This guest post comes from Sheri Baer who heads our broadcast practice. She shares a behind-the-scenes look at one particular client’s story and how the humanity played out in both print and broadcast media.

As broadcast director at The Hoffman Agency, it’s my job to get executives on TV. I spent 13 years working on the media side of things, so I know what makes a compelling story. And, I’ll be the first to say, we don’t always have the goods. 

So we get creative. We try to piggyback more interesting angles. We break the technical down into analogies people can understand. And we coach our clients to deliver with passion and conviction. After all, TV isn’t just about what you have to say, it’s also about how you say it. 

But every now and then, a story shows up that has it all: drama, emotion, real human benefit. People you care about. A story that lingers long after it’s told. This was the case with Gordon Murray and Dan Goldie, the co-authors of a new personal finance book called “The Investment Answer.”

At first blush, the PR mission was an obvious one: drive awareness and demand for the book. But after spending time with Murray and Goldie, it became clear that to give full justice to the book, we also needed to tell the story behind the book. 

Here’s how it goes. Murray spent 25 years on Wall Street working with many of the world’s largest institutional investors. Goldie is an independent financial advisor who has worked with individual investors for the past 20 years. They crossed paths professionally and became close friends. While they come from opposite sides of the financial industry, they discovered they shared common beliefs about how individuals should approach long-term investing. They talked about writing a book together. But they never did it. That is, until Murray was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Goldie responded by saying, “We need to write this book now.”

And that’s exactly what they did. The result is “The Investment Answer,” a short, easy-to-read book designed to de-mystify the investment process, boiling it down to the essentials every investor should know. 

Murray and Goldie are convinced Wall Street stacks the odds against the individual investor. But they also believe you can still have a successful investment experience. That’s pretty compelling. But it becomes downright transcendent when you realize that Murray chose to spend the last months of his life putting this wisdom into words.

For sure, there are media outlets that are interested in covering the book - and just the book. But we also realized that the extraordinary story behind the book could broaden the audience even further. And for Murray and Goldie, the whole point was to get the book into as many hands as possible. 

By our painting the complete picture, Mike Cassidy of The San Jose Mercury News immediately recognized how the themes of friendship, loyalty and perseverance would resonate with his readers. And with Cassidy’s expert storytelling in our court, it became easier to spark national interest. We secured an opportunity with Fox Business Network’s “Countdown to the Closing Bell” with Liz Claman. 

At this point, Murray was two-thirds of the way into his doctor’s “six months to live” prognosis. In light of Murray’s deteriorating condition, it became clear that a live interview segment would clearly push the limits of his strength. Thus, the challenge: how to help Murray and Goldie make the most of this opportunity while working within the constraints of Murray’s health and the pressures of live TV.  

Here’s what we did:

• Arranged with the producer in New York for Murray to handle the interview as a “phoner” from home with Goldie live in a remote TV studio
• Worked with Murray and Goldie to identify the ideal question and conversation flow
• Gathered photos and video of Murray to send to Fox as the supporting visuals for his voice
• Talked through the proposed (and anticipated) questions and responses
• Created a mock interview and simulated the interview multiple times; practiced and then practiced some more

In the clip below, you’ll see the results. Fox graciously incorporated our general guidance and flow, and Murray and Goldie performed well, hitting the key notes we had practiced. Murray and Goldie couldn’t have been more pleased with the outcome, including the book’s meteoric rise from unranked to the No. 1 seller in Amazon.com’s Investing and Personal Finance categories immediately after the interview.  

Judging by the feedback from Fox Business, it was a win-win for both sides. 

As one producer commented, “I thought it went beautifully today. Gordon’s answers were inspiring and I thought it had the right mix of business, emotion and information.”

How gratifying to tell a good story - made even better by the story behind the story. 

Click below to watch the Fox Business piece in its entirety.  

Blogging is the new black at corporations.

Everyone is doing it.

And it’s not just large companies that fall under the technology umbrella. Want to know what’s on the mind of Bill Marriott and the “wacky” world of hotels –  latest post titled “Honesty Is The Best Policy” – no problem.

It makes sense. After all, why wouldn’t companies take advantage of what amounts to digital pulpits to communicate their perspectives to the outside world.

Unfortunately, this corporate blogging phenomenon is generating a ton of content with writing that can kindly be described as dreadful. Why does the writing quality and specifically the entertaining quality of a blog matter?

Given a choice between dull or compelling, people gravitate toward compelling. This is why more people watch American Idol than C-SPAN and how Jim Cramer has built the Mad Money franchise (although I’m not suggesting yelling is a form of a storytelling).

That’s the idea of applying storytelling techniques to blogging. It pushes the content toward the compelling quadrant.

No one expects a scientist coming out of R&D to write like David Pogue from The New York Times. Geez, I wish I could bring such cleverness and levity to my own blog.

But that same scientist can absolutely improve his or her blog content by using techniques found in classic storytelling. 

For example -

Just trusting your ear and writing with a conversational tone improves a blog.

There’s a reason that anywhere from 10 to 30 percent of the content in Economist articles are anecdotes. They entertain and show a certain realness.

Recognize that drama comes from contrast, showing the difference between “what was” and “what is.” The greater the difference, the greater the drama.

All of these concepts and others help people who don’t write for a living tell their stories in a more entertaining fashion.

Conventional wisdom holds that you shouldn’t be different for the sake of being different.

I disagree. 

There are millions of blogs out there. 

It’s tough to break through the noise. 

If you’ve got a way to be different, give it a shot.

Your Google Analytics numbers will tell you whether it worked or not.

I’m always on the hunt for the science that demonstrates the power of storytelling.

This McKinsey article, “Revealing Your Moment of Truth” (requires registration), doesn’t get into the science but it’s damn compelling in connecting storytelling to leadership.

The lead graph sets the stage in a way that probably has a few McKinsey-ites shuddering in their cubes:

The purpose of leadership isn’t to increase shareholder value or the productivity of work teams, though effective leadership does these things … The process of leadership is to turn your values into a compelling cause for others.

The article goes to explain “To pull this feat off, you’ll have to step out from behind whatever protection your job title affords and make yourself willingly vulnerable.”

This is where the storytelling comes in.

It allows you to share your experience and the proof points – not just the theoretical – behind the values you believe in.

The heart of the article consists of a senior executive taking this very action in telling a story to her staff about a childhood experience. This “moment of truth” showed how strongly she believes in commitment and loyalty.

The story is so powerful I’ve included it in its entirety:

I grew up in a very small town in the Deep South. There were two schools in our town: the white school and the black school. Since I’m black, I went to the black school, which didn’t have as many teachers or books or fun things as the white school. But I was a smart little girl, and my mother made up for the lack of resources when I got home every day. Before I could go out and play, we would sit at the dining-room table, and she would take down a big, old encyclopedia from the shelf and teach me about the world.

I looked up to see four huge men on horseback with masks on, carrying baseball bats. They were riding right at us.

One day I brought home a report card that was so good my mother said, ‘I think we can get you into the white school. Do you want to go?’ ‘Yes!’ I said, because I was a smart girl and I wanted to learn. I didn’t know that the school district was under a lot of federal pressure to integrate. Our family talked about it and decided that if the school would accept me, I would go—as long as my two older brothers transferred with me. My brothers didn’t want to go, but they loved their little sister and so they agreed. We would be the first black children at the school.

I had only two dresses and I got to wear my church dress on my first day in school! I was assigned a seat in the back next to a little redheaded white girl and I immediately became best friends with her, the way little girls do. When the bell rang for recess, I went out to the schoolyard to play with my new friend and her other friends. All of the girls were on the schoolyard, and all of the boys were playing on the football field. A large wire fence separated the two areas. My new friend told me that boys and girls used to play together, but since my two brothers were here now the school had put up the fence to separate the boys from the girls.

“We were playing and screaming and laughing when we heard screaming of a different kind from the edge of the schoolyard. I looked up to see four huge men on horseback with masks on, carrying baseball bats. They were riding right at us. Everyone ran toward the school building. The teachers got there first and locked the doors behind them. As I was running, I could hear my brothers yelling my name. They were clawing at the fence, trying to save me, but the fence was too high.

I was a fast little girl—weighed almost nothing, and most of it was legs. I was already almost to the bleacher seats stacked against the wall of the school building. I knew if I could scramble under those bleachers, the horses couldn’t get to me. I was just about to roll under the seats when I heard a scream I thought I recognized. I turned around and saw that one of the riders had grabbed my new friend by the hair—she had been playing with me—and was holding her a couple of feet off the ground. She was screaming and sobbing.

I didn’t even stop to think. I just turned around and ran at that man on the horse. He was holding my friend on the left side of the horse. This horse was so big and it was sweating and its eyes were wild and glaring at me. It was trying to move around to kick me. I ran to the man’s right side and sunk my teeth into his leg, biting him as hard as I could.

The good news is that he dropped my friend, but he picked me up instead. He dragged me by my arm across the concrete and two blocks outside the schoolyard. My Sunday dress got torn off. I was bruised all over, the skin on my back and side and left leg was in ribbons, and they told me that I lost a lot of blood. He left me lying in the street, but I don’t really remember that.

My mother came to the hospital every day for five weeks. Every day, she brought my school lessons and that old encyclopedia and she would help me study the best I could. When I got out, she asked me what I wanted to do. ‘I want to go back to the white school and graduate,’ I said. And I did.

I am a grown woman now. I am a successful executive. I am a wife and I am a mother. In this life, I have had an opportunity to learn what is most important to me, and what is most important to me is loyalty. The little white girl from that school is still my best friend today. I’m not willing to live without loyalty in my life and I’m not willing to have people I care about live without it.

We have a lot of pressures on our team these days. You’re working very hard, and we often don’t get the cooperation we need from other departments. Things aren’t always easy for us, and I know that. I know this will change, because we will be the ones to change it. I just can’t tell you when it will change.

But I can tell you this: if you are working for me and you ever get into trouble trying to do the right thing—I’m coming back for you.”

At this point, you’re probably thinking a couple things.

Wow.

And I don’t have a story that measures up to this one. 

Few of us do. 

Such stories both inspire and cultivate connections. But all of us have stories - even if they’re not saga grade - that show who we are and what we stand for.

Writing these words prompts me to reflect on my own leadership. As an introverted soul, this type of sharing can feel uncomfortable, but I’m making a renewed commitment “to get uncomfortable.” 

The media and twitterverse has been abuzz with the news that Dick Costolo has replaced Evan Williams as Twitter’s new head honcho.

Most of the coverage has focused on Costolo’s operations acumen and, specifically, if his leadership will cause those pesky API-problem or traffic-overload messages to go away.

Everyone has missed one of Costolo’s greatest assets, communications.

He is a master storyteller, perhaps a byproduct of days as an improvisational comedian.

For insights into Costolo’s mindset, values and storytelling, look no further than his old blog called Ask the Wizard.

He penned a post back in 2007 titled “Have a Company Voice” that shows conversational language, pithy insights and a touch of humor. It’s downright Buffett-esque.

The post starts off pointing to a letter Costolo received after placing an order with a company called Moosejaw.com:

“If you are actually reading this note you should be super happy. First, you have received your order, reading is fun and getting something in the mail (even if you bought it yourself) has got to make the day better. Second, I put your order together all by myself.”

That’s a fun note to read. I like Moosejaw more because of that note. Is it silly? Sure, it’s a silly note and it’s pre-printed, so I know that everybody else gets one. Why does the note make me like Moosejaw more? People like it when companies have personalities.

That last line, “people like it when companies have personalities” would seem to indicate that we’ll see Twitter’s brand-building effort open up in the coming months.

The post spends more time on this very point.

It’s fun to be the customer of a company with a personality. This seems totally obvious, and yet you too rarely see companies with distinct personalities really grab your attention in the marketplace. Why is this? It’s actually hard to remove personality and character from communications. So, instead of saying that companies don’t take the time to have personalities, it’s probably more accurate to state that companies don’t allow themselves to show their personalities.

Love the contrarian thinking and clever writing.

Costolo even calls out the corporate communications function as misdirected:

So, we (meaning you) spend lots and lots of time depersonalizing our corporate communications, because, you know, we can’t say that!. We write press releases that use approved emotions like “we are very excited to announce the release of…” instead of writing “It is with great fear and trepidation yet in some ways it is ultimately delightful for us to let you know we’re releasing …”, etc.

I’m looking forward to reading Twitter news releases that come down the pike during the Costolo era. It will be interesting to see if he wins the tug-of-war with the legal department.

And he closes with humor and self-deprecation, again, standard tools in Buffett’s communications toolkit:

Post-Script: I think I’m slowly going insane because the structure and grammar of my posts seems to get progressively worse. It’s like I’m the lead character in Flowers for Algernon and the brain surgery is wearing off. Soon I’ll be writing in all consonants and uploading pencil sketches.

After officially getting the CEO gig on Tuesday, Costolo tweeted:

So *that’s* what you have to do to get more followers.

His humor comes in a dry version too as further illustrated by the fact that one of the 113 people he follows on Twitter is @badbanana.

Is it refreshing or what to hear an executive share his or her views without going through a Six Sigma filter?

Clearly Costolo values communications and what it takes to truly build a great brand.

It’s also worth noting that he admires the Apple brand and how Steve Jobs himself puts his imprint on all communications that touch the customer.

I really think we’re about to see a new era at Twitter in ways no one anticipated.

At the very least, I don’t think the Twitter PR department will be exhorting the CEO to stay on message (although I suspect his Ask the Wizard blog won’t stay live much longer).

I regularly discuss the value in applying visuals - photos, infographics and even charticles - to storytelling in business communications.

At last count a picture was worth 1,000 words, so it stands to reason that an infographic could top the 10,000-word mark.

Some of the best ideas on visual storytelling can be “borrowed” from media properties which focus on this area 24×7.

Which brings me to Om Malik’s kumbaya post on Michael Arrington cashing out TechCrunch and selling to AOL.

Rather than transform a walk down nostalgia lane into long-form journalism, Malik marries the company timeline with the infographic which you can see below:

It really does tell the five-year story of TechCrunch in a way that is visually appealing and can be consumed by the reader in a couple minutes. (Hopefully all the boys sitting around the campfire during the first TechCrunch meet-up at Arrington’s house signed model releases.)

This same concept can easily be transferred to the company timeline which typically languishes in a boring if not downright unreadable format.

The vast majority of company timelines resemble the same form as the one from Cartesia Dx.

Not good.

Plus, you’ve got to tilt your head 45 degrees to read the headings.

Even Amazon, known for marketing and a CEO who tells stories, falls into the timeline status quo trap.

… and that’s just the first page of 10.

One other point to share on Amazon.

You need to make choices on the timeline; i.e., less is more.

Amazon captures over 100 milestones during a 15-year period which renders each one meaningless.

Compare this to GigaOm’s interpretation of TechCrunch’s five-year history which zeroes in on 14 events.

If you’ve seen other examples of marrying the infographic to the company timeline, send them my way and I’ll add the information to this post.