TechnicalExpertsNeedtoGetBetteratTellingStories.pdf

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PUBLISHED ON HBR.ORG
APRIL 13, 2018

ARTICLE
CORPORATE
COMMUNICATIONS
Technical Experts
Need to Get Better at
Telling Stories
by Karen Mazurkewich

For the exclusive use of R. Ramos, 2021.

This document is authorized for use only by Rosendo Ramos in EMGT 6010 UPDATE-1-1-1-1 taught by STEPHEN FLAHERTY, Ohio University from Mar 2021 to Sep 2021.

CORPORATE COMMUNICATIONS

Technical Experts Need to
Get Better at Telling
Stories
by Karen Mazurkewich
APRIL 13, 2018

ANDREW NGUYEN/HBR STAFF/THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

“If only we could tell our stories better,” is a refrain I hear often from people I work with in the
science and technology community. And I understand why. In my experience, startup and technical
business leaders don’t tell their innovation stories well. This is a huge missed opportunity. When
you’re doing good work, you want people to know about it. So whether you’re drafting website copy,
a marketing brochure, an online article, or a press release, consider hiring professional storytellers to
make the world-changing things you do mean something to regular people.

2COPYRIGHT © 2018 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

For the exclusive use of R. Ramos, 2021.

This document is authorized for use only by Rosendo Ramos in EMGT 6010 UPDATE-1-1-1-1 taught by STEPHEN FLAHERTY, Ohio University from Mar 2021 to Sep 2021.

From my vantage point at MaRS, the Toronto-based start-up innovation hub, I have the opportunity
to meet, interview, and write about some of the remarkable people and discoveries emerging from
Canadian institutes and startups. And while I’m continually impressed with our network of technical
experts, I’m less impressed with how they share their work. The reasons are clear: technical
breakthroughs are burdened by the weight of jargon, dragged down by clunky clauses and weighty
words. The ledes are buried and the color bleached, leaving journalists and readers disinterested. It’s
easy to write about wearable technology; it’d be far less fun to plough through language related to
gene therapy. What are technical innovators doing wrong – and how can they fix it?

Don’t hire PhDs to write your stories.
I’ve been approached many times by recruiters asking me to refer them to communications talent,
but frequently the folks I offer up are rejected because they don’t have a master’s degree or PhD in a
scientific or technical field. The problem is that many institutes are hiring “experts” in the science,
not practitioners in the craft of storytelling. My suggestion: A good communications expert can help
you translate your work so it relates to the world outside your lab, office, or facility.

If you are looking for a PhD in brain science to communicate brain science, then you’re not looking in
the right place. Instead, seek out writers who have crafted op-eds or articles for a variety of
publications and show dexterity in messaging. If a writer can write effectively for different
publications, then chances are they can write for you.

Don’t believe that plain, clear writing is dumbing your ideas down.
Jargon clutters your message and confuses the reader. That’s why tech leaders need to understand
their target audience. The language you use in white papers and research papers, which are crafted
for peers or senior stakeholders, cannot be easily transferred to other marketing documents.

At The Wall Street Journal, where I used to work, a front-page story went through five editors whose
chief task was to eliminate jargon. The reasoning was that if they couldn’t understand the paragraph,
our readers wouldn’t either. The final result didn’t always convey every nuance I was aiming for, but
the end result was immensely digestible. The same logic should be applied to communications from
deeply technical companies.

Design a new communications playbook.
It’s not easy to tell straightforward stories about complicated topics. But the solution isn’t to cram all
the ideas into one story or release. In fact, given that readers’ attention spans are getting shorter, it’s
essential to follow this rule: Keep it simple. Build your narrative from the foundation up – one idea at
a time.

There are many ways to approach this, but let me tell you part of what we’ve done at MaRS. Rather
than start with pitches and press releases, we’ve reverse engineered the process: we’ve hired
magazine writers to write multiple stories on a particular theme or sector. We give them freedom to
interview different startups, tenants, and corporate partners across these sectors, and encourage the

3COPYRIGHT © 2018 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

For the exclusive use of R. Ramos, 2021.

This document is authorized for use only by Rosendo Ramos in EMGT 6010 UPDATE-1-1-1-1 taught by STEPHEN FLAHERTY, Ohio University from Mar 2021 to Sep 2021.

https://www.marsdd.com/

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/06/how_people_read_online_why_you_won_t_finish_this_article.html

journalists to do what they do best – find the angles that will appeal to readers. We provide general
topics, access to experts, and let them write either for our internal magazine or contributed content
that we place in outside publications. Once published, we distribute different versions of the stories
across our social media channels.

The purpose of starting with long-form articles is not just about creating branded content: it’s about
crafting our organization’s unified approach to messaging. The freelance journalists and editors we
hire serve as sherpas, helping us find interesting narratives in the labyrinth of angles and ideas across
our ecosystem. We can then crowdsource other ideas by teasing out the themes surfaced in our
magazines. These new ideas can be turned into fresh pitches or op-eds for other journalists or
publications. So the articles serve both as branded content and primers for savvy journalists seeking
background information and insights for their own articles. In short, we feed the top of the marketing
funnel in multiple ways by giving reporters the transparency and traction they need to develop
stories for their own publications.

I recently reached out to a colleague who is also a former journalist to ask him why his company’s
messaging wasn’t as plain as I knew his writing to be. His response was that the technical experts
who reported to the C-suite insisted on rewriting his copy. The company’s leaders were
unintentionally doing themselves a disservice by complicating – and watering down – their messages
highlighting the organization’s competitive advantages and technical expertise. No surprise, the
organization remains frustrated that it’s not getting recognized for its amazing work. The main
reason: complex stories require different marketing approaches. If your traditional communications
strategy isn’t working, try hiring professional storytellers.

Karen Mazurkewich is the head of Communications and Marketing at MaRS Discovery District. In addition to co-
founding her own startup, she spent a decade as a senior journalist for The Wall Street Journal in Asia and the Financial
Post in Toronto where she covered financial services, business innovation, and technology.

4COPYRIGHT © 2018 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

For the exclusive use of R. Ramos, 2021.

This document is authorized for use only by Rosendo Ramos in EMGT 6010 UPDATE-1-1-1-1 taught by STEPHEN FLAHERTY, Ohio University from Mar 2021 to Sep 2021.

https://www.marsdd.com/