fbpx

David Woodward of ClickFunnels

Christoph Trappe

Founder at Authentic Storytelling

Christoph Trappe (aka The Authentic Storyteller™) is a career storyteller who has worked as a journalist, a nonprofit executive, and a content marketing strategist and coach. He is a global keynote speaker, frequent blogger and author. His digital initiatives have been recognized globally. From 2014-2017, he helped hospitals across the United States share their authentic stories and also took a short stint in the content marketing software vertical.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Christoph’s success
Result if you follow the steps in Christoph’s session

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

So storytelling, of course, is not a new thing at all right? People have talked about it for a long time.

But authentic storytelling is really a somewhat new discipline. Because we used to have marketing storytelling like the fiction storytelling, movies have a lot of storytelling in them, of course, as well.

But authentic storytelling is you use the stories that are happening in your organization to actually move business goals forward. So I call that authentic storytelling.

Lots of lots of barriers. Of course, we can talk about how organizations that are there, they’re running into them.

Because it’s hard to tell stories, we want to sound correct, what the boss thinks is correct. You know, that’s an approval, hell, we can talk about that for sure. That’s when content gets approved like eight times. And by the time it’s done, it’s no longer authentic. It’s really just marketing gobbledygook. So that’s really everything.

I do circles around that and then of course, also how do you distribute it to people? How do you get it to them to social media, email, speaking interviews, doesn’t make any difference what it is, right, but you find every channel to share your stories that are currently out there.

You’ve brought up some interesting that I haven’t thought of before. In that, I mean with these interviews that we do, these sessions, we don’t really edit them out too much. We keep them all as authentic as possible.

But when it comes to say, some of the content writing that we do with our chat emails or blog posts, we do go through a series of kind of checks and approvals, which kind of reduces I suppose that authenticity or that rawness I suppose.
Are there any like, what’s your thoughts on that? Cuz I know you brought it up.

Yeah, I’m a big fan of teamwork. And I’m big fan of having good editors, but I’m not a big fan of people who just throw their weight around, and who just edit because they have their higher up in the chain of command, right?

In fact, a lot of times I have a rule of my teams that I work with, we don’t edit for preference, we edit for a reason, right? This doesn’t make sense, or it doesn’t. There’s something actually wrong. But we don’t change something just because somebody else likes a different word better. It’s totally a waste of time when everybody’s part.

And then the worst thing is people argue back and forth. “No, my word is better”. ”No, my word is better”. Oh, my God, what a waste of time. We could have used that for something else.

So I’m a big fan of teamwork. I’m a big fan for people making our content better. But I’m a big proponent of people just editing to slow things down. And, you know, to not even make the content better.

So really, that’s kind of a new system, quite frankly, still, unfortunately. But people need to kind of wrap their head around that on, you know, is it actually improving the content or am I just trying to justify while I exist in the process?

Hand-picked experts share their #1 tactic

One marketing tactic delivered to your inbox each morning, 5 days a week