got your back and I’ll do whatever it takes. And I love doing that.”

A simple line or two introducing yourself is fine for a video opener — you don’t need a flashy introduction or magical words. But use your best writing-thinking skills to find the substance that you can communicate with great conviction. There’s a good quote from Theodore Roosevelt that applies: “Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.”

Sharing expertise with video

Most people today go straight to the Internet to learn things: how to fix a computer problem, how to treat a pulled muscle, how to make a quilt. If you’re good at something or have specialized knowledge, you probably already possess excellent subject matter for how-to videos.

Disseminating such videos may be well worth your while to establish expertise or authority in your field. The Internet offers an astonishing number of videos, just like blogs, that share knowledge purely for the satisfaction of doing so. I think that’s great, but bear in mind how much competition is out there. Think through carefully how to communicate your knowledge or advice as clearly as possible. Create a step-by-step set of visual-plus-narrative instructions.

How-we-do-it videos are also especially good enhancements for your organization’s website or blog. Whether you make boots or art glass, teach yoga, or fix carburetors, how-to tips can interest your target audiences. They can also communicate what makes your product unique and perhaps expensive: special materials, a demanding process, long experience.

If like most of us you’ve searched online for a way to solve a problem, you’ve probably found that most how-to videos are badly produced: out of focus picture, poor sound, hard to follow. Use common sense and pay attention to production values as best you can. If given a choice, we’ll all watch the better-quality video.

If you don’t have a team of specialists to work with, build one with colleagues who have good ideas and a willingness to experiment. Ingenuity and imagination can, to some extent, make up for specialized technologies.

If you’re basically your own crew, rely on the following production essentials:

• Lighting is the big difference between interesting, clear video imagery and indifferent visuals. Invest in a light you can position and adjust. Take the time and effort to light your subject carefully.
• Sound quality counts hugely. The biggest technical complaint about home-grown video is poor sound. People can apparently forgive not-so-good picture but hate having to strain their ears to catch or interpret the words. Seriously consider investing in a good, versatile microphone.

For more tips on achieving quality and using a step-by-step production process, see Chapter 17.

Articulating your special value, adopting the techniques of storytelling, and applying some video know-how can amplify your communication toolkit nicely. The techniques will come to your aid in many situations where you are selling yourself in some way, from building a unique online presence to job hunting, my next subject.