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The magical science of storytelling | David JP Phillips | TEDxStockholm

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3 Ways to Build Real Empathy for Others in Your Life

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Empathy allows us to take the pain and suffering of another person as if it were our own. Learn the effects of empathy in relationships and how to strengthen it.

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Connect or Die: The Surprising  Power of Human Relationships | Starla Fitch | TEDxFargo

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Telling a story is an essential part of building your brand for both B2C and B2B companies. Stories are commonly used in B2C marketing, but even in B2B campaigns, stories can help you get the attention of someone who is making a business decision.

As a result, a B2B company needs a good story just as much as a B2C company. The following 15 resources will help you craft a compelling story that helps draw new customers to your brand:

Goal Setting

Before you can tell your story, you first need to know why you're sharing it. What response are you hoping to get? How will sharing your story help you meet your business goals?

A service like Brainrider can help you answer those questions with their free template for defining and prioritizing success. Once you've determined what your specific digital marketing goals are, Google Analytics is a great tool for tracking your progress.

Content Planning and Sharing

Now that you know what you want to achieve, it's time to plan how you'll tell your story and how you'll create the content that will connect with your potential customers.

Callidus Cloud offers plenty of free resources on creating a content calendar and filling it with engaging content. You can also try Content Marketer, a great tool that helps you promote your content and increase traffic.

Content Creation

Once you have your strategy written out, your next step is - unsurprisingly - to actually create the content.

Contently is a great starting point, offering tools to help you create your brand story quickly and easily. Contently also has experts available to write your content for you, should you decide that outsourcing is necessary to meet your campaign objectives.

In addition, check out Scoop.it, which will aggregate existing content based on your industry or niche, giving you an excellent base for fast content creation.

Social Media

B2B social media strategies tend to differ from B2C, as B2B sales funnels are generally longer and require deeper layers of social interaction to move prospects through each buying stage.

Social storytelling can play a key role in creating these deeper relationships. A tool like Pardot from Salesforce will help you post and track your social storytelling efforts effectively. With Pardot you can post cross-platform to different social sites at once, schedule posts in advance, and track the response you get and the number of social contacts who go on to become buyers.

Percolate is another similarly helpful social tool that larger companies may want to take advantage of.

Video and Visual Storytelling

Videos are well established as an advertising medium and storytelling tool, but many B2B marketers feel they lack the expertise needed to create great videos.

Vidyard Studio makes the process easy, allowing you to easily build custom videos and track engagement. For another take on visual storytelling, check out LookBookHQ, which helps you assemble content in a tile format with included analytics.

Case Studies

Another important way to tell your brand story is through the use of case studies. Research has shown that case studies are the most influential type of content in both the awareness stage and the evaluation stage of B2B sales. B2B Marketing has a Free Case Study Outline you can use.

Then, take a look at LinkedIn Publisher, which is a great way to spread awareness about your case studies (in addition to posting them to your website and sharing over social media).

Analytics and Evaluation

Once you start creating and sharing your story in various formats, you need to track the results you've achieved and make sure you're prompting the desired actions from your readers.

Optimizely is a useful tool you can use to A/B split test your different content pieces, while Track Maven allows you to compare your results to those of your competitors to see how you measure up.

Finally, SharedCount is an excellent tool that tracks social shares of your content, helping you to determine where your campaigns need work and how to better allocate your marketing resources in the future.

Final Words

It's a common misconception that storytelling is too "touchy-feely" for B2B companies, but telling your brand story is just as important in the world of B2B as it is to B2C retailers.

Using these 15 tools will help you to set goals, design and tell your story, spread your message across the web, and track your results. There's truly never been a better time to be a B2B storyteller.
How do you share your B2B brand story? Share your experiences and suggestions in the comments below!

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15 B2B Resources For Better Storytelling

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Telling a story is an essential part of building your brand for both B2C and B2B companies. Stories are commonly used in B2C marketing, but even in B2B campaigns, stories can help you get the attention of someone who is making a business decision.

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Storytelling Through Song | Rick McLean | TEDxGullLake

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The Power of Human Connection | Mary Davidson | TEDxYouth@IdahoFalls

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Transcript of "Compassion and the true meaning of empathy"

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TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Buddhist roshi Joan Halifax works with people at the last stage of life (in hospice and on death row). She shares what she's learned about compassion in the face of death and dying, and a deep insight into the nature of empathy.

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Animated movies' growing popularity has sparked interest in digital film and motion design classes.

However, most movie-goers have no idea about the time-consuming process required for a polished animation. For instance, one second of motion has 24 frames, so one minute has 1,440 frames.

The thought of that much tedium deflates some Hollywood dreamers but our "creative computer nerds" enjoy building those frames into a seamless story.

While my students have varying dreams, unique strengths and weaknesses, they are bound by a shared love of art, video games and animation.

They help make leading a team and teaching in Booker High School's Visual and Performing Arts (VPA) Program exciting, challenging and rewarding.

Not only do I get to teach using cutting-edge equipment and software from the motion picture industry, I also am fortunate to both teach and learn from some of our community's most original thinkers who, as young teens, possess the passion and drive to audition for the exacting four-year VPA program.

Once admitted into the VPA program, students must maintain a 2.5 or higher grade point average to stay in the program. I believe that students who put the time and dedication into meeting the VPA program's high standards deserve my commitment to create lessons that challenge them to work up to their potential. That is why I pursued-and received--a grant last year to support an ambitious project, an interactive stop-motion lab titled: "Edge of Imagination Station: Literacy in Motion."

The project was designed for students to learn to make videos that communicate story concepts, elevate script-writing skills, develop animation and playwriting techniques, and gain proficiency in the entire production process involved in telling a simple story.

Set in a real-world environment with tight deadlines, students worked in groups to produce stories from scratch. They made up characters and wrote stories about them, constructed necessary items to visually support the stories, and made sets and storyboards.

We have a saying: "We teach you skills that pay the bills." Students graduate from our program at a high caliber with skills they can take to the real world in a way that nourishes their creativity and pays the rent.

The incredible potential of my students frequently astounds me. With pride and affection, I tell them, "You'd better thank me when you win an Oscar." And that is a scene I can see in their future.

Lori Burton is department head of Visual and Performing Arts and a teacher of digital film and motion design at Booker High School

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LORI BURTON: Animated storytelling develops Sarasota students' skills

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Animated movies' growing popularity has sparked interest in digital film and motion design classes.However, most movie-goers have no idea about the time-consuming process required for a polished animation.

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YouGov survey finds 51% of people think we are losing ability to understand and sympathise with others

The majority of adults in the UK believe there is less empathy in society now compared with a year ago.

Only 12% of people quizzed for a new study by YouGov said they had noticed an increase in most peoples' ability to put themselves in others' shoes, while 51% reported a decrease.

The findings point to "an emerging crisis of empathy", according to the Scout Association, which commissioned the research.

"All sorts of factors could be contributing to this - the uncertainty around Brexit and the alienating effects of social media - but it's clear that cracks are appearing nonetheless," says the organisation's chief executive, Matt Hyde, in an article on voluntary sector news site Third Sector.

"The reality is we're not listening to each other and, in particular, we're not engaging with people who are different from us," he adds.

Research by Cambridge University earlier this year "found empathy is a largely learned trait, although it can be passed on genetically in a minority of cases", says The Guardian.

Explorer Bear Grylls, chief scout at the Scout Association, warns that if the general decline in empathy continues, "we risk more division in our communities and increasing alienation among young people", the newspaper reports.

Grylls said: "In a world that sometimes feels fractured and insular, empathy and kindness are more important than ever. When society is polarised we need to work twice as hard to understand each other and find ways of working together.

"I believe young people have a right to develop key skills such as empathy and kindness and we urgently need more adult volunteers to help us do this."

Ben Page, chief executive of Ipsos Mori, said studies had shown that people born prior to the establishment of the NHS and the welfare state were more empathetic towards the poor than each subsequent generation.

"This continued until the [2008] crash, when empathy increased, but levels have still not returned to that of the 1980s," he said. "We have become a society less empathetic to the working-age poor."

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Is Britain experiencing an 'empathy crisis'?

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The majority of adults in the UK believe there is less empathy in society now compared with a year ago. Only 12% of people quizzed for a new study by YouGov said they had noticed an increase in most peoples' ability to put themselves in others' shoes, while 51% reported a decrease.