Why Content Marketing ROI is Back to Front

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Why Content Marketing ROI is Back to Front

The Content Marketing Institute released the 2016 Content Marketing Benchmark, Budgets, and Trends for Australia report a few days ago, and I’ve been stewing over exactly what these numbers mean for the local industry.

As Joe Pulizzi’s initial wrap-up points out, there are some interesting anomalies in here that invite interpretation and further investigation. But as Joe has already looked at these in some detail, I thought I’d focus on one particular area that leapt out at me.

Show me the money!

When I run workshops, I’m always quizzed on how to measure content marketing or social media ROI. In most cases, I suspect it isn’t the marketer actually doing the asking. Instead, they’re channelling a question from a boss who needs more convincing that what they’re already doing is actually benefitting the business.

In short, it’s about retrospective justification, not strategic measurement.

The ROI question pops up again in the new report. The most common challenge may be “Producing engaging content” (69%), but the number two slot is taken by “Measuring the ROI of Content Marketing Program” (54%).

This, for me, remains the key to understanding many of the other responses in the report. It also reveals a lot about what we mean by effectiveness and the quality of the strategy—documented or otherwise.

Top 5 Challenges for Australian Content Marketers

No ROI = No strategy

So, here’s my thing.

If you don’t know how to measure the ROI of your strategy, you don’t have a strategy. If you don’t know how to measure the effectiveness of your content, you don’t have a strategy. A strategy should define both effectiveness and ROI with agreed upfront KPIs because your strategy should be focused on clear goals and outcomes.

But marketers often work in reverse. They start using content marketing, because who doesn’t blog and tweet and publish these days. After a while, they realise the need for a documented strategy, so they produce one that attempts to formalise the activities they’re already doing. And then they struggle to justify the strategy in business terms – KPIs, ROI, and so on – because none of these activities were originally devised with the CFO in mind.

Speaking of which …

These are not the metrics you’re looking for

Earlier this year, The Fournaise Group released some pretty damning research. In short:

  • 76% of marketers track effectiveness wrongly
  • 77% of marketers believe effectiveness is primarily about awareness
  • 71% claim the best way to prove effectiveness is through measuring engagement: clicks, views, likes, shares, opens, etc.
  • And, 86% of these engagement marketers mistake engagement for conversion.

Indeed, these marketers believe that their engagement KPIs actually prove they generated more business for their organisation, even though they can’t really and unequivocally link these engagement KPIs to actual business and P&L-related results, and marketing ROI (based on the real and precise finance-driven definition of marketing ROI, and not the fluffy ones they often come up with).

The Fournaise Group

These results terrify me because they show how our industry has become increasingly out of step with the business expectations and outcomes we’re supposed to deliver.

Constructing a strategy should always begin with a clear understanding of at least one measurable business outcome that everyone can agree on. This is the source of the ROI; reduced support costs, increased sales, improved lead quality, and so on. If the goal has a measurable value to the business (and you can work with the CFO on this) then the ROI math becomes a lot simpler.

Only then can you work forward to implement the tactics and content assets required to achieve that goal.

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Tommy Walls and the Native Advertising Caper

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Tommy Walls and the Native Advertising Caper

Tommy Walls from Eagle comicThe GI Joe comic book is probably the best known case study of a brand partnering with a comic publisher for content marketing. First published in 1982, the popular Marvel comic was part of a deliberate marketing strategy by toy manufacturer Hasbro to help relaunch the line of action figures. But GI Joe was far from the first.

Wall’s Ice Cream beat Hasbro by over thirty years, with the weekly Tommy Walls comic strip that ran in the popular Eagle comic between 1950 and 1954. Tommy Walls, the Wonder Boy, also serves as a fantastic example of how good native advertising can be.

I’ve collected both US and UK comics most of my life, with examples of both famous and long-forgotten titles going back over a hundred years catalogued neatly in folders. So I was already very familiar with Tommy Walls, having become a fan of 1950s Eagle comics as a teenager. But familiarity can sometimes blind us. It was only when I tried to come up with some new and less obvious pre-internet examples of content marketing for a recent workshop that I had the forehead-slapping moment of realising there was a fantastic and fun example right next to me on the shelf.

Tommy Walls comic page from Eagle, November 1950
Early strip from Nov 1950.
Click to view

In 1950, Wall’s Ice Cream partnered with Hulton Press, a magazine publisher preparing to launch a brand new weekly comic; Eagle. Hulton had never published a comic before, previously known for titles such as Farmers Weekly and Leader Magazine. This might be why the publisher was more open to branded content than other comic publishers (most of whom had already turned down Eagle when the proposal was shopped around in 1949). Magazine advertorials were nothing new, so why not use the same approach in comics? Marcus Morris, the editor, knew this was an innovation, and the deal was only agreed after a lot of market research and negotiation. However, Morris knew the high quality comic was an expensive gamble. This deal meant Wall’s would pay for the space and the entire production of one page of comic strip adventure, helping reduce costs without reducing the number of comic pages.

The first issue of Eagle went on sale on April 8th, 1950 (cover dated 14 April 1950). The new comic was a sell-out, partly thanks to the front cover adventures of a new kind of space hero – Dan Dare. Only eight of the comic’s twenty pages were in full colour, and one of those was dedicated to the adventures of Tommy Walls. The character appeared throughout the early golden years of the comic, finally exiting the lineup in 1954. Eagle continued until 1969 and is still fondly remembered and celebrated as one of the greatest comics of all time.

“Thanks to the Magic ‘W’ – and Wall’s”

Tommy Walls comic page from Eagle, May 1953.
Tommy Walls from May 1953.
Click to view

Tommy Walls combined product placement with childhood fantasy. By forming the magic W symbol with his fingers, Tommy could fly, exhibit super strength, and whatever else was needed to apprehend bank robbers or rescue experimental airplanes. Naturally, Tommy always credited his powers to Wall’s Ice Cream.

After a few years, the superhero elements faded, to be replaced by multi-episode adventures with more detailed plots. Tommy and his friends would assist Sir Gerald of the British secret service to defeat the nation’s (not always politically correct) enemies. The second page reproduced here is a perfect example, while still demonstrating how the brand could be squeezed into the storyline as a helpful Wall’s van driver uses a random ice cream fact to prove Tommy’s sanity – an extra bit of branded education for the reader.

Wall’s and Eagle never attempted to hide that this was marketing. The full page comic strip always carried the legend “advertising announcement” above the Tommy Walls masthead and the product placement was clear enough to make the brand’s agenda obvious. The target readership (10-15 year olds) were certainly old enough to recognise that they were being marketed to. But who cares if the content is actually good? (It’s actually very corny, but it’s fun.)

I’m sure no child reading the comic genuinely believed he or she could gain super powers or catch spies by licking a raspberry ripple and sticking some fingers in the air. But the fantasy was fun. It, no doubt, lead to more than a few Wall’s Ice Cream purchases, each one eaten with a healthy topping of imagination. Wall’s was the only ice cream that promised adventure.

For the more classically educated among you, this is also a classic example of ethos, with a healthy scoop of decorum. Ethos is one of the three appeals of rhetoric, tapping into the interests of the audience and being likeable enough to warrant attention. Decorum is the adaptation of the message, language and presentation to suit the time, place and sensibilities of the audience – surely the core goal of content marketing and, especially, native advertising.

One of the Boys

Frank Hampson, the award-winning Dan Dare creator and artist, illustrated the first six episodes. This is the comic equivalent of Orwell writing your blog posts or Coppola shooting your YouTube videos. Hampson was succeeded by a number of other leading Eagle artists, including Harold Johns (who also worked on Dan Dare), John Worsley (PC49) and Richard Jennings (Storm Nelson).

This is an important point. Unlike a lot of native advertising today, this content wasn’t produced by the brand or its content or advertising agency, supplied to the publisher to fill a paid slot. It doesn’t try to copy the house style; it is the house style. The whole strategy relied on the comic strip receiving the same creative process and production values as any other page in the comic. As a result, Tommy Walls is listed alongside all of the other Eagle characters in any documented history of the comic. He was as much an Eagle character as Dan Dare, Harris Tweed, PC49, Riders of the Range or Luck of the Legion. Not many advertising features can claim that!

Good content marketing is that which the target audience actually chooses to read. While other full page adverts might attract a moment’s attention as the reader flicked the page to the next adventure strip, Tommy Walls WAS that adventure strip. Now that’s native advertising!

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When is an expert not an expert?

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When is an expert not an expert?

Today, everyone seems to be an expert. There’s so much (warning: buzzword incoming) “thought leadership” around, it becomes extremely hard to determine who really knows their stuff, and who is merely parroting information and insight researched from Google.

There is too much content out there that aspires to showcase expertise or authority while merely rehashing information and ideas from elsewhere, without adding any unique value or insight. The information may still be accurate and valuable. But it ain’t a sign that the writer, or the brand who paid the bill, is any more of an expert than you would be if you simply popped the same keywords into a search engine.

Anyone who reads my stuff regularly or has heard me speak will know I’m a cynical and skeptical grumpy old bugger. So, naturally, I’ve developed an irrational bias against a lot of what passes for expert commentary and thought leadership these days. And when anyone ever accuses me of being an expert, I’m quick to correct them for fear of the stigma (my own irrational stigma, remember) sticking to me.

Ironically, I’ve also stated elsewhere that I believe expert or thought leader status is defined by others, not by ourselves. So if others want to award me that status and authority, should I argue?

But being branded an expert still makes me nervous. I feel it sets an expectation that I should have the definitive answer for everything related to content marketing and strategy – and that’s just plain unrealistic. In short, I don’t like the expert tag because I’m far too aware of my limitations and the boundaries of my knowledge.

You have to stick within what I call your circle of competence. You have to know what you understand and what you don’t understand. It’s not terribly important how big the circle is. But it is terribly important that you know where the perimeter is.

Charlie Munger

“I don’t know” can be the right answer

Mark Twain said, “If you have nothing to say, say nothing.” But unfortunately there are many who act as if saying nothing would reveal a weakness. So when asked a question outside of their “circle of competence”, they say anything, even if it is ill-informed or overly-subjective twaddle, to cover up the holes in their knowledge.

It’s as if they’re afraid that, if they give the honest answer of “I don’t know”, the “expert” tag will crumble away and their hourly rate will come crashing down with it. Of course, the opposite is often true, as by giving a poor answer they potentially do far more damage to their expert reputation.

When I run a content marketing workshop or speak at events, I’m often asked technical questions and software recommendations.

Of course I’m aware of the various digital tools available to marketers, and use many of them. But my experience of them and insight into their use can never be comprehensive enough to venture an opinion on whether Joomla is better than WordPress or which of the many social media monitoring dashboards to use. How can I recommend or advise others on their use when I haven’t had reason or opportunity to work with more than one or two platforms in any serious way?

The technology is simply not my area of expertise. Apart from anything else, the irrelevancy of focusing on digital marketing technology bores me. It’s like a creative writing class focusing on the different functions of Microsoft Word.

Therefore, I’ve always steered clear of getting too deep into the technical side of content marketing and openly say so when asked such questions. For one thing, deconstructing every Facebook algorithm update or experimenting with every new platform that comes along would take far too much time and effort away from mastering what I feel are far more important skills — the art of producing effective and well-written content.

True experts recognise the limits of what they know and what they do not know. If they find themselves outside their circle of competence, they keep quiet or simply say ‘I don’t know’.

Rolf Dobelli: The Art of Thinking Clearly

Ask the right question of the right expert

If I do need something technical doing, I bring others on board. I might need a new website, but I’ll get someone else to build it. And that someone will be skilled at building websites, not designing content strategies. Want a recommendation on which CMS to use? Ask the web developer. Want advice on the content to put on that site? Ask me.

Plus, Google is already packed with plenty of information and commentary on almost every marketing technology topic you can imagine. Remember when Pinterest became an overnight sensation? Remember how every third tweet seemed to be a link to an article on how to make your website more Pinterest-friendly or a hundred other technical issues? Whenever any major new technology comes on the market, within days there are hundreds of such blog posts, providing commentary, comparisons and ten-step guides on every possible technical detail.

Why? Because it’s easier for marketers to blog about technical tips — promising ten steps to this or how to build that. And because it’s hard to have a unique opinion on how to set up a LinkedIn ad campaign or set up Pinterest board, most of these posts contain parroted information replicated many times over across the web.

On the other hand, it’s far harder to explore and write about the vagaries of the creative process and human behaviour, both of which will actually have more to do with whether a marketing tactic is successful or not.

So if you attend one of my content strategy workshops in Sydney or Melbourne, or hear me speak at a marketing conference, don’t ask me the technical question. Google it. That’s all I’d be doing anyway. The difference is that I’ll be honest about it.

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Is Content Marketing Lost in Translation?

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Is Content Marketing Lost in Translation?

One theme that cropped up again and again at this year’s Sydney Content Marketing World was how marketers need to understand their audience – even before they become customers. So far, so much common sense. Yet we can all name thousands of examples where what should be common sense is overlooked in favour of disconnected and cliched marketing-think.

It’s not surprising this happens when marketers persist in overcomplicating everything while speaking a different language to everyone else. Why is so much marketing discussion carried out in code?

“Sorry, I don’t speak Marketing”

The always plain-spoken journalist Stilgherrian wasn’t at Content Marketing World (I think he would find burning hot coals preferable) but he vented his frustration at the #CMWorld hashtag on Twitter.

Why are we? It’s a fair question. Our industry is now so full of weasel words, buzzwords, cliches and empty rhetoric that sometimes even we struggle to understand what we really mean. However, although it might not always have been obvious from viewing the hashtag, Content Marketing World did try to hold certain overused terminology to account.

Joe Pulizzi even opened the event by apologising to the audience for popularising the phrase “content marketing” back in 2007. At least content marketing is a pretty innocent term that attempts to simplify rather than overcomplicate things. That certainly can’t be said for many other overused marketing terms …

Don’t look now, but your buzzwords are showing

Put enough marketers in a room and before long someone will start talking about “analysing the social graph” to “foster creative ideation” so they can “launch innovative tactics” designed to “activate community engagement” for “maximum reach and cut-through”, all while “maintaining alignment with the core brand message”.

By which I think they mean, “thinking up new ways to use social media so that interested people can learn more about what we do.”

People who make things more complex than they are either know less than they think, or are trying to sell you something

Jay Baer, Convince & Convert

Despite working in the persuasion industry, we have a terrifying knack of believing our own bullshit as it bounces around the echo chamber. In the constant search for a silver bullet, we sell each other new fads and develop new theories, dressed up in impressive sounding but ultimately empty terminology.

Marketers marketing marketing to other marketers is never going to end well. (Tweet this)

We’re only deluding ourselves by thinking such fluffy concepts and unaccountable ‘goals’ actually have substance. It’s the “Emperor’s New Clothes” syndrome. Our clients and CEOs can usually see through our vague nonsense just as much as the general public can. And the scary thing is there are plenty of marketers willing to go out in public wearing virtually non-existent strategies woven out of this stuff.

Is it any wonder marketers get heckled on our hashtags? Is it really surprising that 90% of CEOs trust information from their CFOs but 80% distrust information from their CMOs? (Here’s the original 2012 research, released by the Fournaise Group. Hat tip to Ray Kloss who quoted the stat at Content Marketing World.)

I don’t think that means what you think it means

Yes, I sometimes catch myself talking about ‘engagement’ or resorting to the phrase “thought leadership” to make a quick point. But this is usually followed by an overwhelming desire to turn around three times and spit to ward off the evil marketing voodoo.

Whenever we describe real world goals and activities by resorting to abstract concepts, we risk losing touch with the real world. If you can’t explain a concept using every day language, can you be sure it will work in an every day world?

Here are some examples that should be struck from the marketing lexicon.

Thought Leadership: Only the audience gets to choose whose ideas are worth following. If you have to tell people you’re a thought leader, you ain’t one. I could call myself a ballerina, but it doesn’t mean anyone’s going to come and watch me dance. Plus how is thought leadership ever a business goal? (Apparently 54% of Australian marketers think it is.)

Brand awareness: Shorthand for “Please God let all these Facebook likes somehow turn into more sales next month because I’ve no idea how to sell to these people”.

Ideation: Refers to a specific and documented process of generating ideas. It is NOT synonymous with “thinking while holding a white board marker”.

Influence/Influencer: Influence is important, but no one in the real world defines their online activity as “influencing others”. When a marketer approaches someone and calls them an influencer, she reveals an agenda based on self-interest. We might as well tell them, “You could be a nice person and everything, but we’re really only interested ’cause everyone trusts you more than us.” Since when has that ever worked as a strategy to make friends?

Engagement: Marketing is a long-term process, so this term was originally coined to describe everything that happens between a person and a brand before eventually becoming a customer. Today, engagement is discussed more in terms of cherry-picked metrics that are easy to fudge. “We’ve had huge engagement numbers on our Facebook page!” Wonderful. But if that doesn’t ultimately lead to a tangible business benefit you can prove, I think you missed the point of the exercise.

Activate/Activation: You mean “promote”, right? Or “distribute”? Or maybe you simply mean “start”? Sometimes it appears to stand in for “improve”. Whatever the context, I assume you’re trying to trigger some kind of response. Actually, I’ve no idea what you mean. And how can you “activate” an inanimate object? (City of Perth Council thinks you can)

Can we get back to simply saying what we mean? Can we start challenging the jargon and questioning the fluffy terminology? Can we stop trying to overcomplicate everything we do?

This is especially important when we’re talking to customers, clients and CEOs. It’s also important when having conversations in a public forum like a Twitter hashtag. Because the more people see us talking a different language, the more they’ll believe we don’t really understand them.

And they would be right.

Go on. Do you have an example of marketing gobbledygook that really melts your brain?

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Post Dating: Is your content timeless or dated?

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Post Dating: Is your content timeless or dated?

Joe Pulizzi sparked a bit of a discussion on Facebook yesterday when he confessed that he regularly ignores blog posts that aren’t dated. Many commenters agreed, but some argued that removing the date from blog posts dramatically increased search traffic.

So who’s right? Does dating your posts somehow limit their ability to attract traffic? Is the whole notion of evergreen content undermined by dates that gradually erode the value many readers place upon it? Does dating your content actually *ahem* date it?

I’m afraid I also automatically look for the date of a post before reading, or even before clicking through from the search engine results. Knowing when a post was written doesn’t impact the evergreen nature of a post if the content is still good, the information still accurate and the topic still relevant years later. But when researching a topic for an article, the date is essential to help me assess the context of the information, as well as filtering the masses of content to find the most relevant facts and most recent statistics. This is why I commonly refine my Google searches to within the last twelve months.

What does impact the evergreen nature of a post is not when it was written or published, but whether the content itself is out of date. And without dating the post, the reader has no way of assessing that possibility.

No Date = No Context

Some topics are constantly evolving, making the date extremely important to avoid mistakes. My recent article for Chief Content Officer magazine on Facebook’s EdgeRank – Beware the Social Media Algorithm Chasers – was only in print for about a month before Facebook updated its algorithm, immediately making my column less relevant. With magazine deadlines running months in advance, and the digital landscape changing on an almost daily basis, I’m surprised that doesn’t happen to me more often.

Naturally, there are also many topics and categories of information that stay relevant and accurate for far longer. For example, the number of planets in our solar system can be assumed to be pretty much the same tomorrow as it is today. Therefore, can we assume any planetary-themed content is evergreen? Why date it?

Yet on the 24th August, 2006, the number did change when Pluto lost its membership of the planetary club. What was nine became eight overnight.

That date became a line in the sand, marking every planetary article and text book published before the 24th as a little less reliable and a little more inaccurate.

But if you search the word “planets” in Google, the top listing (undated) is still The Nine Planets Solar System Tour. Granted, the webpage does include a correction further down to clear up the Pluto confusion, but by that stage young Billy has already scribbled the wrong answer on his homework sheet.

The same website was also the number one listing back in 2009 when I used this example for a magazine column on how the internet can make bad ideas and outdated information immortal. Back then (thankfully, not now) the second listing in those results – clearly dated prior to 2006 – still ranked Pluto as one of the nine, with no correction. Sure, the offending page has probably seen its search rankings erode over the last five years because of the date on the post. But isn’t that how it should be if the search engines are to avoid devolving into inaccurate collections of outdated information?

The mere fact that I’m able to make the same argument five years later by using the same example sort of proves my point. Dating content helps clean things up, both in the search engines and in the mind of the reader.

No Date = More Traffic

Sure, removing dates may mean more people click through to older content from Google (unwittingly so?). But the difference in click through rate is most likely because people WANT to see dates and are less likely to click through to something that the search listing indicates isn’t fresh. The dating information merely filtered these readers out before the click, instead of after. When they don’t see a date on the post they land on, how many click the back button to find something more likely to be fresh? If they do continue reading, does the lack of a date colour their view of the content as potentially unreliable or less relevant?

If more search traffic is the prime argument for removing the dates from posts, then doesn’t it prove that people care about dates? And if so, then aren’t we being slightly deceptive in trying to conceal the context or relevance of a post in the name of more traffic? Content marketing is about heralding the quality, utility and relevance of content above the SEO tricks designed to merely drive less qualified clicks, surely.

But you can have your cake and eat it too.

Post Dating

Post dating seemed a nice pun for the title, but its double meaning is also a hint. I don’t mean that we should put future dates on our content in the same way we might post date a cheque. But we can revise the content – and the dates – ex post facto (after the fact).

Digital marketer Ian Lyons once took me through his content strategy for the BeReady website which targeted business travellers (sadly now defunct so no link). He explained how older posts were constantly revised to keep the information fresh and accurate. The site was constantly cycling and recycling its greatest hits back to the top – interspersed with new content – to keep everything as evergreen as possible.

For example, an article for business travellers on how to get a SIM card at Hong Kong airport was updated every few months with the new locations of telco provider booths as the terminal changed. This ensured the post remained relevant, useful and highly popular for months if not years.

It’s a shame the project ended as I thought this was a great way of using the dating of content to reinforce trust and accuracy on older content to make it truly evergreen.

2020 UPDATE: When I first published this article, Lyons commented with further detail on this process:

“One thing we did is have both the original posted date and ‘updated on’ date so people knew that we had at least ensured the latest information was presented. In the CMS I had a ‘to be reviewed date’ which varied by article type but defaulted to three months post publish date. This gave the editors a nice moving calendar of stories to re-assign to writers.

“Comments are often a great source of updated information. The editor can summarise the important/useful discussion points at the end of the article.

“I’m pretty sure we also implemented the various date fields from http://schema.org/Article.

“One pet peeve is lazy date formatting/presentation. Unless you’re doing up to the minute news, there’s no need to clutter the UI. I like a simple, concise and unambiguous format:

Posted: 12 Jan 2013 | Revised: 12 Apr 2013

“We never considered not dating our articles.”

Remember, this is digital. And digital content is fluid, dynamic and constantly changing.

Who says content should be locked in amber, unable to adapt and change? If content dates, it’s because we allow it to. [Tweet this]

Instead of content becoming a fossilised record of some other time, why not keep it alive? Always growing, always changing, always fresh?

So maybe we need to think a little harder about how we use the dating of our content to signal context and relevance to potential readers.

What do you think? Does removing the dates from posts makes content more timeless or less trusted?

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Why Stories + Examples > Facts + Statistics

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Why Stories + Examples > Facts + Statistics

Why is it my wife will always come home with a lottery ticket in a jackpot week? Statistically speaking, she is more likely to die in the car on the way to the shop than she is to win the $30 million draw.

She knows this. I tell her often enough.

Deep down, most people know that the odds are stacked so far against us that a lottery ticket could never be considered a sound investment. But we fickle humans don’t think or behave like logical, objective and dispassionate computers. Our decisions are far more subjective, relying on a different kind of evidence – experience.

And when we lack the personal experience to make a decision, stories and anecdotes allow us to imagine and internalise the second-hand experiences of other people.

You don’t think in statistics, you think in examples, in stories. You decide the likelihood of a future event on how easily you can imagine it.

David McRaney: You Are Not So Smart

And so adverts depict happy lottery winners on a world cruise, or happy parents paying off their daughter’s mortgage – just to help us imagine that statistically unlikely lottery win.

Each is a subjective view of one person (or family), because that is how we see the world — not as a statistical whole but as an entirely unstatistical personal experience.

Lotto winner newspaper headlineThese fictional tales are then given credibility by regular newspaper stories of surprised jackpot winners talking about what they plan to do with the money. And so the weight of anecdotal evidence begins to outweigh the cold reality of statistics.

Never mind how improbable it is. Our imagination says winning is entirely possible. Gimme another Maxi-Pick and what was your brother’s birthday again?

This power of imagination over statistics isn’t always negative, tricking us to ignore the facts. Most of the time, storytelling can help us to understand otherwise abstract concepts with far greater ease.

The Evolution of Story

Storytelling has been at the centre of how our brains work since the first time someone told a tale around a campfire. Telling tales was a way of transferring personal experience to a wider group. This is how I hunted the mammoth. This is how I escaped the cave bear. This is how your ancestors lived.

Teaching by example. Sharing history. Communicating information in a way others can imagine within their own subjective view of the world.

Telling another member of the tribe how to make a fire still required a beginning, middle and an end of cause and effect. You do this, then that and the result is warmth and light. But if you do that, then this, the result is burned hair and lots of pain. Information and experience conveyed as story.

What do these facts mean to me?

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but an example is worth a thousand stats. [Tweet this]

Consider the recent debate in Australia over the two competing policies for the National Broadband Network (NBN). When the coalition announced their policy, almost all the reporting was confined to stats, numbers and details.

All of that discussion about upload/download speeds remained very abstract for most average consumers. My mum wouldn’t have a clue how those numbers would affect her daily usage of the internet. Therefore, many people latch onto the only numbers they do understand; one party’s plan will cost taxpayers less to implement across the country cheaper than the other. The reasons why it won’t work nearly as well are harder to grasp for most.

(2020 update: Not only didn’t this “cheaper” approach not work as well, it ended up costing more, not less, because of the new complexities it introduced.)

So I was extremely happy when James Brotchie — a Queensland university student – launched a website called How Fast is the NBN this week.

The site tells a number of stories in the form of common scenarios internet users may relate to, such as uploading wedding photos to Facebook. Each scenario is followed by a clever visualisation of how the different proposed upload/download speeds transform the experience for you, me, your mum and my neighbour.

Screenshot of the how fast is the nbn website

Stories + examples > stats. Beautiful.

Yes, the politicians are arguing over whether the facts are misrepresented. The point I’m making isn’t about which NBN plan is better, but how James conveyed the numbers in such a way that this visualisation has become the most viral piece of NBN-related content in the controversial program’s history – one that people could understand, imagine and share.

So, next time you’re releasing that white paper on recent trends and statistical results, consider whether there may be a better way.

Is your headline a statistic or is it a story? Help your valuable information to resonate with more people by using examples.

We may be smart enough to understand your facts and figures. But you need to feed our imaginations as well.

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