Category: Story
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Gender, Performance, Macs, and NASCAR
You can teach an old dog new tricks. You can upgrade older software. You can change your understanding of gender. I did. I am a fact-based person. My world and my living is made of facts, of data, of analysis, of as much objective truth as possible. Argue with the interpretation or meaning of a…
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Finding Your Next Job Using Digital Marketing, Part 2: Brand You
Once upon a time, a very long time ago in Internet years, I wrote a webinar and publication on finding your next job with social media. I stumbled over it recently while cleaning up one of my archives. While lots of the individual pieces are badly out of date, the work as a whole is…
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Does your strategy tell a story?
What is strategy? Strategy is the plan to achieve your goals. The plan is a blueprint. It’s a menu. It’s a map. By extension, the blueprint is not the hammer. The menu is not the cookbook. The map is not the land. Here’s a simple trick to determine if your strategy is coherent. If you…
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7 Basic Plots of Content Marketing: Conclusion
Over the past week or so, we’ve had a chance to look in depth at each of Christopher Booker’s 7 Basic Plots as they apply to marketing and storytelling: Overcoming the Monster: The protagonist sets out to defeat an antagonistic force which threatens the protagonist and the things/people/places the protagonist cares about. Rags to Riches:…
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7 Basic Plots of Content Marketing: The Rebirth
Previously, we looked at Christopher Booker’s 7 basic plots of how stories are told. Today, we’ll look at the last of these 7 from a content marketing perspective: the Rebirth. The Rebirth is one of our favorites stories, as a human race. Rebirth is the story of redemption, of bad made good. Rebirth is especially…
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7 Basic Plots of Content Marketing: The Tragedy
Previously, we looked at Christopher Booker’s 7 basic plots of how stories are told. Today, we’ll look at the sixth of these 7 from a content marketing perspective: the Tragedy. The tragedy is one of the oldest storytelling forms, in which the protagonist is actually a villain whose demise everyone roots for. One of the…
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7 Basic Plots of Content Marketing: The Comedy
Previously, we looked at Christopher Booker’s 7 basic plots of how stories are told. Today, we’ll look at the fifth of these 7 from a content marketing perspective: the Comedy. Comedy isn’t just funny content. While there are shows on Netflix of stand-up comedians doing their routine for two hours, that’s not comedy in the…
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7 Basic Plots of Content Marketing: Voyage and Return
Previously, we looked at Christopher Booker’s 7 basic plots of how stories are told. Today, we’ll look at the fourth of these 7 from a content marketing perspective: Voyage and Return. JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit epitomizes the Voyage and Return, so much so that the subtitle of the book is There and Back Again, a…
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Flip the coin to tell the story
It’s now the first day of February, so we’re a month into my three words of story, restoration, and compassion. All three are moving ahead very intensely, and I want to share one of the lessons I’ve learned about story. Early on, I thought stories were just narratives. You tell what happened. This tends to…
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What are your kata?
In the martial arts, there are series of exercises called kata (in Japanese), or forms. These are single or multi-person exercises that follow a pre-arranged sequence of techniques that are performed almost like a dance. An astonishing number of martial artists no longer see the value in kata. To them, they are outdated, outmoded relics…
