How to start your factual story
Introducing your content, using AI responsibly, a new range of microphones and how to grow your audience on Substack
If you want others to pay attention to you, learn how to introduce your content.
Learn how to engage people quickly and effectively, and become skilled at introducing your factual communications. If you don’t, you will be missing perhaps the greatest opportunity you have to impact others, and be listened to.
So apart from the importance of a good hook, how do you best introduce your story, content, presentation, social media post or report?
Perhaps one of the most surprising rules of how to create good introductions, is also one of the most counter-intuitive. When people tell stories, they think they need to start at the beginning.
In fact, a good introduction should start at the end, the story’s end.
What do we mean by that?
If you start at the beginning, the risk is that you spend too much time setting out the context for what you later want to say. Or you try to explain why you want to communicate with your audience.
Or you try to set a scene, or focus on introducing characters or personnel. This mistake is commonly made when writing presentations and reports, which often open with a long explanation of why they have been published, who the content is for, or a long list of who authored it. All of which is frankly dull, uninspiring, and unlikely to win the audience’s attention or affection.
For more, visit the Factual Storytelling School, where, for a single fee, you and your colleagues can enrol for more than 90 lessons, including Authoring Captivating Reports and Creating Powerful Presentations (p 252).
A good, powerful introduction should begin by somehow capturing, or encapsulating, the key, most important point of your story. The point that your narrative will lead up to, and conclude on. Your introduction should convey or reflect in some way, everything you are trying to say.
Let’s look back at an example of a powerful introduction that does this - the introduction to this article.
‘If you want others to pay attention to you, learn how to introduce your content. Learn how to engage people quickly and effectively, and become skilled at introducing your factual communications. If you don’t, you will be missing perhaps the greatest opportunity you have to impact others, and be listened to.’
Those words essentially summarise the whole point of this article. They also reflect a core message of our Factual Storytelling Course, which is to help you learn how to engage people quickly and effectively, and become skilled at introducing your factual communications.
It also introduces a value proposition to you. And it acts as a sales pitch of sorts, encouraging you to continue paying attention, to gain the reward of new skills.
It also contains an element of jeopardy, that you will lose out if you don’t read on.
So as well as starting at the end, the introduction to this article was crafted so it was personal to you, meant something to you, and created a connection with you based on expected value, and emotion, as it’s hard not to have an emotional response to the idea that no-one may listen to you.
There are many reasons why you should learn to shape introductions that evoke the main point of your content.
First, is the very blunt conclusion that if the most important message you have to report isn’t that interesting, and is unlikely to gain your audience’s attention, then you can’t expect anyone to engage further, and consume any more of your content.
Second, audiences subconsciously prefer to be led through a story, which is why we use narratives and structure to direct them to what we next have to say. It is why we use techniques such as signposting, to further direct them to upcoming or important aspects of our stories.
Third, some audiences will disengage with your content, however good your introduction. Life gets in the way, and people have other demands on their time.
So by introducing the main point of your content, you have grasped the opportunity to convey your message in the shortest time possible, and you’ve extended an invite to those in your audience to return, as they will understand the subject of your content they are returning to.
Using AI tools responsibly
Generative Artificial Intelligence is a fast developing technology that poses opportunities and risks for content creators, the majority of which are factual storytellers striving to communicate their work.
How should you use Gen AI to help tell your story? Will it serve your needs? How will your audience respond - will your colleagues, clients, customers and partners be comfortable with your use of the technology and its various applications?
There are no simple answers. We’ve offered guidance as to why you shouldn’t use AI to write for you, but also recommended AI-image generating tools and raised issues with how some of them perform.
The UK’s national broadcaster, the BBC has now updated its own plans for how it will use Gen AI.
They are worth a read in case they may help inform your organisation’s approach.
The BBC has already set out three principles to govern how it plans to use Gen AI responsibly, which are:
Always act in the best interests of the public.
Always prioritise talent and creativity.
Always be open and transparent with audiences when we use AI to support content-making.
Now it outlines some of the ways it is considering using Gen AI to help create future content.
They include:
Using AI to translate content to reach wider audiences, and reformat content to widen its appeal.
Creating a new BBC Assistant - essentially a digital chatbot to help people learn, as they use the BBC’s Bitesize educational service.
Using AI to create more personalised marketing material - this reinforces one of our core messages at The Factual Storytelling School - that personalising content is a great way to better reach and impact audiences.
Using AI to aid journalists - for example, by helping them generate a range of headlines to factual news stories. Again this reinforces another of our teachings - that you should continue to iterate your content to find the optimal way of expressing it.
And asking Gen AI to help label content so it can be better and more consistently be found via search functions, and served to audiences engaging with similar stories.
Take a look here, and see how the BBC’s approach to using Gen AI may inform your own.
A new range of microphones
Is you’re creating video or audio content, then microphones matter. Good or poor sound recording can lift or ruin the story you are trying to tell.
So it’s worth being aware of the hardware you need to record good sound, and new options coming onto the market.
Shure have just launched a new discreet range of lavalier microphones, the ones you attach to clothing, usually a lapel, to record a person’s voice as they speak.
Their MoveMic system is wireless, and designed for use by content creators, videographers and mobile journalists.
You can purchase a MoveMic One to record over a single channel of audio, or MoveMic Two to capture a second sound source. You’ll get 8 hours or recording, with a further 24 hours available using the microphone’s case to top up the charge. The mics can wirelessly record direct to a smartphone, and a receiver kit can be added to record to a DSLR or mirrorless camera. You can also use free ShurePlus apps to determine and monitor your recording settings.
Other brands, such as Rode and Sennheiser also make great lav mics, but Shure’s new clip-on wireless mics may also be one to consider buying.
They get great reviews, including from Forbes.
How to grow an audience on Substack
This newsletter is based upon the Substack infrastructure, which is a relatively new platform, designed to help authors find and build an audience.
If you think Substack could be for you or your organisation, have a read of this guest post by Anna Codrea-Rado, which offers valuable advice on what to do when starting from scratch, how to build a career and find an audience.