Writing Samples
Storyphora provides a wide range of communications services to clients. The following samples are excerpts from actual assignments Storyphora has recently completed for clients, along with some examples of published works.
BLOG EXAMPLE
Investment in Real Estate Marketing is Imperative for Developers
Investing in quality marketing with respect to real estate development is more important than ever, regardless of market trends. The concept of real estate development marketing has emerged from being a mostly frivolous consideration in the design of a new development into a critical investment that defines how developments - and thus, developers - are perceived in marketplaces that are now more competitive than ever.
Why Investment in Quality Marketing Is Imperative
Significant investments in leading-edge marketing technology allows developers to harness the power of the highest-resolution imagery, customized virtual reality tours of new developments, stunning 3D animation, and other innovations that bring commercial and residential properties to life, allowing developers to pre-sell quickly and easily.
Will Developers Benefit Financially From Better Marketing?
Yes. When real estate developers embrace digital technology and invest significantly in marketing tools, they not only allow potential buyers to save time, effort, and money, they provide them with an enhanced purchasing experience and increase pre-sale activity before construction even begins.
Marketing tools deploying virtual reality and 3D modeling technology allow potential buyers to view the entirety of a property in crisp detail online. With virtual reality, no parties involved in the sale have to travel to the site location. Virtual tours using 3D floor plans and 360-degree technology can be experienced simultaneously by multiple prospective buyers, at any time of the day, from their homes.
Consumers are able to control their own viewing experiences when looking at properties with virtual tours. Further, the virtual viewing experience is not just limited to the property itself – potential buyers are able to get a feel for the entire neighbourhood.
Investing in Marketing Technology
The advent of property technology has changed the landscape in terms of how real estate property is experienced, and also how its value is realized. Virtual reality technology and related proptech developments have gained significant momentum in relation to real estate marketing.
Emerging Trends in Real Estate Europe suggests that the use of digital technology in real estate marketing will continue to trend upward over the course of the next five years.
Particularly as Millennials enter the real estate market in greater numbers, high-resolution images and videos will give way to an increased use of technology to market real estate, including the use of drones to collect high-quality aerial images in showcasing properties. Current in-drone camera technology captures still images, multiple overhead mapping images, video, and 360-degree panoramas.
In 2023 and beyond, proptech has established a new standard in how real estate developments are effectively sold. As a result, making considerable financial investments in the highest quality marketing technology is imperative for developers in order to avoid being left behind in the marketplace.
BLOG EXAMPLE
Successful Workplace Communication Strategies
Along with an effective exchange of information and ideas among employees, sharing business strategies, goals, and cultural values throughout a company is essential to an organization’s success.
Communication practices used by companies to provide information to employees have evolved significantly. Because information sharing strategies are intended for employee masses, the dynamics of one-on-one conversation can apply less. This makes ensuring individual employees connect with shared information a challenge.
Given the COVID pandemic and hybrid work models now becoming the norm, companies have to work even harder to maintain effective communication frameworks to keep employees informed, connected, and motivated. Organizations wanting to create successful hybrid work models with strong communications methodologies must first embrace the basic rudiments of remote work, then consider the nuances select companies are using to be truly effective.
Openness, Clarity, and Regularity
Clear, regular, and open communication is the foundation that remote work is built upon. Face time opportunities for remote employees can be scheduled as regular check-ins, to avoid employees feeling disenfranchised. Organizations should always consider the experience of the remote employee and attempt to replicate a workplace experience for them as closely as possible.
The Inability to Emote
Awareness that digital communications can’t ‘emote’ is important. Precise and considerate written communication is essential to success with remote and hybrid work models. How ‘tone’ is received is critical – establishing a tone reflective of the organization’s culture ensures adherence to its values.
What To Use and When
With respect to communications platforms, companies will inevitably use several. Using the right ones at the right times is essential. Just as a best practices framework should be developed around tone, a guide should be created to outline ideal use of communication technology. Different communication situations call for specific formats, and it’s important to ensure awareness, alignment and a clear understanding of rationale in matching the appropriate communication medium to the task.
These are the basics. By building on these fundamentals, the following companies are revolutionizing their internal communications strategies for both remote and office employees.
Amazon
Amazon strives to share information among employees in smaller, more easily digestible pieces. Their communications teams theorize that messages containing more than 100 words won’t be read, so precise, tidy ‘bites’ of information resembling social media updates are conveyed in favour of lengthy email chains and memos.
Starbucks
Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz built the Starbucks brand on the premise that employees were critically essential to customer experience. As such, huge investments have been made in internal communications tools and strategies to ensure employees at every level are instantly and routinely updated with regards to core values and mission, product offerings, and all other relative information. This builds employee trust, confidence, and loyalty.
Apple
Apple tends not to subscribe to typical leadership models, instead inviting all employees to challenge concepts and ideas in the interests of continual improvement. This approach extends to the internal communications medium, where ideas are built upon collaboratively between team members until they’re satisfied that they’ve come up with optimized solutions.
Smart organizations focus on listening and learning, two critical elements of communication in and of themselves. And once the fundamentals are in place, successful navigation into the future of workplace communications is possible.
SOCIAL MEDIA POST EXAMPLE
LinkedIn, Leveraging the Power of the Millennial Generation
When he made The Incredibles, filmmaker Brad Bird purposely utilized Pixar’s most frustrated, disenfranchised employees.
It was positioned as an opportunity for these employees to prove themselves.
They did. The Incredibles won the Academy Award for Best Animated Film the following year.
By using this strategy, Bird successfully leveraged the power of one of the Millennial generation’s hallmark traits – an insistence on doing things their own way.
To attract top Millennial and Gen Z talent, organizations need to consider a similar ethos.
Recognizing, accepting, and harnessing the defining elements of these generations – their requirement for diversity, their appetite for disruption, their need to forge their own paths, and digitization as a part of their identity – are employer branding musts for organizations looking to attract the best Millennial and Gen Z employees.
PUBLISHED ARTICLE EXAMPLE
The Weeklings Webzine, Younger Americans - Bowie Through Our Eyes
At the height of my obsession with The Thin White Duke, my fascination with the impossible vastness of his music compelled me to try to step inside his songs, to get closer to them. If I could do that, I could in turn get closer to the man himself - David Bowie.
In my mind, there was no more powerful invitation to do so than via “Sweet Thing” from his Diamond Dogs album - a record that came after the glam-bam blitzkrieg of Ziggy Stardust and before the smooth finesse of Young Americans. For its time, the release seemed to betray David Bowie’s sudden uncertainty in direction, of where next to go. “Sweet Thing” lay embedded directly at the center of this notion.
The genuine position of “Sweet Thing” is in fact one of fragility, and this is what makes it so attractive to me. For the first time, it felt like the ever-mysterious Bowie wasn’t mysterious at all. “Sweet Thing” was like being afforded a glimpse behind the curtain and seeing Bowie for what he really was during that period - scared and lonely. Diamond Dogs was a record borne of a failed bid to theatricalize George Orwell’s 1984, and while it superficially showcased an Orwellian lack of confidence in the future, given his worsening cocaine habit it was also an intentional metaphor for Bowie’s uncertainties of his own.
And now, in this moment following his passing I sit with head bowed, embarrassed by the grotesque exhilaration I feel while listening to “Sweet Thing” over and over - David Bowie’s most heartbreaking song is lent added poignancy by the fact that he’s gone. Before “Sweet Thing”, Bowie’s musical canon offered loads of bold and daring music that challenged my perceptions. In fact, I would credit him with changing the way I actually listened to music. But the misery inside “Sweet Thing” scored even deeper. Bowie’s message had never before carried such veracity, and it humanized him in my eyes. It marked the first time I felt I could relate to him, as though he were newly vulnerable; seeking connection with earnest words delivered through beautifully lilting melodies and a swelling crescendo that makes my skin vibrate each and every time I listen. As resolutely alien as he had previously been, now Bowie seemed just on the other side of the speaker, right there - reaching out.
Just like me. Just like the rest of us.
BOOK EXCERPT EXAMPLE:
All My Favourite People Are Broken, Brent Jensen
It was late. I didn’t have much left.
We had to be close to the end at this point. I could see through the window that the blackness was receding. The sun was coming up.
Everything in this room was governed by slower motion now. I heard a good portion of the beginning of Garvey’s next song before he could get to the sound dock to suppress it.
“What’s that?” I asked. “Let it play, I like this.”
“It’s Gillian Welch. The song is “Elvis Presley Blues”,” Garvey said as he turned to sit back down.
“This is one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard. I love everything Welch does. She’s one of those artists that everybody in Nashville knows, but few people know outside of Nashville. The voice, the sparse instrumentation are great, but the lyrics...damn, I wish I could write lyrics like that. It’s Elvis Presley as prophet, who gave away everything he had, and everything he was, to change the world. Then he laid down and died, and was grateful for the rest. Just like John Henry did. Brilliant.”
“This is brilliant,” I enthused. “I love this.”
What an unexpectedly beautiful juncture this was, suddenly.
I sat quietly as this song hypnotized me with its delicate darkness. I felt that scin excitement of being exposed to compelling music for the first time. This would be Garvey’s last number. His playlist had been exhausted. With this song, my pusher had provided me with one last splendid and powerful score, one I could inject into myself and have run through my blood. One that, even if only for the four minutes or so of its duration, could still the maelstrom that swirled in my head.
As we approached the close of our aural Show & Tell enterprise here, I acknowledged the semblance of this undertaking to the two of us making a big, grandiose mixtape for each other. And we both knew that you only make mixtapes for other people to a certain degree. Really, you mostly make them for yourself.
I stood and looked at my playlist. I was also down to my very last song now.
As I pressed play for the final time here, a live version of Sheryl Crow’s “Leaving Las Vegas” flooded the room. The live version was in this playlist, because Sheryl evoked so much more pathos when she played this song live.
I stared at the planks that formed the floor of our dimly lit chalet, searching for the words.
“This song was playing on the car radio as I backed out of my mom’s driveway and left home for Toronto in January 1995 to start a brand new life. I lived in that house on Tudhope Street since I had been a young kid. It was where I had done most of my growing up. I’d left home for long stretches of school several times before, but I had always come back; and this place had been my home until this moment. My mom stood on the porch waving goodbye just outside the door. She had done this every time I left before, waving and mustering a weak but brave smile. This time, as the car went into drive and began to move away, I looked back at her and noticed that there was no smile, and that she was crying as she waved goodbye. She had never, ever done that before. But we both knew I wouldn’t be back this time. As I drove away Sheryl so serendipitously emoted that line about taking a losing hand and making it win, and that memory has always stayed with me like some lonely talisman from that day. That’s what I left home to do, though I had no idea it would be that hard. But the depression I felt was lent a certain poignancy by this song. It did what every sad song should do - it dignified an otherwise unfortunate emotion,” I told Garvey.
With that, I looked up at my friend, unable to do anything but smile a weak yet brave smile at him. And from his chair across the room, he smiled one back.
