In honour of #VividIdeas, We Are Social Sydney (plus a special guest, Simon Kemp, from our Singapore office) teamed up with leading technology educator, Decoded, for a morning of tips, tricks and insight into effective storytelling with data. In case you missed it live or in our live stream (@WeAreSocialAU), we’ve recapped a few best bits that your brand or business may benefit from. Enjoy!
5 INSIDER TIPS FOR EFFECTIVE STORYTELLING WITH DATA
As told by We Are Social’s Simon Kemp and Decoded’s Chris Monk
Start with empathy, always. Even when using data, your audience is still human. Building trust and connecting with people is an essential first step to telling any story.
Remember the three ‘R’s. Reach, relevance, and resonance are all crucial elements for creating effective strategy and messaging.
Pay extra attention to research results you don’t recognise. While it may be tempting to overlook the unfamiliar, it’s often those seemingly irrelevant pieces that unearth the most interesting stories.
When in doubt, animate! Graphs and data may not look ‘sexy’ from the start, but animating them over a period of time helps make even the most dull data seem more interesting and story-worthy.
Don’t tell the whole story. Leave gaps – when you’ve left that ambiguity for people to interpret their own meanings, it triggers the part of the brain that lets people fill in the blanks with their own ideas.
THE FUTURE OF CONNECTIVITY: Q&A WITH SIMON KEMP
Q: So, what’s the deal with chat apps? Are they really the ‘future of social’?
A: Chat apps change the social rules. They’re harder to advertise, demand new metrics for success, and can’t rely on boosted content to reach people. That’s what makes them so popular with users. For advertisers, the easiest way to succeed is to stop thinking about the platform or the content. Those will always change – it’s about creating marketing that people want to talk about wherever it is, whatever the platform. Chat apps are certainly the near future, but they will be superseded by something else sooner than we think.
Q: A future without Facebook? What does that look like?
A: It’s more than that – imagine a future without screens at all. A look at what’s being done around voice control, motion sensors, eye trackers, thought control, etc. leads us to believe that we’ll spend far less time looking at screens pretty soon. Even smartphones are temporary.
Q: But what does that mean for marketing?
A: Today’s marketing paradigm will disappear. As advertisers, we’ll need to adapt and evolve our approach to focus more on utility and less on entertainment and distraction.
Q: Are any brands on the right track?
A: It’s an overused example, but Red Bull has done a fantastic job of putting its fans’ interests before its brand interests. More brands need to plan their marketing around relevant moments, not just placements in media.
Q: So what happens next?
A: The most exciting developments at the moment are in AI. The algorithms behind things like Facebook, Amazon and even driverless cars are shaping the way we behave today, but when you think about the algorithm behind something like Tinder, it’s clear that algorithms are shaping the whole future of humanity as well. That might sound scary to some people, but actually, for those of us who are willing to learn about the way the algorithms work, we realise we just need to think of them like a new kind of audience with a set of behaviors that we can learn.
