How To Weave Great Storytelling Throughout Your Marketing

According to recent Twitter statistics, 70% of consumers think brands should boost positivity and share positive stories with people, looking for inspiration and hope. During a challenging time, there’s an opportunity for brands and a challenge for marketing agencies to brighten up social media pages and provide a much needed break from doom scrolling.

Interestingly enough, the ever-growing broadcast sector is sets of surpass a billion dollars with 32% of Americans listening to podcasts. At least once a month, podcasts are a great way to communicate brand stories to an audience that might be looking for alternatives to social media scrolling or browsing a website.

This different medium enables people to tap into content they really enjoy. So whether you’re tasked to help clients create live video or podcasts or even written content, the struggle for marketing agencies is the same. How do we tell other people’s stories? That’s what we’re digging into. Today’s episode of agency accelerated

Welcome back to agency accelerated where we explore ways to grow and scale your agency with some of the most trusted brands and experts in the industry. I’m Stephanie Lila, and we’re live every other Wednesday at 2:00 PM. Eastern time. 11:00 AM Pacific time on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and you guessed it.

LinkedIn. Make sure you head on over to a gore pulse.com sports slash calendar and subscribe. So you don’t miss any episodes. Make sure to stay until the very end, because you’ll also get a chance to get your hands on an easy way to add more revenue to your marketing agency. So, Hey, I want to give a quick shout out to the crew that’s already here.

Let us know where you’re tuning in from. I would love to hear how you are doing so, Hey, listen, friend consumers are looking for authentic and trustworthy over perfectly polished and staged. And new world for 46% of college students purposefully share, like, and engage with specific content to train algorithms, to give them content that they actually want to see.

They’re also sticking to old fashioned and boring strategies. Well, it’s not, it’s a no-no for agencies today. So instead focusing on content, that’s real honest, and to the point is an absolute must. And that’s where storytelling really comes in. Today’s guest is an author, entrepreneur consultant, evangelist podcaster.

And if I got this right surfer is. Well throughout it all, it’s also a storyteller and I couldn’t be more excited to introduce him. So having said that, let’s go ahead and bring on guy Kawasaki. He’s the chief evangelist of canvas.

Yeah. Super excited to have you here. My goodness. Let me give you a quick bio or quickly. Cause I was like, wait a second, you got the remarkable people podcast. You’ve got a port on the way. Executive fellow of the Haas school of business over at UC Berkeley, adjunct professor of the university of new south Wales.

You’re also the chief evangelist of apple and a trustee of the Wikimedia foundation. How to do all of those two, lastly. We’re in my past. I’m no longer chief evangelist of apple or on the Wikipedia board of trustees. That’s good to know. Well, go ahead and let, yeah, we’ll let our producer go ahead and get that out.

That’s right. You got that right. You’ve also written the wild sky, the art of the start 2.0, the artist’s social media, enchantment and 11 other books, honestly. CA guy, how you have time for all of this? Absolutely amazes me. Um, well I’m old. So I had a long time to pull all that off. It’s not like a 30. Mm. I love it.

We’ll look up to this show guy. How you been, how you doing how’s your week so far, so far so good, but it’s only Wednesday. So it’s supposed to rain here in Santa Cruz. So that’s good. You know what I was thinking about that too. Cause I’m here in San Diego and I was like, you know what? The clouds have been rolling in.

I wonder if it’s going to be raining or not. Cause it’s, it’s a whole thing here in San Diego. I don’t know how it is over there, but when it rains here in San Diego, it’s like everyone out of office, that’s it. Call it a day, get some hot chocolate and we’re good to go. And where do you go when you go out of the office, we watch Netflix.

That’s what we do.

How about apple TV, Ted lasso. Right. You know, I’ve been seeing that pop up in my, my social media newsfeed lately and I’m like, you know what? I gotta pay attention to that. I only subscribed to apple, um, DV, just for Ted lasso. It’s the only thing I watch on apple TV. That makes sense. Well, if it’s coming from you, then, you know, then I got to write that down and make sure I get that squared away.

Uh, I, I don’t watch that squid thing. Those, oh, you don’t really okay. I feel like, okay, I get it. I got to get the show back on track. Cause otherwise I’m like, come on, then we could talk to them as part of telling stories. That’s right. So he got, can you start off with sharing a little more about the work that you did over at apple and what you’re doing currently now with canvas, because we have so many people that are absolutely enchanted by gambit.

[00:05:57] Guy Kawasaki: So at apple, I worked there from. Geez, 1984 to 1987 and then 1995 to 1997. The first time at apple, I was in the Macintosh division. I was a software evangelist. So my job was to convince people to write Mac software The second time I was Apple’s chief evangelist. And that time, my job was to convince the Macintosh community to stay loyal to apple and Macintosh.

Uh,

[00:06:25] Guy Kawasaki: many people don’t remember, but back in the 95, 97 timeframe, apple was supposed to die. And in fact, Michael Dell,

uh,

[00:06:34] Guy Kawasaki: went on the record and said,

you know,

[00:06:35] Guy Kawasaki: apple should take the cash that it has, which was about $2 billion. And give it back to the shareholders and close up shop because it’s all over for apple.

So,

[00:06:46] Guy Kawasaki: so much for Michael Dell’s wisdom. But,

uh,

[00:06:48] Guy Kawasaki: yeah, that’s what I did Now at. Canva I’ve been at Canva for about seven years and I am a Canva’s chief evangelist and evangelism comes from words, meaning bringing the good news. So I bring the good news of Canva, how Canva has democratized design so that everybody can become a better communicator.

Oh, I love that. I love that. And it wasn’t a recently that there’s video, that’s now involved with Canva. Yes, yes, yes. Now we can help you make video as well as the traditional, uh, graphics. Yeah. So much. I, I love that you mentioned that it democratizes graphic design and storytelling because it really does make it so much easier.

It’s I could easily just type in something and say, Hey, I need a proposal template and boom, we have, we have, I think it’s like 800 different design types where design type is Pinterest. EBay, uh, Twitter, the album photo poster business card presentation. And by the way, since many people are, who are listening to this, probably have to do a lot of presentations.

Uh, you need to put PowerPoint in your rear view mirror because we have several hundred templates for the design type presentation, 16 by nine predesigned. The pallets are already all set up for you and you change the pictures and the text. So, you know, basically we’re replacing PowerPoint there, but wait, there’s more, there’s also the ability to record yourself, picture and picture.

So, you know, if you want to tell a story with PowerPoint, And you’re not doing it live as we are now. Uh, you would put the PowerPoint slash now in Canva presentation behind you, and you’d be in a little circle. And so you could say, you know, as you’re on each slide, you could say, all right, so here’s our mission.

Uh, next slide, you know, here’s our strategic strengths, here’s our go-to market strategy. Here’s the competition and the slide would change and you’d still be talking. So that’s a way of, you know, just instead of sending a static presentation to tell your story and praying that people get it from the slides, uh, your face in a video can be explaining every slide, which is very, very powerful.

Oh yeah. Absolutely video altogether. I mean, that makes it super exciting. I know. Did she love the sound effects from our producer? Yeah, I can do sound effects too. So.

No, this guy actually has like a live audience in his office to make it feel like, Hey everyone, I’m here. Got the lights going. You’re on the stage, pacing around. I love it. So guys, let’s talk about the remarkable people podcast, right? Let let’s let’s tell the folks what the podcast is about. And Holly, how you actually came up with the idea.

Yeah. So, uh, it’s called the remarkable people podcast and guests who we have as guests, remarkable people. And so the whole point of this is for me to help my listeners become more remarkable by listening to the stories, the S word of remarkable people. And so who are some guests I’ve had Jane Goodall, Margaret Atwood, Angela Duckworth, MacArthur award winners, Stephen Wolf from MacArthur award winner, uh, Ronnie Lott, best safety in the history of the NFL.

Roy Yamaguchi of Roy’s restaurants. They have one in San Diego, Kristi, Kristi Yamaguchi, uh, no relation, um, gold medal winner. Uh, let’s see, did I say Jane Goodall? I said jingle at the start. Uh, Katie milkmen from Wharton, uh, up and coming social psychology expert. Bob Cialdini. Godfather of influence. Yeah.

Godfather of branding. Uh, let’s see, uh, Steven Pinker, uh, Andrew Yang. I mean, I have a hundred guests. I could just go on. You’ve reached, you’ve reached over a hundred episodes with the podcast. I mean, congratulations. Actually, this today is number 99 and it was Linda Zang, who is the get this? This is the product manager of the Ford, one 50 lightning, the electric Ford one 50.

Uh, she, uh, moved from China when she was eight years old. She’s five feet three. And she’s the product manager for the Ford one 50, which is the motto trucks. So the juxtaposition of. Two things is very interesting. And I think the Ford, one 50, maybe over the course of time, it may be more important to the electrification of cars than the Tesla.

Although Tesla clearly started the whole trend, but Ford one 50 is going to make it so that it’s not just for, you know, jerky west coast, venture capitalists, living in Silicon valley, driving their Teslas. This is going to make electric cars mainstream. And then next week for the 100th episode, we have the Seth Goden.

Wow. Wow. Congratulations. That’s that’s such a big major milestone. I know that here for agency accelerated guy you’re you’re our eighth episode. So we have a ton of catching up to do that’s right. The hardest, any tips, any tips on like how to make that smooth. Oh, we could talk for about half an hour. Um, so I, you really want tips.

I mean, are you just being conversational? I, I would really love to know, and I didn’t know that our podcast producer right now would be interested in knowing. Okay. So number one, uh, what started me off very fast is that my first guest was Jane Goodall. So when your first guest is Jane Goodall, you tell your second guest, well, you know, you can be on the same podcast as Jane Goodall.

Not many people think, oh no, I’m far superior to Jane Goodall. Why would I lower myself to a podcast that had only Jane Goodall? So then after you get Jane Goodall, then you get Margaret Atwood and you get Arianna Huffington. And pretty soon you just say, okay, I have Arianna Huffington and Jane Goodall and Margaret Atwood, perhaps you’d like to be on it.

Very few people say no to that. So it’s maybe in a much smaller way you can say, well, I’ve had guy Kawasaki and then people say, oh, must be, I should take this serious. Or whose guy Kawasaki one or two reactions. So that’s tip number one, tip number two. I probably spent two or three hours prepping for every interview because I like to really dig into a person’s past.

It’s not like a producer hands me, the Wikipedia article printout and said, you know, five minutes before we go on and say, you know, have at it. So there’s a lot of prep. And the third thing is, um, I really worked my ass off. I personally edit every episode. I take the first pass, which is two or three hours.

And then it goes to a sound designer for another three or four hours. So it’s probably five or six hours of editing in every hour of guy Kawasaki’s podcast. That’s another tip. So it’s, you know, don’t just think it’s turned on the recorder and go, uh, another tip is

[00:14:39] Guy Kawasaki: I think one of the most important things you can do, and it is a goal for me.

Is I try to ask the very first question, a question that has never been asked of this person and truly shows that I did the research.

So, you know,

[00:14:56] Guy Kawasaki: when I opened up with Angela Duckworth, I asked if her daughter is still playing cello. And the reason why I asked that is because I want Angela to say, huh, this guy really did research.

He knows my daughter plays the cello, or was it Viola anyway, something like that. And so I think that’s very important because from then on the guest understands that,

you know,

[00:15:18] Guy Kawasaki: this person didn’t just read my Wikipedia entry. This person has read my book, seen my videos, et cetera, et cetera.

Um,

[00:15:25] Guy Kawasaki: that’s

very,

[00:15:26] Guy Kawasaki: very important.

And then another tip. See, you started me. Got it. You’re like, you could tell when someone’s passionate about it, right. As you said, you could expand upon it. And I think if anything, I heard descript mentioned it before we started. I absolutely is a crucial tool. The script is a tool that takes your audio, puts it into a machine transcribed format, which is not far from perfect.

It’s not transcription in the sense of, okay, now I can let deaf people read it. It’s transcription in the sense that it kind of documents your audio. But the beauty of descript is you can select things in descript, in text and delete or ignore the text. And then the audio will be deleted or ignored. So, this is much better than going back and forth with a, with an I movie or something saying I want to take out that, um, let me capture that you can select the word, um, and remove it by selecting texts.

That is a huge thing. Uh, another tool tip is I use squad cast and squad cast is so much better than using something like zoom or Skype because zoom and Skype, you’re always dependent on everybody’s internet speed and. Quality, but what squad gas does is it’s, it’s, it’s, what’s called a double ender. So it’s recording locally on my end and on the guest’s end and frequently it uploads to the cloud.

But fundamentally the recording is from my microphone to my computer. It’s not from my microphone to my computer over the internet, you know, through zoom and back and compressed and all this crap. It is just that one foot distance. And at the end, you end up with two local files, which is a beautiful, beautiful thing.

Um, and another tip I have is like my, my goal for a guest is to make the guests look as remarkable and as articulate and as communicative as possible. So now this, this is something that some people would debate me because they believe you turn on the recorder and you just you’d be open and transparent and true to life.

And if they say I’m 250 times in an hour, which people do, uh, that’s real life, that’s how they speak. You should be true to the, you know, whatever. I don’t have that theory. My theory is I want my guests to look so articulate. You see free. I was just amazed at the articulateness of guys, guests. That’s my goal.

So, you know, I take out the ums and the us and the Wells and you knows, and the, uh, see, I even do it. You got to, you should take those. You should take out that, ah, that I just said. And then lots of people when they’re interviewing. They go, uh, uh, yeah. And you hear that all the time. And so all of that stuff should be taken out.

I, I think that that’s the way to do it. And I also think that when you look over the course of your podcast, my goal is that 90% of the time the guest is doing the talking 10%. It’s me. There are podcasts, highly successful, highly visible, highly paid who are more like 50, 50, or really more like 90 10 the other way.

But listen, if I get a Jane Goodall for you, you are there for her, not me. So my goal and role is to bring out the remarkable illness in Jane Goodall. Not for me to try to convince you that I’m remarked. Yeah, I love that. You’re dedicated to bringing out the best in your guests by highlighting how remarkable they are.

I love that you use these scripts because I’m just that much Venn diagram similar now to guy Kawasaki. If you use, if you use descriptive squat gas, we would be basically overlapping. And I also think, you know, one of the, one of the most, one of the highest forms of praise for me as a podcaster is when a guest says no one has ever asked me that before.

Yeah. Because it means that you prepared and you have an insight into the guest that nobody else has ever had. Because if you listen to most podcasts, they all ask the same questions. And some of them are really dumb ass questions. I mean, there are podcasts where the host always asks. So do you think your book will impact your reader?

Well, dumb shit. Like what author doesn’t write a book that you think is going to impact the lives of the people who read it. I mean, what a dumb ass question. So, um, I really, I hate them ask questions. So, Doug, I mean, if, if, if you’re thinking, when you hear a question like that, and if you say to yourself, well, duh, of course, then that’s a bad question.

That’s hilarious. Now, now, now I feel like you’re just egging on the crowd the next time that they’re going to see you on stage. Like, that’s going to be the one question.

Yeah. Do you think your speech is going to impact customers or do you think your speech will impact people? Well, yeah, I’m getting paid for it. So going to impact me out, I hate like that. I just hate questions. Like, so, so then out of all the episodes that you’ve done so far today on the remarkable people podcast, which one would you say is your favorite knowing like the, the daughters instrument that you playing in one or what are some other ones that you’re just like, you know what that, to me was the most memorable one.

Well, see, now you should wipe out the, well, that’s a filler word. This is a very difficult question. And it’s because every Wednesday at 6:30 AM Pacific, we release a new episode. And I swear every Wednesday at 7:00 AM. I think that’s the best episode we ever have. And I’ve said that a hundred times, like, I it’s like you think it’s all you, but people listen to them like, oh God, you’re so full of shit.

You’re just, you’re just, you know, promoting your podcast, but I’m telling you, nobody has a guest list like me and I just, just suspend disbelief for a second and just go listen to a few episodes. And it, it really, you know, when you have a hundred guests and it’s not like I’m a sports podcaster. So I have, you know, just 50 baseball players and 50 football players.

I have. All kinds of people who are remarkable, but not necessarily rich or famous. And so I have a very broad spectrum of, from a fantastic, probably the best photo editor for the New York times, who, you know, was talking about how she worked for life and sports illustrated and the New York times and how she got the, this is a great story.

You want to talk about storytelling? So she was at, at life when Martin Luther king was assassinated and she was the person who worked with. Photographer. He was an intern who caught the famous picture of the people on the balcony who were pointing their at, you know, the person who shot Martin Luther king.

And so she was tasked with getting those photographs. And this is back in the days of film to New York to publish. And so she goes to the airport to pick up the photographer because he had to fly there from Memphis, with the photos and they’re in the cab. And she says, you know, give me the negatives. And he says, well, I developed the film and had it printed because I was afraid that someone would seize the negatives and he had taped the photographs to his chest so that nobody could get it.

So in the, in the back of this cab, she’s kind of undressing him and getting the photos and, you know, it’s that kind of story. I mean, the story behind that famous photo is so great. Yeah. Wow. I know. I love that. Just the way that you’re describing it. I mean, I totally forgot that I was actually supposed to be pot it’s like, so just so captivated by this story in and of its of itself, because you could just imagine what was going on in their heads and around them and just how stressful that, that, that could possibly be.

And so then guide between like all of the podcasts episodes that you’ve done, the books, your career, all the wonderful, amazing storytellers that you’ve been surrounded by. If you were to tell the agency accelerated audience, what really makes a good story, what do you think would be the best tip for them?

Well, first of all, let us, let us, uh, establish the foundation that I think that storytelling is the key to communication. And David Aaker in his episode makes a very strong case that, uh, and we were talking about vaccination. He says that many people believe that you should use facts that, you know, you’re 11 times more likely to die without vaccination or in 90% of the people who are in the hospital have not been vaccinated.

And when you use facts, there’s always ways to argue a fact. And you could say, well, yeah, 90% of people in the hospital are not vaccinated, but blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? There’s some, there’s some conspiracy theory about, I don’t know, maybe you’re in the hospital. Ah, who knows whatever. So he said, instead of using facts, you should do stories.

The story is. My grandfather was not vaccinated. He got COVID he’s in the hospital. Not he’ll never see his grandchildren. You can’t argue that you can’t say no, he will. He’s not in the hospital. I checked that’s stores are much more difficult to argue against. So you said stores are much more powerful.

And so I think that is a key lesson and oh, the book is, I mean, in the book, the podcast is filled with stories like that. Now, having said that, uh, you know, just to be a little bit of a devil’s advocate, when you’re the recipient of a story, you should be cognizant of the fact that it is harder to argue against a story.

And a story is not science. Science is where you have a controlled experiment and you have a meaningful pool of tests and subjects. So, you know, that’s like saying to use a negative example, uh, My father smoked for a pack a day for 60 years. And he never got lung cancer. That’s a story you can’t argue against that story, assuming it’s true.

You can’t argue that. No, he did get Dick lung cancer and he died. You’re wrong. So you can’t argue about that, but he may be the outlier that generally speaking, if we all smoked a pack a day for 60 years, most of us would die. He happened to be the exception. That doesn’t mean you should smoke a pack every day.

So that’s the, I think the cautionary part of storytelling now I forget what the question was. What do you think makes very good story. Oh, okay. Right, right. All right. It’s really talking about how story telling really capture someone’s imagination. It’s really hard to fact check it all the time and all the different things, but it makes it much more memorable.

But go ahead. Yes. The first of all, you have to be quick enough on your feet and smarter than. To discern what story to tell in what situation. So, and that is that is to use a sports analogy. You have to be a quarterback and you have to call them audible after the huddle. So to use this podcast, as an example, I had no intention, no plan of telling any particular story, but I thought that at the moment you asked me about, you know, that story or telling a story.

I use the example of Karen malarkey, the photo editor, and how she got the Martin Luther king assassination photo into life magazine. And hopefully that was an appropriate story that stuck with the audience. Based on the question you asked me. So some of it is just, you got to be able to audible. And I think the only way you get to be able to Autobot, if you think about it, continuing the quarterback metaphor is you have to play in a lot of games.

So, so you know, when to call it audible, and that means you have to do a lot of speaking, you have to do a lot of presenting. You have to get it so that you’re completely relaxed and you’re not working off a teleprompter or a script or note cards. And, you know, if you ask me another question, I’ll find another story for it, but I have to do it in real time.

And that, that is a hard thing to do so, and okay. So let’s assume that you figured that out, but then I think that storytelling is a very easy skill in a sense, because unlike debating or unlike sort of formalistic ways of speaking. Everybody tells stories, right? I mean, you, you, you, you go and play Mahjong with your group of people and you’re telling stories.

You’re not, you didn’t go to the Majong game and say, okay, like, these are the key points I got to get in my story. Let’s tell, you know, it’s, it’s ER, you remember that scene in crazy rich Asians where they’re playing Mahjong and the, the Nick’s mom is finding out from the other. Um, I dunno if they’re playing my song, playing something, uh, finds out, see, this is a story about a story.

So she finds out that her son is coming to a wedding in Singapore bringing a girl that no one knows anything about. Right. And so, you know, my point is, I think many people are, most people are natural storytellers because that’s how you communicate in life. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. When you were talking about the module.

I was thinking about the movie, but I have a six year old and every day, you know, she comes home from school and I’m just like, tell me about your day. And there’s a story about what happened at the playground and who was being mean and how she solved that problem. And, you know, you’re just, oh yeah. And she didn’t need PowerPoint to do that.

Right. She didn’t need sound effects. No. Yeah. I love, I love the fact that you bring up, you know, when you have stories, it’s nice to have them on hand it’s I don’t think a lot of people practice that or even have like a story bank to refer back to, because if you’re not a podcast or if you’re not a content creator, sometimes you’re just consuming the stories that come in.

But when you have it, at least like jotted down of like, Hey, this is what I remember about this person. Yeah. And I could go either way on this. Cause I am not suggesting that every one of you. Start a story bank and, you know, scrub your brain and put it into index cards or put it on, you know, in Microsoft word or a template or something like that.

I think,

[00:31:44] Guy Kawasaki: I think storytelling is much more natural because we use it every day. When you come home from work, when you come home from school, then these are the three key points I need to make with my 10 slides. That is very unnatural. And so all of my talks are basically top tens and each of my top 10 recommendation comes with a story.

Now I have been doing that for 30 or 40 years. So it comes naturally to me at this point. But I think when you give a presentation, Using the top 10 format is very useful because it adds structure and it communicates to the audience.

You

[00:32:27] Guy Kawasaki: know, this is how long the speech is going to be. You can

kind of

[00:32:29] Guy Kawasaki: plot your way.

Cause

if,

[00:32:31] Guy Kawasaki: if a speaker stands up and says, I got my top 10 lessons about innovation and he, or she says, number five is get to the next curve.

Well,

[00:32:40] Guy Kawasaki: you

kind of

[00:32:41] Guy Kawasaki: know, oh,

he,

[00:32:42] Guy Kawasaki: he or she said, there’s going to be 10. And he’s at number five he’s halfway done. And that’s very settling because I’ve saw, I’ve sat in on keynotes and the person is just

rambling and

[00:32:51] Guy Kawasaki: rambling and rambling.

And

like,

[00:32:53] Guy Kawasaki: what the hell, when the hell do we come to the end of this damn thing? So this way you can,

you know,

[00:32:59] Guy Kawasaki: communicate to your audience that you’re halfway done or you’re two-thirds of the way done. And some of the pressure is removed.

It’s kind of like you haven’t, you have the set up for them. So they get to kind of know where they are at, in your presentation or your storytelling in, and of that sentence.

Yeah. Well, hopefully your audience is not wondering when the hell you’ll be done, but if they are, it’s better that they know. And so if, if, if I could make a recommendation to someone making a keynote and I’ve made this recommendation many times, but nobody ever listens to me about this. And that’s because I don’t know why.

Maybe it’s just a bad recommendation, but the top 10 format for a keynote is a very useful thing. It adds structure, and then it adds discipline. And you have these 10 key points and you come up with 10 stories and butter being, but a bang, you know, once, you know, it’s 10 and these 10 stories and these 10 points, you can relax.

And then you can just tell stories what a great idea. Yeah. I, I, when we talk about like presentations too, I find that some people, when they’re trying to remember the facts and all the bullet points and all the different things that they have to say, that puts a lot more pressure. But when you’re telling a story, you don’t always tell the story the same way every single time.

Yeah. And you know, when you need to remember facts, as I just quoted David Aaker for my podcasts, facts are not that powerful. If, let me say, let me say this very succinctly. If facts were powerful, we would not have a pandemic because people would have gotten the facts and mast up. They would have gotten the facts and maintain social distance.

They would have gotten the facts, even if it took a while, 90% of the world would be vaccinating. Right. I mean, it is factual that we should do this, but obviously half the world thinks that if you get vaccinated, bill gates is placing a microchip in you to track you. Now, never mind that Tim cook has your phone and knows every word you said, and every place you’ve been, but bill gates is going to put a microchip in there and he’s going to cause me to what standardize on Microsoft office.

I mean, you know, like don’t get me started. So the point is that the counter you, the point is the stories are more powerful than facts. That should be, that should be a key lesson for anybody. You know, when you pitch a customer or potential customer, you should use stories because, I mean, unless you got a fact like social media, Per sale is 10 times more effective than magazine advertising.

Okay. That’s a powerful fact, but I would, if let’s say that, you know, that’s part of your pitch that, uh, we want you to use social media. Instagram is 10 times more effective per dollar than magazine advertising. Okay. That’s a good fact. I can see that, but then I would follow that up with, for example, for example, when Madison Reed made the pivot from analog hair dying salons to online and utilize Instagram to show their new colors, they found that this was 10 times more effective than ads.

They were running in the New York times, Sunday magazine. That’s a fact and a story, but that’s much more powerful than just the. Yeah, I love that. That’s so smart. So for everyone that’s tuning in and you’ve got like Anna, you’ve got Chad, you’ve got the whole entire crew here. They’re just, I’m seeing the view count, like climb up in the comments, all, all coming through.

So, Hey, listen, if you’re, what was that guy? I just want them to subscribe to my podcast. It’s a damn good podcast. We’re about to celebrate the hundredth episode. That’s going to be amazing. Yeah. Say, Hey crew, if you’re just tuning. When you’re talking about the importance of stories and how agencies can help their clients tell great stories.

But first, just a quick reminder and bonus the show’s brought to you by Agorapulse voted the number one social media management tool by customers on the planet’s top review sites. And if you’re looking for an easy way to increase and versify your agency’s revenue streams, a gore polls has a free webinar to help you do exactly that.

Make sure you head on over to Bitly Ford slash ad agency revenue to sign up, learn, and start driving more revenue from social media services. So having said that, let me give a quick shout out. We’ve got Anthony Sammie who’s here. He’s always tuning in Chad Illa Peterson. One of my fantastic friends that I recently saw at video marketing world.

And he’s a great storyteller as, as well. And I know that he’s probably going Gaga right now. The fact that like, oh my God, Stephanie’s like guy Kawasaki and Chad in the same sentence. That’s what I was thinking. My name was in the same sentence with CHADS. Oh, he’s all you just made his day. Oh my goodness.

He was going to like, okay. So I can tell you how to make your Agorapulse promotion better. Right. So you should do your girl pulse, whatever you said, which I can’t remember. Which is part of the problem, but I think what you say is, you know, your, your group Hall’s blurb, and then you say, for example, Proctor and Gammer, excuse me, for example, you’ve got to wipe that part out with descrip where I said dead rocks.

So you say, for example, Procter and gamble uses Agorapulse and it increased the sales of Swiffer by 10 times, that’s a story. And now that people are going to remember yeah. Proctor and gamble uses a group also, and it helped them sell 10 times more. Swiffers I got to use that. That’s brilliant. There you go.

Hey, we’re all about feedback, right? There is no failure. There’s always feedback. So I don’t know about that, but sometimes they’re failures. Yeah. I think that if you make a mistake and you keep making the same mistake, Yeah, you’re a dipshit. Yeah,

that’s true. It’s just trying to make it a little bit better, at least 1% different. Yeah. At least, at least, at least. All right. Cool. So you were talking about crazy rich Asians earlier.

There’s a moment where you were, you were talking about you measure your success, not by a word by awards, not by rotten tomatoes scores. So not by money, you’re measuring your success by the future success of your actors and actress. Oh, you did listen to that episode. See, I’m impressed. There you go. So now I’m thinking, wow, she’s really prepared you

for those of you who are wondering what the hell we’re talking about. So one of my guests on remarkable people is the nun and all the, the one and only John M Chu, the director of crazy rich Asians and into the Heights. And he talks about how he directed crazy rich Asians. And in the middle of this podcast, you know, he kept talking about, I can’t remember the actors and actresses names, but he kept talking about, oh yeah, you know, such and such went on to this and such and such went onto that and such and such went out to this after crazy rich Asians.

I said, you know, you know, you’re not talking about your rotten tomatoes scores. You’re not talking about how much it grows. You’re talking about the success of the actors and actresses after the show. And I’ve never seen any. Measure success in that way. And that’s Jon M Chu who come to find out his father is chef choose.

So if you’re in the bay area and you’re ever in Los Altos and you need good Chinese food, go to chef choose and small story, small world story is that when I was an undergrad at Stanford, eating a shift, choosing one of the great treats in undergraduate life. So there’s this hook already.

I love that. I was just like, I was trying to imagine all the actors and the actresses and isn’t it. Gemma? Who’s in the new, I don’t know. I, I, my, uh, my, my favorite part of crazy rich Asians is when the tiger mom. Yeah. The rich guy’s mom. Well, they’re in this study group, a Bible study group in her house, fabulously wealthy person.

Right. And they’re in his house and there’s, you know, it is to mix cultures here. They’re kind of, five-year enters playing Mahjong and she gets the call that her son is coming to the wedding with this woman that they don’t know anything about. So she gets up from the table and takes the call and all the other women, the Housewives at the table are wanting what the hell is going on?

You know, what’s going on this who’s, who’s her son bringing in all that. And she kind of puts the phone aside and she goes, um, I gotta take this call. Just keep going onto Colassians and I’ll catch up. And that’s just the funniest line you had to be there if you don’t find that funny. But anyway, I like the whole entire crew is about to go ahead and watch crazy rich Asians.

Again, you should, you know, there, there are people who think as Asia, they think, oh, crazy rich Asians is bad because it’s stereotypes us as this materialistic people who all want Lamborghini’s and buying Louis Vuitton, golf bags and all that. And I’m an Asian and I was not offended. I, I thought it was the funniest damn thing I had ever seen.

You know, what am I? One of my favorites from there was Aquafina. Yeah. She got man her personality, just even like her raspy voice. I absolutely love everything about her. And I remember which character was she that she’s the best friend. She was the best friend of all. Yeah. No, the one that she went to the house and her father is dressed in like, I dunno, gold Lamaze robe or something,

but there are people like that I’ve met. It’s true. It’s so true. I loved crazy rich Asians. It’s a good one. It’s a good one. I mean, to be honest with you, I think I read the whole entire trilogy, I think even before the movie came out or sometime for that, but it was, it was, it was really good. And so guy, I love the fact that we can all learn from you so much, as far as when you’re interviewing people and giving them the time and the space to tell their stories.

Also make sure that they freaking sound remarkable in the sense that you’re, you’re editing out what needs to be edited out. But even before that, you know, what’s your process for determining who you interview? Like, how do you choose who specifically you start off with Jane Goodall, the very first one.

And you’re like, how am I going to follow up with, yeah, well, I still don’t have Michelle Obama, but, um, so there, there are some people who are very obvious, right? So, you know, you want Michelle Obama, you want Stacy Abrams. I can’t think of a Republican. You would want, because there are no remarkable Republicans.

Oh, you know that guy, Adam Kinzinger or his insurer Kiplinger or whatever, the guy who’s like the anti-Trump Republican. I would have him, if I could get to him, I would do him. But anyway, I digress. I don’t want to get too political and offend your audience, but I see there’s no applause coming, but anyway, so, um, so there are some people who are obviously remarkable.

The Jane Goodall, Michelle Obama. You know, uh, I had Julia Cameron, you know, those kinds of people, basically any MacArthur award winner would qualify in my humble opinion. So that’s the easy one, but my podcast is not rich people and it’s not famous people. So to take an example, if the person who’s in charge of Goldman Sachs asked to be on my podcast, I would tell them no, because what are you besides rich?

You know, what have you done to make the world a better place? So it’s not rich or famous. It’s remarkable. So I have had people who you never heard of because they were snuck across the U S Mexico border as a baby. And now they work for Adobe. It’s a remarkable story of how she was snow smuggled by coyotes, and is now a marketing person at Adobe.

You would not have heard of her. So that’s a remarkable store and those kinds of people qualify. So, uh, a lot of it is. Um, when people write books, I’m in the flow. So PR firms always reach out to me about upcoming books. A lot of it is that people who listen to my podcasts and love my podcasts, they contact me and say, listen, I love your podcast.

And I know the woman who is the only. Director of an opera in the United States in, and she is in charge of the San Francisco opera and I’m making this up. So it’s somebody like that. Like, I’m not an offerable who, how would I know who this person is? But if somebody in the know says, okay, she’s the only woman opera director, I, that qualifies right there.

I can tell you that right now. So th that’s how people who love your podcasts will re recommend people that they think would fit in. And that’s a very rich vein, arguably the richest vein, because it’s very hard to get, even to that opera director, just saying I’m guy Kawasaki with my podcasts. So you want somebody who already knows, or even if you know, your podcast is fairly well known because there’s no assumption that she knows who the hell I am or cares.

So you need somebody who connects the two of you. Now, I also want to address the flip. And the flip side is even funnier. The flip side is that every day I get a request from either Joe blow or Joe Blow’s person. And the pitch always goes like this. I enjoy your podcasts in particular, you know, David Aaker, Jane Goodall, Linda Zang from Ford.

I really enjoy your podcasts. And I think I would be a great guest for you because I’m remarkable too. I have started a consulting firm and we’re doing over a million dollars. I have written a book it’s called secrets of success by Joe blow, published by blow publishing. And so I think that I should be on your podcast too.

And I got to tell you, it takes every ounce of strength from me and resistance and control to not send back an email. How to, how do you figure that you are on the same league as Jane Goodall? Just like, educate me here, but I don’t because I’m a kinder, gentler person in my old age. And so I send back a kind email.

Actually I have a virtual assistant do it because it’s just easier for me to do it that way. But, you know, we just say, we’re very busy, sorry, blah, blah, blah. But I got to tell you, man, it just amazes me sometimes about people who think that they are remarkable. And as a rule of thumb are really going to get in trouble now.

But as a rule of thumb, I would say that, um, if somebody asked to be on your podcast, you probably don’t want them on your podcast. It’s kind of Groucho Marx. You know, I would not join a club that wants me as a member. So, and that is, uh, that is a part of doing business. So, uh, I don’t know, that’s how I roll.

What can I say for better for worse and all your audience is saying what an arrogant asshole. He’s just like, I, I feel like all the other PR folks and all the influencer outreach through like, well, dammit, I know what I’m working on today. Well, let me see yours. Okay. So let’s be more constructive than so, you know, if, if you want to pitch me, not that I’m the center of the podcasting world, but if you want it to pitch NPR, I mean, let’s take the extreme, the gold standard, if you want it to pitch Terry Gross, which I have never been successful in pitching.

Myself. So, you know, I’m not remarkable enough for Terry groves, but you know what? You got to figure that she’s getting 10 requests a day, maybe an hour. So you have to stand out from all that noise. And if you think your pitch that says, well, I represent Joe blow of blow consulting and it’s over a million dollar practice.

And he’s written a book called the blow away, published by blow press. If you think Terry Gross, if you think you’re going to get past the producers, personal assistants, personal assistants, personal assistants, with that pitch, you are on drugs. You have got to have a really compelling story, and it doesn’t mean that you have to be Michelle Obama to get an NPR, but you better have a really compelling story, more so than I’ve been successful in creating a seven digit consulting.

Yeah, my goodness. That’s it. It’s, it’s one of those things where I’m just kinda like, how do you separate yourself from the sea of sameness? Right? It’s I feel like you have to do a little bit more and, and research and find the common thread, because I would imagine that you have a certain criteria for who you bring onto the show and it might not be.

Uh, gone. I don’t mean to interrupt. Go ahead. Yeah. I was going to say that it’s probably unspoken, but as a listener, you could pick up on those certain cues and then see if it would be a good fit. But to your point, it’s some people just are out there just for them. Well, I mean, really a good rule of thumb is if somebody asks the probably not worth, like I don’t anticipate Michelle Obama, Stacey Abrams, uh, who, you know these, like if you get, if he’s a guy, who’s your fantasy, who, who do you want?

And you have not gotten, it would be if I had one choice, if God said to the guy, I’ll give you one guest, pick anybody, one guest, I would say Stacy, April. No, I don’t think she’ll be calling me up if you know what I mean, but I’ve said this on podcasts about five times. So I know one day Stacey Abrams or Stacy Abrams, best friend or Stacey Abrams, PR person is going to be listening.

They’re going to say shit, we should get her on that show because you know you to cast a big net. So, but, but I think it’s really a point of working backwards from your audience. So if, if let, let’s put it more in the guise of the people who are probably listening because no ad agency is going to bring on Stacey Abrams because CCA films is so political that any ad agency or PR agencies thinking, oh, if I bring on Stacey Abrams, then the NRA will never use me as an agency, which I would argue is a good thing, but we don’t need to go there.

So. You know, who, who you should think of, who’s listening to an agency podcast. What would they be interested in? If it were me, I would say, well, if, if I were a marketing or sales person listening to podcasts, who do I want to hear interviewed? It would be David Aaker. Bob Cialdini, Angela Duckworth, Scott Galloway, D uh, let’s see, um, Katie milkmen, uh, who else?

Simon Sinek. Seth Godin. Gary Vaynerchuk, Tim Ferris. I just steam Marquez Brownlee. If I were an agency. Okay. Let’s take the case of Marcus Brawley, who I can’t even get him. I would love to hear how a black young adult graduated from college. Frisbee player now has, I don’t know, 30 million YouTube subscribers now, you know, he gets the Tesla, he gets the Porsche, he gets the math book.

He gets everything before anybody else. How did he do that? You know, if you had a choice between having Kara Swisher or Marquez Brownlee, talk about your product, who would you pick? I would pick mark as Brownlee. How did he get to that? Every agency in the world should want to know how the hell did Marquez Brownlee become Marcus brown.

That would be, he would be my second choice to Stacey Abrams. Really. So I think now my message here is you got to think about your customer. Who would they want to hear? Marquez Brownlee, not Joe blow from below consulting.

I’m cracking up over here. Cause I know that I know that our team has probably written down all of these names and they’re like, yes, yes, yes. And yes. Yeah, I absolutely, I love that because there are a lot of times, you know, to your point, a lot of people are out there just to pitch their services and whatnot.

But when we had Alan cam the show and he was talking about the, his campaign, when you see something, say something the way that, that whole entire story unfolded and the fact that it wasn’t about profit, it was about making a positive impact in the world after, right after nine 11, the state of what was happening in the world and how that really pushed him to make that campaign where anyone, if they wanted to do.

Run with it. They could no charge whatsoever, as long as he got credit for it. That was probably the one episode where we got so much feedback from people about, wow. I can’t believe that. That was amazing. So thank you for that. Yeah. I know him. Maybe I should bring him on the podcast. He was great. He was good.

Yeah. Yeah. We even had one of our listeners, Yvonne Hyman, who was at the airport and she saw the ad and she had tweeted it and it was just like, I learned that from Alan K. Too bad, David. Ogilvy’s not alive. That’s true. So we’re, we’re just about to wrap up because you’ve got a surfboard coming along the way.

I know you’re Kevin Guy. I know it’s four hours away, but you’re still excited. You’re going to be imagining where you’re going to put it and all the different things. So agency accelerated fam, this is your one chance to like, ask your questions. Now, if you’ve got questions about storytelling, all the different things, um, bring it through.

I actually, someone would asked earlier guy, let me find it. It was, he was asking about, um, the Harvard graduate that was deaf and blind that you did the interview with grim. Yeah. Do I have her book right here? Um, yeah, so she graduated from Harvard law. Deaf and blind wrap your mind around that. Hard enough to go to Harvard law school.

If you’re not deaf and blind, she did a deaf and blind. She’s now a disability rights activists. And yeah, so that was, let’s just say that was a challenging podcast for technical reasons, because the way it worked is I say the question, her, her, her personal helper, you know, whatever, here’s me, he types it into a device that then uses braille.

So she feels my question and then has to respond. Now. She lost her sight and hearing in her teenage years. So she can’t speak otherwise. Oh my God. If she had to braille it back and then have to read it back, it would really, my head would explode. So quite a fascinating of great sense of humor. It was quite an episode.

Yeah. And that, that is one case where I like to wipe out the long pauses, unless it serves a purpose, like communicating great cogitation. But in that case, I left all the long pauses in, because I wanted people to have a sense of, this is what it’s like to communicate with someone who’s deaf and blind, who has to go through multiple steps that hearing person hears it, types it, then you have to feel it in your fingertips.

You know, that’s a lot harder to just listen. So that’s the story of that episode Hoben, Girma having an agreement. Yeah. So that was a really good one. And then we have Chad who popped into the comments again, and he says that we’re all natural storytellers, of course, but that’s how we communicate. We talk about what’s going on in our day, how it made us feel and all the different things.

And so that’s absolutely amazing. He’s also saying that he now needs to have a team of personal assistants and gatekeepers.

That’s what you truly know you’ve arrived yet.

I don’t have any, you have that one, you have that one virtual assistant for, for winter. My email is guy Kawasaki at Gmail. You know, it’s just, it’s going to come right through.

You’ve said before in the past, right. You’ve said, I think my podcast is the best work I’ve ever done in my career. Why do you think that is of all the books, all the speaking engagements and all the different things. Why would you say that the podcast is the best body of work that you’ve created? Well, maybe it’s because at 67 I finally figured out something.

Um, it would be very well, first of all, if somebody of 25, you know, Joe, Blow’s 25 years old, says this is the best work I’ve ever done in my career. And you say, okay, so your career is four years long. BFD so watch if it’s the best work of your past four years. But prior to that, you know, what are you? So, so partly is because I’m 67 and now I have the benefit of hindsight.

And I will tell you that I truly do believe I was just born to Bodcast. Okay. One of my regrets is that I was not smart enough to embrace the podcasting medium earlier. I’ve only done it for two years because it’s a hundredth episode and I do 52 a year. So if I had done it for five or six years, when Dave Weiner who has been on the podcast invented podcasting, man, I would be like bigger than Joe Rogan today.

So sometimes, you know, it’s timing is everything. Yeah. Well, what are your thoughts on the live audio rooms, those clubhouse chat rooms and all those Twitter spaces. I, I jumped on clubhouse and, you know, I didn’t build up a following a millions of people, but after a while, And I have not been on clubhouse for months now, and I really don’t know how it’s doing.

So how is it doing before I put my foot in my mouth? How is it doing? Is it still as hot as ever? I know, I, I think it’s kind of died out. I mean, you, you have Twitter spaces and then Facebook is now opening up, live audio to all other users at this point. Well, but, but as a forget clubhouse specifically, but as a genre of social audio is, you know, is it sticking or not?

I think it is in the sense of you kind of get that live aspect of it without the pressure of having to be on camera. Yeah. Like we are now. Um, well, you know, my, my, my, what, what made me lose interest in clubhouse was that whenever I went into rooms, I mean, it seemed like every room was about. I’m a self-made millionaire and you could be as successful as I am.

I’m talking to you today free, but if you click in the link in my profile, it’ll take you to my Instagram. And at Instagram, you’ll see that I have a $500 course on how to be successful in social media, but for you today, special it’s two 50 and it was like so much, it was just so many wannabes talking to so many other has-beens that I just could not wrap my mind around hearing everybody talk about like everybody on in club.

This is six months ago. Everybody in clubhouse was a self-made millionaire. I mean, there’s like nobody poor and clubhouse everybody. Everybody’s bragging about how great they’re doing it. I was like, so sick of that bullshit. And you know, everybody’s, they’re like, yeah, I made seven digits being a real estate broker in my first month.

And I’ve written down those secrets. If you click on the link in my profile, I’ll show you how you can be rich too. And I usually got so sick of that shit that I just stopped.

Okay. I can also let me the fact that they’ve got a gardener out here in the, in the background. You guy, that’s not a sound effect. That’s a leaf blower. That’s yeah, he’s out there. He’s having a good. Seriously, and this was so much fun. Seriously. It’s just, just talking to you and the realness that comes out.

And I love everything that you, that you had to share. I think whoever’s going to be editing this and descript is going to have one hell of a good time trying to figure out what they want to pull out. You know, I think if I were to share, like, when you were saying that you always want to show, what’s remarkable about your guest and how you do all those extra things for them.

The one little like arc that I have when people are repurposing content for like audio grams is that they don’t edit the typos or they, they say one thing, but then the, the word that’s been transcribed is different. Have you ever seen that? Okay, so we can address that too. So I see that all the time, and for the longest time I would just put up a computer journey to test transcript.

Okay. Yeah. And then I just looked at him. I said, Aw, man, they’re just like, it’s just not accurate. And so. If you try to really edit a machine transcribed transcription, you would spend four or five hours working on that. Especially, especially if you have a guest like Jane Goodall. And she says, I was in no, no, no, no, no, no village in Nairobi.

And like, what the hell, what village has not like, I know which village in Nairobi there was, how do I ever look up that word? It’s really difficult to accurately transcribe stuff. But then so then I stopped transcribing because I figured, well, you know, of the thousands of people who download it, well, none of them are deaf because they wouldn’t download it.

But you know, how many people are really using the transcript. Now I’m all about equal access. So I feel, and, and, and after I interviewed her. I really felt convicted that because I wasn’t putting enough resources into transcription. I was short changing the world of knowledge and it was immoral for me to have this knowledge, but not take it the last step and get it transcribed.

So after Hoben convicted me, my procedure now is I take the audio. I send it to a company called rev and rev has people who are maybe the first pass is a machine, but the second pass is definitely a human because it is too good when it comes back to be not a human. Now it may be for all. I know someone with a PhD in, in English working in Bangalore, but somehow some very intelligent person is, is editing my rev transcription.

But my, my rev transcription comes to me and. I have someone local. I have two or three people who work locally and they are trained to understand how my podcasts in particular work. So they really understand the nuances so they can, um, shorten the paragraphs. They can more accurately change the punctuation.

They are more familiar with the proper nouns that would come across in my podcast. So after I spend, let’s see probably a hundred bucks per hour for the rev transcription. And then I spend, I have someone who spends another two hours. So two humans go at my transcriptions and then we put it up. And I just hope that enough people care about that, but I feel it’s a moral obligation on my part to transcribe as high quality as I can.

I love that. I love how much time and effort you put into making sure that the stories you collect can be downloaded, can be read, can be shared and experienced by other people. Because if they ever make a movie OCD, Asians, I will be to stop staring guy Kawasaki directed by Jon M Chu using Manwell Miranda.

That’s right. Coming on Netflix. Now

maybe they’ll have Ted lasso will be my character. Yeah, there you go. What’s the best way to reach. Gmail hard to remember my name at Gmail. If you can’t remember that, don’t write to me. All right, girl, you heard it here. If you have any other comments or questions, go ahead and drop them in the comments.

That’s seriously. That’s all that we have today, friends, but don’t worry. We have so much more coming up for you. Fantastic. Series of shows coming up and who knows maybe all of those amazing, wonderful people that guy had just mentioned. We’ll get them in the lineup too. Cause whoever it is that you want to hear from, let’s get them all on this show.

So in our next episode, Let me tell you who’s going to be coming in tomorrow. If, if I got Stacy before you you’d probably come after us, I really would or I’d kill myself. Oh, fab. So the next one is we’re going to have an agency coach who has spent years building up a multimillion dollar marketing agency, and now teaches other agencies, his systems and structure.

It’s Lee Goff followed by Jairek Robbins, Kelly, Mirabella, and so much more in PS. By the way, if you have other names, please go ahead and let us know that way we could go ahead and start pitching them out and start building those relationships as always remember to subscribe to the calendar@agorapulse.com forward slash calendar.

If you want to be sure to catch our live episodes, because honestly, Chad, you got to like. You got your name mentioned in the same sentence as guy Kawasaki. That’s gotta be like a game changer right there. We just made your whole damn year. Don’t forget to get Joe blow, blow consulting. Oh, goodness gracious.

And remember agency accelerated is available all podcast channels, including apple podcast, Spotify and Amazon. So hit us up, leave a review, let us know what you think. Thank you all so much for being here, guy. You got us on that surfboard. Good. Bye. See ya.