PR professionals know storytelling is powerful, but science is beginning to show just how stories trigger powerful learning reactions in the brain.
In her book – Wired for Story: The Writer’s Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence – Lisa Cron makes a compelling case. As I understand her words, the act of reading is something greater than simulation for your mind.
Your brain brings you into the story and allows you think about courses of action and decisions you might make as if you were actually part of the story you’re reading about. Your brain synthesizes your past experiences and what you are reading to advance your learning.
That might sound natural for a voracious reader, but if you pause to think about it, it’s really pretty incredible: Words written well, in a story format, actually become part of someone’s experience.
I was reminded of this recently as I flipped through a slide deck with 75 quotes from blog posts I’ve published over the last year or so. What started as a marketing experiment, has grown into a process that supports audience development.
I save these slides and quotes as an individual JPG (see photo hack #2) – and use them as an embedded image in blog posts as an effort to draw a reader in, provide an easy takeaway, and serve as another digital asset to share – like this one.
As part of my effort to wrap up this year in content, I decided to distill the deck down to just 20 for a presentation to embed in a post. When I had finished, I noticed many of these quotes stem from pieces written for the Unscripted Marketing series.
Regular readers know, this a series that I publish on the occasional Saturday that threads three interesting articles I’ve read, wraps them with insight, and presents them under a single theme.
For me, this was a remarkable moment of introspection, which may well be fitting for the year’s end: when I went back with some level of agnosticism and reviewed at my own writing, those ideas that I deemed best were more often a blend of what I was reading with my marketing and PR experience, rather than my own original rants and ramblings.
It supports the notion that marketing at its core, is about advancing the user experience.
Here are those 20 golden nuggets – on SlideShare – and each one has a link to the relevant post (which you can click through if you download the presentation).
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20 Insightful PR and Marketing Predictions for 2018
Photo credit: Flickr, brianjobson, reflections, (Public Domain Mark 1.0)
