StoryQuest Blog

"Story is your path to creating faith"

For better or worse, today we live in a service oriented economy. Large enterprise consulting companies have been growing and delivering professional, IT and creative services for years. Traditional hardware and software firms are getting in the game and finding that services are the key to growth, customer satisfaction, and retention. We all have unlimited coaching services available from personal trainers, life coaches, and business coaches. Regardless of where you stand in the services world, if you are selling, you need to overcome some major hurdles before a prospect will engage

#1 - Prove you can do the job.

Continue reading “Selling Services with Stories” »

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I recently came across this blog post: Explaining vs. Storytelling for Startups from Common Craft, a explanation video production company.  We are in the storytelling business and this resonates powerfully for me. Lee’s point about establishing context, and “starting with the forest instead of the trees” is spot on. Good stories involve characters, drama and details – (aka trees). But without enough context, all the wonderful details of a story simply add confusion.  Quick story: We love This American Life – the most popular show on NPR. Often the stories you hear on that show start in the middle, then the host (Ira Glass) provides a bit of context and commentary, then the story continues. This is a very effective way to engage listeners, introduce characters, and create suspense (what is going on).
Continue reading “Explaining vs. Storytelling for Startups – Our Response” »

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A great presentation and story … taught me (again) the value of a good story, and how we can all tell better business stories.

Answer: Details – small ones

Continue reading “The Power of Business Stories: Details” »

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We are recommitting!  To sharing, blogging, learning,  and exploring new ways to share business stories. 

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Video is the most powerful medium in the world. You need and want it. But - stop shooting video! Why? Because there are better and more cost effective ways to produce compelling multimedia.

You need video.

Video is critical to cutting through all the noise. No one wants to (or will) read your website, brochure, or white paper. They want to scan, click, watch and learn. They want video. Here are a few stats to noodle on: Video increases

• Consumption & engagement,
• Understanding & memory,
• Emotional connection
• Action!

Don’t stop using video. Stop shooting it.  Shooting video is expensive, painful, and often unnecessary. For the last ten years we have been producing business videos, from all over the world, and for large and small companies like SAP, Deloitte, Avaya, Mars Air or Mentor Tech Group. All without shooting one second of video.

Just stop shooting video.

Continue reading “Stop Shooting Video!” »

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Click, click, scan, focus, ignore, click, focus… hmmm… focus a bit more … decide if is this content is relevant, understandable, or credible. This is path we all take when checking the limitless content available to us. In the B2B world that last one: credibility – is really challenging. We are all selling – and our readers and visitors know it. So how can you be honest, credible, and perceived as such in B2B? Here are 10 proven ways:

1. Be imperfect.

This is the easiest to name but the hardest to execute. We all have managers and peers offering opinions and editorial reviews on web pages, brochures, white papers, and customer reference stories. Each opinion removes phrases that may offend, confuse someone, but also may be most fun or interesting content. Life is imperfect. People connect with and trust imperfection. If you want to be perceived as honest and credible, trust your audience and share your imperfections. If you are playing in social media, check out this article by Eric Wittlake about authenticity vs. believability.

Continue reading “11 Ways to Be Honest in B2B (and perceived that way)” »

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Marti Konstant and Andy Crestodina

500 words. That’s it. Once I get there, I do a quick edit, add a few links and hit Publish.

That is the promise for this article. A promise to myself. But sadly – I have broken promises to myself before. Eat healthy. I had  a cinnamon roll this morning. But my mother taught me to be an optimist, so here goes.

8:45 – lets do this and make the 9:40 train.

You see, I just attended a great marketing session on blogging and content marketing. It was hosted by two great marketers Andy Crestodina of Orbit Media Studios, and Marti Konstant of Konstant Change. After a quick intro to set context, we dove right into SEO, key words, article titles, guest blogging, linking, and all kinds of great stuff. It was wonderful – really.

And yet here I am … first with tons of article ideas. Then to make things easier, I pull up an article I started last week … Why video? – about creating multimedia without the lights, camera and cost of traditional video. It is what we do, it should be easy. But no. One page becomes two, then three, then rearranged. The message changes, and soon it’s a train wreck. No closer to a blog post than when I started.

Continue reading “The Courage to Publish” »

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Outside our offices here at StoryQuest, the City of Chicago is undertaking the huge project of rebuilding Wacker Drive.  It’s a complex engineering effort and it has disrupted street and pedestrian traffic for months, but we have a bird’s-eye view of all the action.  The process is pretty fascinating: pouring concrete, laying rebar, building a heavy structure that essentially floats in the air and is designed to support itself; and it’s something I know very little about having spent most of my life working in information technology.

My fascination with the building process—and secret envy of manual laborers getting to work with their hands—got me thinking about how this might relate to what I do in building websites for clients.  What I noticed looking down on the construction is that you can’t just create something out of thin air.  You need scaffolding not only to support the structure while it is being built, but to give you something to stand on.  The natural metaphor in the world of web development is the website wireframe or mockup.

Continue reading “Scaffolding and the Wireframe: From Wacker Drive to the Web” »

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UPDATE: Over 300 registered! Join us!

We’re very excited about our upcoming webinar with SalesBrain. We are hosting it, but the speaker will be Christophe Morin, founder and CEO of SalesBrain.  He has spent many years developing the concept of Neuromarketing — studying the effect of various stimuli on the brain and what that means in the business world. Beyond just stories, the whole SalesBrain approach is very powerful. It offers great insight into what is most effective in reaching the “reptilian” or decision making brain. I love hearing Christophe and Patrick with SalesBrain talk – both are compelling speakers – no fluff, all facts, research and examples.

Join us. Presented by Next Friday, April 27th @ 2 PM EST – it is filling up fast! Register Here

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Above is a my 10 year old daughter. She weighs 54lbs, the backpack weighs 21.8lbs. That is 40% of her weight carried everyday to and from school. Just to get the backpack on requires the use of a chair and a helping hand. Watching her crawl across the back seat in a winter coat and that backpack strapped to her back always make me laugh.  Throw in a clarinet, lunch, and … well you get the idea,  it’s both sad and funny.

Apples recent announcement to get into the textbook business made me think of what her like would be like in the future.  And carrying less is just the start of it. The efficiency and enhanced learning opportunities are endless. If you have a second, check out the video on that page – it’s pretty inspiring!

On the cost side – the story is also great. We recently went hunting online for an Algebra II book for my high school son. I had the ISBN number, looked on Amazon and four or five other sites. Most e-stores did not have the book at all, and one had it for $135.  Only after even more searching, I found it on another site for $25.  Insane on two counts – one, the price and the other on how hard it was to find the book online!

I am excited about what digital textbooks will mean for everyone.  From helping a 54lb ten year, to saving me money, to far better learning experiences for everyone. While I’ll miss the images of my daughter trudging out the door, stooped over with books – I know she won’t.

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