Interactive Matters

White Knight CEO Elin Barton was recently asked about why storytelling and interactivity matters when creating annual reports and other online publications. You can hear the full interview or read the transcript?here. We asked her to fill us in on the top reasons that investing time and resources into a creative approach really makes sense.

1. Participants connect with you and remember more than passive readers. ?Remember getting offers in the mail for CD subscription services? You’d get 10 CD’s for $1 and then have to agree to buy so many more over the next two years. Do you recall how interactive and tactile that whole experience was? You had to peel stickers off, write down number codes, tear off a perforated postcard… so many steps for your cheap CD’s, but each and every one of these steps helped to ensure that you were engaged in the process and that you really were going to mail the response in. ?It’s essentially the same philosophy with anything in marketing – get your audience to actively think, engage, “play” with you and you’ve got someone who is much more likely to remember – and act on – your call to action.
2. People like choice. Increasingly, audiences are expecting to be able to control their experience, create their own storyline and spend more time on looking at and engaging with things that they find interesting – which is not necessarily the same thing that their colleague or neighbor would choose to engage with. When you welcome people into your company (say, via an annual report), and invite them to get curious and poke around, you will find that they actually end up staying longer than if they were being forced into a certain order of seeing things. Invite viewers to discover how wonderful you are – don’t just force the information on them.
3. Engage multimedia. Attention spans are shrinking, and people are increasingly adverse to reading large blocks of text. Multimedia is so accessible these days, why not use video, motion graphics, audio, photos, even a live Twitter feed – to paint an impressionistic picture of your organization. People take action when they engage with you and your brand on an emotional level, and many of the multimedia options that are now available are a perfect vehicle to help your audiences do just that.

Elin?Barton?is a graduate of the Goldman Sachs 10KSB program, enjoys speaking engagements and is the?CEO and President?of?White Knight Productions, Inc.?White Knight Productions?is a boutique agency providing full-service video, advertising and marketing.??The firm specializes in multi-channel campaigns that tell the clients’ stories and resonate with their customers in a results-driven way. ?Elin would love to hear from readers elin@whiteknightpro.com