Making a new B2B format: Everybody Is Interesting

Welcome to Attention Matters, the newsletter from Storythings which gives you practical insights and tools on how to tell better stories and grow your audiences’ attention.

Hello!

When Anjali and I were at SXSW this year, the biggest B2B trend in the sessions was the rise of B2B Influencers/creators. A lot of sessions talked about this in terms of income generation or channel strategy, but we were interested in something else that was behind this trend - authenticity.

But we know from the response to our STAY HUMAN B2B campaign that B2B marketing often struggles to tell authentic, human stories. Sometimes this is because we think (mistakenly) that using jargon and technical language makes us seem more professional, but the opposite is the case. Connecting to the authentic knowledge, experience and passion in your contributors is the only way you will get, and keep, your audience’s attention.

So when we were developing our new B2B format aimed at CMOs, we focused on one of our mantras at Storythings - do the hard work to make everyone interesting. Here’s a quick checklist of the kind of questions we ask before, during and after contributor interviews:

1 - Does your format give them a chance to shine?
Interviews really flow when you unlock the passion and expertise in your interviewee, rather than defining them as their job title. The quickest way to check this is to look at your questions - are most of them about their individual experience and knowledge? Or are you asking them to be an ‘expert’ on a much more generic subject? Ask them about stuff that only they can answer, and you will unlock way more interesting and unique stories. Don’t make them do the hard work to be interesting - it’s your job as an interviewer to do the hard work for them!

2 - Are you ready to go off script?
So you’ll have a list of questions at the start of the interview, but your job is not to get through the list of questions. It’s to listen out for little glimmers of story that you can then follow up and explore. It’s these deeper stories that will make your interviewees interesting, but often they won’t realise what their best stories really are. Don’t just ask a question and then move on to the next one - listen for potential rabbit holes that you can dive down with follow-on questions like ‘what did that feel like?’ or even just ‘can you tell me more about that?’

This is something Hugh did when recording a pilot interview for our new format, where we ask CMOs for their ‘creative crush’ - the tv show, game, podcast or other media format that inspires them:

3 - Are you giving them opportunities to brag?

If our first point was about giving your contributor the opportunity to share stories about their passions, this is the flip side - you don’t want to have questions that can easily be answered by grandstanding. We see this most often in questions asking people for cultural reference points - their favourite book, person they most admire, who they would want at their ideal dinner party, etc. These are the kind of questions you get in newspapers features, and they’re great fun, but they are too easily answered by something that you might say to impress people, not something that will generate a great story.

If you want to ask a question like this, place it in a context. So don’t ask ‘what’s your favourite book?’ but rephrase it in a context that gives it more weight - ‘what book would you give to your 16 year old self?’ or ‘what is the book that you feel like you should have read, but haven’t?’ Introducing context to the questions stops them being empty cultural boasts, and turns them into the beginning of a new story.

4 - Are you helping them build their stories?

This last one is a bit more complex. Great interviewers replay and open out the things they are hearing in a way that encourages contributors to build out their story into something deeper and more complex. If you’ve ever read about improv comedy and theatre, you might have heard about the ‘yes, and…’ process, where stories are developed by not disagreeing and closing down, but opening out the story to new possibilities. This is something you can build through practise, but its a combination of active listening, recapping and checking in on your own comprehension, and asking follow on questions that let the story continue down more interesting paths.

I’m low-key obsessed with Subway Takes at the moment, because it’s such a great format, but also because the host, Kareem Rahma, is absolutely brilliant at interjecting and opening up the stories, then giving space for his contributors to be interesting. And he does it so quickly! Look at this example - in just two minutes it goes from why Batman is a dickhead to a really compelling argument for universal healthcare:

That’s it for this week! We’ve been doing some video interviews for a new client recently, and we’ve been using all these techniques in the interviews. We did one remote video interview today that was so interesting I wished we had an extra hour to record with the contributors. In fact, I’d love to pitch a format to the client with just those contributors, as they were super interesting. If you’d like Storythings to help you get really interesting stories, hit reply or email me and we can set up a call!

Matt