Alan J. Porter: Storytelling for Enterprise Content Strategy – Episode 206

Alan J. Porter Storytelling is the oldest content practice. Alan Porter helps enterprises and content practitioners improve their story craft. Alan shows how better stories both convey the unique benefits of a business to their customers and improve cross-functional communication within organizations. We talked about: Content Pool, the enterprise content services organization he runs and its recent focus on storytelling the shift he's seeing in his clients' needs from formal to more informal communications the importance he sees in delivering consistent and aligned stories and content experiences irrespective of delivery channel the crucial role of memorable storytelling for brands his immersion in storytelling outside of his content work, writing fiction, for example the importance of changing your storytelling mindset from inside-out to outside-in his inclusion in his workshops of content practitioners from functional groups across organizations his belief that there's no B2C or B2B or B2B2C, just people communicating with each other the four C's of storytelling that he learned from an editor at Marvel comics - character, conflict, choice, and consequences - and how he applies them in business storytelling how he uses customer journey mapping in his storytelling work how storytelling techniques apply in internal stakeholder interactions predictable storytelling patterns used in Hollywood and how he applies them in his workshops how he engages and connects content people across organizational functions like tech comm, marketing, customer support, UX design, and even cyber security Alan's bio Alan J. Porter is first and foremost a storyteller, with close to 40 fiction and non-fiction book publishing credits. He is the Founder and Chief Content Officer of The Content Pool, that provides storytelling-driven content services to enable brands to deliver exceptional engaging customer experiences. He has held senior leadership roles in Content Operations, Product Marketing, and Customer Experience. Named one of the Top 25 Content Strategy Influencers and a Digital Strategy thought leader. Connect with Alan online The Content Pool website The Content Pool newsletter email: ajp at 4jsgroup dot com Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/GhVD3XR8NG8 Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 206. The craft of storytelling is the original content practice. From that famous cave painting 44,000 years ago, to countless campfire conversations over the centuries, to modern content strategy, content design, and marketing practices, humans have always been driven to share stories that inspire, inform, and educate. Alan Porter helps story crafters in modern enterprises communicate more effectively, both with their customers and with each other. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 206 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show, Alan Porter. Alan is a longtime storyteller in the content community and does a number of other things and has done a number of things in the content world. He's currently the Founder and the Chief Content Officer at the Content Pool, his company. So, welcome, Alan. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Alan: Hey, well first off, thanks Larry. Thanks for inviting me. Yeah, the Content Pool is an enterprise content services organization, but actually, really interesting around the subject we're going to talk about, storytelling. Probably over the last nine months, my clients have pretty much told me that the thing they're really interested in is how to apply storytelling to their businesses. So I've been doing more and more of that, more consulting around that, running workshops for clients around actually bringing storytelling into their corpora...