Storytelling in SEO

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By Indhran
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 How many of you consider
yourselves digital marketers?

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 How many consider
yourself storytellers?

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 Facts Tell. Stories Sell.

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 Storytelling

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 22x
Stories are 22 times more memorable than facts.

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“If you put bananas and money
in front of monkeys, monkeys will choose
bananas, because monkeys do not know that
money can buy a lot of Bananas.”

- Jack Ma

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 Story

Data
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 “Storytelling is by far
the most underrated
skill when it comes to
business.”
Gary Vaynerchuk

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 “Marketing is no
longer about the stuff
you make but about
the stories you tell”

Seth Godin

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“The most powerful
person in the world is
the storyteller.”
- Steve Jobs

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 Is Steve Jobs talking about this?

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 Storytellers are
makers of meaning

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 Identity Image

Reputation
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 Their Our Your
Story Story Story

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“Humans are not ideally set up to
understand logic; they are ideally
set up to understand stories.”

- Roger Schank

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 “SEO without storytelling is
getting harder and harder.”

Indhran

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“People do not buy
goods and services.
They buy relationships,
stories and magic.”

Seth Godin

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 My Story

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 MALAYSIA

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 BATU BUROK

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 33K 80M
employees customers
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 My Disaster
Down Under

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 Page one in 7 days

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 Sales training in partnership with

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 10,000 10
Entrepreneur Years
s
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 Don’t believe a word I say
from this point on.

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 I’m not here to teach
you anything.

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 My job is to challenge you.
To make you think.

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 NEW MEGA
TRENDS
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 The first trend

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 What is the world’s most
valuable resource?

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 Gold Oil Data
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 Actually, there is one resource
even more important than data

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 $16.91 Billion

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 Facebook got a sweet spot in
a brand new economy

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We are now living in
The Attention Economy

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 100 500 5
MILLION MILLION BILLION
Photos Tweets Videos

...every single day

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 The world’s data is doubling every
24 months

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 What is the new currency
for the attention economy?

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Trust
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 Where attention
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 Number of Ads Viewed

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 Attention Trust

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 The second trend

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 Money flows where
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 Number of Ads Viewed

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 Attention Trust

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 Hang On A Minute

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 The third trend

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 42% 58% 85%
are more are less expect a
selective distracted story

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 Grab
Attention
+ Hold
Attention
= $

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 THE POWER
OF STORY
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 Stories help us makes sense of
the world around us

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 The Jury Study
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 We are hardwired for stories

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 "When the woman spoke English, the volunteers
understood her story, and their brains synchronized. When
she had activity in her insula, an emotional brain region,
the listeners did too. When her frontal cortex lit up, so did
theirs. By simply telling a story, the woman could plant
ideas, thoughts and emotions into the listeners'
brains."

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 The Tea Test

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 So why “Blend B” ?

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 “Blend B” had lots of stories

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 Bought for $125

Sold for $8,000 - 64x increase!

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 Bought for:
$1.00
Sold for:
$102.50

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DESCRIPTION:
According to my wife I am a willful misunderstander, but regarding this
tendency of mine I understand her feelings too well.

The daughter of dour pragmatists who prefaced many a conversation with

the phrase, “In the wake of Rorty,” my wife initially mistook me as a
source of peculiar brightness. One day, however, I noticed that my wife,
after weeks of inexplicable bleeding, had tired of me. I took her to see
a specialist who diagnosed her with a melancholy cervix — his
beautiful Chilean way (the specialist was Chilean) of conveying to us that
we would have no children.
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I’m sorry your cervix is melancholy, I told her, rubbing her shoulders
insincerely as she wept, because I had never wanted to have children
with her. But in fact, she claimed, the specialist had told her that she
was dying, an interpretation of recent events that I frankly disbelieved.

Soon she’d stopped eating (the smell of food, she claimed, made her
ill), as if to prove that she was right and I wrong regarding certain things.
So I started to carve, in our garage, from pieces of oak left by the former
owner, a so-called neoclassical orthodontist who whittled, in his spare
time, the many sets of wooden teeth he’d left behind on crooked shelves,
her favorite fruit.

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I carved whole pears and whole oranges, but found that I hated to see, at
the end of a breakfast, say, my plate empty and hers full. I returned to the
workshop and carved wood into the shape of already-eaten food;
halfway through our meals I would exchange the uneaten food for the
already-eaten food, and I would congratulate her on her excellent
appetite, and this would make her cry at how well I understood her.

But one afternoon, as I was exchanging an uneaten apple for an

already-eaten apple, she took the already-eaten apple off her plate and
threw it into the yard.

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I retrieved the already-eaten apple.

“You are a tiresome fool,” she said, and threw the already-eaten apple
into the yard.

I fetched and she threw, we carried on like this (the exercise, I could see,
did her good) until finally I left the already-eaten apple in the yard,
because one must relent to the livid pessimism of a so-called dying loved
one; to do otherwise, or so I believe she believed, as she lay face-down in
the soft grass, was to deny her this last skeptical foothold on life.

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Soon it was fall, and then winter. In spring, a tree began to sprout, not far
from the place where my wife had thrown the already-eaten apple. I
desired to drag her out to the yard and say to her, lovingly of course,
“Who is the fool now? Who, now, is the fool?” Unfortunately come
spring my wife was dead. Alive she would have scoffed at the idea of a
tree sprouted from a wooden apple, because she had not yet won the
battle we were apparently fighting to the death. But I knew that now she
could allow herself to see things from my perspective, that dead trees
beget live ones, and wooden apple cores, if you hold them to your ear
like a shell, contain the reassuring echo of a human voice that does
not believe in you.

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 SignificantObjects.com

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 STORY
STRUCTURE
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 Every Story Has A Line

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Anatomy of a
Blockbuster

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 ROLLER
COASTER

SUSPENSE

SEQUENCE

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 8
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CASE STUDY: Susan Boyle
Britain’s Got Talent

Copies: 1,360
Views: 734 million
Engagements:
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1. When a video included a story of
personal triumph, it was shared more
babies, animals, and dancing or singing

1. But in our sample of 800 videos, personal

triumph only appeared in less than 3% of
all videos

1. Personal triumph therefore represents the

best opportunity for marketers.
Dr Karen Nelson-Field
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 Questions?

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 Bonus

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 We started with the Mountain Dew® Kickstart™ "Come Alive"
spot—a popular ad that had been running on television and
TrueView for two months and earned nearly 9 million total
views on YouTube.

Our mission was to take this ad and make it even more

"unskippable," especially on mobile.

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 Thank You

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