Speaker 1: Hey guys, it's Ben, and today we're going to cover a strategy that will make your event message unforgettable. Okay, quick story, yesterday an employee of mine, Kevin, came back from a conference. I asked him about the conference because I saw a photo of him on Instagram holding a skateboard and Kevin responded, the conference was amazing, it was so good. That skateboard, I actually designed that with a professional skateboarder and it was so cool. And I said, where was it? Tell me more. He said, well, I did it right after I heard a story from the president of Vans talking about that the only thing in retail that really works anymore is connecting with your audience experientially through their passions. And then I made a skateboard and he said to me, I was really impressed with Vans. And it occurred to me that what Vans had done really, really well was build a pass along story for Kevin to tell me about. A pass along story is a pretty crazy idea. It's the idea that we as humans, we remember by recounting, by telling people things. We repeat things and they dig deeper into our memories. And so as event marketers, it's our job to think about how we can build stories or really experiences that become stories for our audiences. And it's a really important thing to consider and really more important is how you're building it. So let's walk through a quick exercise to think about how to build a pass along story for your next event. Hopefully you'll find this effective. Question one, the storyteller. Who is your attendee? Try to think about that person. Really envision them. Make their avatar. What is their name? Where do they hang out? What is their job title? The more specific you can be about this person, the better. The next question is what I call the campfire, right? And the campfire, I call it this because this is where we tell stories, right? Humans have been telling stories around the campfire since the dawn of time. And so you almost want to imagine a scenario where your storyteller would deliver their story. It might be at the office. It might be at a dinner party, right? It might be amongst their friends while they're just hanging out, like where would they tell that story? So you want to write that piece down, too, and kind of imagine the emotion that they're telling the story with. And now we're moving on to the actual story. Let's call that the tale. And you almost want to think about this as like candy, meaning like what could they just not resist telling their friends about? Now here's a quick hint on building a story that's irresistible to talk about. When you make people feel really good about themselves or proud of themselves, that's usually something that they need to tell someone about. So when you're building a story, you want to think about, well, make them feel proud to tell someone else. And it's not just that. A story has a couple different points to it. There's like a beginning, middle, and an end to any good story. So as you're building the tale, you might want to think about, was there a transformation involved in this story? Was it something new that they saw? Was there a surprise? People love talking about something that they thought was going to happen, but instead something else completely different happened, right? Was it a superlative? Was it like the best or the most that they had ever happened? What is a peg or a storyline that you can really build for them? We're going to call that the tale. And the fourth question, the fourth question is actually the most important and kind of the most fun. I call this the message, but you might also want to call this the emotion, right? Because the message, especially in events, is the emotion. And I actually, I learned this from one of the earliest days of my event planning career. Someone said this to me, and it was one of the most frustrating things I've ever heard, but also one of the truest things I had ever heard, which is that emotions is really all that an attendee ever remembers. They usually don't remember what you tell them at the event. What they remember is how they felt at the event. And so that's what you want to focus on when you're building this message. You want to think about what emotion you want someone to feel, right? And that's question four. And emotions could be something like admiration, or do they feel like you understand them, like empathy, do they feel inspired, do they feel excited, do they feel love? What is an emotion that someone is going to feel, okay? So we've gone through that. We've gone through the storyteller, the campfire, the tale, and the emotion. And so once you have all those written down, here's the trick to building the story. You want to work backwards. You start with number four, and you work your way to number one. Okay, so let's try an example of how to build a pass-along story by using one of the events that I hosted a couple months ago for some of our top clients. Now our clients are some of the top event marketers in the world, and we brought them all together in a really cool venue here in New York. And I had gotten together with my team in advance to think about what emotion we really wanted them to feel. And the emotion that we came to after a lot of debate was that we really wanted them to feel love. Love and appreciation for their job, and for themselves, and for the craft that they do. Okay, so that's where we started. How do we get them to feel love? We threw out a lot of ideas for storylines that they would take away. And really what we landed on was that one of the most important things that we could focus on was the format of the event and kind of how their experience would play out throughout the day. Okay, so fast forward to after the event. I wanted to test this pass-along story and see how effective we were. So I called up a lot of the different attendees and asked them, not how was the event or did you like it, but instead, what was the story that you told when you got home? And more than that, who did you tell it to? So retell me that story, I asked them. And they did. And the stories, more often than not, really weren't about the content that they learned or a certain data point that they heard. But instead, really they started to talk about what had happened. They talked about somebody that they had met at a cocktail hour, or a piece of swag that was now sitting on their desk that they were really excited and surprised by, or a musical interlude that had happened right before a speaker, the violinist and how amazing she was. And really that's what they focused on, but what was even better was that interwoven into each of those stories was the emotion. And they were using really interesting adjectives. And over and over again, we started to hear words like excitement and appreciation and inclusion. And it was those adjectives that we wrote down because that was our goal. That's what we were focusing on. Because remember guys, it's not about how you communicate your content and what you say, but instead, what people are going to remember inside of these stories is how they feel. All right, that's it. Good luck with all of your next events. Please do leave some comments in the comment section below and let us know what you think. And we'll make sure to see you next time for the next run of show, where we will be talking about more nerdy event stuff. Talk to you guys next time. If you felt like this episode made you much smarter than when you started watching it, make sure to check out other episodes of Run of Show weekly, and don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel. Bye.