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Let Real People Tell Your Story
Gain credibility with skeptical audiences
Today's audience is sophisticated and media savvy. Whether you're targeting your business communication to employees, investors or customers, they've seen Bill Clinton wag his finger, heard George Bush, Sr. promise "no new taxes," and seen the infomercials promising rock-hard abs without exercise. And now, they've heard Ken Lay tell Enron employees everything is coming up roses. So they can be extremely skeptical of the "company line." They know corporate scribes can sugar-coat bad news, P.R. pros practice spin, and a professional narrator reads words he's paid to intone -- to inspire investors, motivate employees or sell a product. In this age of 100-plus cable channels and information screaming on the Net at 256K, we business communicators face the toughest, most cynical audience in history.
How do we overcome this resistance to our message? At Visions West we've had tremendous success with our own version of "reality TV." In the 1980's I began experimenting with and ultimately refined a "documentary" technique for corporate video -- letting real people tell a company's story. We found employee audiences were very much inclined to believe the "testimony" of co-workers describing what they liked about a reorganization or new benefit plan; and when a CEO looked directly into the video camera and spoke from the heart, employees believed and investors bought into the leader's vision.
The key to believability is to let these people tell the story in their own words. Too many business video directors, in the interest of efficiency, write the words these people are supposed to say. Then they expect an assembly-line worker to do what Harrison Ford does - deliver a line from a script and make us believe it's from the heart. Harrison Ford is paid over $20 million a picture to do it, so it's foolhardy to expect a worker or even a CEO to be able to pull that off effectively. That's a cardinal rule in our projects: Don't put words in other people's mouths, unless they're actors.
The success of the recent spate of reality-based television programs underscores the fact that real people, places and events have inherent interest and appeal to audiences. Great business leaders and savvy politicians take advantage of this phenomenon by using storytelling to communicate values, concepts and important principles. The most powerful stories are those that are true. And if they're true, what better way to spotlight that fact than to let the actual participants tell the story. My technique is similar to that used by the extremely successful, long-running television news series, "60-Minutes." Using a journalist's approach, a script is seldom written before I take a crew on location and interview the participants. Although we have a general sense of the story going in, and I always arrive with a shooting outline in hand, what I learn in the interviews drives the story, dictating modifications of the shooting plan. It's a journey of discovery. I strive to let the participants tell the whole story - with no professional narration (which would undercut our credibility). So the script is made up of sound bites.
If it sounds easy, be assured it isn't. Conducting the interviews is an art in itself, requiring quick thinking to evaluate responses and reformulate questions when necessary to elicit useful responses. One word "yes" and "no" type answers don't help us advance the story, because the interviewer's questions are not included in the final program. So when I conduct an interview I word my questions so as to encourage complete answers. I also listen actively to the answers, and if I don't hear a usable sound bite with good edit-in and edit-out points then I ask the question again or probe to get a usable response. It's also vitally important that I help the interviewee relax. A tense interviewee is not a useful part of any program (except 60 Minutes!). My technique is to help the individual forget he or she is being interviewed. I engage the person in a conversation. People are generally relaxed while in conversation, and if they're talking about something that interests them they can be quite engaging! I find this technique particularly useful with executives. More and more business leaders are, by necessity, adept at looking at the camera and delivering a compelling monologue. But there are still many more who are ill at ease in this situation. Unfortunately their discomfort appears on the screen to be a lack of business confidence. These exec.s are much better off being engaged in a spirited one-on-one conversation with a skilled interviewer.
Once the shooting is completed, I work with interview transcripts to do a preliminary paper edit. The paper edit is only a starting point, however. Only when you get into the edit suite and see and hear the sound bites in juxtaposition to one another can you accurately judge the believability of the words and the power of the way they are combined. Here we take full advantage of the potential of random-access non-linear editing on the Mac or PC. With the ability to instantly re-sequence sound bites, we don't rest until we have honed the piece to perfection.
Over the years we've produced video segments featuring real people as themselves on such diverse subjects as living through and recovering from a tornado, financial planning, bringing an automobile assembly plant on-line, building a dot.com start-up, developing a new benefits plan, and providing excellent customer service. Fiction can be fun, but there is nothing quite so compelling as hearing the excitement in the tone of a real person describing an actual experience; nothing quite so convincing as to look into a CEO's eyes and hear words coming from the heart.
