Content Creator’s Creed Line 3

We Believe…communication derived from story transcends communication derived from product features

This conversation was used as the source material for a corresponding blog post.

Content Creator’s Creed Line 2

Grab the entire Content Creators Creed series (9 short episodes) on iTunes.

Transcript:

Shayla: I’m talking today with Dave Young, the founder of Shortcut Content, and, Dave, we’ve talking about your Content Creator’s Creed the past few podcasts and we’re learning a little bit more about each of the bullet points in that creed. And right now today I’d like to talk about why the communication derived from story transcends a communication that would be derived from like a product feature?

Dave: Well, think about that. What most people, what most inexperienced sales-people, for example, you go into Best Buy and you start asking about some piece of equipment and an inexperienced salesperson is going to just start blathering out product features, right? “This is has this big of a hard drive and it can talk this fast and, blah, blah, blah.” And they just give you this endless stream of product features and those things are good to know. My view is typically they’re, those are things you won’t know either, if they’re really important to you it’s something that you would use as a filter. If you’re kind of in an early stage, it might even be too early to even think about those things. But they’re not, the “hows and the “whats” so how this works and what kind of features it has, those aren’t the kinds of information that activate the empathy in the human mind. It’s something that we can use to make a comparison, but it’s not something that helps us see ourselves using that product. And so when you start taking about “who” and “why,” so who this product is for, who’s it best for, who has used it and how has that turned out for them in the past and why did they choose it and why do they continue to use it? And those are the kinds of things that lend themselves very well to story, as opposed to product feature. So let me give you an example: who uses Shortcut Content? Well, we have been helping time-starved business owners create content for their business. So the who, these are people that know they have a story to tell, that find that they just don’t have time to write. So when they use our service, they can actually tell the story, they can talk about their patients, they can talk about their customers, they can talk about why they got into the business that they’re in and they can talk about why their customers use them and those lend themselves better to story than product features.

I know that may seem a little bit confusing. So if were going to turn that into a conversation about a product, let’s say we’re talking about bicycling and we’ve got somebody that’s interested in a mountain bike and they’re looking at different bikes, and if we talked about the features we’d be talking about, well, this bike has 21 speeds, but if we talk about, this is the kind of bike that, and just pick a demographic. Let’s say, this is the kind of bike that senior citizens or people that are still active or thinking about retiring, they really like this bike because it’s got enough gears that they can climb, if you’re specific about that, if you tell the story about somebody that used that bike to climb some hill in your city and they talk about why they choose it, you’ve turned that into a story as opposed to just a list of product features.

Shayla: Right, I want to hear this is going to impact my life and how it impacted yours.

Dave: So the customers that have been using Shortcut Content for the last three years have never had to write a thing, but have had, in some cases, more than a hundred thousand words posted to their blogs. I mean, they’ve written the equivalent of two or three business books by sitting down and having conversations with us once a month. That’s who we help and by telling their stories using our help, they’re helping their customers understand why it’s important to use them for their services.

Shayla: Well, Dave, they’ve heard you say who and why Shortcut Content benefits and if they, if whoever’s listening wants to get their story out instead of just giving out their product features, how are they going to get a hold of you?

Dave: Just go to website, ShortcutContent.com and we’ve got a lot of ways to reach out to us. There’s forms, there’s telephone. We’re pretty easy to get a hold of.

Shayla: Great. Thanks, Dave.

Dave: Thank you.