Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

44Look to Analogy instead of Example

As you think of ways to tell your story, consider that the way you tell it doesn't have to be original to the whole world. As professor Mason Cooley has said, “Art begins in imitation and ends in innovation.”¹ So look at what other people or organizations are doing—sometimes, even those outside of business entirely.

Marketing expert Seth Godin makes the same point repeatedly, and it's one I also espouse. Don't wait for a case study in your specific industry or field to prove the effectiveness of a marketing tactic. Rather, heed what Godin says on his blog: “Innovation is often the act of taking something that worked over there and using it over here.”²

Consider some of the content examples in this book: Virgin dances to MTV's tune for its in-flight safety briefing; HubSpot borrows a page from People magazine (see Rule 74). And Massachusetts congressional candidate Carl Sciortino fashions a new mode of political campaigning when he patterns his video after storytelling.

In a bid for the Massachusetts Fifth District congressional seat, Sciortino was one of seven Democrats running in a special election in December 2014, the result of a sequence of events that were set off when John Kerry became U.S. secretary of state.

Sciortino is openly gay (he married his partner 10 days before the election), and the story in his ad plays with the idea of Carl coming out to his conservative Tea Party father. Not as a gay man, but as a Massachusetts liberal. ...