Hello!

Welcome to Friday! This week definitely had a back-to-school/work/college/uni feel to it. The air has an autumn chill, I’ve started craving casseroles and crumbles, and we’re seeing actual humans responding to their emails instead of OOO auto-replies.

As a result, we’re having lots of interesting chats with potential new clients. The thing we’re hearing most is that people are missing something - can we call it a story thing? - that connects their branding, PR and comms work. They’re looking for stories that bind them all together, something that people will really want to engage with, and that will make them stand out from their beige B2B peers.

Well, as it says in our logo above, finding your story thing is exactly what we do. If you’ve got the back-to-school blues about your B2B comms, let’s have a chat about how we can get you excited about your stories again. Hit the big button below and we’ll be in touch asap!

In the meantime, here’s 10 story things that we found inspiring this week.

Matt

The Most Sought-After Travel Guide Is A Google Doc (5-minute read)

There’s No Such Thing As ‘Performance Branding’ Marketing (5-minute read)

The Untold Story Of How We Played Pac-Man (2-minute read)

The Last Two Shakers In America (20-minute read)

Unpacking The Legacy Of Notorious BIG’s Ready To Die (54-minute listen)

Become A Better Problem Solver By Telling Better Stories (8-minute read)

Celebrity Number Six And The Unreal Power Of Crowdsourced Investigations (10-minute read)

READ JPG - An Image-Only Newsletter (5-minute view/subscribe)

Why Going Niche Can Help You Bring Focus To Diffuse Sectors (5-minute read)

Cleaning The 9/11 Memorial Pool (3.5-minute watch)

How we can help you

Storythings is the content marketing agency of choice for some of the world’s most forward-thinking B2B brands and organisations. Here are 2 reasons to get in touch. 

1. “I don’t know what to do” – You’ve been creating content but it’s not having the impact you need. Talk to us about our Content Audit Workshop.

2. “I need something making” – You know what you want to make, but need an agency to make it. We can help make your podcast, video, publication, animation or newsletter. We do other things too. Get in touch for a FREE 30 minute consultation. 

The Most Sought-After Travel Guide Is A Google Doc (5-minute read)
Back in 2007 I wrote a blog post describing the six spaces of social media, including ‘secret spaces’. So I loved this article about the trend for sharing private documents with travel tips between friends. It feels like every time public social media spaces feel burnt out, we go back to secret spaces again: “In many ways, that’s the real benefit of these docs: the humanity they bring to an industry that feels like it’s become rote and performative”

There’s No Such Thing As ‘Performance Branding’ Marketing (5-minute read)
Anjali included a link to Peter Field and Les Binet’s seminal marketing essay The Long And Short Of It last week. This week, Mark Ritson builds on their ideas to argue that you can’t do long-term branding content and performance content in the same campaign - you need to budget for both. A lot of the B2B clients we’re talking to are trying to make this argument within their orgs, so we’ll be sending them this great article to help!

The Untold Story Of How We Played Pac-Man (15-minute read)
Sometimes, finding great stories is about noticing something tiny, and then disappearing down the rabbit hole that opens up. This great 2019 essay from Cat DeSpira does exactly that, using some awesome archive imagery to explain why all Pac Man arcade cabinets have a worn-out area on their left side.

The Last Two Shakers In America (10-minute read)
Another great example of story finding from Jordan Kisner, who spent two years with the last two members of the last Shaker community in America. It’s a great story about committing yourself to a timescale beyond your human existence: “We’ve survived 250 years. We are looking forward as much as our ancestors did to the next — whatever that involves. All we have to do is be ready.”

Unpacking The Legacy Of Notorious BIG’s Ready To Die (54-minute listen)
To mark its 30th anniversary, Storythings’ own Chris Mitchell has produced a fantastic deep dive into Notorious BIG’s classic album Ready To Die. Chris and his Breaking Atoms co-host Sumit Sharma have tracked down a remarkable group of contributors, including BIG’s Brooklyn neighbour and Prince Charles Alexander, the recording engineer on the album. A must-listen if you’re a fan of music docs.

Become A Better Problem Solver By Telling Better Stories (8-minute read)
We’re always a little sceptical of the way storytelling and narrative is used as a way of solving every business communication problem. Storytelling is something you need to use carefully, not as a panacea. But this HBR piece gives a great example of where it is really effective - as a way of re-framing problems so everyone can understand them.

Celebrity Number Six And The Unreal Power Of Crowdsourced Investigations (10-minute read)
If you are terminally online, you might have heard of the Reddit community trying to solve a seemingly trivial problem- who was the unknown celebrity in a tacky fabric print from the 2000s? Well, many years later, they’ve found the answer, and Caitlin Dewey opens this up into an insightful take on the pros and cons of internet investigations - “These types of cases, silly though they may seem, foreground the unique resources of crowdsourced investigations: an infinite appetite for menial, time-consuming work … and a wide range of specialized knowledge”

READ JPG - An Image-Only Newsletter (5-minute view/subscribe)
We often use this newsletter as an example of a great format in client workshops, but I’m not sure we’ve shared it here before. It’s surprisingly refreshing to get an email newsletter that is just images - memes, screencaps, archive images and other visual flotsam and jetsam. Even though there is no text explanation, there’s enough suggestions of narrative between the images in each newsletter to tickle your brain into finding connections.

Why Going Niche Can Help You Bring Focus To Diffuse Sectors (5-minute read)
For the latest in our Attention Matters series on B2B content problems, I wrote about why going niche can, surprisingly, help you bring focus to a diffuse sector. We’ve shared a lot of links to articles talking about how the internet is breaking into niches. It definitely feels the interesting bits of the web are coming out of new, less public, spaces.

Cleaning The 9/11 Memorial Pool (3.5-minute watch)
A lot of newsletters linked to a Rolling Stone piece this week about how for younger audiences, 9/11 is more of a meme than a tragic moment in history. This beautiful short video about the man who cleans the 9/11 memorial pool in NYC is a great metaphor for how history is a process of preservation and repairing. For some people, it’s their life’s work.

So there we are - another 10 creative stories we’ve found for you to take into the weekend. If you enjoy them, please tell your friends/work colleagues/neighbours and ask them to subscribe!

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

Hugh, Matt, Anjali and the whole team at Storythings.