It’s been awhile since my last post, but I really haven’t seen anything that has caught my eye enough to comment on. Of course I am also involved in my super-secret project, called SimsUShare, and then taking care of regular business and such hasn’t left me a lot of time for exploring. In a few months, I will begin talking about SimsUShare and why I believe it will be the next generation in product marketing (hint: it’s about making simulations easier to build, change, share, and deploy).
Today I came across an intriguing post entitled “What Content Marketing is Really About“, by Robert Rose at the Content Marketing Institute. In his quest to explain what ‘Content Marketing’ is about, Robert boils it down to:
The content marketing process is really centered on marketers becoming better storytellers. Our jobs are to create a lasting impression with our content with the goal of maintaining or changing behavior.
As I’ve talked about in other posts, I am convinced that simulations lend themselves naturally to develop compelling content that helps tell a story, because they can provide a vivid environment in which stories can be set, even stories that the viewer helps to ‘write’ (albeit in a directed way, “Successful selling by using simulations o put your prospects in their own (future) success story“). Robert suggests we have to consider how each piece of content fits into an overall theme, into a picture of the kind of story (the ‘theme’) we want to tell about our product(s).
This led to me to think about a conversation I had this past weekend with my cousin Wyatt, a film editor who recently completed editing a major 3-D movie. I was wondering whether he felt that 3-D was waning, because several of the ones I have seen recently really seemed to use 3-D pretty gratuitously. In the course of the conversation, he expressed that in his view, movies like Avatar work well for 3-D because an important part of the movie was about inviting the viewers into a world to explore. With many of the movies that follow (especially, it seems, the ones I’ve seen), the use of 3-D is for pure effect.
The relation I see to storytelling and simulation is that the good simulations, through depictions of meaningful interactions and details, help to recreate a vivid experience in which one can tell a great story. Just as a great storyteller does not necessarily need a lot of theatrics, a great simulation does not need the full Hollywood effect to be compelling, provided that it has the right elements in which to allow the story to unfold — and resolve the problems/issues.
