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FOREWORD 4

Assemblages Are the Post-Modern Story By Linda Zimmer reprinted with permission from Channel and Place

Why “Content Marketing” is A Model for Disaster 6 – And Why Journalism is the Answer

Layered Narrative Storytelling: 10 A Journalistic Standard for Creating Content

The End of Content: 14 Storytelling Using the Layered Narrative System

Data + Storytelling: 19 Emotion Must Be in the Equation

Case Studies 22

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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Assemblages are the Postmodern StoryTHERE’S A PROBLEM with all this talk of “content” in my mind. It’s contained. It’s boxed. It is boundaried, even though we can unlock it from its containers in all our glorious socialness.

It’s created for distribution along or in specific channels. The format of our “content” must fit (conform) to the media (platform). Text just doesn’t seem to fit into Pinterest all that well.

“Content” is created with a specific intent, and that is usually “engagement” (secretly we mean viral, but we’d never speak that term before it went that way).

“Content” has one voice even if we “Storify” it.

“Content” doesn’t trust its “consumer.” The mandate for attention means it has to pack a punch, hit us in the face, as we are swiping by in our liquid media flow. Content can’t afford the time to peak curiosity and allow it to unfold into attention.

“Content” is stifling. It leaves little room for breathing or complex meaning. There are no gaps. It is all gravity and no elegance. It collapses into invisibility. Constant replenishment is inescapable.

So, in postmodern tradition, “content” is being re-examined through the lens of “Story.”

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Gary Goldhammer at H&K Strategies champions today’s “Story” as the “Layered Narrative.” He writes:

A Layered Narrative allows space for interaction, sharing, collaboration and contribution. Every unique layer makes the source material stronger and the core story more engaging….Think of the layers as a series of “sidebars,” all related to the central narrative but each owning a unique characteristic, angle or call to action.

Gary’s layered narrative crystallizes the forms of media upon which the story layers may be constructed: paid, earned, owned and shared.

On its face this Layered Narrative may seem to emphasize the solid or con-structed part of the story – the assemblages of content and assemblages of channels – but implicit in these is the most liquid of all media: the messen-gers, the tellers of the story, the talk, the sharers.

The messengers are also the medium. The constructed narrative is disrupted, interrupted by the messengers working collaboratively in their channels and places to understand the story, to gather it’s meaning or uncover personal relevance. The degree of visibility of the teller (her “influence”) imparts a particular meaning to the story while her talk also shapes the meaning of the story. She herself is an assemblage of her communication platforms and the meaning imparted by her in each is the interplay of the platform and her talk.

Our challenge in building the layered story is not only to construct it but to ac-count for the meaning of our assemblages of media and the assembled meaning.

The meaning of the story will be impacted by each medium. The story will be used by the medium. The “content” is never the narrative.

Assemblages of content, in assemblages of channels, and flowing through as-semblages of messengers is the postmodern “Story.

By Linda Zimmer, CEO MarCom:Interactive

(reprinted with permission)

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Why “Content Marketing” is A Model for Disaster – And Why Journalism is the AnswerA former colleague recently asked me the following in an email: “I’m looking for recommendations for good content marketing conferences to attend. Let me know if you have a few minutes sometime to chat?”

So it’s come to this. We’ve gone so far down the “content” rabbit hole that there are now entire conferences dedicated to teaching smart communications peo-ple how to act like Alec Baldwin’s character in Glengarry Glen Ross. Awesome, sign me up. I mean, first put a bullet through my skull and then sign me up.

I know, I know. Not all “content” is created equal and not all Content Marketers are douchebags. A great story is “content” as much as a lame infographic about Why My Company Can Beat Up Your Company is “con-tent.” Yet this is the problem we’ve created: Because we use “content” to mean everything, it now means nothing. Even “storytelling” has turned into a euphemism for content, stripping away any emotional value it once had.

Here’s the challenge for brands in 2013 and beyond: How to apply journalism principles to content that tells a story and works across devices, platforms and audience frames of mind, while not getting lost along the one-way, one-size-fits-all and “feed the machine” content path plaguing us today.

That’s right, I said journalism. You know, that thing people respected before Rupert Murdoch and Julian Assange, before gratuitous link baiting and automated news aggregators. But journalism – real, emotional, story-driven journalism – is the way out of the Sea of Sameness and the path toward lasting connections with customers.

• “Content Marketing” is about, well, the “content” first – what does (insert brand here) want to say and then replicating that message across every channel possible. It’s about channel and technology. It’s about using “story” as a Trojan horse for whatever ulterior motive is hiding inside.

• Journalism is about the audience first – what do they care about and then tailoring the story to engage people where they are. It’s audience-centric and channel agnostic. It’s about connecting, not marketing.

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Good stories have multiple voices, not just the Corporate Voice or the well-crafted customer testimonial. The best journalism inspires, has impact and earns trust. It’s not a press release turned into a creative writing assignment.

Look, creating content is easy. Brands do it all the time with releases, videos, ads, brochures and white papers. Brands are content machines.

Journalism isn’t that hard either, but it takes time and resolve. For every journalistic brand endeavor such as McDonald’s “Our Food, Your Questions” or Coca-Cola’s “Journey” publication, there are countless initiatives like GE Stories that, while well intentioned, miss the journalism mark.

That’s okay. It’s not like every company is going to close its Content Mar-keting department tomorrow and open a Newsroom (though that’s the right idea.) The point is to recognize that the tide has shifted and that the days of “content” are numbered.

Let the bottom feeders of our industry market content. The rest of us need to look to journalism to restore content’s value and, more importantly, to ensure that we can communicate effectively and emotionally in an ever-fragmented media environment.

Why “Content Marketing” is A Model for Disaster – And Why Journalism is the Answer

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Layered Narrative Storytelling: A Journalistic Standard for Creating ContentAll the Facebook updates, tweets, RSS alerts, texts, chats, Instagrams and pins can’t change the One Simple Truth of countless millennia: We are wired for narrative.

Similarly, all the opining for simpler days when media was mass and J-school graduates got to decide what stories to tell won’t change the exponential media fragmentation that led to the rise of “content” at the expense of story.

The convergence of these divergent forces hasn’t all been bad – we have never been more connected, never had more choices and never had more control over our media experiences that we do right now. The “Great Unbun-dling” of traditional media platforms from their static containers delivered a newfound freedom. “What I want, when I want and how I want it” is no longer a vision but rather an expectation.

Nevertheless, as media unbundled, our ability to tell stories unraveled. Journalistic principles gave way to bursts of speculation and reporting information ahead of facts.

Our ability to tell stories became as fragmented as our audiences’ ability to process them from one channel to the next. According to a Google/Sterling Brands study, 77 percent of TV viewers have another screen directly in front of them at the same time.

We can’t go back nor should we. But that also doesn’t mean we must abdi-cate the role of narrative. All that’s required is a shift in strategy and focus, one that embraces our expanding digital culture and taps into the wiring our brains already possess.

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Layered Narrative Storytelling

The new model isn’t convergence, where different media platforms come to-gether to deliver the same message. It’s about layers – not how media comes together but how it works together, while still retaining the “native” character-istics of the individual media types whether Paid, Earned, Owned or Shared.

This can’t happen with a media-centric or channel specific approach – we must be audience-centric and channel agnostic. Story and audience must sit at the center, powered by digital and social means. This is how ideas spread and ultimately can stand out in a fragmented world.

From this central idea, narrative “layers” cut across channels and forms of media so that we can reach more people at scale. A Layered Narrative allows space for interaction, sharing, collaboration and contribution. Every unique layer makes the source material stronger and the core story more engaging.

And why is journalism essential to this equation? Because (the best) journalism is about telling emotional stories, and it is this emotion that binds the layers together, enveloping the audience and making the story stronger over time, not dissonant. Think of the layers as a series of “sidebars,” all related to the central narrative but each owning a unique characteristic, angle or call to action.

Layers can take many forms, but for the most part are organized in four ways:

• The “Paid” Layer: search marketing, social ads, native ads, syndication and paid placement

• The “Earned” Layer: search engine optimization, blogger and influencer outreach, PR pitching and placement (offline and online)

• The “Owned” Layer: Web sites, e-mail, newsletters, mobile apps

• The “Shared” Layer: Facebook/Twitter/YouTube/LinkedIn engagement, forums and other two-way media such as live webcasts or chats

Starbucks took this approach with its “Everylove” campaign, a blend of poignant video stories and layers of consumer contributions via Twitter, Facebook and Instagram that make the stories richer and more impactful. Mercedes-Benz used layers in its “Impact” campaign about car safety, in-corporating video, stories within paid online ads, photos and actual accident reports to create a sense of intimacy and realism.

Layered Narrative Storytelling: A Journalistic Standard for Creating Content

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And because our involvement is essential to a Layered Narrative, the story tran-scends media fragmentation – emotional connection, the true currency of the Digital Age, takes over and ties the narrative together. We become the “fifth layer.”

A Layered Narrative is no place for “content.” Sure, you can implement this approach on a technical and practical level, but ultimately you need to tell a story and stand for something. You need to be engaged in the narrative for the long haul, not just the product launch or whatever your purpose may be.

The old world of a monolithic mass media is not coming back – but narrative is.

Layered Narrative Storytelling: A Journalistic Standard for Creating Content

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The End of Content: Storytelling Using the Layered Narrative System

INSPIRATION: What’s the story?

Everything begins with the story – more importantly, with the audience and what they most care about. This isn’t like planning a press release, which focuses on what companies want people to know. This is a narrative, the beginning of a journey that focuses on what people want to know about you.

This first step is audience centric and channel agnostic. It allows you to get to the core of your story right away, to dig

into the DNA of post-modern narratives – authentic emotion. If you can do this, then dry, channel-driven “content” doesn’t stand a chance.

Content is a cul-de-sac, a dead end. But narrative is a superhighway that can take your story anywhere.

CREATION: How to tell the story

Now that that you know where to go and what you want people to do, the next step is creat-ing the narrative experience. Is the story best told in text, video or both? What is the “native”

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or originating format of your narrative, and what are the ways in which you can extend that narrative to more audiences, on the channels and in the ways they want to experience it?

Think of your main story as the “feature film” and the related narratives as the “DVD extras” or “sidebars” that can add deeper meaning and greater resonance. By freeing your mind, you will free your story from being stuck inside the static vertical silos of old media thinking.

DISTRIBUTION: Where to share the story

You have your story and you know how you want to tell it – the only question left is where? This is when the Layered Narrative takes its form across the four primary layers of Paid, Earned, Owned and Shared media.

The above graphic gives you an idea of how the various executions might play out. The more you brainstorm using this system, the more creative your distribution opportunities will become.

The real fun, however, comes next, when the layers intersect and ultimately deliver the desired outcome:

The End of Content: Storytelling Using the Layered Narrative System

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As this final graphic illustrates, the Paid-Earned-Owned-Shared

layers don’t always stay within their swim lanes (nor are they

supposed to). They diverge and converge, connect and intersect.

Blog posts are amplified by Promoted Tweets and videos are

elevated by Facebook discussions or Pinterest photo essays.

The Layered Narrative System

The End of Content: Storytelling Using the Layered Narrative System

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But no matter where the layers go, all narrative roads lead to an action, a spe-cific outcome or deeper, more meaningful engagement. This journey’s end is also a beginning – the start of new dialogues, relationships and thinking.

Campaigns are transient but conversations are permanent. Storytelling today is more about the “output” than the “input” – the audience is the medium, and in the end, they are the only storytellers for your brand that matter.

The End of Content: Storytelling Using the Layered Narrative System

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Data + Storytelling: Emotion must be in the Equation1+1 = 2.

This is fact. It’s balanced. It is universal, comforting and logical.

1+1 = 2 tells a story.

But sometimes, 1+1 = 3. This, too, is fact.

1+1 = 3 is powerful, ironic and messy. It’s surprising, uncomfortable and transcendent.

1+1 = 3 tells a great story.

I celebrate the end of “content” and the return to journalistic-inspired nar-rative storytelling – but I fear we now rely too much on “data” to tell our sto-ries. Emotion must be part of the equation; otherwise 1+1 will always equal two. This is not only bad for storytelling but it’s bad for our culture.

Data can assist and guide. It can validate and reveal. It can make sense out of chaos. Data is absolutely critical to telling both good stories and great ones.

But data can’t write. It can’t speak. And it certainly can’t feel. It may have a heart but it doesn’t have a soul.

Companies such as Narrative Science literally use raw data to write complete stories. But this is closer to stenography than storytelling.

Quill – Narrative Science’s storytelling software – pulls in, analyzes, organizes and ultimately writes complete narratives. According to the Narrative Science Web site:

“Quill’s natural language, visualization and rendering engines generate the text, graphics, layouts and styles for each story. During this process, Quill incorporates variability, expressiveness and uniqueness into every element, as if it were written by a skilled writer or analyst.”

But “a skilled writer or analyst” doesn’t write the stories, a machine does. And if machines start writing our stories, using the same universally available data sets, then all of our stories will be the same. They will sound like and be nothing more than content, indistinguishable from each other.

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Stories, like people, are incomplete without their emotional sides. Without emotion they are clones, not unique individuals.

This is why Spock from Star Trek was unlike other “logical” Vulcans. Logic or “data” only took him so far – it was his emotion that made him unique. Similarly, Captain Kirk needed Spock’s logic to help contain his emotions and help him make logical decisions.

We need data but we also need journalists to find the places where 1+1 = 3. We need data to help us tell stories that people want to hear, but we also needs brands to be better storytellers by embracing the risk that comes with emotional exposure.

How we tell stories has changed but the nature of story itself is wired into our DNA. The Internet didn’t change us, social media didn’t change us and data won’t change us. Only stories ever have and ever will.

A good story connects us to ourselves. A good story connects us to each other.

But a great story, even in a world overwhelmed with fantastic change, does something even better – it connects us to being human.

Data + Storytelling: Emotion must be in the Equation

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The Hunger Games The Hunger Games’ social media team put together an immersive, multi-platform campaign that focused on three of the main themes that run through the novel.

They created 13 Facebook pages, one for each of the Districts from which the Hunger Games contestants are pulled from, and captured each of their unique characteristics. A Facebook app allowed people to identify with the individual districts as well.

They created a Twitter account – @TheCapitolPN – for the oppressive Capitol that hosts the games and forces the contestants to fight to the death. It tweeted news, information, and warnings in character.

Finally, a Tumblr blog was created called Capitol Couture that focused on the fashions of the characters, which were used in the book to further define the Capitol from the people of the Districts.

Individually the accounts let fans customize their experience according to their interests and where they prefer to engage online. Taken together the multiple platforms gave people who hadn’t read the books everything they needed to know about this fictional world by immersing them in the culture and conflicts of it’s society.

In short, any barriers to becoming a part of the community of Hunger Games fans were removed. This allowed moviegoers an opportunity to be just as emotionally invested in the movie as those who read the books, priming them for social sharing.

The social media strategy helped fuel an extremely successful opening for the movie franchise. (SOURCE: SalesForce Marketing Cloud blog)

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Starbucks - Everylove The intention of the ‘everylove’ campaign is to showcase stories where Star-bucks has touched the lives of their patrons, and with acts of kindness in a pay-it-forward fashion these patrons then share their ‘everylove’ stories.

It launched on February 6th of 2012, just in time for Valentine’s Day.

The campaign started with Dan, a man who does weekly coffee runs for the patients and staff at the Michigan Cancer Institute in St. Joseph’s Hos-pital in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

Starbucks encourages its patrons to share their ‘everylove’ by using the hashtag #everylove on Twitter & Instagram, and by joining in on the conversation on Facebook.

Within the first 8 months on Facebook: 22,055 likes, 703 comments & 1,434 shares

On YouTube: 318,800 video views, 1,513 likes & 196 comments

Starbuck’s has kept the campaign alive by launching a ‘Cup Magic’ app that allows users to create eValentines through augmented reality.

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Starbucks - EveryloveFacebook & YouTube Engagement

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Starbucks - #EveryloveInstagram & Twitter Engagement

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE EVERYLOVE CAMPAIGN VISIT

Starbucks Everylove

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Nike – Find Your Greatness Nike’s ‘Find Your Greatness – Jogger’ commercial first aired during the 2012 London Olympics with the intent to help athletes and average Joe’s every-where share their fitness motivation & successes through social channels.

Consumers are encouraged to share their athletic achievements in the form of Instagram ,Twitter & Facebook posts and home videos.

Nathan, from London, Ohio, was the first. There are now 18+ inspirational ‘Find Your Greatness’ videos produced by Nike on their YouTube channel.

Nathan’s video, seen right, has had over 1 million YouTube views to date.

‘Find Your Greatness’ has expanded to Facebook & mobile apps as well as print ads, billboards & television commercials.

Nike has branded more than #FindGreatness for fitness motivation. #makeit-count and #gameonworld are other hashtags used as well.

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TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE FIND YOUR GREATNESS CAMPAIGN VISIT

Nike – Find Your Greatness

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Twitter, Instagram & Facebook Engagement

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Chipotle - Cultivate The mission of the Chipotle Cultivate foundation is to raise awareness of sus-tainable agriculture, healthful eating & community support of local farming.

They released a 2 minute video on the internet and in theaters, during the sum-mer of 2011 featuring a cover of Coldyplay’s “The Scientist” by Willie Nelson.

Due to the impact of the video, it was voted top commercial of 2011 by AdWeek, Chipotle then ran it during the 2012 Grammy’s.

‘Back to the Start’ currently has over 7 million YouTube views.

From here, the Foundation hosted it’s first ever, free, ‘Chipotle Cultivate Festival’ which kicked off in Chicago’s Lincoln Park.

The Chipotle Cultivate foundation has currently raised over $2 million towards helping local farms prosper & bringing culinary education in schools, among many things.

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THE LEARN MORE ABOUT THE CHIPOTLE CULTIVATE FOUNDATION & FESTIVAL VISIT

Chipotle Cultivate foundation

Cultivate Festival

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