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

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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:

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 corporate communications, and that’s corporate communications across the board. It’s not just tech pubs, it’s not just marketing, but actually how can they look at storytelling from a holistic point of view. So, that’s become a really interesting area of focus.

Alan:
Still doing some of the more traditional stuff, the information architecture, the content strategy, the helping people choose CMSs, all that good stuff. But the real focus over the last nine months, thanks to some of my clients, has really been around this rapidly growing interest in applying storytelling.

Larry:
That’s fascinating, and the fact that it’s largely in-house, like corporate bizcoms kind of stuff, that’s really… Do you have a feel for what’s driving that, like the sudden interest in it?

Alan:
I think a lot of it is coming from their customers, and we touched on it just before we started recording, and the fact that we’re now in an omnichannel world and they’re looking to really be able to tell good, engaging stories and consistent stories, away from the traditional deliveries of, oh, here’s another PDF, here’s another white paper, here’s a tech doc, piece of tech doc. There are customers, some customers still want those, but how do you really engage the customers in the first place is by getting them. There’s a lot of noise out there, how do you capture somebody’s attention? You really capture people’s attention with empathic stories and through channels like TikTok and whatever social media platform of the day is.

Alan:
Video, YouTube, I’ve seen a definite move of people who are starting to do more interest in YouTube videos. I’ve got a client currently who is looking to take, they’re in the… I like construction industry, they do safety equipment. They’re looking to move all their safety briefings away from the PDFs to video. I got another client who we were just talking about podcasts before we started recording, I got another client who’s talking to me about revitalizing their podcast series and making it more engaging and stuff like that. So there’s that awareness I think, that the way the customers want to consume content is changing and it’s going from a more formal to a more informal sort of model, if that makes sense.

Larry:
Makes perfect sense. And I’m also really curious now, I kind of had omnichannel is just like, we talked about this before we went on the air, like an obligatory buzzword to make sure we get to, but it sounds like it’s fundamental to the work that you’re doing. Do you have storytelling strategy that helps unite these? You’re talking about podcasts and videos and PDFs and traditional web content and other social media content. Is there a lot of attention to aligning the stories across those channels?

Alan:
Yeah, I mean, one of the big things is to try and make sure that those stories are consistent across irrespective of whichever channel. I think so if you’ve got a YouTube video that links to the webpage, make sure that the webpage reflects that story or has some connection to it. There’s no good putting a nice YouTube video out there that’s a good, fun story that talks about your products, and then you don’t give them the product information or you’ve got to be able to make sure that they align. If you’ve got a podcast, I’ve seen too many corporate podcasts that they do the podcast and then there’s no place to go find follow up information.

Alan:
So, just making sure that that’s a consistent customer experience because the one thing, I’ve talked about this all through my career is, as far as the customer’s concerned, they’re interacting with you as a brand. They’re not interacting with your tech. They don’t care that they’re talking to the technical publications department or the finance people or customer support, or you consider they’re 0.7 in the pre-sale cycle. The customer doesn’t care about that, the customer doesn’t know about that. All they know about is they’re interacting with the brand, and as long as that brand, the stories that brand is telling and they’re getting the right information, it’s consistent, that’s going to put you a step above everybody else.

Larry:
Yeah. The way you just said that too, it casts a really interesting, slightly different light on omnichannel than it’s often talked about. It’s usually talked about as channels that you shove the content through, but you just said a couple of things about like, they don’t care where they are in your sales funnel. I mean, that’s probably implied by the kind of content that you’re giving them, where they think you are, but that sort of cross-departmental awareness in your storytelling, is that separate and distinct from your omnichannel kind of content strategy, or?

Alan:
I think it sort of applies to both. For me, I really like to start with figuring out the stories, irrespective of that functional group or even irrespective of the delivery channel. For my clients, as a company, who do we want to be? What sort of stories do we want to tell? What’s the benefit? I go and I start every workshop I do with two things. The first thing is, we’re going around on introductions and having everybody introduce themselves and what they do. I ask them to tell me what one of their favorite brands is and why do they like that brand? And I can say 100% of the time, what they do is they tell me a story about why they like that brand. They tell me-

Larry:
Interesting.

Alan:
At the end of it, I’m like, look, you all just told me brand stories about those brands. Can your customers say the same thing about dealing with you? And then I do-

Larry:
That’s so great. That’s reminding me of that definition of a brand, it’s what people say about you after you leave the room.

Alan:
Yeah, exactly.

Larry:
And they tell stories.

Alan:
Yeah, yeah, which is actually going back, I’m going to tell a story about how I got interested in storytelling, because it’s exactly that. When I was working for a software company, I was living in Austin, Texas, at the time, and there was probably 15 of us who worked remotely, but we all lived in Austin. So we would get together once a month for dinner just to exchange stories, have a beer, blah, blah, blah. And there was one time, there was probably eight of us had turned up that night, and towards the end of the meal somebody said, “Oh, sorry, I’m not going to make the…” I can’t remember, it was an all hands or something the following day. He said, “I’ve got to go and talk to the toll company about my toll tag on my car.” And everybody around the table went, “Oh,” and sighed. And then everybody around that table went around that table and had a story about dealing with the toll company, and they weren’t good stories, I will tell you that.

Alan:
And I sat there, I was working in marketing at the time, and I thought, what if we can take that and spin it through 180 degrees where we can get to the point where a bunch of our customers have sat around a table after things and they’re telling stories but it’s good stories about our company and the product we use, and not just the product we use, but how we help them do their job better. And that’s what really got me interested in… Because outside of work, outside of the consulting stuff in my old day jobs, I write fiction. I write narrative nonfiction and I write fiction books and I write comics. So, I’m sort of fairly steeped outside of work in the whole storytelling framework. And it’s like, how can I apply that storytelling techniques and ideas and framework to the business environment? And that’s really over the last several years, what got me interested in that. And the more I talk about storytelling, the more people will say they’re really interested in doing it and that’s really driven that sort of shift in the last nine months. Yeah.

Larry:
Yeah, that’s really, the story of the toll story is like, everybody had a crummy, bad story. How did you do that 180 turn? Are there principles, or… Because I think a lot of people would love to be able to do that, to plant seeds and tell stories in a way that elicits positive conversations about the brand than what you heard about the toll company.

Alan:
Yeah, it’s really, again, you’ve probably heard this numerous times over the years, it’s not that revolutionary. It’s taking, changing our mindset from that inside-out mindset to an outside-in. You talk to a lot of people who work in communications within companies or even customer-facing communications and customer-facing content, and it’s about what we do as a company and what our product has. I actually just wrote an article about this the other day. We keep forgetting the end, which is the benefit.

Alan:
You think about basic story structure. Aristotle’s basic story structure from 550 BC, every story should have a beginning, and middle, and an end. As companies, what we tend to do is do the beginning and the middle. This is who we are and we’re great. This is what middle bit is, this is what our product is, and then we stop instead of thinking about the end, how does that make life better for our customer? And if you take that, how does that life make life better for our customer, and put it at the front, then you start to think about the telling stories that actually engage the customer because it’s an empathic story. You’re talking about what’s important to them.

Alan:
So if you go back to the toll company, that particular toll company, their website was really good if you wanted to pay your bill, that was their benefit. Okay? If you bought a new car and you wanted to add, move your tag from the old car to the new car, it was a pain, it was a terrible experience. That was a customer-driven action. They didn’t design or tell stories about how to do that. There was nothing on the website that said, “Have you changed your car? Congratulations. Here’s how we can make that easy for you.” No, no, no, no, no, you had to go through 10 clicks and multiple dropdown menus and stuff to even find out how to do it. So they were taking that inside-out view of, we’re communicating stuff based on, we want to take your money, as opposed to, we want to make life easier for you as a customer. Does that make sense?

Larry:
It makes perfect sense and now I’m wondering how when you sit down to craft these stories, do you just… I’m picturing you, like I would rearrange everything in the room backwards so that I’m reminded like, dude, you’re doing it wrong. But seriously, and you mentioned earlier just a few minutes ago the notion of mindset, that you come in, and the current mindset isn’t maybe that conducive and productive. How do you shift your mindset? And I guess, and maybe more to the point, how do you help other content professionals shift their mindset so that they’re better at telling these kind of benefit-driven stories?

Alan:
So when I do these workshops, I always ask for people from each of the functional groups who create customer-facing content to be in the room, at least one rep from there, and somebody who is in charge of content. I’ve not found any other companies that have a CCO yet, but I’m hoping one day we’ll get there. And actually, even a representative, somebody who actually works with a customer, maybe it’s a salesperson or a support person or whatever. So get a group in the room. And then I literally, after the introduction storytelling thing, I actually, one of the first things I do is, okay, tell me what your company does. And then we whiteboard and invariably it’s, oh, we produce product this, or we produce product that, or X, Y or Z. By the time… We then go through the whole thing of, okay, let’s talk about changing way that customers are doing it. We talk about storytelling, we talk about storytelling frameworks and techniques. Hopefully during that, we’re getting them to start to think about the answer.

Alan:
I actually start the second day with, okay, I’ve taken a look at what your company does, and this is what I think your company does from a customer’s perspective. So just to give you an example, I was working with a power generation company who does generators, and they came up with, oh, well, yes, we produce generators of X, Y, and Z kilowatts, and we help people who are putting generators into buildings to spec it and stuff like that. And at the end I was like, okay, so start the second day. I sat down and told them a story of my daughter who was born with a congenital heart problem and was in the hospital, actually had just had heart surgery, and there was a brownout in the city where she was. So the hospital lost power while my daughter’s in ICU just recovering from heart surgery. But everything was okay because that hospital, guess what that hospital had?

Larry:
Backup generators, yeah.

Alan:
Backup generators. So I went in and I told this story and I said, “What does your company do? Your company saves lives.”

Larry:
Wow, that’s a more powerful story.

Alan:
I’m like, you want a story? There’s a story. And that got them thinking about, okay, what else would we do? Well, we bring the light to… They had a great story. They’d actually developed a really good story but they weren’t doing anything with it, about how they had brought light to a remote village in China. They powered sporting events, they powered ships, they powered marine stuff. There was so much that one of the other guys in the room was like, “Oh, yeah, I was just dealing with this company that does animal rescue, and because they’ve got our generators, it allowed them to rescue like 100%, double the number of animals that they could bring into their facility.” I’m like, see, there’s a story.

Alan:
So you start talking to people, get people to talk, get people talking within the company themselves, and everybody has a favorite customer story, but generally they don’t get collected. What gets collected is the broad data, but if you don’t put the story around the data, all you’ve got is the numbers. And what you need to do is actually look at the numbers and find out where those numbers are coming from and what the stories around those numbers are.

Larry:
In a world where we’re just completely awash in data and people talking about data, that notion of, if all you have, if there’s no story around that data, you just have a pile of numbers.

Alan:
Yeah, you do, yeah.

Larry:
Yeah. Hey, as you were talking just a minute ago, I was reminded, I don’t know, have you ever seen that Simon Sinek, TED Talk? It’s one of the most popular ones about, people don’t buy what you do or how you do it, they care about the why. He uses the example of Apple. It’s like we’re different, that’s why you buy a Mac, not because of the way we build it. Is there an analogous kind of escalation or something in a good story?

Alan:
Yeah, I think there is. I mean, I always say there’s no such thing as B2C or B2B or B2C. At the end of the day, everybody buys, everybody buys from a person, it’s all people to people. Even if it’s, you’re putting in a business to business system, at some point it’s a sales guy talking to somebody who has a need. There’s always a relationship there, there’s always an individual relationship. And the ones that work best are the ones that where people tell good stories that relate and resonate with the other person on the other end of the thing.

Alan:
So one of the things I like to talk about, like I said, I write comic books. I was very lucky enough at one point to do a little very bit of minor work for Marvel. She brought me in contact with an editor there, and he has this thing, it’s basically when somebody sends in a script, he says, “I have these four C’s, it’s the checkpoint as to whether what they’ve sent in is a plot or a story.” He said, “Because a lot of people will just write plots, they don’t write stories.” And he said, “A story for me has four C’s. It has a character, that character has a conflict, they make a choice, they deal with the consequences.”

Alan:
And I was like, you know what? That applies to every single business communication that we send out. Replace character with customer, we have a customer, they have a problem or something that they need to do. They either have a problem to solve or they want to go through a process like they want to pay us or they want to change their sticker on their car. They’ve got something that they need to do. Then they make a choice about how they do it, and that choice may be that they actually don’t buy our product. It may be that they don’t sign up for two-factor authentication. It may be that they buy the wrong power level for their generator, but they make a choice. And then there’s the consequences and the story is the consequences. So if we can build stories around the fact the four C’s of who are our customers, knowing our customers, what their lives are like, what they’re trying to do, what’s that challenge they’re facing? What are the choices they can make? And then what are the paths around making those choices?

Alan:
And you’re saying, where do some of the ideas for the story come from? It’s around those consequences. What happens if they don’t buy our product? What happens if they don’t apply our product correctly? What happens if they do this with the product instead of that with the product? What happens if they don’t click the right thing in the service? What are the consequences? And some of the best performing stories I’ve seen are around those consequences, but the two-factor authentication one comes from a software company. They put up a blog post about, this is why you should sign up for two-factor authentication. Their take-up was very low. When they changed it to a blog post of, this is what happens if you don’t sign up for two-factor authentication. That two-factor authentication sign up went through the roof.

Larry:
Oh, interesting. Yeah, because everybody’s heard those horror stories and can relate. Interesting. As you were talking about your adaptation of the Marvel editor’s four C’s, for us, I was thinking about customer journey mapping from the service design or other designers use that perspective as well. Is that something you’ve ever done or does that align with… yeah?

Alan:
Yeah, definitely. That comes back to knowing the journey. Unfortunately, a lot of customer journey mapping is done by folks in the marketing, a lot of customer success people. Again, from an inside-out point of view. I’ve been there, we sit in a conference room with a whole bunch of sticky notes and we put stuff up on the wall and say, “Hey, what do you think they do here and what do you think our customer does here?” And very rarely is the customer actually in the room.

Alan:
But yeah, I’ll just tell you a story of another example. When I was working for a large manufacturing company, we did one and we decided that our particular customer, we figured out what their average day was, and we reckon there was like eight. We reckon there was 16 things that they did during the day, and that there was potential touch points for us and our products eight times during that, eight of those 16. But we decided to check it. So we actually hired a consultant to go out and ask questions without them knowing it was coming from our company, as to what our typical day in the life was of our ideal customer. When he came back, we found out there was not 16 steps that they did in a typical day, but 32.

Larry:
Interesting.

Alan:
But we were sat in a conference room thinking, oh, well, we know what they do. And we also found out there was probably another four steps in the expanded day. So what we started to do was tell stories before and after those steps to get them engaged earlier. So it wasn’t just contact us when you need X. It was like, if your machine is starting to show wear, maybe you need to do this and then you can contact us. And then when you’ve installed your new part, maybe you need to do Y.

Alan:
So yeah, there is a very definite thing within customer journey mapping, but again, a lot of these things… Do you know what? A lot of this at the end of the day just comes back to actually talking to people. Not silo-ing, talking to people down to, oh, only the sales guy and the customer support people can talk to customers. I think anybody who creates customer-facing content, any organization, a functional organization that creates customer-facing content should be allowed, should be able to actually talk to customers and go out and meet them, get out on the job site, get into the office, go meet them at trade shows. The amount of trade shows I’ve been to where it’s like, oh, only the marketing people can go to the trade show. Why can’t your product development guy go to the trade show and talk to potential customers and find out what their stories are so he can tell a good story? Because storytelling is built into software product development.

Larry:
Now you’re reminding me of the conversation that led to this interview. We met at LavaCon in Portland a few weeks ago, and that conversation was around, one of the things we talked about, the thing that really grabbed me was the sort of cross-functional communication stuff that we’ve talked about this a little bit already. But what you just said really drives that home, that it’s about conversation and listening to your customers and that it doesn’t happen just in one or two places. But then there’s also, I’m going to guess there’s the communication between and across and among all the internal stakeholders as well. Is there storytelling involved in that?

Alan:
Yeah, I find storytelling is a really good way to do it because with all due respect, if you come in and say, “Oh, this is content strategy and we’re going to talk about structured content,” and the marketing people will go, “Oh, that’s tech pubs.” If you come in and say, “We’re going to talk about personas,” the tech pubs will go, “Oh, well, that’s marketing.” When I come in and say, we’re going to do a storytelling workshop, everybody’s like, “What’s that about? That sounds intriguing.” So I tend to get much better cross-functional representation in the workshops because storytelling is something we all do. We’re hardwired to story tell. I mean, as a species, we’ve been storytelling for whatever, as long as we’ve been able to communicate with each other.

Alan:
Arguably, the first tech piece of, however you want to call it, the first comic book, the first piece of technical documentation, first captured graphic story is 44,000 years old on a painting on a cave wall, which is a painting showing a buffalo hunt. That’s a story about somebody going out on a buffalo hunt, but it’s also a series of instructions on how to do a buffalo hunt. So yeah, storytelling I find doesn’t, if you come in and talk about storytelling, you’re not immediately putting yourself in one of those functional groups and it’s something that everybody understands.

Alan:
I will say one of the downsides of it, because I do teach about storytelling structure, is it ruins watching movies for anybody else who comes on the workshop, because once you know the basic format that Hollywood uses for movie scripts, you can sit in any movie you watch from that point on, you’ll go, “Oh, 26 minutes in, we’re going to get the inciting incident.” But it helps people think about their content if they can put it in the terms of the storytelling that they encounter, both inside and outside the workplace.

Larry:
Now I’m picturing a cautionary slide at the start of your presentations about “warning, this is a universal spoiler, you’ll never…”

Alan:
I actually say that. I do say, “You’ll never watch a movie the same again after.”

Larry:
Oh, interesting. Yeah.

Alan:
I’ve got these three slides and once we’ve been through these, you’re never going to watch a movie the same way again.

Larry:
Yeah. Well, tell me a little bit more about how that manifests in the enterprise. I’m gathering they’re not sitting around a campfire in the cafeteria swapping stories, but what does it look like and how does it improve cross-functional communication and collaboration?

Alan:
I mean, just from the workshops, just getting people in the room is really interesting because for me, the favorite part of it is, there’s always a point at some point where I find that I’m stood at the side of the room not saying anything. And the conversations are going between the groups because they’re like, “Oh, I’ve got a customer who did this.” “Well, that’s a great story. I’d love to tell that customer story. What can you tell me about X?” Or, “That would be cool if only we knew Y.” And somebody goes, “Well, we have that data.” And so just starting to build those relationships.

Alan:
I have at some points in my past, literally walked down the hall and grabbed a tech pubs manager and walked him into a marketing meeting and said, or walked them into a marketing meeting and said, “Here’s your tech pubs manager, you should know each other. You’re talking about the same thing but using slightly different words. You should be collaborating.” And this is just sort of growing back across other functions. One of the best ones I had had people from tech comm, marketing, customer support, and UX design in the room. And cyber security, that was an interesting one when I had cyber security folks was in the room as well, and he was like, “Well, how do I tell stories to my clients, my internal clients about cyber security?” And he was picking up on conversations that the marketing and the tech comm folks were having. So yeah, it’s just starting that.

Alan:
You mentioned LavaCon, and I think there was a great presentation there about building influence and the speaker there was like, “Just go out and talk to people. Talk to somebody in the canteen.” One of the things I like to talk about is you’ve got a finance department, a legal department, they’re dealing with customers, find out what their stories are.

Larry:
I’m seeing the picture now, just pulling people away from their computers and getting them to look at each other and talk. Just remind them of their humanity and like, oh yeah, and we tell stories when we get together.

Alan:
Yeah, we do. Yeah. The manufacturing company I worked at, my team three years in the run we won the best team award because basically we did this thing where every Thursday we would go to a local wings place and we let everybody know that every Thursday we would be in this local wings place. And if you wanted to join us and have some wings and a beer and talk and tell stories, we would be there. And people from other departments gradually started to, it’s like, oh, Thursday, those guys will be at the wings place, and it worked. Sometimes there was four people, sometimes there was 20, but-

Larry:
That kind of brings in the notion of ritual as well, which I know this ritual and storytelling, I think go hand in hand. Is that true?

Alan:
Yeah, that’s true. I mean, like I said, there is framework around storytelling. There’s always been framework, be it Aristotle’s or the more recent movie ones or TV ones. There’s always the rich and you go back to the ritual of telling the stories around the fireplace. I mean, that’s how we first exchanged information is telling stories, sitting around the campfire. That’s how we first started telling, exchanging information about how to grow crops and hunt and build and exchange knowledge, was that interpersonal relationship. And if you can build some of that into the company process of capturing stuff.

Alan:
How many companies have a CRM to CRM that you can go in and you can say, “Oh yeah, this is customer X. They live here. Here’s their phone number, here’s their email. And then this is how many times they impacted the website and they’ve had two support calls,” but is there anything else in there about why they had those support calls or why they’re on the website that often? Or what problem it is they’re trying to solve or what their company actually does, or? Those are the sort of places you can start, if you can start building that attitude, you can start capturing that data so other people can see it. Yeah.

Larry:
And that brings us right back to something you said early on about the mindset. Once you have this kind of mindset about that, you’ll look at data and that kind of thing you just go, that’s not the full story and want to flesh it out.

Alan:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like I said, otherwise, all you end up is with a bunch of data, a bunch of numbers. Yeah, yeah.

Larry:
Yeah. Well, here’s to more stories and less or better contextualized data. But hey, Alan, I can’t believe it, we’re coming up close to time already. But before we wrap up, is there anything last, anything you want to revisit from the conversation or just make sure we share before we wrap?

Alan:
I will revisit the thing, whenever I do webinars or anything on this subject or shorter talks, I always say, “If you come away from this with only one thing, just remember those four C’s.

Larry:
Excellent.

Alan:
Character, conflict, choice and consequence, and how you can apply that and think about the consequence and if you put the consequence first, rather than at the end.

Larry:
Yeah, character, conflict, choice and consequence. I’m starting to internalize them myself. Hey, one very last thing, Alan, if folks want to connect with you or follow you online, what’s the best place to find you?

Alan:
They can find me through my website, the-content-pool.com, or I actually have a weekly Substack newsletter, which is free, which is you can get at thecontentpool.substack.com, or if you just want to email me direct, my email is AJP, that’s my initials, AJP@4js, that’s the number four, 4jsgroup.com.

Larry:
Great. I’ll put all that in the show notes as well. Well, thank you so much, Alan. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Alan:
Me too. I think we could have talked a lot longer. I really enjoyed it.

Larry:
That’s always the thing. I want to do a four-hour version of this at some point, but for now we’ll stick to a half hour.

Alan:
Well, it was great to talk to you again, Larry.