Tim Staples - 9 July

Copyright 2019 by Tim Staples and Josh Young

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Staples, Tim (Marketing consultant), author. | Young, Josh (Joshua D.), author.

Title: Break through the noise : the nine rules to capture global attention / Tim Staples and Josh Young.

Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [2019] | Includes index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018052171 (print) | LCCN 2018055028 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328618603 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328618566 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Internet advertising. | Internet videos. | Viral marketing. | Internet marketing.

Classification: LCC HF6146.I58 (ebook) | LCC HF6146.I58 S73 2019 (print) | DDC 658.8/72dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018052171

Cover design by Mark R. Robinson

Staples photograph Daniel Saxlid

Young photograph Josh Young

v1.0619

Curiosity and Shareability from The American Heritage Dictionary, Fifth Edition. Copyright 2012 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Nobody cares.

Its very important that you understand this.

Nobody cares about that video you just posted, that photo you Instagrammed last night, and especially not that commercial that your brand just pushed out.

Really, nobody cares.

Its nothing personal. Its just the hard truthwith the explosion of social and digital media, millions of posts are launched every day. People are so bombarded by messaging that they tune out nearly all of it. So no matter how well-intentioned or beautifully designed your message is, its destined to be lost in an avalanche of noise, chaos, and distraction. This is the reality of the internet world.

But viewers can be made to care. There is a way for major brands, small businesses, and even individuals to break through this wall of indifference and to make all the dominant social platformsGoogle, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagramwork for them. The secret to making people care lies in understanding and tapping into basic human emotions and in mastering the dynamics of how to tell stories on the internet.

The process for doing this is not theoretical. Not at all. In fact, its a practical, usable approach, based on what actually works. You can find your place in the online storytelling revolution that is blowing up the $190 billion advertising industry and altering the media landscape.

But first, an introduction. My company, Shareability (http://www.shareability.com), is a content and marketing firm that has cracked the code of how to break through the noise of the internet and get people to not only watch content, but share ita highly powerful concept. Our wildly popular, typically offbeat videos are far more than just fodder for Likes. They are relatable stories designed to trigger the human urge to immediately share them with their friends, friends of their friends, and people they want to have as friends.

What marketers have always known is that the most reliable way of selling something is also the most difficult to tap: word of mouth. Studies show that roughly 90 percent of people trust recommendations from family and friends, making the personal recommendation the elixir of marketing. For years, conventional marketing wisdom held that word of mouth was not scalable. Because of the rapid advances in technology and social media, that is no longer true. Through the way our company creates and distributes content, we have effectively figured out how to scale word of mouth.

Here are a few numbers to show that our process works. Our videos have had over 5 billion organic views and 50 million shares, and have generated more than 100,000 articles for major brands like Pepsi, Adobe, Hyatt, and the Olympic Games. Many brands dream of catching lightning in a bottle and creating just one viral hit, yet we have done it over and over and have rebuffed all of the naysayers along the way.

The interesting part is that, at their core, these videos are in fact marketing tools for brands small, medium, and large looking to find new customers and entice those customers to take action. By producing and distributing videos and posts that have maximum organic shareability, the Shareability team has tapped into a way to use Facebook and other social media platforms to push out our videos at a fraction of the cost that most major brands typically pay.

The sharing of content online is now the single most effective way for brands to create meaningful relationships with their customers. Creating the most valuable content and building the most engaged community around that content can be worth thousands of views for some, millions of dollars for others. Today, creating this content and building a relationship with that community are cheaper and more effective than ever beforeprovided you understand how online storytelling actually works.

Sounds great, but what if you dont have a large marketing staff or deep-pocketed investors willing to let you experiment and learn? Thats not a problem. I didnt have any of those things when I started out either.

The reality is that you can still achieve success because there are universal principles that apply to building and pushing out your brand, whatever size it may be. You dont need to know the latest and millionth change to the Facebook algorithm, because the fact is, tactical stuff in the online world doesnt age well. Rather, you need to know the philosophy of why social platforms like Facebook were founded, how they work, and how they can work for you.

This book isnt about which 84 buttons you push to cross-post on Facebook or how to hack the YouTube algorithm to make your video go viral. Rather, its focused on understandable concepts. Hacks change every day. Concepts dont, and these are the ones that drove our business three years ago and will also work three years from now. You cant be chasing the digital breadcrumbs of every nuance and change on the major platforms.

So, thats the straightforward stuff. Of course, there is plenty that is more complex. We are going to dive deep into the current dynamics of the internet and reveal ways to ensure your messaging breaks through the noise and chaos. Using the Nine Rules that are covered in the book, we will teach you how to master the powerful concept of shareability, what you need to know about the psychology behind why people share what they do, and ultimately how to use valuable content to launch a global brand at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising.

By understanding these Nine Rules and adapting them to your message or your brand, you can make the internet work for you, rather than fighting your way through the electronic weeds. And any messagewhether its from a community activist, a singer, or someone sitting at home with an offbeat idea that just might workcan be heard and seen by millions of people.

In short, this is a book for anyone who seeks to understand how to reach millions of people and to build an engaged and powerful brand. So whether you are an individual at a laptop trying to be heard, an entrepreneur courting investors, a small business owner trying to build your customer base, a YouTube star in the making, or the chief marketing officer for a Fortune 500 company, understanding and executing the Nine Rules of Shareability will help you break through the noise and take your brand further than you thought possibleand not be left to the worst fate of all: finding out that nobody cares.