128. Brand Authenticity with International News Anchor — Julie MacDonald

Related Episodes:

• 003. Jon Morrow (Copyblogger) On How To Use Blogging To Build A Highly Successful Business
• 070. Valerie Khoo – Founder of the Australian Writers Centre on Power Stories (And The 8 Stories You Must Tell)
• 075. Joe Pulizzi — Founder of Content Marketing Institute — Does Your Content Fit Into Your Buyer’s Journey?
• 116. Brian Clark — Founder of Copyblogger — On How To Create Content That Converts, Empathy
• 117. How to Create An Empathy Map

Key Points and Insights

• 03:00 Why is authenticity in the media so critical in terms of building a strong business brand and online presence?
• 04:06 Despite recent technological advances, we still live in a ‘tribal’ world online
• 09:52 Keep it simple
• 10:09 Be Human
• 11:27 The sales process
• 12:45 Explanation made fascinating
• 15:09 Human communication
• 15:57 Action steps
• 16:30 Meeting your customer when they are on their journey
• 18:00 Listen to your customers
• 18:25 Understand the goals of your business.
• 18:36 Who are you and what is your story?
• 19:50 What value do you offer?
• 23:40 Understanding your customer
• 24:42 Problem-solving
• 25:25 Unity is important
• 27:16 Biggest challenges that people face in building a brand
• 29:15 How does a CEO stay authentic and tell the truth despite challenging circumstances?
• 33:45 Specific actions to increase brand authenticity and align your brand with your values?
• 40:00 Action steps to get you started
• 46:40 Tell the story in the organization first
• 49:47 Book/s that had a big impact on you and why?
• 53:44 Message from Julie

Four Steps to Storytelling

• Get clear by listening to your audience
• Decide on your goals
• Get clear on your values
• Tell stories

Action Steps

• Keep it simple.
• Understand that storytelling is about listening first and talking later.

Transcript

Machine transcript, lightly edited for reading. Speakers aren't marked. The intro, plug and closing voiceover are left out.

Welcome, everyone. This is Ash, the founder of ProductiveInsights.com and it's great to have you on the Productive Insights podcast.

Today, I'd like to introduce you to Julie, who's an international news anchor and correspondent and she's been very passionate about storytelling through her whole career. She spent two decades reporting across the globe for BBC, ITV Channel 5 and Al Jazeera and loves creating compelling, imaginative films for companies and charities.

She's also a media coach working for some of Britain's most trusted brands. In her spare time, Julie is a mum of two and the founder of The Daily Juggle, a website for stressed out working parents with some awesome hacks on how to make your life easier.

So I strongly recommend you check it out if you're a working parent. Today's guest also happens to be one of my dearest friends.

I'm delighted to welcome Julie MacDonald, the founder of clanmacmedia.com. Welcome, Julie.

Thanks, Ash. Thank you so much for having me.

I can't believe how old I am when you say that I've been telling stories for 20 years. I suddenly feel incredibly old.

Also, the mention of spare time makes me laugh because I think who has spare time? Who's a working parent that has spare time?

You know, they're just sitting up tapping away in the middle of the night. That's me.

But thank you very much for having me. You're welcome.

It's an absolute pleasure. Now, can I just say that you may say that you are old, but you don't look old.

You certainly don't look like you've been doing media for two decades. So, yeah, you can feel free to return the compliment, too, by the way.

You look awesome as well, Ash. And I can say that as far as I'm concerned, this is completely false advertising.

You know, I have the help of makeup and makeup artists. And I've had them to tell me what to do.

This is not the picture that you see when I wake up in the morning. So if that makes you feel any better, that's the truth of it.

Well, interestingly and ironically enough, we're going to be talking about authenticity in the media today. So let's start by talking about what we mean by authenticity.

And actually, let's take one step back. Let's talk first about why you think as a media coach, why do you think that authenticity in the media is so critical in terms of building a strong brand presence if you're a business owner?

I think authenticity is important whether or not you're a business owner. I think authenticity is pretty much a 21st century life skill.

And I think it's become more important because of the way that we communicate now. I think in the the olden days of media, you know, you had television and radio and then you had real life.

And we communicate with one another as humans with our authenticity radar fully on. And in real life, we make judgments about people.

You know, what are their values? Are they people like us?

And I think that moving online, which is where we get a lot of our news, it's where we communicate. And if you're a business owner, you're probably doing a lot of your business or you're at least trying to get business online.

It's almost as if that whole human process is completely magnified online. We exist in a very, very tribal world online where we almost have to learn to micro market to specific groups of people.

And we can't do that. I believe if we don't strongly know who we are, who we truly are.

And, you know, why is it that we do what we do? You know, if you're a plumber and you're really passionate about that, why are you really passionate about that?

What drives you? And I think that allows your prospects, your potential customers to make value judgments about whether they want to buy from you.

And so the online world has changed everything. It's so important to know who you are authentically, what your product is authentically, and to share that with people, because people have become very savvy buyers now and they want something else.

They want a little bit of your soul. And now you might say, well, sometimes I just want my tap fixed.

Yeah, sometimes you do buy for practical reasons and you go to the phone directory, you go online or whatever. But, you know, here I go to something called Checkatrade.

And then I look at the content of the reviews. You know, what kind of people does that plumber attract?

Oh, they seem like people like me. So storytelling is something we are always doing, whether we like it or not.

Even the reactions to our products and our services, our stories in themselves. And that means that we're never ever turning that off.

So the first step, I think, to understanding what your story is is who are you? Why are you doing what you're doing?

Why are you offering what you're offering? And I work with a lot of huge brands.

I do a lot of media training and I always start, you know, with that question, like, why are you here? Why do you care about being a better communicator?

And it would amaze you that there are literally thousands of people in careers doing especially well who cannot answer that question. And by answering it, it makes their life so much easier because then they know how to communicate in a very human way, the old fashioned way, if you like.

And it's still the best way to communicate, I think. OK, Julie, you've dropped some great insights there and I want to bring them out.

I just want to mention that I'm actually writing things down as you're talking. So I keep looking down from the screen.

I hope you don't mind. I don't mind at all, Ash.

Brilliant. OK, so look, there's some things that you've said that really, really stuck out.

One thing that you said was we exist in a tribal world online. And that really, really made an impression on me because I agree that even though we've moved forward into this, you know, hyper-connected world, this hyper-connectedness is somehow exposing our lack of authenticity or authenticity, whichever the case, in a more immediate and dramatic way.

So, you know, the communication that we have with each other is instantaneous. The access we have to each other is instantaneous.

The responses we hear from each other and see from each other, albeit on Facebook, which I agree is one layer removed from a human interaction or several layers removed. But regardless, our responses are a lot more immediate.

And I guess we have a much more visceral understanding, if that's the right word, of each other's minds. And so to that extent, if we aren't clear about who we are and where we stand and what we stand for, then we are likely to get swayed by a lot of these various messages that are getting, that are hitting us from various angles, social media not being the least of those, and then not being able to really respond in an authentic way because we haven't spent enough time or mental energy trying to get clear about who we are, what we stand for and what we don't stand for.

So I think you make a very, very valid point about the fact that we live in a tribal world online. The other thing I want to say is that as humans, our frontal lobes have only developed very recently in human history, relatively speaking.

And the rest of us is still very much like we were when we were cave creatures. And so tribalism is still alive and well.

And once I can't remember who said it, but civilization is a very thin veneer. And I think there is a lot of truth to that.

A lot of our responses are still very fight or flight. A lot of decisions we make about who we hang out with and who we don't and who we buy from and who we don't are still quite made at a spinal level, at least at that initial level.

Do I like this person or do I not? Do I feel safe with this person or do I not?

Is this person part of my tribe or is she not? And if they're not part of your tribe, you're out.

Whether it is as a business person or anything else, sorry, go on. I totally agree with you, Ash.

We are humans at the end of the day. And when I media train people, I say it's not media training.

It's human training. I love that.

I'm quite often faced with companies and the shit is hitting the fan and everybody's scrabbling around. They may have a communications crisis plan and they don't know what to do.

And then I come along and I say, be a human. The public wants an answer and deserves an answer.

And if you don't have an answer right now, explain why not. It's like when you sit on a train and it stops between stations and nobody says anything and everybody gets really, really annoyed because the reptilian part of our brain can't stand not knowing.

So I call it explanation made fascinating. We love explanation.

We love stories. You know, ever since the time that people were drawing on cave walls, this is how we communicate with one another and this is how we make decisions about who we want to admit to our life or which products that we want to buy.

And I think that when we edit our experience online by judging what other people's values are or what they appear to be. And at the moment we have in the UK, the whole Brexit scenario and in the States, we obviously have dear president Trump.

Now they both won their case based on a war of values. Yes.

And that same war of values exists when you are selling a product or a service. So my advice to anybody would be keep it simple.

Go back to just being a human. You know, if you get something wrong, put your hand up.

Explain why. If you don't have an answer, say you don't have an answer.

If you do something brilliant, put your hand up and shout about it. If you don't know, just tell it like it is.

Be a human. And if you look at all the kind of circumstances of real life, it plays out there too.

So you know, if I have an argument with my spouse, and I can tell you that is a regular event in this house, probably even in this room, because this is where we do our financials with our big chart here. If he's accusing me of something or he's saying you do this and it drives me mad, the one way to build connection in that scenario is to take responsibility or to at least let the other person know that they're being heard.

So you know, you don't do this or you never research the ice says, yeah, sure honey, I'll do that in my sleep, like the other millions of things that I have to do in my sleep. But if I say to him, look, I totally get it, I understand that you're stressed.

And I understand that I'm not really interested in ice, isn't it? You do do that.

And I understand you're not interested in them either. And I'm sorry for that.

I get it. And so, you know, can we work together?

And suddenly what was a flaming, crazy argument becomes something much more human because you're willing to share your vulnerability. You're willing to listen and be empathetic and hear another person.

And the sales process is exactly the same. So people tend to think of storytelling or media training about what you say, but actually it's about what you hear.

It's listening first and doing later. So are you listening to your customers and what they're saying?

And then are you telling the story of what is they're saying, good or bad? That's how you build trust.

So we do the listening first and then we get to the doing and the listening step is one that is very often missed. I was asked to give some advice to a big supermarket here a few years ago when there was a big scandal about horse meat turning up in products that said that they had beef in them.

And obviously a lot of people were really, really upset by that. And so a good colleague of mine who used to be a journalist called me and said, look, these people need some straight talking because they're just running about like, well, headless chickens or headless horses, depending on how you want to put it.

And so I went in there and I just said to them, tell me what's actually happening here. You know, how do we think this happened?

What are you actually doing about it now? And then let's share that.

They were like, what do you mean? Let's share that.

And I said, well, let's get, you know, a camera crew in here. Let's see what you're doing.

Let's see what you are doing to solve it. Because that's the other thing about humans is they're mad at you and they want an explanation.

So give them an explanation explanation made fascinating. And then it stops people from worrying about what your motives might be.

You know what else that does when you provide an explanation, it stops people from creating their own explanations, which can be much, much worse. Yeah.

One of the worst things you can do, as you were saying with the train example is when you leave people room or, you know, when you have this big elephant in the room and people have to come up with their own explanations, fill in the blanks, as it were, they can put anything in there if you don't go and put something in there yourself, which is the truth. You know, are you in control of your own truthful story or are you not?

Now people get very upset about this word truth, what do you, what do you mean be honest? Just explain yourself.

You know, I always use the example that I remember coming home one night from being out with my boyfriend when I was younger. And this was a boyfriend that my parents did not like, but they thought, you know, she's got to see it through.

And I can remember exactly why we were home late, but I was, you know, hormone filled. I bounced across the path, I knew I was late, but you know, Hey, I'm up to here with hormones.

So what would I care? I get into the front door and the latch is still on.

And I'm thinking, wow, well, the big guns are coming out. Now, my parents gave me a lot of rope to hang myself with, they're very reasonable people.

So for the latch to still be on, you know, just meant basically I was going to get shot. I opened the door and my mom's face said it all, you know, which is basically, you know, I've encouraged your dad to treat you like a responsible adult and now you're late and you're going to lose your privileges and he just looked upset, but he also looked afraid.

And now that I'm a parent, I can see that he was terrified. Like, where is she?

Have they crashed the car? I hate that boy.

Why did I ever let her see this through? Why did I listen to her mother?

So, you know, in his head, he wants to kill me. He wants to divorce my mother.

And all I did in that moment was to say, I know I've screwed up. I'm really sorry.

I know that you trust the mean. I know that you're afraid.

And it makes people upset to talk about it because here was my poor dad thinking, you know, that I was lying in a ditch somewhere or God knows probably something worse. And all I had to do was to fess up and to say, I get it.

I'm sorry. I've screwed up.

And whatever punishment you come up with for me, I take it on the chin. And he just hugged me.

He gave me this big massive hug and he said, let's talk about it in the morning. And in the morning, we had a very civil conversation between two adults where he explained what he was feeling and how scared he was.

And I said, I completely understand that dad, you know, and I think in that moment I grew up a little bit seeing that fear in his eyes, but also that's human communication. I explained why I thought we were late and I took it on the chin.

It's really not complicated, but, and this is an aside, shareholders do not like the word truth and honesty. They prefer the backwards route, which I never recommend.

I say, fess up, be clear, explanation made fascinating. If you're trying to fix a problem, show people how you're trying to fix that problem.

And hope that it will go away because you can actually make great content out of your vulnerability and out of the actual fixing. And that is a step that people miss because when you're screwed up, you get a lot of free publicity.

So you've got to make that free publicity last and you've got to show in the time that you have that free publicity, that you have the source of values that people out there that are buying from you, you know, are using your services care about. Okay.

So there's some great action steps for anyone who's listening over here. One is keep it simple and understand that storytelling is about first listening and talking later.

So if you don't understand the narrative that your audience or your tribe relates to, then your story is not going to work. Well, actually that even sounds quite inauthentic.

What I mean to say is you need to understand your own story and you need to understand the other person's perspective and your story has to map into their journey and it has to be relatable for them so that they can relate to your story and understand it. So vulnerability is something that most people can relate to, which comes back to what you were saying earlier on with the company that, you know, had concerns about the horse meat instead of the beef and so on.

I remember I spoke to Joe Pulizzi in episode 75 and he was talking about meeting a customer where they are on their journey and this sounds very reminiscent of that. And more recently in episode 116, I talked to Brian Clark and Brian Clark talked about humanizing your content, which I really liked.

And we were saying that, you know, all these sales funnels and marketing automation, that's great. And that's a tool that facilitates more efficient marketing processes.

But if the core of your content is inauthentic, is not human, isn't vulnerable, doesn't express your essence and doesn't call out your tribe and provide someone and a human hook on which to make a connection to set a foothold, then all the marketing automation in the world is only going to automate something that is very robotic in terms of communication. Yeah, I totally agree.

I mean, I can give you a worksheet that I use with my clients and you can send it out to anybody who wants to download it. That would be great.

I'd love to link to that in the show notes. Yeah.

Exactly. You know, what this worksheet is about is kind of reducing storytelling down to kind of constituent parts.

Yeah. So we start with, you know, heading, listening to your customer.

What is your customer or your prospective customer telling you? Now you might say, "Well, I don't have any customers yet."

Well, who would you like them to be? Go out, find them online, look at the comments that they're making on your competitor's products because people will always say what they don't want rather than what they do.

So look at what they don't want and build your product or your offering around that. So that's listening to them.

Listen to the tone that they use, the words that they use. So that's your kind of listening part done.

And then it comes to you, you know, what are your goals for your business? We don't want more than three because more than three is really complicated.

So what are those three goals for your business? And then we come to who are you as a story or who is your product as a story?

And in the words of an old news editor of mine, "Forgive me for swearing, but why the does anyone care about your story?" I would go into a news meeting when I was a trainee journalist with some of the fiercest brains in the land, and I'd be sitting there at 22, quaking in my boots when it came to my turn to pitch.

And I learned if you cannot nail it in one sentence, you're done. You are burned and they move on.

That's the reality of the media. And actually, that's the reality of the attention span of most of your customers.

So you have got to have done all the work. You've got to be able to reduce it down.

Now, I'm an expert storyteller and a communication strategist. And I have to do this all the time and I have to keep redoing it.

So I use this same sheet every six months. What are my customers telling me?

What's working for them and what's not? What other problems have they mentioned to me that they would like me to solve?

Who am I right now? What kind of problem solver am I?

What am I passionate about delivering right now? And then I try to update my website or whatever it is that I'm putting out on LinkedIn with those things.

So that I'm kind of constantly evolving along with my customer. And then I think, what is your main value?

And when I say value, I mean, in ClanMac Media, useful. I want to be useful.

I had a meeting with a client the other day. They wanted to buy a film for me, but they had absolutely no runway or path for this film.

They wanted a film, but they didn't know what they wanted it for. Now I said, I can happily charge you 15,000 pounds for a film, but you're going to be really dissatisfied when you tell me, well, the film didn't do anything for me.

That's because making a film doesn't actually make it useful unless you do something with it. It's just an accessory, but you have to know what it's for and what to do with it and where you're going to send it out into the world so that we can make you a film that matters.

And actually the answer might even be not making a film. It might be doing a host of other things and not wasting your money on a film because they will get better results.

So I think for me, we need to be valuable to people. We need to be useful to people and we need to be trusted.

And so looking at those values, being a trusted advisor is so important. Yeah.

And I do not want to take people's money and then not deliver. That is not who I am.

I want to give value. I will always give more.

I'm always there when a client calls me in the middle of the night, you know, I'm giving a speech tomorrow. I still have clients that I media trained three years ago and they say, I'm giving a speech.

And I remember it said in the storytelling notes, but oh, I've lost them. Can you help me?

So I point them to where we store everything online. You know, once somebody is a client of mine, they're part of my family and that's how I operate.

That's wonderful. And so that's the story that I try to tell through all the interactions that I have.

Now, I don't always get it right. I'm still learning.

I still get feedback that goes something like, we didn't like the edit process. It wasn't quick enough.

We'd like more. And then I have to listen to that and I have to think, okay, could I have changed that?

Or actually, do I need to manage my client better and explain to them about the filmmaking process that they don't understand? So I think first up it's listening, then it's deciding on your goals, your story, and your values.

And then it's about picking that one value, that one story, and telling it everywhere all the time. If you're useful, if you're trusted, if you're the best, although that's a pretty difficult story to tell, then tell it everywhere.

So you know, I recently met with a businessman here where I live locally who runs a private GP's service, he's a very well-known local GP, and he also runs a kind of cosmetics business. And he'd had a meeting at a big agency, but there was just something about it that was saying, "I'm going to put out all this money, but it's going to be kind of a one-trick pony."

And so he said, "Can we have a strategy meet and discuss what we should be doing?" And we had such a great meeting and we used that worksheet and we just took it down to brass tacks.

And at the end of it, I think he was happy that he discovered actually the money that he has to spend now is quite minimal, because until he starts to communicate, he won't have the answers he needs to bring out the big guns. So it starts a little, yeah.

I just want to jump in there and just mention a couple of things, bring out a couple of points. First of all, I want to just highlight those four points that you said to the listeners.

So the four steps I've got here are, first, you get clear by listening to what your audience is saying. The second thing you do is decide on your goals.

Then the third thing you do is get clear on your own values. And then the fourth thing is you tell your story everywhere.

Now something that this resonates with me or this sort of is very parallel to the idea of understanding your customer and creating a customer avatar. And Julie, you and I, we met when we did a course together where we learned how to write from Jon Morrow, who's in episode three of this podcast series.

And we learned how to do customer avatars. And more recently, when I spoke to Brian Clark, we talked about empathy maps and I did a full episode in episode 117, I think, on empathy maps, which is another really great way to get a feel for what your audience or your tribe is experiencing and an empathy map.

If you as a listener don't know what an empathy map is, it is drawing an image of a person or having an image of a person, your target audience or your tribe in the middle. And then you have what are they thinking in one quadrant, what are they feeling?

What are they seeing? What are they hearing?

And then you do that sort of empathizing on those four levels also in relation to how they consume your product or service. So when they consume my product, what are they thinking?

When they consume my product, what are they feeling? What are they hearing?

And so on. And then you can also have what are their biggest fears and frustrations at the bottom on the left-hand side and what are their biggest challenges, sorry, what are the biggest aspirations and dreams.

So that allows us to really lock into their world and understand their world from the perspective of both their problems and their aspirations. Now I also want to point out that as humans, we have a strong bias towards risk minimization as opposed to opportunity maximization.

So problem solving, in my opinion, has to be the first level at which we try and help people. The reptilian brain's first prioritized danger minimization, risk minimization.

So solving a problem is the fastest way to demonstrate value and to resonate with the person with whom you're trying to resonate with. And so when your story is crafted, would you agree, Julie, that when you create, when you come up with your story, you come up with your values, you need to be able to somehow articulate or at least call out your tribe's values.

It has to be a shared problem, perhaps. I love what Brian Clark said at the end of our talk, I think it was in episode 116.

He said, unification, unity in a tribe is important. That's an important part of leadership.

So can you talk to us a bit about that? Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I have a phrase that I use that I keep front and center, and I used to have it on a little post-it note on my computer, which is this. What gets you out of bed in the morning and what keeps them awake at night?

I love that. That's what people are trying to reach, so does your passion, your problem-solving skills and ability and what drives you match with their problem?

And if not, how can you tweak it so that you get that unity that you speak of? Because I think that that's really, really important.

And it may be like in a business like mine, I have loads of different customers, so they will have lots of different problems. And I always need to flex the listening so that I'm honing in on their exact problem.

And sometimes, and this will happen to a lot of business owners, if I don't know the client well or maybe there isn't a lot that I can do to do due diligence on them, I'll go into the meeting and they'll start to tell me, "I'm not really hearing you. I get that you provide that."

And I'll just say simply, "What are your goals? What are your problems?"

So if you feel that things are going a little bit off track, ask questions, then do the listening. And it's the same with people doing little surveys or simply going back to your clients.

Maybe you've only got four or five and saying, "What could I do better? What's still bugging you?

What's the next thing I should write about?" So that unity is about always engaging in a two-way conversation with the people buying from you, with the people that might buy from you.

I mean, you'll see it a lot. If you ever subscribe to any of these kind of movements online about, you know, sell to speak or the course that we did with Jon Morrow, and they're always coming back to ask you essentially for more intel so that they can serve you better.

So that unity is just really about having that conversation and making sure that both ends of the bargain are fed, if you like. Yeah.

Okay. So let's talk a bit about the biggest challenges, and one comes straight to mind.

But the biggest challenges that you've seen people face when trying to be authentic and develop a brand presence, which I see as being almost inseparable, at least in my mind. And what's worked best in terms of overcoming these challenges?

Well, the first challenge I would say, based on what you've been saying to me, is the challenge that our stock market, our business system, and to some extent our society presents, which is we are expected to have an unrealistically heavy bias towards everything being hunky dory. You know, the profits have to eternally be on the up and up, which to my mind, it just boggles me.

I mean, I've got a background in finance, and I can tell you, like any finance person can tell you, that everything is cyclical, and to expect the profits to indefinitely rise is clearly insanity. I mean, sure, you can have productivity gains, and yes, we are a lot more productive than we were 200 years ago and all that sort of stuff.

But at the end of the day, there are going to be some contractions in the economy. Just the fact that, at least in Australia, the definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters that have negative growth itself is, to me, crazy, because you are going to have two consecutive quarters with negative growth.

And this crazy behavior, this crazy psychology has bled into the finance world to the point where a company like Apple in one 12-month period is valued at $200 a stock, and at the other end of that 12-month period is $700 a stock. Now, I don't know which one is right, but one of them is wrong, because you can't have multi-billion, almost closest to a trillion-dollar company, having so much disparity in their stock values.

And that's because some analyst is sitting there, watching their earnings per share, and if they don't meet a target that they have come up with, and they miss it by a cent for a quarter, they hammer the stock. So how in this world of insanity and this expectation of perfection and continuous growth, how does a CEO stay authentic and tell the truth?

So to answer your first question, why do we see this sort of robotic communication that we often do from CEOs and brands? And the reason is fear, fear of the shareholder reaction, fear of the market reaction.

And as you've pointed out, those are very real fears. And if I'm ever coaching anybody, I acknowledge those fears.

They are a big deal. They can make a huge impact on somebody's livelihood.

They might mean that you have to lay people off. So a CEO has a massive, complex, incredibly nuanced job to do, but the CEO has to choose not to be what I call a fair weather CEO.

Are you the kind of CEO, like a fair weather golfer, who only goes out in the sunshine, who can only talk about the journey when it's happy? That does not build trust and it doesn't build trust with the marketplace, but so few companies and organizations take the opportunity to talk about the journey, the story, the potholes, the peaks.

It's all incredibly important. And to focus only on the positive is a huge mistake because right now we're all self publishers.

Every person, every organization, every employee is a self publisher. And my advice would be tell the story of the journey at all points in the journey and be honest and be authentic.

And I quite often meet CEOs who are actually excellent at this. They're excellent at explaining what's going on, but they also need to be true leaders.

And that's how they set themselves apart. Because when you ask them the tough questions, they tell you, yeah, it's challenging.

And you know what? I stay awake at night and I am terrified for the people who work for me because I want them to put food on the table and shirts on the back of their children.

And I know that I'm partly responsible for that. So let me tell you about the challenges that we're facing.

It takes bravery, it takes boldness, and it's all about telling your own story. So I quite often work with big corporates and they'll tell me, well, the media have hijacked my story.

Well, no, they didn't hijack your story, but you were never telling a story. You are not engaging and not just with the media, with people.

Things for a really long time have not been engaging with real people. Trump comes along, Nigel Farage here in the UK, and like their politics or not, they are brilliant strategic communicators.

And they also have data segmenting behind them on platforms like Facebook to back that up. But look at what Trump is doing right now.

He's going out every week. He's traveling around with the country.

He's electioneering and it's not even the election yet. And when you run a business, that's essentially what you're doing.

And when you're a CEO, that's what you're doing. But most CEOs and most top management are so far away from the people that they serve that they are either not listening, they believe they don't have time to listen, and they've forgotten the point of what it is they're doing.

And the point of what you're doing and why it matters is people. It's always people.

Which brings us back to your point about values. It's all about values.

I just want to give you one really good example. I was doing a media training session on behalf of a colleague of mine who fell sick with a client that I didn't really know who's the CEO of a big insurer.

And they're running a campaign about how they really knew that they know their clients. They've done all this research.

We know you. We get you.

And I'm thinking brilliant. This sounds really, really great.

They've done all this research. They really care.

So I sit down and I'm asking simple questions. What specifically did you find out about your clients?

Tell me about one or two of the people and their lives, these people that are buying insurance from you. What did you learn you can do better?

And how much does the average person spend on insurance nowadays? Couldn't answer any of those questions.

They like the idea of doing the research, but not the human digging that it requires to understand a person. So I said, now that's a corporate risk because you want to go out and talk about something that one you don't really care about.

You haven't done the due diligence on and you don't care about the people at the center of this. And that will always show.

And if you go into the media or online with that attitude, it will come back to bite you because that's the world that we live in. So storytelling is incredibly useful, but humanity is at the core of all of this.

Okay. So how do we then translate this to an everyday person?

If I'm listening to this podcast episode and I say, well, I'm not a CEO of an organization or if I am, I'm just a small business owner. How does that translate to me, what actions can I take today to increase my brand in my tribe?

Whether it is my local business community or my stakeholders, how do I build a presence that is authentic and communicate in a way that is consistent with my values? Now I get it.

The CEOs have a lot of stakeholders to manage and maybe their situation's more complex. But even for them, how does one stay authentic in an environment that is putting so much pressure on us to just put our best foot forward?

You don't see Facebook posts where people are saying, I've had a crappy day today. Everyone's talking about how everything is perfect.

So how do we change that? I disagree with that slightly actually, because I think there is a lot of vulnerability out there and there are lots of people who follow folks online because they put their vulnerabilities front and center.

Okay. We had a project with a new CEO quite recently of a big organization, German chap really invested in what he was doing and turning around this organization, but somebody who probably would find it hard to make a connection with in real life.

And so partly what his team wanted me to help them do is how to build that connection, how to help him be more human, because he has the smarts and he actually does care how to help him make that connection. So I suggested, let's put a suggestion box in the front lobby of the office.

And on it, we put a really critical newspaper article about him and it basically just said, read this and then tell us what you don't like about your new CEO or what you'd like to know about him or the things that bother you about the organization right now. And people wrote all sorts of hilarious things.

And then they were published on the intranet every week after that, and he reacted to them. So it was his way of building a connection.

And then it showed that they could face up to the criticism that he was willing to do that and allow that to be put in the lobby to make himself vulnerable. And suddenly people trusted him and they said, actually, this is a person who wants to listen.

And then he was actually able to overcome his shyness a little bit in his fear and go out and start talking to people. So to answer your question, whatever size of business that you own or that you run or that you're part of, talk to people, talk to your colleagues, what are their problems?

Talk to the people who buy from you, what are their problems? What are your own problems?

How can you go out there and solve them? And then how can you tell your story?

If you're a local business, what are the outlets that are already readily available to you to tell your story? To go back to the GP example, one of the things I suggested to them was, you're running a private GP surgery and you want people to come in.

So what's happening in the community? Why should they trust you?

Why don't you put something out of video every week that says, these are the main lurgies that are going around in the community, or this is a really serious outbreak of chickenpox for children. This is how to know what to do.

Be useful. Okay.

That's what you have to reduce it down to. Be really useful and try to be that useful, valuable person who goes around connecting everything without other people having to do the work.

And to be useful, you need to understand your trying to help or who you're trying to communicate with, because if you don't understand them, you're not going to be useful. Exactly.

I want to give you another sheet that follows on from the one that we were talking about, which basically then takes you through, what are the small steps that you can make? Because the biggest problem, and you asked me this before, it's actually lack of time for everybody.

And they might listen to me and think, "Dear God, she works with all these companies. They've got bajillions of dollars and loads and loads of stuff.

I don't in my business." And it is something that I have to devote a bit of time to every week.

And so what I would say is, don't lose heart. There are actually really simple ways to start off by telling stories.

To give you an example, there is a plumber that I met who works for us sometimes here. And he does a little blog on his website once a month about all the hilarious things that go wrong when they go out on jobs.

And he's a really funny Polish guy, and it's very amusing. And sometimes they do things on Facebook Live, and the water will be gushing behind them.

And you kind of think that's counterintuitive. Why would you want to air your mistakes?

But actually, it builds trust. And they had a...

It does, because it shows vulnerability. Exactly.

And this guy is booked up to 2019. Not because he's an expert storyteller, although he is good at that.

Because the service he's providing is human and people trust him. And ultimately, when he puts in a tap or a shower, it works.

So storytelling is never going to... It's never going to transform a poor product.

It can get people to buy, for sure. But it's never going to get them to truly buy into the cause, the movement, or whatever it is that you're trying to create.

So yeah, there are loads of small steps that people can take. I'll provide you with a sheet that people can go through.

Yep. And I'll include them in the show notes.

Yeah. The other thing to say too is that quite often, when I meet people locally, and there are loads of local businesses, to me here in Surrey, just outside London, they've got all sorts of different goals.

And they'll tell me, "We want to get national coverage. We want to get into the newspaper."

And I'd say, "Why? Why would you devote your energy to that?"

Because your customers are actually right here, right now. Yeah.

And we live in a world now where you don't have to be published in the newspaper. Exactly.

You are your own publisher. You are your own newsroom.

So if you are a story, be the story, tell the story. Another example to give you is where I used to live in North London.

There was a butcher close to us where we used to go. And the guy was a really keen photographer.

So the walls of the butcher shop were covered in photos that he'd taken over the years of people in his local community. So he matched one of his passions with one of his other passions, which was obviously selling meat and providing for his family, and word spread.

People used to go there just to look at the photos on the wall. Then of course, somebody goes in there and says, "We'd really like to feature your photographs in an exhibition in a massive gallery in London."

So he was always telling his story. He wasn't sitting down every week having a strategy.

Think about it. He's like, "I love taking pictures.

I love the community that I live in." And there would always be stories about him in the paper.

There was always a cue outside the door because he was a human and he knew how to connect with people. He was just authentic.

And so what I would say to people is even if you think to yourself, "I don't have a story," you do. Even if your story is that we're not like all those other people with all their gimmicks and their photos on the wall and their blogs.

We're just straight up butcher, painter, candlestick maker. We do what it says in the tin.

You can trust us to get the work done. There is a customer out there who wants that efficiency and that almost lack of a story, but you still have to tell the story.

Does that make sense? Yeah, it does.

So I see what you're saying. The lack of the story is the story, but if you don't communicate that you don't have a story, then you don't have a story.

Exactly. And I quite often hear from people, they'll say, "Well, this brand's got all the gimmicks and that really annoys me."

I'm like, "Great. Get a piece of paper.

Why does it annoy you? Will it annoy me because it's all about the gimmicks?

Is it about the gimmicks or are they trying to do something else? They're trying to make a connection."

Why did they want to make a connection with their gimmicks? Oh, because they want to attract those customers.

Yeah, I don't like those customers. They always complain.

They want too much. "Okay.

Well, what kind of customers do you want? And what do they want from you?"

They want simple. They want efficient.

They don't want flim flam and window dressing and Facebook live-ing. They just want you to bloody fix their problem.

Fine. Tell me that story.

Put a rant about it on your website that you're not about gimmicks and then the people who click on it will say, "No gimmicks plumbing," or whatever it is. Everybody has a story.

Once you see the values written down and you understand what they are, you should know what your story is. I've got a confession to make.

I have been very anxious about emailing my list and so I freeze because there's lots of stories I can tell. But I think to myself, "Well, why would they want to read this?

Do I have the right to pollute their inbox with my story?" And so I end up not emailing them as often as I probably should be.

I've emailed them very infrequently to the point where sometimes they don't even forgotten they've subscribed to the list. So it's kind of like a self-fulfilling prophecy, really.

But what I'm hearing is that I need to just be getting out there and putting my story forward. And if they don't like it, they can unsubscribe and if they do like it, they will.

But either way, they'll vote one way or the other and I still need to tell the story whether people like it or not. You still need to tell the story.

And whether people like it or not, I think it always freaks people out and it freaks me out too. Of course, I would, in an ideal world, like everybody loved my stuff, my films, or whatever.

But that's not reality because we're humans and we have different needs and wants and different ways of connecting. And actually, if you lose some people from your list or you lose some people from your prospects, that's a great thing because then you can concentrate on the place where you are going to convert, make a difference, add value, be useful, whatever it is for you.

So actually small is beautiful. Because those...

I'm not so much worried about losing people from my list. I'm more worried about polluting the inbox with stuff they don't want.

I just don't want to be a pain. But I think two steps there.

One is you have to shoot some things out of the canon first and then listen. So I would say, yeah, maybe not sending things every week.

It depends what they told you that they like receiving things every week because, okay, keep doing it. But also, if you're listening to them and you're identifying their problems continually, you're never really going to be a nuisance.

I mean, there's things that I subscribe to. Seth Godin's one of them.

I read his stuff every day. It takes me one minute.

I find it of huge value. I quite often click on the things he suggests because I feel like he's plugged into the world at large.

He's plugged into the same stories I am. He's interested in the same things.

I don't see it as a nuisance. There are other things which I don't click on, but I'm not offended because I have opted into that.

If I'm so minded, I can opt out altogether. But in reality, we only learn by doing.

Effects don't happen by thinking. We've got to do and then listen and then react according to what is coming back, the boomerang.

What's coming back and what do you need to do to react better to it next time? Then on top of that, I think it's asking again.

I've noticed people that these are some of the comments that I'm getting. What should I write about next?

If you didn't really like that one because it didn't get a good open rate, well, do you want me to talk about? Again, it comes back to that two-way relationship.

But again, this is still something even with my own website, thedailyjuggle.com, which I'm rebooting at the moment. It's a constant juggle for me there.

I often feel like I'm not getting this right, but in the beginning and even further along in the journey, there is no right. There's just put it out there, see what happens, and then react more intelligently, the more intel that you have.

Yeah. Okay.

There's lots of stuff we've covered in this episode and we've got lots of action steps. I'm just going to try and recap one.

Some of them have taken some notes here, so some of the action steps I've written down is keep it simple. Storytelling is about listening first and doing later.

The four steps to developing a story and a narrative that resonates is step number one is learn to listen. Step number two is decide on your goals as a business or a brand or both.

Step number three is get clear on your values as a business or a brand. Step number four is then tell the story and tell it as widely as you can.

Yeah. Another really great insight you gave me was try and understand what gets you out of bed in the morning and that also keeps up your prospects at night because that is the sweet spot where you can really add maximum amounts of value.

To understand what keeps up your audience or your customers at night or your tribe up at night is listen. Listen on social media, listen in conversations, always be on the lookout to listening.

The other thing that I got from this was a lot of ... One of the biggest challenges to being authentic on media and to developing an authentic brand presence is fear.

Large corporations are fearful, large shareholders of ... CEOs of large corporations are often fearful and the answer to that is face the fears or maybe even speak about your fears and make your fear the story and make the journey of overcoming the fear the story.

A bit like I tried to do a few minutes ago when I was talking about my fears about emailing my list and that then becomes a little bit of a story and I deliberately did that because I thought that would be a good opportunity for me to implement what you're saying right here and right now. Absolutely.

I think on that, Ash, in big organizations, people listen to this, they say, "No way. That just would not get past the checks and balances."

Okay. Tell the story internally.

I love that. Tell it in a way that it would be surprising.

If you're a CEO or a head of communications or whatever, you would never even consider making a video or a podcast or whatever. Do it.

Do something different because if you do what you've always done, you'll always get the same results. If you know you need to increase engagement or that people's levels of satisfaction at work are dipping, don't sit there and hear the problem and feel the problem and then not try to solve it.

Now, people have a huge workload. I totally get this and it can be very, very difficult to know what to do when.

My advice would simply be, tell the story where you can, where it's appropriate to tell it. For a big CEO, that may be in the world at large or it may be internally.

That's the same in your business. Maybe you want to try telling it your story internally first because actually, probably those people in your business have a lot of the problems that they either understand the customer has or that they have themselves.

Use them to test it first and see what comes back. We've all got friends and relatives or people that we can ask.

The best thing to do is to find the friend or colleague of yours who is the grumpiest person and who's going to tell you when something's shit, when it's shit. Basically, you go and you see them and say, "This is my idea.

This is what I want to do. This is the story I want to tell," and let them tear it to shreds.

Then when they do that, you piece it back together in the knowledge that people need explanation to remove the barriers to their acceptance of the story. That is what stops us from buying most of the time is fear, a lack of confidence, or on the other hand, that helps us to buy or to belong to something is that the barriers have been moved out of the way for us and that we think that the value that we're going to derive is worth the risk.

These are all tiny little baby steps. As I say, I've been doing this for 20 years.

Last night, I was on air and I was interviewing someone and I had a moment where I thought, "I'm not sure this is the right question to ask. Maybe I'll ask this question."

I said that to her on air in front of millions of people around the world. I said, "I'm not sure if this is the right question to ask you.

I'm not even sure if it's completely insensitive, but I feel like I need to ask it," but explaining why I need to ask it means that it softens the blow and it shows that I'm a human. Now for some journalists, that might not matter, that's not their style, but to me, it matters.

Show yourself wherever you are, being decent. It's just about being decent, yeah.

Yeah, and decent is massively undervalued except by other humans. The other thing that I really liked is you said we're all self-publishers and that was something that really struck me as well.

Lots of learnings from this. I'll include everything in the show notes.

Now let's talk a bit about the books that have had the biggest impact on you and why. Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, obviously there are books that have had a huge impact on me that are fictional books, but I think because here we're trying to be useful and practical. There are a couple of books that I really love.

One is Guerrilla Marketing and it is massive. It's a huge tool.

It took me six months to get through it because I would read it every time I went for a peek or I would take it on the train with me and read it. I was grasping at moments to read this book, but actually I learned a lot about marketing from reading that book.

One of the headlines from that book is consistency. Deciding on your story, deciding on your values, deciding on your path, and then committing to it because quite often what people do is they jump around and they don't see the results quickly enough or the level of results that they want and they start jumping around.

Now that can make depending on what you're trying to sell and what you're trying to achieve people nervous, so consistency and commitment is really, really important. But also what's great about that book is it talks about all sorts of things you can do without spending an awful lot of money and that is obviously really important, but it all does take effort and like everything in life as my dear dad always says, it's all about the hard work and that's true here.

So take the small steps, be committed, put in the hard work. There's loads of great stuff in that book, I'd really, really recommend it, but don't kill yourself to try to read it in one go because it is a massive, a massive, massive tone.

And the other one, which I've just forgotten my name off off the top of my head is Confessions of a Media Manipulator, which I think everybody should read because it will help you to understand how news and how stories, the viral ones, the ones that infect your world get there in the first place. Now in the olden days, things had to be truly, truly worthy to get on the news, you know, was it a big train crash, did a ferry sink, was there an earthquake?

Those kinds of things were the things that made the news. But now media strategists who understand the space very, very well are able to manipulate storytelling to put it out there so that it does go viral, so that you click on it so that somebody gets elected.

That's the world we're living in. And the bottom line for any business owner reading this book is if everybody else is out there strategically storytelling, where are you?

If you don't opt into the swim, where are you? Now in a small scale, what that means is some of the things we've talked about before, go local first, try to be useful to the people that you serve.

You know, if you are so minded, go to local TV and newspapers, but in the same way that there are strategists being paid millions of pounds to do this for the big brands, you're going to have to either do it for yourself or pay a VA or somebody to make these calls for you. But nothing happens from nothing.

And the impression that there's just this invisible kind of fairy world of stories that are just waiting to be grasped by the media, it doesn't work like that. It is all strategy.

And right now it's also placement of stories at particular times, you know, even right down to the political fraternity, you know, they'll put stories that they don't want the public to pay attention to on a particular day of the week. Or sometimes they'll get lucky, a scandal will come out and then a plane will go down.

Oh, they'll create a scandal. Oh, they'll create a scandal, you know, and that level of manipulation is out there.

So I suppose if there's anything to take away from this book is that's the reality in the world out there for you. Stories are powerful and they create whatever possibilities you want to put the effort in to creating.

Yeah. You know, you would really enjoy this episode I did with Valerie Khoo.

I think it might be episode 70 from memory. It's the eight stories you must tell in business.

So you, you might want to check that out anyway. Well, thank you so much for being on the show and I really enjoyed this conversation.

I've learned a lot. I hope everyone who's been listening has learned a lot.

Is there anything else you'd like to add before we say goodbye? No, just, you know, go forth, try to, you know, put the fear in a box when you try a new thing.

It's something I also find really, really difficult, but just do it, see what the reaction is, and then listen, spend more time listening and observing, and you'll be able to make better decisions and better use of your precious time. And you know, if you have any questions, you can email me.

If you log on to the contacts page, you'll see it there. And I'm one of these people I like, I'm an enabler.

I love to help people. So, you know, if you have a question or you've listened to something in this, maybe you disagree with it, whatever, just shim me a line.

Okay. You know, I want people to do well.

I want people to go out there and make the best of their business. That is what gets me out of bed in the morning and what keeps me awake at night is thinking that people are stuck and that they don't know how to overcome a barrier.

And so if I can help you overcome that barrier, you know, drop me a line, let's have a conversation. Can't wait.

And I'll include a link to clanmacmedia.com on my show notes as well so people can reach out. Brilliant.

When you mentioned my website, it made me think of something else. So many things to say, which is that, you know, company or a brand may have many faces and my company has lots of different faces.

So one of the things I've been working on this week is writing our LinkedIn page. And I've had somebody help me with that as well, an external person.

So looking at the LinkedIn page, what kind of offers and things are going to go on that page. So that's, that's one face.

We also have another face on our website and the website is quite simple. There's not a huge amount of storytelling in it.

And that's mainly as a shop window for my corporate clients to show them that, you know, that I am a brand that's big enough to have a website, but there's not a huge amount of detail there. So I prefer to go into the detail and the storytelling and the sharing of my soul in a more private forum.

And that's something to think about if you are a business, not everything has to be done in the light of the day, you know, choose which faces you want to show on what social media outlets and then how much you want to share. And that can be really important.

It's important for me because I'm actually quite a shy person. And whilst I do want to share, I want to have control of where I'm sharing.

So that's something for you guys to think about as well. Great.

Thank you. So look, there's clearly so many cans of worms we have opened in this conversation, which makes for great storytelling in the future.

So I'd love to have you back on the show and maybe we can do a few more episodes on some other key topics that come to mind off the back of this. Absolutely.

I'd love to, Ash. Thank you for having me.

Thanks, Ash.