Frank Wolf is co-founder and chief strategy officer at Staffbase.

If you want people to remember a piece of information, wrapping it in a story is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal. Studies show we recall stories anywhere from seven to 22 times better than isolated facts. Though, of course, the quality of the story matters.

Which would stick with you more—hearing that persistence leads to success, or hearing the story of Thomas Edison, who famously failed 1,000 times before inventing the lightbulb?

But the real magic of storytelling isn’t just in helping us remember. The true power lies in how stories guide us through a transition—moving us from an old world into a new one, helping us grasp complex ideas, and feel the weight of transformation. That’s what makes storytelling not just memorable, but transformative.

Senior leaders often think about the future regarding business strategies and goals. That’s the end state. But we all know the real challenge lies in the change and transformation needed to move from the current state to the desired future state. This is where we enter the sweet spot of communications. Like storytelling, it’s about understanding where your audience is today—their beliefs, dreams, and identities—and what story needs to be told to shift the narrative toward the desired future.

The communicator’s storytelling structure

Telling engaging stories might be the ultimate goal for the entertainment industry but the same isn’t necessarily true for communicators.

However, whenever we talk about storytelling, attention often turns to professional storytellers from the entertainment industry. If you work for Disney and attend a communications conference to lead a session on storytelling, you can be sure it will be overcrowded.

This focus on structure is why there’s such an emphasis on the classic hero’s journey: the hero discovers a problem, meets a guide, and eventually overcomes their challenges.

But the entertainment industry aims to engage audiences and get them to subscribe to Netflix or sign up for a paid newspaper. Corporate communication, on the other hand, isn’t about entertainment—it’s about changing hearts and minds.

Changing hearts and minds is hard in a world full of noise. Telling a single story isn’t enough. Our attention spans have become so short that cutting through the noise has become increasingly difficult.

We need to hear information multiple times to take action.

Not only do stories help us remember, but they also guide us through change. One or two stories might be enough to be noticed, but it takes more to make people remember what you want them to. It takes even further repetition to build trust in your message and even more for people to take action.

Many studies support these insights. For instance, a study by Robert B. Zajonc and others from 1968 describes the Mere Exposure Effect, where people start to like things after being exposed to them about five times. In marketing, there is a widely accepted “Rule of Seven,” which suggests that people need to hear something seven times before they are likely to take action.

That’s why storytelling should not be viewed as merely a tactical technique for packaging information. Yet, we often see communications teams thinking of themselves as service centers, helping leaders and subject matter experts wrap their knowledge in better stories. As one of our clients once said, “In an average year, our communications team tells more than a thousand stories, but we don’t create impact. Our main goal is to focus on fewer topics and ensure these tell diverse stories that all feed into the same overarching narrative.”

This is where strategic storytelling comes into play. It’s about aligning multiple stories behind a joint strategic narrative. Strategic storytelling allows communications teams to focus on initiatives that create business impact and drive key transformations.

Narratives are more powerful than stories

People often use “story” and “narrative” interchangeably, but storytelling and narrative are different concepts. Narratives are patterns that emerge from multiple stories.

Stories and narratives share common elements. The most important is their basic structure — they have a beginning, then something happens, and then there is a new end state. This structure is immensely helpful if you want people to follow a vision. It’s not just about where you want to go (the end state), it’s also about the journey of getting there.

No matter how powerful stories are, they are mostly about other people’s experiences. Narratives, however, invite us to become participants. This inclusivity is what makes narratives so powerful — they turn abstract ideas into personal motivations, allowing people to see themselves in the larger scope and be part of a movement or cause. For example, a specific founding story of a company becomes powerful when people can relate to it based on their own experiences or stories they’ve heard from others.

Consider Patagonia, which has successfully built a narrative around environmental activism. Their stories of sustainable business practices feed into the larger narrative of a company committed to saving the planet.

This is why any impactful communications strategy should focus on the narratives you want to create or change through your storytelling. For example, a topic like “Let’s do more about sustainability” is a topic, not a narrative. A sustainability narrative would be “We are transforming this business to be carbon neutral by 2040.”

A clear and powerful narrative will allow a communications team to identify and elevate the best facts and stories to build and nurture the narrative. The broader scope of a narrative also helps in connecting with current events and opportunities through approaches like agenda surfing or newsjacking.

What narrative are you crafting for your organization?

How to get started

The main insight is to completely reverse the way of thinking. In many cases, communications functions as a service center, engaging with all stakeholders to learn about the stories that need to be told. This bouquet of stories is often hastily squeezed into something resembling a strategy, but not necessarily a coherent one.

The strategic storytelling approach starts with the reputation you want to build and protect. You then identify the corresponding narratives that need to be shaped. After that, it’s time to find the right stories to support these narratives.

The result is a communications team that says “no” much more often than stakeholders would like to hear. However, the reward is fewer, but far more impactful campaigns, along with measurable impacts on the most important transformation and reputation drivers in the business.

By focusing on strategic narratives, you’re not just telling stories — you’re shaping the future of your organization.

Wolf goes deeper into strategic storytelling on free Staffbase’s free webinar, “What Taylor Swift Can Teach You About Elevating Your Comms Strategy,” Nov. 12 during Ragan’s Communications Week. Register here. 

The post What it takes to move from tactical to strategic storytelling appeared first on PR Daily.

There’s no such thing as a “sure thing” when pitching, but as communications and PR pros know, telling an original and captivating story is key to earning media placements and approvals for even the most ambitious initiatives.

In the cinema and publishing worlds, the demand for “high concept” stories is a recurring drumbeat among literary agents and screenwriters. Well-executed, high-concept stories have major potential to capture the attention of both audiences and gatekeepers such as literary agents, publishers and studios.

Framing a story of any kind through this lens can be a great way to express why a story is powerful and drum up excitement about it.

But what does “high concept” mean, and how can we apply it to comms and PR? Let’s find out.

What are high-concept stories?

High-concept stories are based on big-picture, big-idea premises that have broad audience appeal, offer something an original twist on or mashup of familiar elements, and can be explained in as few words as possible.

These premises are often styled as “what-ifs,” “X meets X,” or “this but with that”:

• What if the genius serial killer helps the protagonist catch the antagonist? (“Silence of the Lambs”)
• It’s “The Lord of the Rings” meets the “Wars of the Roses.” (George R.R. Martin’s actual pitch for the “Song of Ice and Fire”/”Game of Thrones” series.)
• A mockumentary comedy but with vampires. (“What We Do in the Shadows”)

Sometimes, a well-executed, high-concept story can even launch a whole genre or trend by fundamentally twisting the tone and plots typical of a preexisting genre. Just look at the way “The Hunger Games” ignited an appetite for young-adult dystopian stories with female leads.

A few more examples of these ideas playing out successfully:

• Films such as “Judge Dredd” and “Blade Runner” (like Phillip K. Dick’s novels before them) helped shape the cyberpunk genre, a gritty, often-dystopian twist on preexisting science fiction. Another branch of the genre emerged when “The Matrix” mixed in superhero-like themes.
• The film “Apocalypse Now” retold Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” set during the Vietnam War.
• “Parks and Recreation” applied the appeal and mockumentary style of “The Office” to a small-town parks department, while “Abbott Elementary” did the same in an underfunded elementary school.

How brands do high concept

How does this take shape in the comms and PR world?

Think of brands doing something so unexpected and original that they ignite a wave of copycats, related products, memes and other trends. For example:

• Volkswagen’s “Lemon” print ad, and more recently, Pepsi’s “More Than OK”. (What if a brand panned its own product?)
• Macintosh/Apple’s 1984 commercial. (Brand meets iconic dystopian story and changes the ending.)
• Nike’s Air Jordan 1 release, one of the most iconic examples of fashion and footwear brands tapping into fandom with a limited-edition (and celebrity- and star athlete-led) product drop. (Brand meets celeb +What if only the first fans scored the highly coveted product?)
• Wendy’s irreverent tone and roasts on Twitter, which led to a swath of brands developing their own irreverent social media voices. (Millennial humor but with a brand account.)

All of these examples…

• Tapped into an audience they might not otherwise be connected with.
• Reversed expectations around how a brand should behave.
• Made others want to get in on their game.

Applying the principle

Now that we have our aspirations, let’s get back down to Earth: Not every story, campaign or initiative you pitch is going to be as great an idea as the Air Jordan 1. Not every social media campaign is going to be as surprising and original as the first-ever Wendy’s roast.

And ultimately, the most powerful pitches are those in which the product, campaign or initiative itself is strong.

But you can apply the same storytelling — and storyselling — principles that make high-concept ideas attractive to any pitch, story or idea, whether you’re aiming to get a campaign covered by a news outlet or  trying to pilot a new comms initiative.

Here are some ways you might strengthen your pitch (or the idea itself) by applying high-concept storyselling principles:

Make connections to similar big wins and explain what’s next.

• Is your organization simplifying its name? It might be easily explained to stakeholders by comparing it to Dunkin’ Donuts shortening its name to Dunkin’.
• If last year’s DE&I video series got the best engagement of any content your comms team ever created, explain how you plan to recreate that success by adding a new and original twist.

Draw from the headlines and research.

• The election has been dominating the news cycle, and your organization’s voter registration push aims to help people feel empowered to participate.
• Employee satisfaction is on the decline, so your comms team plans to organize a volunteer event because studies show they have a statistically high likelihood of boosting an employee’s sense of loyalty, connection and wellbeing.

Prioritize actions over individuals.

• If you’re pitching a celebrity-focused campaign, the pitch shouldn’t just be about who they are, but what they’re doing in the campaign and why they’re a good fit for the brand or product.
• If you’re writing about a new executive hire, start with what actions and accomplishments made them the right choice for the role.
• When pitching yourself for a promotion or project lead, explain what you’ve done rather than what titles you’ve held.

Use  high-concept phrasing: “what if,” “X meets X,” and “this but with that.”

These can be applied to many types of pitches to explain what makes the core idea both appealing — because it’s like something that already worked — yet original. Applying these phrases to create original premises can inspire great opening lines when pitching journalists or your organization’s leadership.

• What if a celebrity marketing campaign starred an astronaut and took place in space?
• What if a CEO tangibly showed they cared about employees?
• It’s Snickers’ “you’re not you when you’re hungry” campaign meets Old Spice’s “the man your man could smell like” campaign.
• It’s an annual retreat meets a music festival.
• It’s a contender in the Chicken Sandwich Wars, but it’s vegan.
• It’s last year’s employee recognition celebration, but with a gamified UGC challenge.

Ultimately, pitching and ideating through a high concept lens can give audiences a frame of reference for understanding the potential of your story by drawing parallels to successful examples, while still emphasizing what makes it different, surprising and notable.

Jess Zafarris is the director of content for Ragan and PR Daily and an author, editor, journalist, TikTok creator and game maker.

The post High-concept comms: Crafting a Hollywood-worthy pitch appeared first on PR Daily.

Twice a year, Dieter Landenberger and a group of his young colleagues take a trip to Poland.

It’s not your typical corporate retreat. Landenberger, Volkswagen director of heritage communications, and a group of apprentices from the German automaker travel to Auschwitz, the site of Nazi Germany’s most notorious concentration camp where an estimated 1.1 million Jews, Poles, Romanis and others were murdered.

Their goal is to commemorate the lives of those lost during the Holocaust and remind themselves of Volkswagen’s responsibility for the horrors of the past. Between 1940 and 1945, 20,000 forced laborers and 5,000 concentration camp prisoners were forced into working for the company.

“It has become part of our company culture,” said Landenberger, who spoke to us from Auschwitz where he and the apprentices were staying for two weeks and doing site restoration work. “It’s very important work and for the young people, it’s really life changing.”

With the Juneteenth commemoration of the end of slavery in the U.S. approaching, it also points the way for other companies to meaningfully engage with their own communities and histories. From a brand perspective, it’s important to do the research, ideally with external experts, and take an active role in reckoning with that history, whatever it reveals. Transparency and authenticity are the keys.

National Geographic and its history of racism

Volkswagen isn’t alone in openly addressing its history in this way.

Washington, D.C.-based National Geographic is recognized globally for its iconic magazine and its role in the fight for environmental conservation. Despite that positive reputation, the magazine’s editors made the decision to confront the brand’s racist past.

The National Geographic Society was founded in 1888 by a group of 33 explorers and scientists, all of them white men, with the mission to increase and diffuse geographic knowledge. But that work came freighted with the prevailing notions of race at the time, said Tara Roberts, National Geographic explorer in residence, during a keynote speech at the Ragan Communications Leadership Council Spring Retreat in California

So in 2018, National Geographic published an entire issue devoted to race and reckoning with the magazine’s role in perpetuating the racial divide and amplifying stereotypes. Nobody called on the editors to do it, Roberts said, and after publication some critics dismissed their efforts and questioned the editors’ motives.

“It was a very mixed public relations bag,” Roberts said.

The power of an open reckoning with the past

But for Roberts, the effect was deeply personal. She had recently become involved with Diving With a Purpose, a group of scuba divers whose mission is to discover the wrecks of the ships that carried enslaved Africans to the Americas. After seeing the issue, she reached out to National Geographic and applied for a grant from the society to document their story.

Tara Roberts, National Geographic explorer in residence. (Courtesy image)

That $30,000 grant allowed her to travel from Mozambique to Costa Rica and create a podcast series called “Into the Depths.” Roberts was featured on the magazine’s cover and was tapped as 2022’s Explorer of the Year, the first Black person to receive the award.

Roberts’ experience is a testament to the power of one organization’s decision to confront its past and let others be a part of the reckoning process. Approximately 1.8 million Africans died in the crossing from Africa, most of them forgotten to history.

“These people were poets and farmers. They were mothers and fathers,” Roberts said. “They were more than faceless statistics in a cargo hold. They were real people and they’ve never been properly mourned or grieved.”

It is difficult but empowering work, Roberts told the audience of communicators in California. “We have raised our hands and said we’re not going to wait for anyone else to decide this history is important. We are going to search for it ourselves and bring it back into memory.”

Roberts is now working with National Geographic on a new project. The Return Expedition is a reverse boat journey that will trace the route of the transatlantic slave trade across 27 countries. “It changed the world we live in today but we don’t really talk about it,” Roberts said.

Transparency in communications about history

Some brands are increasingly willing to talk. In 2020, the Scott Trust, owner of the Guardian and Observer newspapers in the UK, commissioned an academic review to look into the links between the paper’s founders and the slave trade. They published the results of that study in 2022, and issued an apology and announced a restorative justice program.

Volkswagen followed a similar route. The company was founded in 1937 by the German Labour Front, the national labor organization of the Nazi Party, said Landenberger, the company’s official historian.

“With such kind of history, you have to deal with it and you have to take responsibility,” Landenberger said.

That effort was led by the workers’ union and the board starting in the 1980s and culminated in a 10-year research project that delivered a 1,000-page report on the company’s founding by one of Germany’s leading historians.

Volkswagen also entered into a cooperative agreement with the Auschwitz Committee and funded a youth meeting center at the site. Company executives also take part regularly in Holocaust Remembrance Day and partner with groups like Yad Vashem in Israel and the Anti-Defamation League in the US.

Dieter Landenberger leads a group through the memorial to forced laborers at the Wolfsburg factory. (Courtesy image)

The company also established a small museum in a former air raid shelter at its Wolfsburg, Germany factory in 1999 that 4,000 people visit each year. During the war, forced laborers went into the shelter during Allied bombing raids.

“It’s not a nice place,” Landenberger said. “Not every visitor can take it, but I think it’s the best place for an exhibition like this.”

Connection, not marketing, drives the efforts

While it’s important to be open and invite others in, communicators have to find the right approach and tone. Volkswagen is open about its history but the company avoids doing active marketing with their efforts.

“If our partners communicate these projects, it’s OK, we’re happy,” Landenberger said. “But we do not do press releases saying we donated this amount of money, we did this program. We don’t want to do marketing with it, not at all.”

That’s not to say there is no communication. Volkswagen maintains a site that directly addresses its history and in January launched a social media campaign on Instagram sharing the stories of forced laborers in conjunction with Holocaust Remembrance Day.

“Transparency is the most important thing these days,” Landenberger said. “You cannot hide or deny anything. I always say history sticks. It sticks on the soles of your shoes and you cannot get rid of it.”

The post Corporate storytelling when the story is difficult: Volkswagen’s reckoning with its dark past appeared first on PR Daily.

Nothing is cozier and more comfortable than a Hallmark movie.

But over the last few years, Hallmark Media has been working hard to diversify its offerings and send the message that “love is for everyone.”

That meant ensuring a wide array of faces and cultures in its movies, but also in carrying those themes through to its social media accounts.

Sharmistha Chatterjee, director of social media marketing and audience strategy, engaged in a Power Conversation at Ragan’s Social Media Conference this March to explain just how they’ve helped share the love with everyone.

Know what you stand for

When communicating diversity and inclusion efforts, the first step is knowing what your brand stands for and how you’ll incorporate diversity into those broader themes.

“For Hallmark Media, we believe in love,” she said. “So how would I talk about love in the social media space, incorporating DE&I? I would say it’s a celebration of the different cultures, backgrounds, ethnicities, etc., that we portray in the film. Putting it together with your content, strategy and images that includes DE&I you showcase on our social media platforms is one way of communicating.”

She also recommends understanding the audiences you have on each platform. While the overarching messaging should remain consistent, the exact ways of communicating can vary based on various demographic makeups of each social channel.

Don’t work alone

Chatterjee recommended bringing in other departments early and often to improve your work. For instance, she reached out to the PR department to gain an understanding of what messaging they had that social media could weave into its efforts.

“I sometimes don’t have a lot of knowledge on what PR is doing,” she said. “But they communicate externally, they’re the first one to get those exclusive press stories. So I would encourage you as a thought leader, as somebody in social media to reach out proactively and get this kind of information.”

Watch Chatterjee’s full presentation for more insight on sharing the love, internally and externally.

These conversations will continue at Ragan’s Future of Communications conference in Austin, Texas, Nov. 13-15. Register now.

The post ‘Love is for everyone’: Consistent diversity and inclusion messaging across platforms appeared first on PR Daily.

Drew Leinonen and Juan Guerrero were in love.

“They were that obnoxious couple that, when they’re in a room full of 100 people, it’s like they don’t even know anybody else exists,” said Brandon Wolf, national press secretary for the  Human Rights Campaign —  and Drew’s best friend.

“We were the three musketeers who traveled together, we loved New Year’s Eve, twirling under a disco ball, making promises to each other.”

It was the kind of life that Wolf never thought that people like him — Black, gay, from a rural Oregon town — could experience.

And once he had it, it was a life and a love Wolf thought he would experience forever, with his best friend and his soon-to-be-fiancé. It felt like a life out of a storybook.

Then on June 12, 2016, a man opened fire at Pulse nightclub in Orlando and murdered 49 people. Almost all of the victims were LGBTQ+ people of color.

Wolf, who was washing his hands in the bathroom when the shooting began, survived. Drew and Juan, who had been in each other’s arms in the club, were killed.

That’s when Wolf’s storybook life turned into a very different kind of tale —  but one he knew he had to tell.

“I started sharing my story because I wanted Drew and Juan to matter,” Wolf said to a silent, intent crowd at PR Daily’s Media Relations Conference in Washington, D.C. “Not just because of how they died, but because of how they lived.”

As he began relating that story in speeches and through his bestselling book, “A Place for Us,” he found that it resonated, even with people who did not look like him or love like him.

“We are in a pivotal moment that demands we tell bold, authentic stories, that we step out and do the courageous thing,” Wolf said. “We have AI algorithms that are forcing us into social media ecosystems that simply tell us, over and over again, we’re the smartest person on earth and anyone who disagrees with us is wrong. We have distrust in traditional media institutions at sky-high levels, feeding disinformation behind the epidemic of loneliness, that is driving people to political ruptures.”

It is, Wolf said, through telling stories and sharing our authentic selves that we can even begin to heal the deep fissures between us — not only as a nation and a global community, but as human beings.

“We as professionals have a responsibility to help others understand that everyone has a story to tell, that everyone has value that they’re bringing to the table,” Wolf said. “We have a responsibility to tell people’s stories holistically.”

Carrying Drew’s casket at his funeral, Wolf made a vow to his best friend that he would build a world his best friend would be proud of. A world where everyone’s life, and everyone’s story, matters.

And as a PR professional himself, Wolf understands the unique role the profession has in creating that world. It’s through the power of storytelling that we can build empathy instead of hatred, connection instead of isolation, understanding instead of fear.

“The easy thing to do in society today is to give in to fear and isolation and sensationalism,” Wolf said. “It’s to tell the same old regurgitated stories over and over again, to pigeonhole people into their buckets. The courageous thing to do is to tell the comeback story. The courageous thing to do is to tell the whole story. The courageous thing to do is to pull at people’s natural desire for resilience and hope and optimism.”

Allison Carter is editor-in-chief of PR Daily. Follow her on X or LinkedIn.

The post Stories will save us: PR’s responsibility to the world appeared first on PR Daily.

Corporate and institutional reputations can sometimes be entangled in a painful past. Some organizations rebrand for a fresh start. Others put the scars of old wounds on display — a difficult step when brands today risk being “canceled” over their public, and even private, positions.

Look no further than Volkswagen for proof. The global auto giant’s roots are in Nazi Germany, a fact the company puts front and center in the first paragraph of its company history. The company even set up a memorial to the concentration camp prisoners and laborers forced to work in one World War II-era plant.

In a polarized environment, many public conversations focus on what keeps people apart rather than what brings them together. And when groups can’t even agree on the facts, communicators must decide: Are past stories worth retelling?

For Tara Roberts, storyteller, adventurer and a National Geographic Explorer of the Year, now is precisely the time to dive deep – literally.

Roberts, the first African American female explorer featured on the cover of the magazine, is now telling the story of Diving With a Purpose, a group of underwater explorers on a mission to find and preserve the submerged evidence of the estimated 1,000 ships that wrecked over the course of the transatlantic slave trade.

Her pioneering work shows how companies can use the power of keeping and telling stories to have productive conversations about emotionally charged topics.

Taking ownership of the past begins a more productive conversation

Between the 16th and 19th centuries, more than 12 million Africans were enslaved and brought to the Americas on the 12,000 ships that sailed from Europe to Africa and the Americas. It’s estimated that as many as 1.8 million died in transit.

Acknowledging that past and honoring the pain it continues to cause is a first step in moving beyond the feelings of pain or guilt. It’s also the beginning of a shared understanding. Roberts explained how Europe, Africa, North America, South America and the Caribbean are deeply interconnected because of the slave trade.

“With this history, we’ve been afraid to really see it and look at it,” she said. “If we approach it from a loving perspective, we’re also seeing that this can be a history that brings us together instead of a history that pulls us apart.”

Finding your purpose

Becoming an undersea explorer and adventurer is an unlikely outcome for a bookish kid growing up in landlocked Atlanta in the 1980s. Roberts’ story begins with her mother, a reading teacher who would often return from conferences with boxes of books.

Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time” was a favorite. Like all good storytellers, L’Engle created connections with readers.

That early influence grew into her ambition to tell stories of her own and eventually led her to the work she’s doing now. Roberts wants to bring those stories back into memoryand broaden the historical perspective of the slave trade.

“We look through a sort of singular lens,” she said. “But this is complicated, nuanced, ambiguous history that is served best when you’ve got a lot of voices in the room telling their own truths.”

Roberts is now at work on her next project, “The Return Expedition,” a reverse journey by boat that recreates the route of the transatlantic slave trade and will travel to 27 countries over the next year and a half.

It’s a story that resonates for communicators today who find themselves confronting topics like race and responsibility as business views on DE&I and ESG policies become more difficult.

Moving beyond blame and division with storytelling

For communicators, the message is to acknowledge what employees may be feeling and provide channels with clear guidelines for people to express those feelings. Discomfort is a necessary part of the process.

“When you are looking at the broad strokes of things, it’s so easy to see people in stereotypes,” Roberts said. “But when you start to deal with people individually, it is a whole different ballgame.”

Developing historical storytelling skills can help guide people through difficult conversations and create a shared purpose and vision, if they’re ready to embrace the opportunity.

Choosing to keep those stories alive may be risky, but it is also a reclamation of integrity. As with many challenges, the journey begins with a question, Roberts said.

“Who are we being inside of those companies and how are we using the resources that we have to really move forward this conversation in the world right now?” she asked.

Tara Roberts, National Geographic Explorer in Residence, will be speaking at the Ragan Communications Leadership Council Member Retreat in May. For more information on becoming a CLC member, visit commscouncil.ragan.com.

Mike Prokopeak is director of learning and council content for Ragan Communications. Follow him on LinkedIn.

The post How retelling historical stories helps communicators navigate difficult topics appeared first on PR Daily.

At their worst, speeches can be cold recitations of facts and figures that no one will remember past the moment they’re spoken.

At their best, they can be soaring oration that change hearts, stick in minds and impact the world.

Which they are depends in some measure on the person delivering it. But even the best orator on the planet can’t turn a dry speech into a masterpiece. Good speeches begin at the writing table, but the very best speeches begin with a story.

During Ragan’s recent Public Affairs & Speechwriting Virtual Conference, Michael Ricci, former speechwriter and director of communications for House Speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan, and Nick Lanyi, media relations and crisis communications expert for RCG, explored how to use speechwriting to project optimism and stability in even the most difficult times. The keys are in emotion, empathy and storytelling.

“Just the insecurity, the stress of everything going on in the world requires some empathy,,” Lanyi said. “But it can’t be faked, it’s got to be there. Sometimes words alone will be helpful, but you want to encourage your principal to be able to convey that.”

Why storytelling matters

Speechwriting, Lanyi notes, is a unique form of communication. People can’t follow along with what you’re saying in real-time. They can’t rewind or re-read. They have to be in the moment.

“If all you’re talking about is abstract concepts or lists or descriptions unrelated to anything human, people are going to lose interest,” Lanyi said. “Whereas if you have a story that is about people struggling to try to achieve something important and the ups and downs they go through, people’s brains actually literally get turned on. They’re emotionally connected and they’re much more likely to hear what you have to say.”

These stories can follow a very simple arc, not so dissimilar from the classic Hero’s Journey:

• Find stories involving human beings (occasionally cute animals!) that speakers can use to demonstrate what they’re talking about. It gives the audience someone to root for.
• Show what that person wants to accomplish.
• Show what stands in their way.
• Show what happens – the good and the bad.

Not everything is a story, but it can make an argument come alive.

“Almost every practiced politician is going to talk about healthcare or the economy and then very quickly talk about real people doing stuff,” Lanyi said.

Indeed, finding a humanizing figure is such a hallowed part of politics, it even has its own name: Lenny Skutnik. Read more about the real Skutnik and the speechwriting trope.

The importance of a villain

Of course, all great stories need a villain. At a minimum, this is an obstacle that the person in the story must overcome to triumph: an industry, your competition, broader economic trends. But Ricci found that personifying that villain has greater impacts.

When he worked for then-Speaker of the House John Boehner, the natural villain was his Democratic counterpart, Senate Leader Harry Reid. But for a long time, Boehner wanted to maintain good relations with Reid and avoided naming him in speeches. Instead, the villain was the nebulous “the senate.”

But once the speechwriting team was given the greenlight to make Reid a proper villain, the messages hit more directly. The response was stronger on social media. [Any specific figures to back this up?-MK]

“When people see the good and the evil in your story, it has more impact,” Ricci said.

Ultimately, facts rarely change people’s mind. Emotions do. Building speeches around humans is the surest way to get people to remember and act.

Watch the full presentation below.

The post How and why to craft speeches based around emotion appeared first on PR Daily.

The term “high tech” conjures mental images of gleaming buildings of steel and glass gleaming along the northern California coastline, or piercing through the clouds of lower Manhattan.

They probably don’t conjure thoughts of Iowa cornfields.

But John Deere is working to change that.

“We’ve gone through this tech journey to try to adapt ourselves from a traditional legacy manufacturing company to a tech company,” said Franklin Peitz, tech & innovation manager for John Deere. Those efforts include major activations at CES and now, a social media campaign with an influencer better known for his cellphone reviews than his knowledge of soil conditions and corn futures.

That’s entirely the point.

With so many people living in urban areas and having less interaction with the agricultural sector, many Americans don’t take the time to think of where their food comes from beyond the grocery store. John Deere wants to change the conversation from thinking of farmers are unsophisticated and old-fashioned to cutting-edge.

“These are highly complex businessmen and women that are operating across, at some points, 30 to 60 miles of farmland, and all these different pieces of equipment in different areas,” Peitz said. “There’s a lot of money invested in a farm to be profitable and productive and also sustainable. We’re trying to get that message out to the larger community outside of just agriculture in rural America.”

That’s where David Cogen, also known as TheUnlockr, comes in. With 770,000 YouTube subscribers and tens of thousands of subscribers each on Instagram and X, he’s best known cellphone reviews, though he also offers a series called Decodr, which offers deep-dive explainers on topics like how induction cooking works.

But he also has a deep passion for farming and food that he can trace back to his pandemic binge watch show: “Clarkson’s Farm,” headlined by “Top Gear” star Jeremy Clarkson.

“I started watching that show and just was fascinated by all the stuff that was happening. And it was shortly after that, John Deere offered me a trip to a farm,” Cogen told PR Daily.

That was three or four years ago. Since then, they’ve done several influencer activations together. And as John Deere’s influencer program grew, they kept getting one specific request: have an influencer do the farming rather than just visiting a plot.

“And so we thought of this idea: It’d be really neat to give someone the whole experience from soup to nuts, right from tillage all the way through planting and crop protection and then ultimately harvest to be able to understand agriculture, the challenges that our farmers face, and how they’re using our technology today to be more productive and profitable and sustainable,” Peitz said.

By May – or maybe sooner, as the Midwest has been unseasonably warm – Cogen will visit his temporary farm, 20 acres not far from Des Moines, Iowa to plant his crop. He’ll return several times over the growing season and be responsible for every aspect of the process, from what seeds to plant to applying herbicides, harvesting and even selling the corn.

He’ll be documenting it along the way with plenty of content for his social channels. He’ll also create both Instagram Reels as well as at least one longer piece for YouTube. Cogen is confident that even though his audience tends more to city slicker than field hand, they’ll find something to like in his farm-centric content.

“I think just following along the journey is valuable to everybody,” Cogen said. “And I think as long as I feel like I can capture the experience in a very authentic way, even through my bumbling and things that I’m going to not do well, because I don’t know what I’m doing.”

But he’s not alone in figuring out what he needs to do. In addition to John Deere’s experts, Cogen has also been teamed up with an actual farmer, who he refers to as his “phone a friend.” Chelsey Erdmann, a North Dakota farmer and rancher, will be Cogen’s mentor through the experience. Right now, Cogen says she’s helping him understand the complicated world of corn futures. As part of the PR campaign, she’s also helping John Deere’s message reach their legacy audience of agriculturalists with her own 80,000+ Instagram followers.

There is an element of danger here: Cogen could fail. And there is no plan B. But that’s just part of a farmer’s life, Cogen said.

“Regardless of whether I turn a profit or I don’t, the story is still there. And the things that I want to tell and show, it’s still interesting to for people to see it. Because it’s thin margins. And rain could change everything. It’s just fascinating.”

But there’s one payoff that Cogen is looking forward to even more than the possibility of a bumper corn crop: riding in the comfortable cab of a massive John Deere combine to harvest his corn.

“There’s a weird complex when you just sit in that giant machine, and you’re just like, ‘oh, have all of the power.’ It’s just fun.”

Allison Carter is editor-in-chief of PR Daily. Follow her on X or LinkedIn.

The post Why John Deere is targeting tech by sending an influencer to farm appeared first on PR Daily.

Whether it’s a child identifying with a Disney princess who shares their skin tone, a teen yearning to see themselves represented in their sports heroes or an employee seeing people like them in the highest echelons of leadership, stories are key to crafting DE&I narratives that inspire real action and change. 

Kimberly Henderson, digital workplace technology lead for Mars, shared practical tips for creating compelling narratives that foster a sense of belonging during Ragan’s recent Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Certificate Course.  

Building stories of inclusion 

While many of Henderson’s techniques focus specifically on internal communications, they can also work for externally focused campaigns. For instance, from her checklist on what stories must include: 

• Start from the top with real life examples from executives. This can also work well for employer branding campaigns, community involvement campaigns and campaigns in historically marginalized communities. Showing that your executive team truly cares and is involved in DE&I is a valuable marketing tool, as research shows.  
• Demonstrate vulnerability, so others feel comfortable and compelled to share their story, too. Again, this is great advice for an external audience. Being vulnerable and real in your storytelling is going to make it easier for people to see themselves in what you’re doing — either as an employee or as a customer.  
• Show the impact and the “so what?” to emphasize the benefits for self and company. And the benefits for your customers, of course.  
• Reflect the diversity of the company and its employees, spotlighting the workforce across geographies, departments and cultures. These can all work well for outside audiences, or you can encourage customers to share their stories of finding belonging and inclusion within your brand. Showcasing a range of diversity in all its forms means more people will see themselves in your own story. 

Henderson offered suggestions for creating a campaign of stories — perfect for either an intranet or a social media campaign. 

• A campaign-style approach (e.g., series set) to collecting and release stories.  
• Using various voices for balance of perspectives (e.g., Hierarchical roles working together) to tell authentic stories for impact. 
• Branding the series (e.g., “Fearless and Courageous Stories”) to capture attention.  
• Tie stories to existing diversity events or initiatives. 
• Include a call to action for additional stories within those we share. 

Go forth and tell stories.  See Henderson’s full presentation here. 

The post How to incorporate storytelling into DE&I appeared first on PR Daily.

Mike Nachshen is president & owner of Fortis Strategic Communications, LLC. 

Once upon a time, you may have heard a senior communications leader say, “Storytelling is the most important skill a communicator can have.” 

If you were like me, you might have even believed it once. But in a PR skills cage match, strategy beats storytelling any day of the week. 

That’s not to say storytelling doesn’t have an important place in the Communications pantheon. It does. In fact, storytelling driven by strategy is one of the cornerstones of a successful communications effort. 

According to author, historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari we humans are “storytelling animals [who] think in stories rather than in numbers or graphs, and believe… the universe itself works like a story, replete with heroes and villains, conflicts and resolutions, climaxes and happy endings.” 

A skilled communicator understands there’s something in the DNA of our species that gives storytelling universal appeal and uses this insight to captivate their audience. They can turn the driest topic into a riveting call-to-action and deliver a message so effectively that the audience wants more.   

The true core of being an effective communicator isn’t in the telling of tales.  

It’s in the strategic approach driving the storytelling.  

Because without a communications strategy, storytelling is simply entertainment.  

Becoming a communications strategist isn’t something that happens overnight. It starts with asking hard questions and doing your homework. 

One of the most important questions a communicator can ever ask is, “What is the business strategy?” Just as important are the questions, “Who is our audience?” and “What do they really care about?” Together, these questions can guide an effective communications strategy.  

To understand the business strategy, you need to have an intimate knowledge of your organization’s business model. This means going beyond mission statements and talking points. It’s about having a fundamental understanding of what keeps the lights on and pays the CEO’s salary. 

The audience may not be who you initially thought they were. And once you do understand who you’re really trying to reach, it’s critical to dig deep and understand what motivates them. Go beyond superficial answers and interpretations and uncover what their true interests and needs are. 

This approach applies whether you’re at a Fortune 50, a non-profit, government agency or in any other kind of organization you can imagine. 

For example, I once worked at a publicly traded Fortune 100 technology company that was trying to bring a new product to market in the federal contracting space.  

When I was brought in to lead the communications effort around the project, the program director was beyond excited about what he called “eye-watering” new technology. He said “give me a press release” to tell “the whole world” about our revolutionary new capability. 

But after asking some questions and doing my research, I learned that our launch customer — the government agency that was paying us to develop this technology – was already all in. Provided we accomplished certain technical milestones, which we were on track to reach, we’d get paid.  

But communications still had an important role to play in this – and one that had nothing to do with telling our story to the entire world. 

The real problem – the business problem — was that our customer’s parent organization thought the project was a complete waste of tax dollars. They wanted to scrap the project entirely, and no amount of great storytelling about eye-watering technology was going to persuade them otherwise. 

But, after doing additional research, I learned that the parent agency was focused on solving an entirely different problem. Congress, the press and other important stakeholders were asking the parent agency a lot of hard questions about this problem. 

Our solution had the capability to solve that problem. But we had never publicly talked about that use case, because up until now, we’d only talked about how cool the technology was. 

That changed. 

Armed with a deep insight into what the business really needed to achieve to succeed, and what our customer and their parent organization really cared about, I was able to develop a communications strategy that looked very different from what the program director asked for. 

Instead of talking about technology, my team and I focused our energy on creating a compelling story about how our solution could solve the parent organization’s problem. And we didn’t blast out a series of press releases to the world – we focused on placing our message where key decision makers would see it. 

The approach worked. Not only did the parent organization fund our progress payments, but they gave the customer additional funding so we could do more. 

Storytelling was important – but it was strategy that enabled my team and I to tell the right story to the right audience. 

Ultimately, strategy lies at the intersection of understanding and mastering the tools at your disposal, the organizational goals, the business landscape, and the needs of the audience. By digging deep into the business problem and constantly asking questions we can all become better strategic thinkers and communicators – and that’s no fable. 

The post Why strategy beats storytelling every time appeared first on PR Daily.

Data can tell beautiful stories. Having hard numbers can give credibility to anecdotal stories and elevate a ho-hum business happening to a broader trend story. 

But there are major pitfalls to dealing with data, too. 

“Data without insights is chaos. It’s too much to digest,” Trovon C. Williams, senior vice president of Marketing and Communications for the NAACP said during Ragan’s recent Future of Communications conference. 

Along with fellow panelist Matt Ward, head of Communications for Corebridge Financial, Williams stressed the need to give shape and context to numbers. Getting your hands on cold, hard data is great, but it’s only the first step. 

You have to marry data with creativity, Williams said, in order to create a beautiful picture. 

Here are 10 tips to do just that. 

1. Data is only as good as your inputs, Ward said. If the data is flawed, the story will be too. Ensure you’re pulling the right information from the right sources. 
2. But how exactly do you know what the “right information” is? Ward said that at Corebridge Financial, they just flat-out asked their audiences what kinds of data they’re most interested in. From there, they tied that data to goals, built tactics and then measured. That allowed them to build a story around why their data matters. Your data must have a purpose, Ward advised, that ladders up to something bigger.  
3. Who are your audiences for data-based storytelling? It can vary widely, from journalists you’re pitching to existing or prospective customers to internal audiences – even your executive leadership.  
4. Telling stories to leadership helps them contextualize your victories, Williams said. Your CEO might not care that you’ve hit a million Instagram followers, but if you can explain that most of those customers are directly in your demographic sweet spot and are engaging with content, suddenly that milestone means a lot more. 
5. Make sure you’re customizing data for each individual audience you’re reaching. “Your data allows you to be a smart creator,” Williams said. No one is speaking to a single audience, so use data-driven insights to segment your messaging to your target. 
6. Authenticity is determining what things you have the right to talk about and own, then using the data to substantiate themes, Ward says. “If you’re meeting people where they are, you have a higher chance of being authentic.” 
7. Sometimes being authentic means finding the gaps and realizing where you aren’t meeting the moment, Williams says. The NAACP is in history books – and they’ll stay in history books if they don’t read the data right, he said. 
8. Using the same messaging across platforms is lazy and does not allow us to reach our audiences as we need to, Williams said. 
9. When you’re working with data, there’s an inclination to include everything. Simplify. Pick one or two points, Ward advises. 
10. Help news outlets tell the story you want them to tell by providing the data necessary to support it, Williams said. 

Numbers can seem cold and matter-of-fact. But in the hands of a skilled communicator, they can form a foundation for stories that appeal to a variety of audiences. It’s merely up to us to coax those stories free and get them in the hands of the right people at the right time.  

What are your tips for better storytelling through data?  

Allison Carter is editor-in-chief of PR Daily. Follow her on Twitter or LinkedIn. 

The post 10 tips for telling better stories with data appeared first on PR Daily.

Lisette Paras is founder and president of Gravitate PR. 

Ask any PR professional what can help a company validate its messages or story, and the answer is unequivocally “data.” Whether it’s in the form of findings from a consumer survey, aggregate information from a company’s technology platform or commissioned analysis from a market research firm, an organization that possesses data is storyteller’s gold.  

 Research can help to reinforce a company’s messaging and perspectives on a topic or trend. It can be used to educate and interest key audiences. It can be used as a form of thought leadership for the company, helping position them as an authority. And it can be maximized across a variety of functions and channels – whether that’s sales teams using the data to support conversations with prospects, or PR teams using it to create news to help drive media coverage.  

Given the value placed on data within an organization, it’s natural for companies to look to maximize this with PR efforts, writing and launching “state of the industry” style reports. Unfortunately, I’ve come across many companies that have spent an exorbitant amount of time and resources on gathering data and compiling it into a report – only to find that its efforts to drive attention to it fall flat.   

Here are the top five reasons why PR efforts to amplify data-driven content have been unsuccessful.    

1. The data fails to tell a compelling narrative. 

After analyzing the data, but before writing a report or compiling it into marketing or PR assets, it’s important to look at it through the lens of what the overall narrative should be. How do all the individual findings tell a bigger story? What are the most interesting aspects to highlight and why? What are the takeaways for the key audiences who would benefit from reading the research report? It takes a skilled, data-driven storyteller to not just interpret data, but interpret it into a compelling narrative. Attempting to write the narrative before the data is interpreted won’t work. 

2. The data is too complicated.

There can be a risk of having too much data. Even if there are dozens of data points and findings, it’s important to not overwhelm the viewer/reader by having a barrage of information thrown their way. Instead, storytellers should be selective in the data they choose to incorporate and use it to ladder up to a compelling set of messages, narratives and takeaways.  

Even if the company operates in a highly technical and jargon-laden industry, it’s critical to communicate the findings in a way that is simple and straightforward. If the data is somewhat complex, use real-world examples, anecdotes, or charts and graphs to illustrate the impact of the data.  

3. The data is overtly self-serving.  

While commissioned research inherently has some connection to what the company does or stands for, the data needs to tell a story that doesn’t sound like an advertisement. Some version of, “Fast food company’s research finds that hamburgers are good for you” is going to get more skeptical eyerolls than interested eyeballs reading further. A company shouldn’t be looking to use research as the main way to aggressively sell its products or services – such verbiage is better used for direct sales tactics than for expecting it will resonate through PR.   

4. The data is not statistically viable.

Conducting research can be an extensive and expensive endeavor. Particularly for companies in a niche market or focused on a specific audience, insights from a small number of respondents may already prove immensely valuable. However, sharing this with media outlets may not be as effective as the data needs to be statistically significant for reporters to find the research credible in speaking to a topic or trend. As a rule of thumb, for U.S.specific reports, it’s safe to have at least 300 business decision makers for enterprise-level research, while consumer-focused surveys require at least 1,000 respondents. If the research extends to additional countries, then these numbers will need to be further adjusted to what is considered statistically viable in those markets as well.  

5. The data is not maximized across all channels. 

There’s a ton of effort involved in creating a report, from coming up with the topic for a data-focused report, developing the methodology, crafting the research questions, analyzing the findings, and drafting, editing, and finalizing the copy and other supporting materials (whew!). So it’s certainly critical to make sure that there’s a clear strategy, plan and timeline from the onset of how to maximize visibility.  

While the report may be the main asset, it can also be sliced and diced into different materials – a brief video, presentation or series of blog posts – and incorporated into sales, marketing, and PR-focused content. This content  can be uploaded onto the company website, corporate social media pages, injected into editorial op-eds. Moreover, the breadth of the data means that it doesn’t need to all launch at once – rather, compelling research has a long tail in which it can be referenced well after it’s unveiled, sequentially through a series of channels.  

Strike gold once, keep mining   

Setting up a data-driven storytelling program can take some time at the onset. However, once you’ve developed the right approach, it can be a rewarding, ongoing endeavor! As an organization’s business and industry evolves, so should the data it extracts to help refine and progress their stories. Data should not only be used as a strategic and creative initiative to support a company’s goals, but also be clear and compelling to the audiences a company is aiming to reach. If PR professionals want to strike data gold, they’ve got to know how and where to dig.  

The post 5 mistakes in data-driven pitches appeared first on PR Daily.

Jennifer Daniel is associate director at Craft.

In today’s digital age, content is king – but not just any content. For PR pros and brand storytellers, the pressure is on to craft written material that captivates, informs, and drives results. Whether you’re writing for email marketing, social media, blog posts, or op-eds, here’s the ultimate listicle to elevate your content creation game: 

1. Don’t bury the lede: Respect your readers’ time and grab their attention from the get-go.  Free tools like Headline Studio can analyze your headlines for optimal traffic, engagement and SEO. 
2. Feel the feels: Just as a painter uses a palette of colors to create a vivid canvas, the best writing evokes a spectrum of emotions in its readers – whether happiness, sadness, or inspiration. Pose relatable questions that tap into universal human experiences, and don’t shy away from literary devices like metaphors, similes and allegories to further enhance your copy. 
3. Take it from Twain: Would you use an SAT word at a bar? Would you call a banana a yellow, elongated piece of fruit? Most likely not, so don’t use it in your social media caption either. Ditch the jargon, and remember, “don’t use a 5-dollar word when a 50-cent word will do.”  
4. An anecdote is the antidote: Humans are innately drawn to stories. They provide context, make abstract concepts relatable and ignite emotions. Whenever possible, share case studies, statistics, and testimonials to build trust and credibility, especially in an age of information overload. 
5. Buzz off, buzzwords: Say goodbye to cliches like “innovate,” “disrupt,” and “unprecedented.” For a refreshing take, check out Lake Superior’s list of the most overused phrases from 1976 – present. 
6. Ignite a spark: Opt for language that evokes curiosity, challenges perspectives, or paints vivid imagery. Propel your narrative forward with strong statements like: “In a shocking move by Congress…” or, “It’s disheartening that…” 
7. Avoid platitudes and hedging: If it goes without saying, don’t say it. Additionally, words like “just” and “actually” can express hesitation or uncertainty and lessen the impact of your writing – stop using them.  
8. Less is more: Practice the rule of thirds, and when you finish your initial draft, shorten it by ⅓. You can also take a page out of Axios’ playbook: the Smart Brevity format is becoming the gold standard for concise, yet impactful reporting. 
9. Understand the relationship between repetition and retention: Consistency builds trust. Whether it’s your brand voice, visuals, or values, studies show that people need to see a message at least seven times before it sinks in. But you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. For example, try repurposing a blog post into an infographic, podcast or video series for social media. Each touch point should echo the overarching brand message to ensure resonance.  
10. Different strokes for different folks: While your primary audience should always be at the forefront, today’s digital terrain demands a versatile strategy. Dive into analytics to segment your audience by behavior, preferences or demographics, and ensure your content mix resonates directly with these specific sub-groups. 

Content marketing is an art and a science. And with these tenets top of mind, you’ll be well on your way to creating content that is compelling and impactful.

The post Crafting content that connects: A PR pro’s guide to digital storytelling in the modern era appeared first on PR Daily.

As your average vertical video creator grows up, so too do the marketing and PR industries that rely on their creative labor. These individuals who concept, script, draft, shoot, caption, publish, distribute and publicize the content they create — often on behalf of brands  understand more about their role, importance and stake in the future of social media than ever before.

This evolution in the social and mobile-first video space is driven by a variety of factors, including: More states and cities implementing TikTok bans on government devices, a demand for transparency and demonstrable authenticity in brand content, influencer snafus and pitfalls by major brands.

In PR Daily’s recent Social Media Crash Course webinar, experts from major brands — and even the U.S. military — gave us a look at where things are and where they’re going with creator partnerships.

How has the creator and influencer economy changed?

Since TikTok’s surge in 2019 and 2020, the boom and continued growth of the creator economy made the case for brands to connect with audiences on a more personal and less curated level.

Scrappy, conversational content became a primary mode of entertainment for billions of people — driving outsized brand awareness and even sales for brands that tap into it. Audiences seek relationships with creators and value the brands that they do.

This sped up the marketing creation process and made it more critical than ever for brands to engage via this medium.

“When people go to look for information, if you’re not out there with your brand and marketing what you have to say about an issue, somebody’s going to talk on your behalf,” said Alan Black, director of corporate communications for the U.S. Naval Surface Warfare Center Dalgren Division.

Today, creators and influencers are savvier than they once were. It’s no longer just celebrities and traditional influencers asking to be paid for a relationship with their audience.

“A lot of them are requiring payment. And that includes micro-influencers, nano-influencers, macro and superstars, which is not surprising and their work needs to be counted for,” said Jonathan Pinkerton, senior social media manager for Hyatt.

“The shift I’ve seen is we are more likely to be able to partner with a lot of international influencers for less compensation, though over the past few months we’re starting to see some of them up their costs or require payment.”

How do these changes impact brand-creator partnerships?

Reels and TikTok are no longer just about entertainment — they’re about discovery. 40% of Gen Zers use these platforms instead of Google as their primary search engine, whether it’s to keep up on current events, find a good book to read, or to figure out where they’re going to eat or go on vacation.

That means creating content with searchability in mind — using descriptive keywords and alt text, for example — is critical to brand success in the vertical video format, and a collaborative relationship with creators can facilitate that objective.

“Take some time to evaluate what your strategic direction is for your organization, what your goals are, and be realistic about what your staff capabilities are and the volume that it’s going to take to enter into a new social channel,” said Adeta Gayah, director of social media and content at Visit Orlando.

“We do a mix of people who are trying to get us the reach and really tell our story on a larger scale,” added Pinkerton, “and then we also have folks who are going to create content for us so that we can own the content from our own accounts.”

Some brands may find that partnering with multiple creators for single videos or one-off campaigns creates more impact. “Ideally we always go in one on one just because we know how vast and how big the influencer and creator market is right now,” Pinkerton continued. “But we always hope that it’s a relationship.”

One thing he looks for is how quickly a creator will turn around quality content: Meeting deadlines signals an interest in an ongoing creator partnership.

Another key is tailoring the content to the platform it appears on. Despite the platform similarities, Instagram audiences differ from TikTok audiences in demographics and content preferences. Hyatt and Visit Orlando use more produced, POV content on Instagram, inviting viewers to immerse themselves aspirationally, while TikTok creators tend to star in their videos, and demonstrate themselves staying at hotels.

As for finding these people and ensuring that they’re appropriately aligned with the brand’s objectives, Gayah said that Visit Orlando uses Klear when vetting influencers to ensure that they will speak to the correct market or demographic, as well as Sprout Social to measure success.

How can marketers and brands prepare?

Expect to pay creators of all sizes: Functions of generating income from social content, such as TikTok’s creator fund, are now split so many ways among an increasing pool, that it’s no longer a means of surviving. Creators who are looking to establish relationships with brands will expect to be paid.

Embrace your niche: TikTok and Reels creators have set a new standard for expressions of brand authenticity, transparency and purpose. Those brands that lean into their interest communities — those that can benefit and learn from a brand’s expertise, products, services and fandom — are in a position to contribute and engage in a meaningful way with people who share their passions.

Pay attention and measure: Ensure you’re up on the latest regulations, content moderation policies and community dynamics of each platform and are moderating opportunities, risks and benefits.

The post How brand-creator partnerships are evolving appeared first on PR Daily.

PR pros love referring to themselves as storytellers.

But what does this mean in practice? Especially if you’re working for a company that maybe doesn’t naturally lend itself to storytelling — say, a B2B firm or a SaaS product?

Pamela Anderson is PR lead at Next PR, and works with many of these kinds of businesses to share their stories with the media and their broader audiences. She believes that any business has a tale to tell — if you know how to look.

“Really, the way to get people to touch into some of those emotions more is to connect it back to your brand values, your mission, your vision,” she told PR Daily during a recent interview.

Here are some ways that she injects the concept of storytelling into the industries she serves — and ideas on how you can too.

Founder forward

There have been at least three movies telling how Peter Parker became Spider-Man — four if you count Miles Morales in “Into the Spider-Verse.”

Why? People love an origin story. And that applies for both superheroes and companies.

“In the B2B (space), in the software space, I would say a lot of the traditional storytelling you’re gonna think of is that founder story,” Anderson said.

Many companies are good at tying the founder to their core principles for internal communications, but many overlook it as an external tool. The key, Anderson said, is to connect it to your core principles and values.

“What does founding your company evoke for you?” Anderson queried. “And then taking it to the next step and say, okay, how can we bring that to your customers? And to those who may be reading about you as well?”

But what if you don’t have that founder story to lead the way? What if you have a problematic founder or just a dull story?

Anderson says in some circles, there is a movement away from founder origin stories. After all, we’ve seen that go terribly wrong with the likes of Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried. Tech journalists in particular are becoming more cautious about lauding a founder.

But that opens the door for a new storyteller: your customers.

“I think those are sometimes even better place to start than necessarily your founder, especially when you start getting into telling stories for certain communities, you want to make sure it’s authentic, and that person is from the community,” Anderson explained. “And so you should be looking kind of everywhere within your communications.”

But it’s important to make your request of a customer as simple as possible. Explain to them the benefit in it for them if they take this step, and do all that you can to soothe their nerves. That might mean offering media training, or offering to let them do the testimonial in the format that’s easiest for them, whether that’s a video, a written piece or even a facilitated interview that you then turn into a finished piece.

“You can find that comfort zone instead of just asking, broadly, ‘could you tell your story for us on every medium in every (medium) possible?’” Anderson said.

In the vein of getting the medium right, our stories are getting shorter. These days, they’re often contained in a tweet or a TikTok, not an epic poem told over the course of many nights around the fire.

How can we condense these stories to a single bite?

“It’s really narrowing in on, this is the most important element for PR professionals. Or in writing, cutting back,” Anderson said. “Because when these emotions and these human stories really start to be put into writing … it can get very long. So it usually takes a couple iterations to get the story right.”

The power of consistency

A story gains power the more it’s told. But often in PR, we forget that we must keep reinforcing a message over and over again. A story that’s told only once can seem inauthentic.

Anderson pointed to two moments many brands seize upon: Juneteenth and Pride.

“We’re going to see a lot of brands start to tell these, hopefully, impactful stories about what their company means to that community, how they’re supporting those communities. That can seem very inauthentic if they are only doing it during this one month of the year and if they’re not continuing to reaffirm in multiple formats why this is important to them,” Anderson cautioned.

Ultimately, good storytelling simply sticks with us, long after an ad is forgotten, Anderson said.

“Companies come to me and say, ‘I want to be a generational brand, I want to be one that that sticks in people’s mind for more than just this one moment in time,’ then storytelling is a very key component that they have to have in their marketing mix.”

Allison Carter is executive editor of PR Daily. Follow her on Twitter or LinkedIn.

The post Incorporating storytelling into a B2B campaign appeared first on PR Daily.

In a hectic media landscape where negative news can go viral in an instant, one PR pro reinforces sharing positive stories, whether through integrated comms strategies or finding pitch-worthy material internally.

Dan Landson, Southwest Airlines’ public relations advisor, likes to soar above the negativity and combat it with messaging that garners interest from internal stakeholders, the public and, of course, the media.

Landson will speak about the ins and outs of integrated communication strategies at the PR Daily Media Relations Conference, June 5-6 in Washington, D.C. Read on for a sneak peek at what he’ll discuss and learn about his initial interest with Southwest.

You don’t have to look far to find your stories

Southwest Airlines is one of the larger airlines in the country. When transporting over 130 million passengers in the sky annually and employing over 66,000 people, there’s bound to be some media coverage along the way.

Landson talked about his initial interest with Southwest after meeting a flight attendant at his first job at a grocery store. He said that discovering those employee-centric moments are culture-building stories that should be told.

“It’s those stories that bring us together but if you don’t hear about those stories, you’re not going to know that Southwest exists as an employer of choice,” Landson said. “But as a PR professional, we get to tell amazing stories of our 66,000 employees. There are incredible people that work for us.”

The mechanics of integrated comms

Landson said that a lot of positivity can come from telling those stories, among others, and sharing good news externally and internally.

“In public relations, it is so important to be aware of all communication activities that are happening,” Landson said of being in sync from beginning to end. “Whether that’s a marketing email or an internal email or internal story and then how does that affect your external story and external messaging? They all have to be intertwined. They all have to be scheduled appropriately and also all have to be written in a manner that’s easy to understand by the audience’s that you’re trying to reach.”

Honing in on integrated media strategies also requires PR pros to build trust, Landson said.

“You’ve got to be able to really lead the conversation to become a trusted counselor among your peers and counterparts at your business and your agency,” Landson said. “You want to become the trusted voice, the trusted seat, and the more trust you build, the more visibility you have, the better chance you have of building and developing stronger and more impactful communication strategies.”

Building media relationships

Landson said that media coverage might not always be favorable but navigating through turbulent skies can go a long way.

“As we say, we can’t ensure anything but what we  can do is really get to know our journalists that cover the industry,” Landson said. “Get to build relationships with those who ultimately become a trusted individual that you can go to bounce story ideas off of, help pitch proactive and exclusive stories with. Ultimately, bringing them to your front door to show them your company’s ways so that they have a much better understanding of what you’re trying to do and what you’re trying to accomplish.”

Landson talked about grappling with Southwest’s issues in December where major flight delays stranded thousands of passengers.

“This was an unprecedented situation for our company and our communication team,” Landson said, adding that the team came together quickly to figure out the best communication tactics.

“Every day we regrouped to discuss what worked, what didn’t work, what we can change.”

Landson said the company listened to journalists and what they needed for coverage, took that information back to the team and regrouped their strategies.

“One of the most important pieces of being in public relations is listening to your audiences,” he said.

Sherri Kolade is a writer at Ragan Communications. When she is not with her family, she enjoys watching Alfred Hitchcock-style films, reading and building an authentically curated life that includes more than occasionally finding something deliciously fried. Follow her on LinkedIn. Have a great PR story idea? Email her at sherrik@ragan.com. 

The post Southwest’s Dan Landson talks gaining media traction through positive storytelling appeared first on PR Daily.

Hopefully by now you’ve at least begun to explore some of the ways generative AI can fit into your communications workflow. If not, take a second to get some inspiration.

But maybe you still aren’t getting the responses you want from ChatGPT. Maybe what you’re getting is too general or too specific. Maybe it’s still not answering your questions at all.

Think of generative AI tools as calculators. They can do a lot of work for you, but ultimately the human being still must give it the right inputs to work with.

That’s where crafting a great prompt comes in.

AI can’t read minds – yet. So it’s up to us to guide it in such a way that it spits out answers we can use.

Here are a few tips for writing prompts that will make generative AI tools work better for you.

Be specific.

An AI tool isn’t a search engine. Even if it’s integrated into one, as with my personal favorite tool, the Bing/ChatGPT integration, you still talk to it in fundamentally different ways to get quality responses. Whereas on Google you’re likely typing in only a few words or a sentence at most to get results back, you can easily write a whole paragraph on ChatGPT.

For instance, you might want to tell the bot what you’re working on so it “understands” your purpose. You might want to give it a word count to stick to, a style to write in or even tell it what audience you’re writing for. You might want to give it text to edit, evaluate or condense. The more information you can give it, the more likely it’s going to find what it needs in the prompt.

But, you might say, if I take all this time writing an uber-detailed prompt, couldn’t I just have completed whatever task I wanted the bot to do on my own?

Maybe! It depends on what you’re asking the program to do. If you want it to compile information, explain something for you or write a first draft, you might still save time even when writing a long-winded prompt — if the results are good.

It’s a conversation.

Another key difference between an AI chatbot and a more typical search engine is that you can have a proper conversation with a chatbot. Each Google search is separate, though it may “remember” what you’ve clicked on before with the use of cookies. But with a ChatGPT session, you can have a proper back and forth where the bot is able to remember and reference what you’ve asked it for previously.

For instance, you can ask ChatGPT to write something, and then to make it shorter. Or funnier. Or to add details in or to edit according to AP style. The Bing/ChatGPT integration will also provide prompts on next questions to ask that could help you add to or improve your response — take advantage of these. You are limited to 20 back-and-forths with the bot (this apparently helps cut down on hallucinations), but that’s enough time to have a pleasant chat with your robot friend and create a collaborative, useful product.

Keep it simple.

One nice thing about generative AI technology is that you can speak to it in plain language, because it’s been trained on vast quantities of everyday human writing. So when you give it commands, talk to it like a human, avoiding jargon, long sentences or ambiguity. Give it instructions like you might an intern on their very first day: clear, crisp and specific.

But above all, remember that this technology is still “learning” and evolving. And so are you. The best way to write great prompts is to write more of them. See what works and what doesn’t, along with what makes sense for your workflow and style.

Any tips you’d like to share with the class?

Allison Carter is executive editor of PR Daily. Follow her on Twitter or LinkedIn.

The post 3 tips for writing better ChatGPT prompts appeared first on PR Daily.

Managing the communications of a consumer-facing company in a highly regulated space comes with challenges, some ethical and many, many procedural. To the genetic testing company 23andMe’s Director of Communications, Andy Kill, working alongside the regulatory teams and legal teams is just part of what he does every day.

“A portion of the product is regulated by the FDA, some of the reports are governed by the FDA, and then there’s other information in the product that falls outside of the FDA’s scope, like the ancestry side of things,” he explained. “We have a drug discovery business as well, which is highly regulated.”

The company was founded in 2006 and provided easy access to genetic testing, which at the time forged new ground for both the FDA and 23andMe and resulted in frequent communications between the FDA and the organization — some which made the news.

“A lot of it is working closely with our regulatory and legal teams and knowing what’s in bounds, what’s out of bounds, and how we can creatively use PR and comms within the confines of that to story tell,” said Kill.

Ahead of his session at PR Daily’s Public Affairs & Speechwriting virtual conference, Kill shares how he stays true to 23andMe’s mission, the storytelling tricks he uses to get coverage in the press, and why his organization leads with science.

Identify and build upon your organization’s purpose

Having a strong mission statement can be a guiding star for companies looking to connect with external audiences.

“The mission of the company is to help people access, understand and benefit from the human genome,” said Kill. “From a communications perspective, [we look at] what we are prioritizing and if it backs up to helping people.”

23andMe stays true to their purpose in several ways; for example, their tests provide information to consumers that helps them identify health risks. The company also builds on their mission statement with work on their FDA-regulated drug discovery business.

“We’re able to find new drug targets based on human genetic information, and potentially develop new medicines that can help people,” said Kill. “That’s the ultimate fulfillment of that mission.”

Not only does a clear mission statement help an organization stand apart in a crowded market, but it also helps the communications team focus on what’s important. “All of our communications ladder up to that mission,” Kill added.

Human stories resonate with customers

When it comes to sharing 23andMe’s mission externally, Kill looks holistically across the company for inspiration. “People find[ing] family and meeting for the first time [are] great visuals for broadcast,” he said. “[Those] customer stories tend to resonate.”

Another area of focus is the research group. “We have over 13 million customers at 23andMe and about 80% volunteered to participate in research,” said Kill. “They’re answering survey questions, and looking at those alongside aggregate anonymized genetic data, we pull out different trends in terms of specific health conditions or genetic risks.”

Any genetic information that is shared by 23andMe meets the most stringent guidelines — a requirement of its regulated nature. “All of that [data] has to be aggregate information. It can’t be any individual level information. It has to be deidentified and it can only come from customers who have elected to participate in research,” said Kill. “[There are] ethical guardrails in place.”

But all that work is worth it when that pitch lands. “Whenever we do studies on common conditions those resonate really well,” said Kill.

Be as transparent as ethically possible

“The strategy is ‘Lead with Science,’” said Kill. That mantra has helped guide 23andMe to success. “The company’s been focused on publishing consistently, not just research, but also publishing on the accuracy of the product through our different FDA authorizations.”

Kill suggests leaning into transparency wherever possible and keeping open lines of communication within the company as well as externally. One of the departments he speaks with: the ethics team.

“We have an in-house research ethics team that we can consult with anytime,” said Kill. While guardrails exist to protect consumer data, having the ethics team on-hand to discuss a potential research story can be handy. For example, during the early days of COVID-19, the team was developing data around the loss of smell and taste phenomena.

Of course, there are still some pieces of misinformation Kill’s team continues to battle against. “It’s often reported that we’re a part of investigations [using] genetics to crack cold cases,” said Kill. That’s false. “23andMe doesn’t participate in law enforcement investigations.”

Join Kill at PR Daily’s Public Affairs & Speechwriting virtual conference on April 4. Kill will speak alongside speechwriters and communications leaders from the U.S. Navy, Edelman, IBM, the U.S. Department of Labor, and more. 

The post Build upon your company’s purpose, transparently and ethically appeared first on PR Daily.

Adam Kiefaber is a longtime communicator, leading public relations teams at large financial services companies. Follow him on LinkedIn.

For the past decade, every corporate communicator has been trying (and likely struggling) to tell its company’s innovation story. Most of the time, the storylines focus on the tech and ideas of the future and rarely include a look to the past.

Procter & Gamble (P&G)has been regularly enhancing and producing products for more than 180 years under iconic, trusted brands like Charmin, Gillette, Oral B, Pampers and Tide. The company’s website says that it believes “in finding small but meaningful ways to improve lives–now and for generations to come.”

To better understand P&G’s story and how the company shares it, I interviewed Shane Meeker, P&G’s corporate storyteller and historian – and I was surprised at what I found out.

How communicating your past can help your future

Like other Fortune 500 companies, P&G celebrates its history. It has archives and a corporate museum, which is now called the P&G Heritage Center.

When Meeker, who started working at P&G 26 years ago, was asked to take over the Heritage Center, he was surprised by what he didn’t know.

“Since I was someone who had previously worked in the business, I immediately thought to myself that I would have loved to know that this was all here,” said Meeker, who has managed the Heritage Center for the past 11 years. “I knew of the archives but didn’t realize how much was really here and how it could have helped me with my work.”

With the help of his team of storytellers and communicators, the P&G Heritage Center has grown to be more than a celebration of key dates and product launches in the company’s history. It has become an employee destination where colleagues break silos across brands and functions to creatively dream up new ideas.

“It is so important that you don’t get siloed in your area of the business,” Meeker said. “You have to ask yourself if you actually know the innovations that are happening across your company and if you are keeping up with them because it might just spark the idea you need.”

There are many interesting stories at the Heritage Center about cross-brand innovation. One company favorite is about an oral care engineer, who after determining what was needed to whiten teeth at home had to figure out a way his product could stick to teeth and keep out the saliva which would reduce its effectiveness. To do this, the oral care engineer worked with an expert from P&G’s plastic food wrap function. The result was Crest White Strips, which had nearly $80 million in sales in 2018.

“These stories need to be accessible,” Meeker said. “And you must also be proactive in sharing them because these are key innovations that could get people thinking differently.”

How admiring your past failures drives innovation

The most popular exhibit at P&G’s Heritage Center is its Wall of Failures. It quotes JG Pleasants, the former P&G VP of R&D from 1955-1969, that reads: “No company can afford the luxury of rediscovering its own prior knowledge.”

Under Meeker’s watch, the wall itself has grown in popularity and now has a digital touchscreen that can be continuously updated and studied by visitors who can learn more about the projects that didn’t work – along with write ups of what the original objective was, what happened and why it wasn’t successful and what could have been done differently.

“The Wall of Failures doesn’t look back, it looks through,” Meeker said. “It can help you learn what not to do and what to be careful of. The higher-level learning has made it so popular that people want to access it all the time and constantly request for more examples including ones that happen outside the company.”

While the focus of the wall is on failures, Meeker pointed out that it is important to remember that not all these failed ideas are bad. He notes that many could have failed for other reasons, for example, it may have not been the right time or had issues in its initial design. One favorite story that is told on the wall is about Tide PODSÒ. Despite being launched as a new product in 2012, the original idea for the laundry detergent pacs at P&G failed in 1960.

These stories are so powerful that Meeker says it is important to be proactive in his communications. By driving more awareness to the Heritage Center, its Wall of Failures and making it more accessible through digital tools, he hopes his colleagues will be more aware of its value, so they are not surprised – like he was – when they see it for the first time.

The post How communicating your company’s history can help the business appeared first on PR Daily.

Storytelling is one of the most ancient and sacred concepts in all of human history. Starting with our long-distant ancestors weaving myths around fires that kept the darkness at bay and evolving through the centuries to include writing, painting, music, dance and more, it’s a complex concept that still strikes at the very heart of who we are as a species.

In communications, we often say that one of our most foundational skills is storytelling.

But what does that mean in practical terms? Not just as a pie-in-the-sky concept, but as a skill we practice every day to improve our craft and reach our audiences?

I posed this question to my LinkedIn network and received an array of thoughtful, often intensely personal answers. Selected responses are provided below, lightly edited.

Let’s “talk story”. Those are three words my family uttered to me nearly every other day during my childhood growing up in the Pacific on the Island of Guam. It is an islander version of hello, how are you, tell me a story. An invitation of sorts.

My family in their own jolly way would mandate that every person they see walking on the street, accept an invitation to visit. And storytelling is an islander way of passing on history and wisdom. Every person in the culture can “talk story” which means every person is a teacher and every person holds wisdom to share, if you accept the invitation.

Amira Barger, executive vice president, Health Communications & DEI Advisory, Edelman

Storytelling is about finding a concise and emotionally impactful way to share information with your designated audience.

The most important storytelling questions are “who is this for” and “why is this important.” Are you trying to delight your audience? Scare them? Inspire them? Is your audience job seekers, potential customers, others in your industry?

You may start a story with “once upon a time” if chatting with kids. You may start a story with an industry stat if chatting with investors. There is not one simple formula, but always consider how you can tell a story that is concise and compelling to the people you are talking directly to.

Mandy Menaker, director of communications, Orchard

Storytelling celebrates humanity in any situation. All of the basic concepts of a story are there, including characters, conflict, and overcoming challenges. A skilled PR practitioner has the unique ability to identify and tell the story found in even the most mundane, everyday events.

Chris Ehrhart, communications manager, Corcentric

I think the art of storytelling in business is less about entertaining your audience and more about using imagery and humanity to make your audience empathize and equate themselves to a protagonist whose problems you’ve successfully solved.

Jordan Whitt, senior manager, digital marketing, Apex Benefits

Storytelling is the basis of why we communicate in the first place. The story is the foundation of the “why.” It is the bridge to connecting with audiences. Stories come in all shapes and sizes. We all have a story to tell because we have something to inform or persuade. To shapeshift narratives. Change perception. Generate conversations. We have the power to tell the “why” and get people to understand or even see your viewpoint. Storytelling also builds trust between you and your target audience. Without trust, people will not believe or care about your story. News is new. Storytelling and communications interconnect with one another.

Yesenia Reinoso, nonprofit communications manager

Storytelling is the careful transfer of information and emotion around a specific idea, topic, piece of news or opinion. In practical terms it is the art of communicating information in a way that paints a very clear picture for the receiver from a specific point of view. If crafted correctly, it should evoke authentic emotion, which removes bias. Storytelling should bring harmony between the messenger and the receiver. If done right, the use of imagination, prompts, questions should all kick in and the receiver should be left with enough detail to make an informed, high-level, opinion on what’s being shared.

Sarah Mawji, independent PR & marketing consultant

What are the throughlines in these responses?

• Storytelling unites us as humans.
• Storytelling draws on empathy, emotion and authenticity.
• Storytelling requires a clear idea of audience and purpose.
• Storytelling paints pictures.
• Stories can be found in everything.

What does storytelling mean to you, and how do you incorporate it into your communications practice? Let us know in the comments, or connect with me on LinkedIn.

The post What storytelling means to communicators appeared first on PR Daily.

Storytelling is more than an action. It’s a philosophy that we must construct and weave through every aspect of what we do as communicators, Joe Benarroch, EVP of Communications, Global Advertising and Partnerships at NBCUniversal, told the audience during the opening keynote of Ragan’s Future of Communications Conference, part of Communications Week 2022.

Benarroch came back time and time again to the idea of building your storytelling philosophy. It’s a way of differentiating yourself in the job market and creating a communications strategy that your team can understand get behind.

“It’s not easy sometimes to get people to rally around (your philosophy), but if you center yourself in it and you believe in it, naturally and organically your activations will start to shape around it and you will have built your own case study,” Benarroch said.

Empathy and values

One cornerstone of these philosophies should be empathy. The importance of this trait has only grown since  outset of the pandemic, when we all had to speed up our internal communications plans by two years and really start listening to each other about how we were doing personally and what we needed socially. It’s the foundation of good storytelling, too.

“Empathy is a really, really big thing,” Benarroch explained. “It is a mainstream leadership quality that we all need to take. If you’re leading with pure empathy, you’ll find yourself listening more, you won’t need to be the person speaking all the time, and you’ll be able to get that philosophy out there.”

Part of that empathy is creating safe spaces for diversity, equity and inclusion work. Listening helps us elevate voices besides our own and reach the audiences we all need to succeed. As you move along your DE&I journey, find partners who share these values to take part in your platform and build with you.

“When you partner with a platform that has equal values, there’s mutual benefit there but also an accountability on both parts to keep those values high. It consistently pushes both organizations,” Benarroch urged.

Storytelling for internal and external use

We often think of storytelling as something we project. But in fact it’s something we as communicators reflect.

“Communications isn’t a separate function of the organization. It’s just a pure reflection of how the organization functions,” Benarroch said.

That applies whether communicators are programming a town hall for our CEOs or speaking to a group of journalists we want to become storytellers for us. Benarroch explained that getting ink shouldn’t always be the goal of external communications. Rather, it’s about bringing reporters to a deeper understanding of your organization and helping them connect the dots between you and the broader world. If you accomplish those goals, the press will come in time.

Ultimately, Benarroch left attendees with the idea that developing our communications philosophies helps us refine what kind of resource we want to be for our organization — and how we can do that in a consistent way that furthers our overall goals.

“Talk about not just activating on daily needs, but how you want to ultimately get from A-Z in a way that articulates your strategy.”

The Future of Communications Conference continues Wednesday.

Allison Carter is executive editor of PR Daily. Follow her on Twitter or LinkedIn.

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With social media, it’s fairly easy for brands to connect with their audience and communicate directly with them. This can be an effective way to create a relationship with potential customers. However, it is important for brands to be strategic with their social media use to maximize their impact and return on investment.

Creating content that is engaging, informative and interesting can be a challenge. When brands are creating content, it is important to consider what type of content will engage and resonate with their audience. Two of the best ways are through storytelling and developing an understanding of their pain points and how you can best address them. This will help develop content that customers are interested in. And while that all seems doable enough, there are a few secrets to success.

[FREE WEBINAR: How to develop a comms plan … that actually works!]

At Ragan’s Strategic Communications Conference in Redmond, Washington, Gina Michnowicz, CEO & chief creative officer at The Craftsman Agency, shared some of those secrets.

Michnowicz broke down how to tell a story through all different mediums and stressed the importance of the images used to convey emotion and ultimately connect people to your brand.

Storytelling evokes emotion

“It doesn’t have to make you cry,” Michnowicz said. “Sometimes it’ll make you laugh, sometimes it’ll make you feel heard and all those things are important and those are important emotions.”

From TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, BeReal, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn, there’s space for stories, but how you deliver the content is what’s important, the chief creative officer said.

“Each platform has a different reason for being and tailoring your content to apply to that is so critical,” Michnowicz explained.

For instance, TikTok is where all the relevant things are happening right now and for the most part has the best organic reach, she said.

“There isn’t another platform that gets you that — how to become successful on TikTok is having content that tells a story,” Michnowicz continued.

Publishing is queen

“Content is king, but the queen is publishing and she wears the pants,” Michnowicz said. “It’s all about publishing and how you do it and taking that long-form YouTube video and splicing it for TikTok and Reels, so you don’t have to create for every platform and take what you have.”

Brands that commit to publishing content that involves telling a story in a fun way, often do well.

An example Michnowicz used was Miller Genuine Draft’s seltzer announcement. After teasing that they’d be “launching” a seltzer, instead of announcing a new product, they released a video showing cases of hard seltzer being strapped to a rocket and getting ready to send the trendy low-cal beverage hurtling into space.

This was a bit of a detour for the beer company, but the risk paid off.

Michnowicz said the marketing efforts resulted in lots of press coverage, social currency and increased the company’s beer sales substantially.

“If you have a customer base and there is something that they’re asking for and isn’t part of your fit or want to tell a story in a different way, sometimes there can be a way,” Michnowicz said.

Guiding principles

The chief creative officer shared some guiding principles on how to be successful on social media and beyond.

Stay true to your voice: Even when you’re storytelling, you’re telling these unexpected moments, you still have to stay true to your voice, you can’t depart too much.

Tell diverse stories: Bring in diverse segments and be inclusive.

Take risks: Step outside the usual box or comfort zone and go for something out of the norm.

Apply relevant current trends: TikTok is a great place to start looking for trends, as well as Twitter.

Give more than one way for people to consume: Having different ways for people to consume content across platforms is important.

Consistent but not boring: Showing up as the same brand every day is important for your audience.

Isis Simpson-Mersha is a conference producer/ reporter for Ragan. Follow her on LinkedIn.

The post Secrets to success on social media and beyond appeared first on PR Daily.

Let’s face it, all communicators can use help refining our social media strategy. No one has it all figured out, and the tools at our disposal are always evolving.

Most communicators struggle not with the ‘how’, but the ‘what’. What should your organization be sharing on social media? What do you want the world to know about your organization? Your employees can help you answer these questions when you include them in your brand storytelling. Spotlighting employees can showcase your internal culture and values in action through their experiences, while simultaneously enhancing your employer’s brand to attract future talent.

Ragan and PR Daily caught up with Kate Seegraves, communications manager at the silicon component manufacturer Silfex to ask her a few questions about social media communications. Seegraves will be a speaker at Ragan and PR Daily’s upcoming Social Media Conference being held in person at Disney World, Orlando September 21-23.

[RELATED: Join us Sept. 21-23 in Disney World for our Social Media Conference]

Ahead of her session, read on to learn more about Seegrave’s plans and approach to including employees in her storytelling strategy.

Ragan: To start with, why did you get into communications and if you hadn’t what do you think your career would look like?

Kate Seegraves

Kate Seegraves: I started my career as a reporter for a daily newspaper and gradually found my way into a corporate communications role. In many ways, it felt like a natural extension of where I started: storytelling, helping people make sense of complicated information and providing them with context and critical details are important to helping people understand the world we live in, now more than ever.

Ragan: In your experience, why are social media communications an important part of any organization?

KS: Social media is a useful tool for connecting with internal and external audiences. When you focus on your people and values, it reinforces company culture, promotes engagement, and helps employees feel connected to a bigger purpose and meaning.

Ragan: How can organizations break through the noise to start conversations that cultivate community?

KS: Start with your people. They are the heartbeat of your organization, and their stories, thoughts and experiences are the most authentic part of what we do. Tapping into their voices and sharing their stories resonates with others because the underlying themes — like passion, purpose, commitment and pride of work — are universal.

Ragan: What do you think is next for social media communications? What should organizations be doing now to prepare for tomorrow?

KS: I think audiences are working toward becoming more conscientious consumers of social media, and as a result, communicators will have to adapt thoughtfully and transparently. I’m a mother of three, and I challenge my kids to think critically about the content they’re reading and watching; as these younger generations come to expect more from the organizations they follow, we will have to raise the bar and prove we’re worth their time and attention.

Ragan: At this year’s Social Media Conference, you’re headlining a session on spotlighting employees with social storytelling. Can you give our readers a sneak peek on what they can expect to learn?

KS: Including employees in your storytelling strategy is something I feel strongly about because I have seen it work so well at my company and elsewhere. During the session, I will discuss some best practices to showcase internal culture and people in authentic ways that promote engagement, as well as how social media can be used to extend internal communication.

If you’d like to gain new insights and social media communications strategies, join us at Ragan and PR Daily’s Social Media Conference, where speakers from TikTok, Volkswagen, Intel, Facebook and more will share their ideas and success stories. Register today!

The post The Road to Disney: Why employees are essential to your social storytelling strategy appeared first on PR Daily.

Once a niche of focus for investor relations, ESG has gone mainstream. Consumers, employees and the media all want to know how your mission is driving your actions — in a way they can comprehend.

Communicators have the task of using great storytelling principles to bring these stories to life with impact and meaning. In this white paper from Ragan Consulting Group, “How to make ESG part of your communications strategy,” you’ll learn ways to make your ESG storytelling compelling and effective.

This primer will provide you with nine key areas for evaluating the success of your content and other helpful tips including:

• Why ESG matters for all organizations, not just publicly held companies
• How to elevate your ESG reporting, content creation, publishing and distribution
• Using data as your “secret sauce” for success
• Finding stories where data and humans meet
• Why ESG content should be part of your regular mix
• And more

Download Ragan Consulting Group’s free guide today and start telling the story of your organization’s ESG mission.

The post How to improve your ESG storytelling without greenwashing appeared first on PR Daily.

You’re a writer and you know you need to make a video. You know you want it to serve marketing and raise awareness.

Great! Now what?

For people who work with words all day, being thrust into the world of video can feel overwhelming. But as long as you know your purpose and your production capabilities, figuring out what comes next can be templatized to make your job easier.

This video grid from Ragan Training walks  you through five common types of video, what they’re best used for, and even a handy dandy style guide.

For a printable PDF version, click here. And visit RaganTraining.com for more resources like this.

The post Plan your next video with this story grid appeared first on PR Daily.