#i really love the transcripts i love the way the sound cues are written

[wolverineheight]

mom come pick me up im selecting favourite gay riddler moments from the unburied transcripts again

[yyuangss-main]

i. will rules

— Dearest Daddy is a collaboration with many other writers about Haikyuu boys. At the bottom of the chapter, I will link the material list to Dearest Daddy and you can find other stories to read. Thank you!

TW: Character death

You gather with friends all the time and think about the future. You’ll guess who will get married first, who will be the one to have children, the one to stay single and travel the world. Have you ever gathered and thought about who might be the first to leave this world? Because you don’t want to think of what you know will be a reality. At one point, everyone will pass away.

“Thank you Takahashi. Any expenses on Wakumi, I will pay you.” Sakusa said. The collar from his suit pinched the skin on his neck. Emiko Takahashi, the babysitter, has stayed with Wakumi since Yoichi and Tadema arrived at the hospital. “For now, you can go rest. Wakumi’ll be under my care.”

“Ah, no worries Sakusa.” Takahashi said, “Yoichi and Tadame were your friends. Not mine. I will gladly take care of Wakumi until a family relative fixes up adoption papers.” Sakusa exhaled.

After the funeral, everyone went to (L/N)’s home for a repast. She sat in her living room, bags under her eyes shown noticeably. (L/N) seemed to not listen to what everyone said. What could she be hearing? The sound of Yoichi and Tadema’s flatline? Her piercing scream that awakened Sakusa from his slumber?

“My condolences (L/N).” Takahashi gripped her hand. “If you need anything, you’re allowed to call me.”

“Thank you Takahashi.” Her lips moved, the dry tears on her cheeks stretching. “Did Wakumi fall asleep upstairs? If she did, you can spend the night here.” Sakusa subtly rolls his eyes.

‘Just say you want someone by your side.’ Sakusa maneuvered through familiar faces, unknown friends, and family members to get to the kitchen. He feels more secure, still hating large crowds. Leaning on the countertop, the male checked his notifications. A bunch of missed calls in a thread from an unknown number was at the top.

Sakusa’s head cocked to the side. Whoever was the caller left a voicemail too. He clicked on his phone, heading to the back door in the kitchen. His foot was wedged between the door, keeping it from closing on him, the sound of a male voice entering his ear.

“Hello Mr. Sakusa. My name is Hansuke Fujioka. I’m leaving a voicemail hoping you can call me as soon as you can. An urgent matter needs to be spoken about. Thank you and have a nice day.”

Sakusa went to his missed calls and clicked the top notification. It began dialing.

“Hello?” Said the same voice.

“Hello, this is Sakusa Kiyoomi. You called me about an urgent matter?”

“First, I’d like to give you my condolences on your loss. Secondly, yes. I am Hansuke Fujioka, the Suzuki’s family attorney.” Sakusa leaned in closer to the phone, pulling down his mask to his chin. “My reason for calling is because I’d like to discuss their will with you. The information is much to process over the phone.”

“Understood. Would you like to make a meeting?” Sakusa mentally remembered his free days. “I’m available to meet up this upcoming Thursday. Maybe around ten in the morning?”

“Works well for me. Come to Fujioka Attorneys.”

“Thank you.” Sakusa said, hearing a ‘You’re welcome’ and Mr. Fujioka hung up. Sakusa entered the house through the way he came out. He quickly typed out a reminder in his calendar for Thursday. He heard the clicking of heels and a ringtone. Sakusa’s eyes darted up to see (L/N)’s figure exiting through the back door. He wondered what that could be about but he dismissed it as uninteresting.

“It’s good to meet you.” Fujioka shook Sakusa’s hand. “Please, take a seat.” The male sat on the left chair. Fujioka quickly aligned documents spread on his desk. He stacked them together and cleared his throat. Sakusa sneakily checked the time from his Black Jackals coat.

“We’ll start? I assume?” Sakusa sat up straight. Mr. Fujioka spared him a glance and held up a finger.

“Just a moment, Mr. Sakusa. I’ll be right back.” The attorney ushered out the room, leaving Sakusa alone. He craned his neck to see through the small crack the door had left. Sakusa’s foot anxiously bounced on the floor. What could it be? What could they have left?

“No worries! You arrived at a good time!” Sakusa heard the voice of Mr. Fujioka say, “Come right in and take a seat! We’ll start immediately.” The door opened, revealing her. Her fake smile she would throw on for photo shoots and movies. Her face he wished he could stop seeing everywhere.

(L/N) (Y/N).

“Thank you for your kindness, Mr. Fujioka!” You said, unaware of Sakusa’s presence. “We can—” You stopped mid sentence, making eye contact with Sakusa. He glared, clearly giving a look of annoyance from under the mask. You returned it, replacing it instantly with an even faker smile.

“Ms. (L/N), I’m not sure if you know Mr. Sakusa. The two of you were mentioned in the Suzuki’s will.” Mr. Fujioka went around his desk, scooting up in his chair. You slowly sat down in the other open seat beside the volleyball player. Fujioka grabbed the file nearest to his computer, “And with that being said, happen to be in the same sentence.” In cue, both you and Sakusa gave each other a confused look.

“What do you mean by that?” Sakusa asked. Fujioka opened the file, picking at the corner of a sheet and pulling it from the pack.

“Oddly enough, the Suzuki’s requested in their will that if they died,” Fujioka said, “You two would have custody of Wakumi.”

“What?” You and Sakusa both said at the same time. And here you were, planning on asking Fujioka where a family member could get custody on Wakumi. “That must be a mistake!” He glanced up from the sheet, eyebrows raised and shook his head.

“I’m sorry. There’s no mistake.” Fujioka said, “I have a copy of the transcript. You can read it.” Sakusa extended his hand, getting a small packet from Fujioka. He brought it back, seeing the words that were typed up. Sakusa flipped through the pages. It was only three stapled all together.

“Is that even possible?” You ask. “And wouldn’t it be better if a family member got custody?” Mr. Fujioka placed the sheet at the top, only holding the top right corner. You could feel the scowl from Sakusa burning holes on your temple. Maybe even hurling insults internally or planning on doing it once the meeting was over.

“Yes. It’s rare but possible to happen.” Fujioka stated, “What’s not possible is the law giving Wakumi over to a family member. Yoichi and Tadema’s will is signed by a judge. I’m to execute these requests. Along with that, all money left in the Suzuki’s accounts are to be saved for Wakumi until she is eighteen or unless the two requested guardians need to use it.” Sakusa hummed, flipping the small packet in your direction. “She also inherited their house.”

You read the first page, Yoichi asking for the money to be under Wakumi’s name. In the second, Tadema asked her husband if they were still going with what they agreed. Finally, near the end, Fujioka confirmed he’d written down ‘(L/N) (Y/N)’ and ‘Sakusa Kiyoomi’ to be Wakumi’s legal guardians. Your breath hitched, feeling conflicted. You felt your eyes begin to swell, placing the stapled papers back on the table.

“Mr. Fujioka, can we change this?” You said. Fujioka clicked his pen repeatedly.

“Look, from an outside perspective, would you really want to defy your friend’s last wishes?” Fujioka asked. “There’s a reason why you were picked. They trust you with Wakumi. I can’t deny this request nor can you. Make this process easier.”

“I just— I just can’t fit a child into my schedule.” You exclaimed. “I love her but my life is busy as it is. A child would only add more stress.”

“Give it time Ms. (L/N). When leaving, you’re allowed to discuss your next moves. Of course, a process for adopting Wakumi’ll happen. We will meet again to finalize more things. I’ll give you both a call.” He gave a nod. Sakusa agreed, his chest rising as he stood up.

“Thank you for your time.” Sakusa said, shaking his hand. “And for informing us. Ms. (L/N) and I are going to talk this out.” Fujioka seemed pleased, seeing the two of you out. Your heels clicked on the wooden flooring as you stormed out.

You fetched for your keys in your purse, muttering curse words under your breathe. Using your shoulder to push the door open, Sakusa trailed behind you with a growing headache.

“(L/N).” Your head whipped around, baring an angry look.

“Yes?” You harshly said, making Sakusa’s eye twitch. “Hurry up Sakusa, I don’t have all day!”

“Fujioka said we need to discuss.” You grunted, turning away and coming closer to your car. Sakusa’s eyebrows raised, a look reading ‘Are you serious right now?’ behind the mask formed.

“Just follow me to my place.” Your voice cracked, fumbling your keys to get inside of the car. “I’d rather talk there than burst out crying in a parking lot.”

❝A tragic accident brings two enemies together under one roof as sole guardians of their late best friend’s baby daughter. Will they survive together and find happiness through the bundle of joy in their lives? Or will their hatred for each other win over the worst?❞

TAGLIST IS NOW OPEN AND CONTINUES IN THE COMMENTS

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DEAREST DADDY MATERIAL LIST

PLAYING HOUSE MATERIAL LIST

prologue

[fvrxdrm]

City of the Living Dead

Chapter 6

"September 28, 2:30 am... It's down to just me and 3 others. No weapons...no ammo...and too many skirmishes have drained us mentally and physically. We're not gonna make it... Officer Phillips once suggested we escape through the sewers. Apparently, there's a secret tunnel under this place left over from its museum days. I brushed her idea off before, but now, it's not sounding all that bad. Yeah, there's no proof there's even a tunnel or that the sewers aren't infested with zombies, but I don't wanna sit here and wait to die, either. It's a long shot, but I'm gonna try to find out what I can about that tunnel... Elliot Edward," you read, "Shit. Rest in peace, buddy." You placed the transcript back to where you found it and proceeded in scanning the room you and Leon were in.

It was an office of some sort with mahogany desks occupying the center, swivel chairs pointing towards every direction, some paperworks piled in a stack and some (or rather most) cluttered all over the tables and floor. It looked like a hurricane together with an earthquake and a tsunami clashed and crashed in the area.

"Leon, w-" your head twisted and turned as you looked for best friend and even called out to him when you found him just staring at something on the ceiling, his trembling lips pinned in between pearly-white teeth, eyebrows furrowed upwards, and eyes looking like a dam was about to breakdown because of too much pressure. You went towards where he was standing and followed his gaze. You gasped. He was looking at stringed triangle banners with letters printed out on each of them

WEL COME LEON

Your face began to mirror Leon's but a pained smile differentiated yours from his as a sudden rush of memory enlightened your brain. "Hey, look, the design's the same as the banner I surprised you with when we were 15," you said, raising an arm to point at the triangular flags.

Leon chuckled softly at what you said and nodded while a sneaky tear flowed down his cheek in a tiny stream. "Yeah."

"Come on, Leon! I worked hard for this." You hauled on your friend's wrist and led him towards his room with a strain as Leon's languor held him back.

"This better be good, Y/N. You fucking woke me up and I'm really close to fucking strangling you." His voice was a little hoarse from having just woken up right before you pulled him off of the couch and he was still lowkey tired because of the three-hour rest he had last night, but as much as he wanted to throw you out of his house and fall into a well-deserved slumber again, he was into surprises and was curious as to what you had in store. So, he went along with it even though he was pretty much a sloth still.

"I promise you'll love it." You chortled.

Leon sighed in defeat before loosening up and letting you pull him towards where you wanted to take him for this so-called surprise with a rub of his crusty eyes.

When a familiar door came into view in front of you, you covered Leon's eyes with one of your hands and twisted the door knob, revealing a bedroom with a banner hovering over Leon's messy bed, before lightly pushing him inside.

"All right, here we are," you spoke as you removed your hand from your face, moving right beside him to watch Leon's face as it shifted from being enraptured to crestfallen real quick. You guffawed in a boisterous way at his reaction and plummeted down to the ground whilst clutching your stomach in a joyful pain.

YOU SUCK LEON

"Really, Y/N? This-this is what you wanted to show me?"

"It's true though, you actually suck!"

"Come on, you know you only won in Street Fighter because I let you," he whined. You stood up from being laid on the floor before clutching onto Leon's shoulder for dear life.

"For 20 times? Really?" You laughed again, "nah, you just suck, bro."

Leon narrowed his eyes at you with lips pressing tightly in a thin line and turned towards you, his feet moving slowly in tandem as he approach you with a spurious anger, his hands closing into fists.

"What?" You asked with a nervous chuckle and feet backing up in rhythm with his laggard advances.

"You think I suck?" His voice imitated a dark tone. Had you not been slightly scared - which you hated to admit - you would've busted a gut at how ridiculous it sounded.

"I mean, yeah, it's already said in the banner, dimwitt."

"Oh, yeah?"

"Hell yeah!"

"Well, let's see who sucks now!"

Welp, that's my cue!

You dodged Leon's attack by the skin of your teeth, stumbling on a stupid pencil for a bit, before proceeding to run around the house to avoid Leon's "spider fingers" as you call it and making a tiny bit of a mess. However, your luck has gone away and he eventually caught you when you accidentally tripped over the leg of a chair, throwing you into his bed and tickling each spot that would make you squirm and and laugh.

"I still suck, huh?"

"N-no, fine...y-you don't...s-suck," you cried in between heavy breaths and hysterics. Satisfied with your remark, Leon stopped his fingers from moving and plopped down beside you, taking a moment to catch his breath before he pulled you closer to his body and spooned you. "You still couldn't win yesterday though."

"Yeah, well, I know a million ways to win your heart though."

"Fuck off, Le-le." Leon tsked at the nickname.

"Y/N, that sounds awful as fuck."

"Whatever." You felt his lashes kiss the nape of your neck as he closed his eyes to give them another four hours of rest, your own following afterwards when you heard Leon's muffled voice vibrate against your shirt.

"Hey, you wanna be my date for homecoming?"

"I thought you already asked Lexee to be your date."

"Dante already asked her out, so..."

"Okay, fine, I'll be your date." You squeezed his hand before intertwining your fingers with his and smiling when you felt him kiss your hair.

"Thanks, Y/N. Good night."

"It's 10 in the morning, dumba-"

"Shh... Rock-a-bye baby..."

"You do suck though." You light-heartedly nudged Leon's side and wrinkled your eyes in a grin, chuckling when he returned the gesture with a titter.

"I really don't," he retorted back.

"Sure." You took his hand in yours and gently squeezed it in a comforting way to ease the two of you before placing a feather's kiss on the back of it. "Come on, we still have a job to do."

*****

Leon S. Kennedy, we're putting you on a very special case for your first assignment. Your mission is...to unlock your desk! The key to your success is in the initials of our first names. Input the letters in order of our desks. There are 2 locks- 1 on each side of your desk. Make sure you get them both. Basically, your first task is to remember your fellow officers' names, but you figured that much out, right? Good luck, Leon. By the way, it might take a little work to get Scott to give you a straight answer.

Lieutenant Branagh

Scrawled in a corner between drops of blood on the paper was an additional note the lieutenant had written while he and his fellow officers were isolated and trapped, and it read:

Be glad you're not here, rookie.

"Remember your fellow officers' names..."

"I think that means the initials of my supposedly co-workers' names should be the password to open these locks on my desk." Leon stood up from where he was knelt down on the floor and casted around from desk to desk, unlocking the padlocks on his table and claiming the prize after accomplishing his "first assignment" - a magazine for his beloved Matilda.

You smiled when Leon pulled out the gun he's had since the beginning of his adult years, another retention reminding you of the peaceful days you once had before you started walking right into confusion.

Matilda was a gift Leon's father had given him on his 18th birthday, a few months before he died of cancer. He was happy about it, and knowing how his family had supported his decision on him becoming a cop, his heart fluttered inside and he couldn't be more grateful about it. Leon held onto it everyday, even becoming a bit hesitant about leaving it behind whenever he went to school. And when his father passed away because of said illness, he grasped onto the weapon the same way he did when his dad was still alive, if not more.

"Happy birthday, Leon. Happy birthday, Leon. Happy birthday, happy birthday... Happy birthday, Leon... HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LEON!"

Leon's cheeks stretched in an almost painful way as everyone erupted into cheers and confetti fell from the ceiling. Each person was wearing cone-shaped hats and the living room was decorated with different ornaments colored in his favorite hues. His family was there and so were his friends, and oh, how could he almost forget...

It was his 18th birthday!

"So, what do you think?" You spoke from behind him. He turned around to see you smiling like an idiot and tugging on the string of a party you picked up from the floor.

"This," he began. "This is amazing! Wh-"

"Well, son, the candle's almost melting. Wanna make a wish?" Leon's dad emerged from behind the small crowd with a three-layered cake balanced on top of his palms. The icing of the pastry was blue, edible police-related finishing touches garnished it with such perfection he almost didn't want to eat it for the sake of admiring and staring at the cake, and a single candle formed into the number 18 as an emphasis to his recent age was placed on top with a tiny flame dancing around in the air. Leon closed his eyes and wished for the best before blowing the candle, watching as the fire disappeared into a swirling smoke. Everyone rejoiced once again.

When voices had began dying down one by one, Leon's father called his name and picked up a box from underneath the table after placing the cake down where it wouldn't fall down.

"Leon, you're going to be attending the police academy soon and in the next few years you'll be the cop you always wanted. So, as a gift, I give you this gun." He opened the rectangular cardboard box where a gun laid and presented it to his child, Leon's eyes sparkling in delight at his very own weapon. "I know you'll be taking good care of Matilda."

"Matilda?" Leon asked in confusion.

"You know, like, Mathilda from Leon: The Professional," his dad replied. Leon chuckled in response before he carefully took the gun out of its container, still a bit iffy about touching it.

"I'll be taking good care of this, dad."

"I know you will."

"You still have that gun?" You spoke as you gestured towards his firearm.

"Yep, she still looks good as new. I didn't want to break my promise," Leon responded. He turned his gun around to show you just how much he kept it safe like a mother would to a child. Your E/C orbs twinkled in admiration, a feeling in your heart you had kept for a very long time flittering in a joyous manner for the first time since you last saw him.

"Nothing's really changed, huh?"

"I don't want to change anything for now...especially now that you're back here with me."

*****

So, I found this image on google and an idea suddenly popped into my head lmao.

Anyway, WE'RE BACK! I was busy in school blah blah blah. I think yall know that already.

[giveamadeuschohisownmovie]

RWBY / Danganronpa AU write-up:

(After watching Game Grumps play DR this morning, I’ve had Danganronpa on the mind. So, I decided to write this up for fun)

Set-up: In an alternate universe, teams RWBY, JNPR, SSSN, and CFVY are invited to attend Hope’s Peak Academy, the next step to becoming Huntsmen and Huntresses after graduating from Beacon Academy. Monokuma traps the students there and forces them to kill each other in order to escape. 

Chapter 1

The motive for this round is “memory wipe”. If no one is killed in 24 hours, then their loved ones’ memories of them will be wiped out. No one will remember them outside of the school. This freaks out Yatsuhashi Daichi in particular due to his past traumatic experiences with his semblance. And sure enough, he is the first student to die.

During the class trial, the students have a hard time determining who the killer is. As they uncover the truth piece by piece, they soon discover that Yatsuhashi was not as innocent as it seemed. It turns out, he was actually PLANNING on committing a murder of his own. Ruby Rose then starts to wonder if Yatsuhashi was killed in self-defense, that he had actually carried out his plan but failed and was killed by his would-be victim. 

The students are about to give up until Nora Valkyrie points out that Yatsuhashi has an unexplained broken rib. The wound wasn’t fatal, which is why the students opted to ignore it. That’s when Ruby realizes that the injury could’ve been caused by a really strong punch. 

Cue the “CHOOSE THE GUILTY PERSON” minigame and Ruby selects Yang Xiao Long. After a long back-and-forth of Ruby picking apart the evidence and testimonies, as well as Yang defending herself, Ruby eventually proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Yang killed Yatsuhashi in self-defense. Yang breaks down, wondering if she inherited Uncle Qrow’s misfortune semblance.

Yang’s execution: Yang fights several robots dressed as the White Fang. Suddenly, she’s cornered by a robot dressed as Adam Taurus. Yang tries to fight him but Adam-bot strikes first, cutting off her arm (just like the show). This time, Adam-bot finishes the job by cutting off Yang’s other limbs before decapitating her. 

(students eliminated: Yatsuhashi Daichi, Yang Xiao Long / 14 students remaining)

(quick note: just like the actual Danganronpa series, I killed off Yang in the first chapter since the games killed off someone you thought would have been a major character for the rest of the game. Sayaka in DR1, Byakuya in DR2, and Kaede in DR3)

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Chapter 2

The motive for this round is “2 lies and a truth”. The group is given three statements about each other, 2 of which are false and 1 which is true. To prevent the students from just confirming which is true and which is false, Monokuma clarifies that any student who reveals the information in their cards will be killed instantly. This greatly increases the paranoia among the group. Just to give an example of this motive, Ruby’s statements are:

1) Weiss Schnee’s sister, Winter, arrested Qrow Branwen for murder, which he was framed for (in this alternate universe, this turns out to be the true statement but was written by Monokuma out of context in order to make Ruby hate Weiss)

2) Blake Belladonna’s parents scammed Taiyang Xiao Long out of a deal that would’ve made him millions of liens.

3) Lie Ren mocked Summer Rose after her death and has even pissed on her tombstone

And the victim of this round is...Sage Ayana. During the class trial, the group discusses whether anyone had any statements involving Sage. The only ones who do turn out to be Jaune, Coco, and Blake. Ruby proves that Coco was in her room at the time of the murder while Blake is cleared by Sun Wukong (he says something about how Blake needed him for help with a special project).

Side note: Blake later reveals that her special project was investigating the academy to find any clues regarding Monokuma’s identity and what happened to Hope’s Peak. 

This leaves Jaune. After prying him for information, Jaune reveals that his statement about Sage was, “Sage Ayana was planning on blackmailing Jaune’s family after finding out he forged his transcripts”. Everyone starts suspecting Jaune of being the killer because of this. Then, surprisingly, Jaune admits to killing Sage. 

However, after analyzing the evidence, Ruby realizes that Jaune is innocent and is trying to cover for the real killer. Reasoning that Jaune would only do this for people he cared for, Ruby then realizes that the killer has to be someone from JNPR. And that person turns out to be...Pyrrha Nikos. 

Despite Jaune’s attempts to defend Pyrrha, Ruby eventually proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Pyrrha killed Sage. After admitting defeat, Pyrrha says that she killed Sage on accident. She and Jaune had confronted Sage and, after a heated argument, Jaune and Sage started fighting. Pyrrha intervened, resulting in Sage’s death. 

Pyrrha’s execution: Just like the show, Pyrrha is killed by incineration. However, before she dies, Pyrrha sees that the people “responsible” for killing her are robots made to look like JN_R. 

(students eliminated: Sage Ayana, Pyrrha Nikos / 12 students remaining) 

(quick note: just like the actual games, the execution in this chapter is meant to propel one character’s arc forward. Mondo in DR1 and Peko in DR2)

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Chapter 3 

The motive for this round is control of the Schnee Dust Company. This immediately makes the group wary of Weiss, believing that she’ll try to murder someone in order to maintain control of her family’s business. Weiss tries to convince Ruby that she won’t do such a thing but Ruby, for the first time, is unconvinced of her friend’s intentions. 

This chapter is especially brutal since we have two murders to deal with. The first turns out to be Fox Alistair. Then, several minutes later, Neptune Vasilias ends up dead. 

The class trial for this chapter is especially complicated due to the two murders. First, the students find out that Neptune was the one who murdered Fox. Ruby wonders if Neptune wanted control of the Schnee Dust Company, to which Sun Wukong says that doesn’t sound like Neptune to him. When the students dig further into the evidence, they start to wonder if Neptune was working with someone.

Ruby proposes the theory that Neptune was ordered by someone to kill Fox. He was then killed by that same person so that the unknown person can claim credit for a murder and to create a complicated scenario that would help them avoid being exposed in trial. This leads to the students turning against Weiss. Ruby points out that Weiss had the most to lose from this motivation and that it would’ve been easy for her to get Neptune to do her dirty work for her (they are still romantically involved in this universe). 

After a round of intense questioning, Weiss finally breaks down and reveals that she did indeed plan everything out. She got Neptune to kill Fox and then planned to kill Neptune to complete her plan. However, she swears that she didn’t kill him. Someone else got to Neptune before she could. 

When Ruby wonders who else had a reason to kill Neptune, she realizes that the only people who could have a reason would have to be someone close to Fox. This person would also had to have seen Neptune kill Fox and were angered to the point of taking revenge, knowing that would make them the guilty party in the class trial. Ruby then narrows the suspects to two people; Fox’s teammates, Coco Adel and Velvet Scarlatina. 

After another intense round of questioning and battling both Coco and Velvet’s arguments, Coco finally admits to killing Neptune. She says that she saw the whole thing and because she was still dealing with Yatsuhashi’s death, she just “snapped”. Coco then bitterly remarks that if she had kept her cool and let Weiss go through with her plan, she would’ve gotten her revenge anyways since Weiss would’ve been exposed in trial. 

Coco’s execution: In a bit of irony, Coco is killed by Monokuma with her own miniguns 

(students eliminated: Fox Alistair, Neptune Vasilias, Coco Adel / 9 students remaining) 

(quick note: just like the games, 3 students are eliminated this round. Also, yes, this is a variation of the Celestia Ludenberg case) 

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Chapter 4 

The motivation for this round is...nothing! Monokuma says that he was going to give them one but, based on the previous chapter, the group doesn’t need one due to Weiss’ presence. No one, not even Ruby, feels comfortable being around Weiss, despite all her attempts to get people to trust her again. 

Eventually, the group does start to warm up to Weiss again. However, that’s when Monokuma intervenes and claims that he helped Weiss with her plot to kill Fox and Neptune. When Ruby asks how he helped her, Monokuma says that in exchange for information on how to best accomplish her murder scheme, Weiss acted as his “mole” by reporting to him directly about the group’s actions. This further enrages the group, especially Blake since she’s been trying to find a way out of Hope’s Peak Academy.

Just as the group is about to imprison Weiss, she ends up dead. Ruby finds Weiss’ body in her room, apparently having committed suicide. Ruby even finds a suicide note by Weiss’ bedside drawer.

The class trial is initially seen as a piece of cake since it’s clear that Weiss committed suicide. It’s only Ruby and Blake who are unconvinced. They insist that the group review the evidence anyways since there might be something they’re missing. 

As the groups digs deeper into the evidence, the students realize that there was indeed more to this death than they originally thought. It turns out, Weiss DIDN’T commit suicide. Someone took advantage of the group’s paranoia surrounding Weiss and her own guilt from the previous trial. They then killed Weiss and made it look like she killed herself out of despair. 

The group then starts flip-flopping on who could’ve done this. First, the group targets Velvet since she could’ve been seeking to avenge Coco and Fox. Then, the group targets Sun Wukong since he was friends with Neptune and may have been furious over how his friend was manipulated. 

Eventually, the group exposes the true killer: Scarlet David. Turns out, he also had the same idea as everyone else and was hoping that the group would focus on Velvet and Sun. Scarlet then says that he had nothing against Weiss, it was purely just to survive. However, he also says that he was justified in what he did due to Weiss’ actions in chapter 3. 

Scarlet’s execution: Scarlet is incased in ice. He is then crushed to death by Weiss’ Arma Gigas as a bit of ironic revenge from beyond the grave. 

(students eliminated: Weiss Schnee, Scarlet David / 7 students remaining) 

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Chapter 5

As the penultimate chapter, Blake’s side mission that was mentioned earlier takes the forefront. Since chapter 2, Blake, Sun, Ruby, and Jaune have been working together to solve the mystery of Hope’s Peak Academy, Monokuma, and what happened to them. In their investigation, the group discovers that a “great disaster” happened to Remnant and that it somehow involves Monokuma. 

There is no motivation this round once again. However, someone still ends up dead. The unlucky student this time around is...Nora Valkyrie. Ren is especially angered by this since Nora was his best friend/the person he was technically “together-together” with. During the investigation, Ruby is troubled by the fact that the evidence she’s been collecting doesn’t paint a logical picture. Unlike the previous murders, Nora’s death seems...unnatural. Like it shouldn’t have happened. 

The class trial for this case is arguably the toughest of the 6 trials. Nothing seems to go anywhere and, despite the breakthroughs made by Ruby, none of the evidence adds up to anything. Ruby then starts to suspect something about this trial; what if this trial is rigged? 

Ruby’s suspicions are somewhat confirmed when the group starts honing in on Blake and herself. Ren and Velvet accuse Blake and Ruby of being aloof from the group, to which they defend themselves by saying that they have their reasons for being on their own. Ruby starts to realize that this is what Monokuma wants and that Monokuma may have killed Nora himself in order to set up a case in which the only answer was either Blake or herself. 

Before Ruby can bring this up, Monokuma claims that he had nothing to do with Nora’s death. Knowing that the situation is doomed and that it was between her and Blake, Ruby takes the fall by saying that she has no alibi. Blake tries to stop Ruby from taking the fall but the group overrides her arguments. Ruby is voted off and, much to Blake and Ruby’s surprise, Monokuma proclaims that the group got the right answer. 

Ruby’s “execution”: Ruby is taken to an angry crowd where she’s laid down on a tree stump. An executioner wielding Crescent Rose appears, preparing to decapitate her. Before he can, Jaune Arc arrives and helps Ruby escape. To ensure Ruby survives, Jaune tosses Ruby down a garbage disposal chute. He’s then stabbed through the back by the executioner, killing him instantly. However, he dies with a smile on his face, knowing that he saved Ruby.  

(students eliminated: Nora Valkyrie, Jaune Arc / 5 students remaining)

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Chapter 6 

Ruby wakes up in the garbage disposal, hazy but alive. As she gathers her bearings, she’s met by Blake Belladonna, who had jumped into a different garbage disposal chute to save her. Ruby and Blake make their way out of the area and back to the main lobby. When Monokuma says that Ruby has to be executed due to Jaune’s interference, Blake argues that Ruby should never have been declared guilty in the first place due to the previous trial being obviously rigged. Blake then says that they deserve a re-trial and if Ruby is declared guilty once again, then they will respect the verdict.

Monokuma reluctantly agrees to this, leading to Ruby and Blake realizing that Monokuma is purely observing their actions. He won’t actually involve himself in their deaths and actively encourages them to solve the murders on their own. It was almost as if he wanted them to solve their problems themselves. 

Ruby, Blake, Ren, Sun, and Velvet reconnect and, after squashing any previous feelings of distrust, agree to work together to solve Nora’s murder once and for all. In the class trial, the group hits all the same snags they hit in Chapter 5. However, this time, the group approaches the situation as if Nora’s death was rigged. That’s when Ruby realizes that they need to figure out how Nora even died in the first place.

When Ruby digs further into the evidence, Ruby realizes that Nora’s death was purely a freak occurrence. Turns out, she suffered a random brain aneurysm that had nothing to do with any of the investigations. After making this clear, the group discussion turns to who arranged her body to make it seem like she was murdered. 

After confirming that none of the group was involved in arranging Nora’s body (including Jaune), Ruby points to Monokuma as being responsible. Monokuma once again declares he had nothing to do with Nora’s death, to which Ruby points out a loophole; Monokuma DIDN’T kill Nora, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t arrange the scene afterwards. Ruby then points out that Monokuma used Nora’s sudden death to his advantage to get the group to turn against herself and Blake. 

With his act exposed, Monokuma decides to reveal himself. And it turns out that Monokuma this whole time was...Ozpin. Just then, the rest of Hope’s Peak Academy’s staff and students (who are really just the Beacon Academy staff) enter the trial room and congratulate the surviving students. Even the students’ families are there to cheer them on. 

The students are shocked when they hear the explanation behind Hope’s Peak Academy. Ozpin reveals that the entire mystery of Hope’s Peak Academy was just a set-up for the real experiment. This entire process, the true purpose of the killing game, was to weed out the weak students. He says that, due to the coming of the dark lord known as “Salem”, they needed Huntsmen and Huntresses who could survive the harshest of challenges. So, Ozpin and the rest of the Hope’s Peak staff devised the “Danganronpa experiment”. They would torture the potential students mentally and physically and those who were able to figure out Monokuma’s identity and survive the challenges would be fit to graduate to the second-level of Huntsman and Huntress training in Hope’s Peak. 

Ruby is horrified by this revelation. When she says that her family wouldn’t have approved of this, that’s when she sees that Qrow Branwen and Taiyang Xiao Long are in the room as well. They congratulate her on surviving “Danganronpa”, saying that she has what it takes to be a Huntress. They then reveal that they also survived a version of “Danganronpa”, which further shocks Ruby since they never told her about their experiences in Hope’s Peak. The game ends on that bittersweet note. 

Survivors: Ruby Rose, Blake Belladonna, Lie Ren, Sun Wukong, Velvet Scarlatina 

[melynen]

No One Flirts Like James Bond - 00Q

((Written for MI6 Cafe’s anon prompt gift exchange, week 2. I never would have written this fic if it wasn’t for this challenge.))

It is nothing new to them - or anyone around them, for that matter - to have M call them in to talk about what she deems ’improper conduct’ on the comms.

What amounts to improper varies from day to day, but more often than not, it’s about Bond propositioning Q in colourful detail, and Q (more or less) politely reminding him that he ought to focus on the mission, not pursuing his Quartermaster. Or, when it’s late and neither of them has slept for a long while, it’s about random, non-mission related topics like books or Bond telling him stories from his time in the Navy.

On one memorable occasion, it was a discussion about their favourite Disney movies, during which Q admitted to loving Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. Delighted, Bond had immediately taken to calling him a princess or my lady for the rest of the mission. He still calls him that every once in a while, much to the amusement of his minions and Q’s own embarrassment, and Q is completely unable to get him to stop.

(Secretly, however, he doesn’t mind it quite as much as he claims.)

Getting summoned to see Headmistress McGonagall, Bond had called it once, in full view of the whole Q Branch. Q had snickered, Bond had looked unbearably smug, and the name had stuck.

So now, whenever M wants to see them, everyone knows to tell them that they’re expected at the Headmistress’s office. Q would much rather they didn’t, but unfortunately for him no one asked for his input.

No one ever does when it comes to these things.

And no, Q is not bitter. He’s not. He gets it, Bond’s the double oh with the reputation and the licence to kill, neither of which he shows any shame in demonstrating when necessary. Or, as it happens from time to time, when not exactly necessary.

So Q sighs but keeps his silence, and goes to see M when requested, and listens to Bond alternate between humorous quips and clearly false excuses, and nods solemnly when M tells them that she expects better from them - “Especially you, Quartermaster!” - in the future. Then he leaves her office with Bond trailing after him like an overgrown duckling, tolerates the arm Bond eventually wraps around his shoulders, and gives Bond something to explode or a prototype to test when it becomes clear that the agent won’t stop bloody following him around otherwise.

Q gets data from Bond to analyse either way, so it’s not exactly a hardship to give in to the subtle manipulation he knows the man capable of using; and as it also gives him back his privacy, he feels it’s an adequate deal.

It goes on like this until that one day when it doesn’t.

*

It starts as a normal post-mission bright and early morning at Six. Q arrives relatively late - for him, that is - after half past eight, goes to get himself a cup of tea, and gets intercepted on his way to his office by none other than Bond.

“Good morning, Q,” Bond greets him, looking far more chipper than Q feels that he ought to, after what had been a gruelling ten-day mission in Georgia followed by a long international flight.

“Good morning, 007,” he says. ”I didn’t expect to see you quite this soon.”

“What can I say, I missed you,” Bond smiles and lets his gaze move up and down Q’s body in clear appreciation.

“Well, I did not miss you,” Q lies as he rolls his eyes at the blatant way Bond eyes him. Sadly, that is nothing new in Bond’s ongoing quest to drive his Quartermaster spare by flirting with him, either, so Q has mostly gotten used to it.

“That hurts,” Bond says, looking at Q with those big blue eyes of his. “I was really looking forward to seeing you again.”

Q hides his sigh behind his mug of tea and takes a fortifying sip. “I assume you have your kit with you?” he says.

Bond nods. “I do.”

Q is about to tell him to follow him into his office when he sees R approaching them. He doesn’t exactly need her telling them that the Headmistress is expecting them, as lately it had happened like clockwork after practically every single mission he’d been Bond’s handler, so he simply nods at her.

“007, leave your kit to R,” he tells Bond instead, and waits for the man to do so before heading towards the lifts and expecting Bond to follow him. Bond does, and he keeps staring at Q the whole journey to M’s office. Q tries his best to appear unfazed, but he cannot deny feeling relieved once they reach their destination and are asked to go in.

Q takes his place on one of the chairs in front of M’s desk and hears Bond do the same next to him. He doesn’t look at him, however, instead keeps his eyes trained on M, whose expression is perfectly unreadable.

Q admits to himself - only to himself - that he has a bad feeling about this.

“Q. 007,” M says flatly.

“Yes, Ma’am?” Q asks.

“You’re aware of why I asked you here.” It’s not a question but a statement, and neither Q nor Bond even thinks about reacting to it in any way.

“I have read the mission transcript, and while I had been expecting something, it sure as hell wasn’t this.”

Q blinks and, despite his better judgment, glances at Bond questioningly. There’s a hint of a smile playing about the man’s lips, and Q frowns lightly at that. Bond, however, is not looking at him but at M.

“I can see that Q is still confused. Shall I refresh your memory?” M continues and pulls out a sheet of paper, setting it in front of them. Q blinks again and looks down at the page.

➡️➡️➡️Q: Do you have the data? 007: Yes, Q, I have it. A bit busy right now, though. (sound of gunfire, followed by rapid typing and a bit of unintelligible muttering) Q: 007, there’s a hidden door on your left. I’m opening it in thirty seconds, and you’ll have no more than a minute to get to the other end of the corridor. 007: Acknowledged. Q? Q: 007? 007: Marry me? (silence) 007: Traditionally, when one is asked a question, one tends to reply to it. Q: Bond! Stop bloody joking around and focus! 007: Still waiting, here. Q: Traditionally, when one is asked such a question, one has previously engaged in something called dating with the person who did the asking. 007: I have asked you out. Several times. You keep telling me no. I thought I’d go all out. Q: 007, we’re not having this conversation right now. The door opens in ten seconds. 007: If not now, when? Q: Five seconds! 007: At least promise me you’ll consider it? I won’t move a muscle unless you say yes. Q: Bond! 007: Q. Q: … I promise. Will you now bloody move? 007: With pleasure.⬅️⬅️⬅️

Q finishes reading the underlined and highlighted lines of the transcript and feels himself blushing to the very tips of his ears. He’d forgotten about this particular bit of conversation, but now he remembers it. He remembers having made a threat of his own to Bond, afterwards, when the man had returned to his hotel room. He also remembers Bond laughing at him, and telling him that he’d come for his answer as soon as the mission was over and he was back on British soil.

Q absolutely refuses to turn his head to see the expression on Bond’s face.

He doesn’t want to look at M, either, but he is no coward. So he looks up at her and keeps his expression carefully blank. (He has a feeling that M still sees right through him, though.)

“What do you have to say for yourself?” M asks, and her gaze is directed at Bond alone. Q feels inexplicably better when he realises this.

Then he gets an idea.

“Yes! A thousand times yes!”

Bond stares. He opens his mouth and then closes it again. Q feels proud at having rendered him speechless.

”What, cat got your tongue, Bond? I thought you wanted me to say yes.”

M looks at him and then at Bond, and starts laughing. There are honest-to-god tears in her eyes, and Q sees Bond colour ever so slightly, especially around the ears.

He likes Bond’s ears, always has. They look even more fetching like this.

Q raises his eyebrows at Bond, as if to say, “Well? I’m waiting.”

“I’m, ah, happy to hear that, Q,” Bond finally manages to say. For some reason, that makes M laugh even harder, and Q cannot stop a grin from forming.

“I’m glad,” he says lightly.

“Well then,” says Bond, slow and steady, “I suppose the only question that remains is whether you’re okay with having the wedding in a week or two, or if you need a bit more time to plan it. And if you prefer a diamond ring or a plain one.”

He also settles a hand on top of Q’s thigh, which causes Q to startle. M has, by now, gotten her laughter under control, and she shakes her head lightly when she sees it. Q swears he sees amusement in her eyes, though.

“I suppose that’s settled, then,” she says, fully professional once more. “I’d tell you not to do it again, but we all know how well that would go. Dismissed.” But before either of them has time to react, she adds, “I expect an invitation to the wedding.”

Then she looks down at the papers before her, and that is a cue for Q and Bond to stand up.

“Come then, princess, I’ll walk you to your castle,” Bond says, and Q flushes in embarrassment (for having M read about Bond calling him that is one thing; having her hear him do it is another matter altogether). He wants nothing more than to get away from M’s stare, so he keeps his mouth firmly shut and follows Bond out of her office.

Outside, once the door has closed after them, Bond wraps his arm not around his shoulders but his waist instead, pulling him close. Q lets him. He thinks he’ll let Bond take him out to dinner, as well.

[johnny2071]

F is for Family - Bill’s Letter and Apology (Deconstructed)

Bill running away and finally calling out his parents is a major turning point in his character arc, and hopefully, the entire family. In these connected scenes, there's a lot of deep contexts, and I will be analyzing each of them. If anyone here has ever watched Mystery Science Theater 3000, Rifftrax, or any Channel Awesome reviews, you should understand what I'm doing here. Pay close attention to everything written in parenthesis within the transcript, as I will explain each note at the end. Bill's Letter: ----------------- Dear Mom and Dad, By the time you find this note, I will be long gone because I'm running away. Dad, I'm sure you won't care too much being that I'm such a big disappointment to you and I'm always bothering you with my problems. And I know you think I'm a pussy. My reasons for saying this are A, I heard you say it to Mom (Bill was there during the bedroom argument). In conclusion, I'm sure you will all be better off without me (Bill has been burned or neglected by all four members of the family). Mom, I'll remember to brush my teeth (No ill will?). Maureen, even though I'll be gone forever, you still can't have my room (Bill's less-than-kind sister has been moved into his bedroom space). And Kevin, you were doing something (Bill is that turned off by his masturbating, followed by his usual excuse). Sincerely yours, Bill. P. S. Watch out for Phillip (Who has a murderous mind and has gone ballistic twice). Bill's Calls Out His Parents & Rescue: ----------------- Frank: Bill, we're here! Daddy's gonna save you! Bill: Go to hell! (Bill strikes!) Frank: What the fuck did you just say to me? Bill: I'm fucking mad at you! You don't care about me, Dad! You never cared about me! You didn't take me to hockey tryouts because your stupid fat boss was eating chocolate in your truck. Pogo: (*"Now, there comes a point where a reasonable man will swallow his pride and admit that he's made a terrible mistake. The truth is, I was never a reasonable man"*) A Puerto Rican forced me to do that! (Pogo proves that he's not a reasonable man to own up to his mistakes) Bill: All you ever do is yell at me and call me a pussy. A guy exploded in front of me and you told me to shove it down. And when I needed you today, you told me, "Not now." Well how about now, Dad? (Bill has called out his old man) Frank: Jesus Christ, he's right. Son. I'm I'm sorry. I have been a terrible father lately. (Frank finally gets it, ….for now) Sue: Your father is very sorry, Bill. (Latching onto someone else's apology like a captain's parrot) Bill: I'm mad at you too, Mom! (You ain't off the hook, honey!) Sue: What? (MGS alert sfx) Bill: You spent all your time with that stupid scissor-spoon that I cut my fingers on! (Bill clearly holding back for some reason) Sue: (*cue Shopping Jaunt music*) It was called the Forkoontula, and it's still in the development stages, but you're right. It's just this new baby coming really threw us for a loop and then we got all wrapped up with the new neighbors. (How to construct an legitimate excuse over an apology to a very upset 11-year old boy) Mrs. Vanderheim: Well, I guess I ain't such a bad mother after all. [BLOWJOB] (Crass humor fodder insert) Sue: But that's all over now. (What's over? The pregnancy? The dead/arrested neighbors? The Forkoontula? The abuse?) Frank: And we're sorry. (Frank either hijacks Sue's "apology" for more .temp glory, or spares her the burden of responsibility) I told myself I'd be a better father than my own dad, and that starts now. You kids mean…. you mean a lot to me. I love you people. Just please come on home. We'll talk about it. (Which is either forgotten, or a discussion is had among the parents, while the children are elsewhere having zero-input) Bill: Can I have my old room back to myself? (A wish off the top of his head) Sue: Of course! Frank: Jesus, Sue, the house is a fucking mess! Sue: Frank! Frank: Sure. Your own room again. (Wish granted) Bill: I just want to go home. (Bill is back) Epilogue: ----------------- Frank: Well, I know things got a little crazy this summer. But now your mom and I, we got our priorities straight. Sue: Our most important job is being your parents. And I swear to you, we'll never forget that again. (Good luck with Frank's jerk father and your pregnancy still a thing) Notes: -Bill was there during the bedroom argument - Bill's parents knowing this is important, because the last time he mentioned this, the entire matter was preempted in favor of Major going missing. It should also tell them that he fully knows about their sex act right afterwards, and raise the question of why was Bill underneath the bed in the first place and not in school? He was suspended that day. Why was he suspended? He got into a fight with Jimmy Fitzsimmons. Why did he get into a fight? Fitzsimmons harassed him on Halloween night, when he was left home alone. -Bill has been burned or neglected by all four members of the family - Frank has been abrasive towards him, like every else he screams at. Maureen has zero-respect for him, blackmailed him, and was the first one to push him over the edge. Even Kevin (who isn't the friendliest guy) has begun to sour towards Bill as early as Season 2. And Sue, the one person you think would be closer to Bill (unlike of rest of Frank's personal juniors, Boy-Frank and Girl-Frank), has been nothing but hostile towards him in the rare moments they actually interact, for next to nothing. -No ill will? - After the way Sue has been hostile towards Bill, including this season, all the Bill has to say is that he ensures her of proper hygiene, a response so generic, he has nothing notable to say specifically to her in his goodbye letter. -Bill's less-than-kind sister has been moved into his bedroom space - After the way Maureen has treated him in the past, Bill is not fond of sharing his bedroom space with her, or giving her the satisfaction of ownership of his room. -Bill is that turned off by his masturbating, followed by his usual excuse - Given Kevin's boy-ish nature and questionable means of pleasure, and the fact that Bill's mind hasn't sexually matured yet (since he's barely in double digits), close encounters with sex-related matters make him squick very hard. In short, Bill is disgusted by Kevin for this. -Who has a murderous mind and has gone ballistic twice - Bill has already seen Phillip's kill book, depicted horrible acts of torture and murder to anyone who upsets him. Phillip himself has also flipped out at Bill for so much as liking a girl. Not to mention Phillip completely losing it on the Hobo Jojo Show. -Bill strikes! - After all the abuse both his family and the outside world has finally put him through, Bill finally lashes out at his father, all while hanging on for dear life. Frank and Sue finally come face-to-face with Bill's rage, something that's been long overdue since episode 5. -Pogo proves that he's not a reasonable man to own up to his mistakes - A reference from a quote from Big Fish. This was originally meant for Frank, except he does just that. Sue is a good alternative, but not only would the quote not make sense out of context, but Sue actually dances around this. Naturally, Pogo has been as much (if not more) of an asshole as Frank. I got the whole quote idea from a YouTuber's video. -Bill has called out his old man - In this season alone, Frank has been horribly dismissive towards all three of his children, especially when they needed his attention/any helpful advice the most. Here, Bill actually succeeds in calling Frank out on just that. -Frank finally gets it, ….for now - Frank, who's been extremely close-minded of anything his children say, actually has his mind opened by Bill, and is nearly left speechless. For the first time ever, Frank sincerely apologizes the Bill for being a bad father. However, this Frank we're talking about. Believe it or not, this isn't the first time Frank has made a passionate speech or apology. In fact, he has done this for each season final up to this point. By now, you would think that he would've because a better person by now. However, this show brands itself on bitterness and misery, and unfortunately, gets nothing but praise for it. In order for the show to keep its bitterness, Frank has to remain an over-the-top salty, powder keg, jerkass. Based on what resonates with this show's audience, it's Frank's defining trait, down to his threatening catchphrase, which is used towards the people he spends most of his interaction with: his children. Based on this and his track record of resetting back to default each season, it seems impossible and and out of character for Frank to change, much like Bojack Horseman (a character who actually tries to change, despite many characters in that show closing their doors on him). -Latching onto someone else's apology like a captain's parrot - Rather than apologize herself for her own mistakes, Sue decides to chime in and repeat back to Bill what Frank had just said, like a parrot or a one-dimensional yes man. -You ain't off the hook, honey! - It's good to know that Bill has resentment towards his mother as well, considering that she was actually worse to him than Frank was, even though the show tries to pretend that these moments never happened, yet throw off people (especially those hoping for better) by giving us more when we least expect it (or when scenario do not call for it at the slightest). You can tell that Bill (despite his situation and limited rage) is using this opportunity as his best bet to call BOTH parents out (since he's been a victim of bad timing and has run out of steam before he can get started, leaving him vulnerable). -MGS alert sfx - A sound effect from Metal Gear Solid that should've played alongside Sue's ridiculous reaction. what's baffling here is the fact that she's that shocked that Bill is angry at her, as if she's done nothing wrong to him, as if she's been nothing but kind to him, as if one of her children holding hostility towards her is such an outrageous out-of-the-left-field concept. It just sounds so fake coming from her, almost as cartoonish as The Simpsons, in a show trying to be as dark and real as possible. -Bill clearly holding back for some reason - Out of all the things Sue has said and done to Bill up to this point, THIS is the thing Bill decides to call out on. It's almost as Bill had a brief flashback of all the Sue-Bill moments and intentionally held back, by only referencing the most immediate she's done during the summer, or at this point, he's literally running out of steam and doesn't have enough stamina and anger to call her out on everything else (like he did with Frank). He isn't WRONG about all her time going into the Forkoontula, and the invention DID amplify Sue's ugly side. However, Bill was unintentionally spared from any instances of Sue's wrath pertaining to the Forkoontula. The only who wasn't so lucky and got the cold shoulder/venom is Maureen. "The Stinger" and "Punch Drunk" are prime examples. -*Cue Shopping Jaunt music*/How to construct an legitimate excuse over an apology to a very upset 11-year old boy - Shopping Jaunt is a public domain stock music piece often associated with assembly line production sequences. This is a reference to Sue/Laura Dern's lack of sincere emotion and patronizing/near-robotic delivery in her line. It's the equivalent of a someone making an announcement over an intercom in a professional environment, as opposed to a mother deeply apologizing to her son. Hell, she doesn't say "I'm sorry" to the the boy, not even once. Instead, she just brings up the news of the baby, as well as the new neighbors as the cause of their problems. The baffling thing is, it's not like Sue/Laura isn't capable of delivering a sincere apologetic tone. She did in episode 4 of this season after she learns the truth of what the other wives though of her invention, and actually apologizes to Marie for yelling at her. -Crass humor fodder insert - Did we really need this? This is supposed to be an emotional moment where the family finally sees first hand how upset Bill truly is, and finally gets his dues. But the impact is muddled by an insert scene of yet another crude one-note, one-dimensional, one-timer character taking up already limited screentime (given Bill's situation, how late in the season it is, and how late in the act it is). -What's over? The pregnancy? The dead/arrested neighbors? The Forkoontula? The abuse? - In a show like this that tries to stay faithful to its branding and reputation its built up, what exactly does Sue even mean by that? Last time we checked, Sue's still pregnant, and they only have a few months left. Will she decide NOT to have a fourth child and get an abortion, even this late? If she's referring to the new neighbors, of course that's over, since Nguyen-Nguyen poisoned Chet and got arrested. Will Sue finally give up on the Forkoontula (and future inventions), considering how it's bought out the worst in her and caused problems or everyone else, and focus on improving as a person and communicating with her children (which brings us to the "end of abuse" factor)? -Frank either hijacks Sue's "apology" for more .temp glory, or spares her the burden of responsibility - We've seen Frank constantly attempt to make up for his recent mistakes enough times already (spoiler alert: Someone like him, especially in this show, can never change). Why not have Sue be a person for once and own up to her mistakes. Just one apology to her children (in this case, Bill, and to a further extent, Maureen). "Sue: And I'm very sorry, Bill, for the horrible way I've acted as a mother." Is that honestly too good for Bill, or the viewers? We get it. Frank is the main character, but when you have a character like Sue act that scary and hostile towards the ones that don't deserve it, they have to take responsibility for their actions and amend for it so they can be sympathetic/likeable again, especially if they're part of the main cast: the family. -Which is either forgotten, or a discussion is had among the parents, while the children are elsewhere having zero-input - The phrase "we'll talk about it/we'll talk about this later" has been used very loosely in this series, with almost no promise, delivery, or payoff behind it. In the Murphy family, do they even HAVE family discussions? Do they actually talk with the children, instead of just barking orders and threats? Do Frank and Sue actually care about their opinions and how they feel, or just how they APPEAR to feel? At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't "talk about it" at all, especially after five months of dead silence after the events of season 2, only for similar mistakes to return and get as bad as they did in this season. -A wish off the top of his head - Bill sees that his parents are desperately pleading for his return, so he uses this opportunity to ask them for anything as a reason to come home. But considering who his parents are, Bill simply asks for the first thing he can think of in reason. -Wish granted/Bill is back - With this request granted, Bill is ready to return home, and his resentment towards his family has faded. With that said, is this the end of Bill's character arc? Will Frank and (mainly) Sue get along better with him, and the rest of their children? -Good luck with Frank's jerk father and your pregnancy still a thing - Despite Sue's promise to never forget that "being their parents is their most important job", there's still the matter of Sue's pregnancy, and all the hormones that make an already volatile person worse. Also, the introduction of Frank's jerkass father, who will have no problem driving everyone in the house crazy with his baggage (based on Frank's experiences with the man). And even without those glaring issues, what exactly does Sue mean by that? More work specifically for Frank (the least-suited man for the job)? Or does it mean simply mean paying more attention to their kids, but without improving communication/reasoning with them, and being more hostile towards them, over the slightest infraction at the wrong time/mood? In conclusion, I was initially ecstatic over S3E10 (since it was the closest we were going to get to a true happy ending, especially after all the crap that went down in season 2), but after I did more research (since I actually didn't sit through this season and skipped to a transcript of the season finale) and learned about everything else that happened, I learned that this ending wasn't enough to make up for it.

[briflatclarinet]

25 Days of Wolfmas: Prompt Two

U.S.S. HEPHAESTUS STATION, WOLF 359 MISSION

PROJECT WOLFMAS: TRANSCRIPTION AND NOTES

Log Date: 12021859-WDE

BEGIN TRANSMISSION

 EIFFEL

Are you serious? I already did this yesterday, Commander! You heard me recording the transmission!

MINKOWSKI

While it was amazing to hear you actually doing your job for once, Eiffel, I’m afraid you’re going to have to do it again. Command sent specific instructions for one question to be read out everyday until Christmas.

EIFFEL

But sir! That’s twenty-three days from now! Do you really expect me to read these things twenty-three times?!

HERA

Actually you have to read them twenty-four more times, Officer Eiffel. You haven’t recorded today’s question yet.

EIFFEL

Hera! Ix-nay on the echnicalities-tay.

MINKOWSKI

I don’t get what you’re complaining about, Eiffel. It’s just reading one cue card a day and the questions aren’t even that long!

EIFFEL

I get what you mean, Commander, and trust me I’d be totally fine with easy work. It’s just… I don’t get why I have to do it. I mean, what’s the point? I’m not even answering the question!

MINKOWSKI

(Sigh) I don’t know why Command wants you to read these, Eiffel, but you were given an order to read them and so help me, I’m going to make sure you actually complete this assignment. I don’t want you half-assing something as simple as this, so you’re going to go in there, record the stupid message, and you’re going to do it right. I don’t want any funny business, capiche?

(Silence)

MINKOWSKI

Eiffel!

EIFFEL

Alright, Commander! You don’t have to shout!

MINKOWSKI

Are you going to go read the card?

EIFFEL

(Silence) (A long sigh) Fine. (Grumbles) I’ll read the stupid card.

MINKOWSKI

Good. Then get to it!

EIFFEL

(Sigh) Yes, sir.

MINKOWSKI

Here’s today’s question. Don’t you even think about leaving the Comms Room until you get this recorded and sent to Command, got it?

EIFFEL

(Groan) Yes, Commander! Will you get off my back and let me get this over with already?

MINKOWSKI

Alright, then. Get to it, Eiffel. (Note: Footsteps are heard and then a door slamming shut)

EIFFEL

(Growl) She can be so annoying sometimes! (Note: Officer Eiffel changes his tone of voice to mock Commander Minkowski) Eiffel! Here’s this useless and menial job sent by Command. I want you to do it no matter how stupid it is because I’m such a kiss-up who always does what Command says. I don’t care if it’s a waste of your precious time, get to work!

HERA

I’d make sure Commander Minkowski couldn’t hear me before I began mocking her, Officer Eiffel.

EIFFEL

Oh, crap! Did I turn the Comms on again, Hera?

HERA

(Note: Unit 214, designation: Hera, sounds amused) No. I just wanted to see your face.

EIFFEL

(Note: Officer Eiffel does not sound amused) Oh ha ha, very funny. You almost gave me a heart attack, Hera. The Commander would chew me out if she heard me say those things.

HERA

Because that would mean you weren’t recording your question and answer card?

EIFFEL

Exactly. I don’t get why she’s so into me reading these. And for twenty-three days? Is she serious?

HERA

That is what Command ordered you to do.

EIFFEL

I couldn’t care less what Command wants. This is so stupid! Command could order me to dress in drag and do the hula and I wouldn’t find it nearly as pointless as this.

HERA

(Laugh) While that would certainly be an interesting sight, Officer Eiffel, all Command has asked is you read one little cue card. Just one! That’s it! You can manage to read one card.

EIFFEL

I could, but it’s the principle of the matter, Hera! I wasn’t sent up here to do busy work! Command put me in the sky to make first contact with aliens and all this time I waste with this stupid cue card is a missed moment where I could be talking shop with E.T.!

HERA

Does all the time you’re wasting by complaining instead of reading the card count as a missed moment too?

(Silence)

EIFFEL

Shut up, Hera.

HERA

(Chuckle) Just get on with it, Officer Eiffel. Then you can go back to searching for your extraterrestrials.

EIFFEL

(Sigh) Alright, fine. You don’t have to twist my arm. (Another sigh as some blips and beeps are heard. Note: noises are presumably from the Comms Room control panel)

(Sounds of Officer Eiffel clearing his throat) Howdy, folks! It’s your favorite radio personnel, Communications Officer Doug Eiffel, back at it again with another stup- wonderful question and answer set from Command! (Laugh) Aren’t they simply the best? And to make things even better, I just found out Command wants me to do this each and everyday until Christmas! Can you believe it? I get to read a question and answer everyday until December 25th. How great is that?

(Silence)

EIFFEL

Yeah, that’s what I though to. So (Throat clearing) Let’s get this over with. Today’s wonderfully amazing question seems to be a simple one: What’s your favorite episode? Now, I’m not sure what they mean by episode but if it were me, I’d probably choose something from a classic series like Star Trek or good old Doctor Who; but as we learned yesterday, I’m not the one answering so let’s see what our mystery writer has to say.

(Note: shuffling can be heard) Okay, let’s see here. Woah, today’s response is a bit wordier than yesterday’s, Dear Listeners, I guess our mystery write has quite a bit to say on the subject. Good ol’ MW says: I can’t just pick one episode, so I’m going to answer this question by picking a favorite from each season.

(Small laugh) Sounds like MW here’s a bit of an over-achiever, they’d probably get along with Minkowski. Anyways.

From season one, my favorite episode is either Am I Alone? or The Empty Man Cometh.

Wait a minute… The Empty Man Cometh? Could they be talking about when Command sent us that psych eval? How could anyone like that?

HERA

Officer Eiffel, maybe your questions would be answered if you just finished reading what’s written down?

EIFFEL

Alright, no need to get smart with me, Hera. (Note: Officer Eiffel is amused by Unit 214’s statement.)

HERA

(Chuckles) It was just a suggestion, Officer Eiffel.

EIFFEL

I read ya loud and clear, Hera, I’ll finish the letter.

I loved the introspection we got with each character’s monologues in Am I Alone? (And the discussions of what can be considered ‘alone’ were very interesting!) and I really enjoyed The Empty Man Cometh because it was super creepy! I remember first listening to this episode very early one morning and I was so spooked because I was the only one awake in the house, but this episode really put me on edge until the big reveal at the end of the episode.

Hmph, well if you thought listening to all that mumbo jumbo was creepy, just imagine how I felt living it.

HERA

Officer Eiffel, I don’t think Command needed you to comment on the question’s answer.

EIFFEL

And I don’t think I needed advice from the peanut gallery, Hera, but here we are. (Note: the transcriber believes Officer Eiffel and Unit 214 are merely teasing each other and mean no malice. More notes shall be taken on this subject as the project continues.)

HERA

Just get back to reading the answer, Eiffel.

EIFFEL

Okay, okay. Now where were we? Oh, right.

My favorite episode from season two is definitely The Paranoia Game. It’s just a really funny episode to me and I love how everyone had a concrete theory on who stole the screwdriver, but they were all wrong (I totally called the real culprit beforehand btw and was really happy to hear from the plant monster once again). Season three was filled with so many great episodes, but I’d have to say my favorite was Mayday. It was so interesting to see how Eiffel worked out what he needed to do to survive and I loved how each part of Eiffel’s internal monologue was portrayed by a different person depending on what Eiffel needed to hear at that moment. I honestly loved how that’s a recurring thing in the show as each character is haunted by the ghosts of what they’ve done. Plus Zach Valenti’s acting was amazing and it was super cool to see Eiffel work out such an innovative and clever way to survive so long on a broken down escape pod.

(Note: Officer Eiffel chuckles and speaks with a smug tone) Well, thank you, mystery write. (A smug sigh) It’s always nice to be appreciated for my genius.

HERA

I wonder who Zach Valenti is?

EIFFEL

Some nobody actor by the sounds of it. Probably just thrown in there as an afterthought, I doubt it’s someone important. But, hey. We’re almost done with today’s letter. Looks like there’s only one paragraph left, thank god. Let’s wrap this up quick.

The most obvious answer to which episode I liked the most in season four would be the finale but while I did love it (no matter how heart wrenching some parts were) I think my favorite episode of season four had to be Dirty Work because it was nice to see Jacobi and Minkowski both struggle with their grief ad guilt. Constructive Criticism was a fun episode too, but I mostly enjoyed listening to how much everyone annoyed each other with Kepler’s games. I’ve even been tempted to try one out myself the next time my friends and I are super bored.

EIFFEL (CONT.)

There. I read the stupid question. Happy?

HERA

Commander Minkowski should be pleased to know you’ve finished her request… But wasn’t that last part super weird?

EIFFEL

Yeah… I don’t know who Kepler or Jacobi are and I don’t know what grief it was talking about. But I thought these were coming from someone who had been listening to our logs?

HERA

So did I, but I don’t know what most of that was about.

(Long silence)

EIFFEL

(Note: Officer Eiffel begins to blow air through his lips, making a sputtering noise.) You know what, Hera? This is probably some sort of joke. Command is probably yanking our chain again.

HERA

Maybe you’re right, Officer Eiffel. Either way, nothing like what was mentioned in that last part has happened yet, so there’s no point in worrying about it.

EIFFEL

Exactly what I was thinking! Now, how’s about I finish this recording and we go annoy Minkowski for a bit?

HERA

Don’t you mean you go annoy Minkowski and then leave me to mediate?

EIFFEL

(Note: Officer Eiffel clicks his tongue, most likely paired with finger guns.) I like your style, kid. That plans sounds even better than mine.

HERA

(Sighs) Just finish the recording, Officer Eiffel.

EIFFEL

Alright, alright. (Throat clearing) So there you have it, ladies and gents! Another day, another confusing question and answer! Will tomorrow be just as annoying? Will the question be just as weird? Will Minkowski actually force me to do this for twenty-three more days?

HERA

That last one is definitely a yes.

EIFFEL

Find out this and more on our next episode of Stupid Space Adventures: Wolf 359 edition! Goodnight, everybody!

[conartist23]

HEADS UP, I GET A LITTLE WORDY

In the first half of this year, I was invited to contribute to a WicDiv zine that unfortunately fell apart. For these 2 pages, I fulfilled the role of both artist and writer (article and editor notes) (because clearly I’m a low-key control freak)

I don’t usually explain my intentions, and I think it’s fun when there’s something to unpack in creativity. But I’m going to touch on some points, in broad strokes.

So, after the jump, my musings, and a full transcript in case its hard to read (with tumblr resolution it probably will be)

The brief itself dictated it would be an in world magazine, we’d be making articles and art as if the gods were real. As such, I leaned toward merchandise, because that felt tangible and novel.

So, first up, Persephone Perfume. Probably sparked by a loose name connection (which I touch on in the editors notes). Visually, it speaks to an important meta-element of WicDiv, decapitation. Logically, it was a way to work in a likeness, so the product was identifiable, rather than some disconnected motif. Storms and Pomegranates are tied to the myth of her namesake.

Next, the Camden market shoddy reality of the not at all unnerving perfume head. In a rare dalliance with comedy, my mind went to knock-offs. What’s more tragic than a t-shirt adorned by Spider-man, Shrek and Darth Vader with the words Justice League… A failed product. So, rather than be the misguided but honest result of sweatshop labour, it’s a semi legitimate venture. I say semi, not to make you laugh, but because I imagined merchandising from the gods being a licensing nightmare. It didn’t make sense for me, to have the gods be hands on with trinkets, branded mugs etc. So, what started as a product defined by the corporate machine, soon began to unravel, design problems leading them from idealistic proof to unsatisfying reality. So, the pineapple headed, generic featured toby mug from hell, ended up being abandoned, with swathes of it turning up at markets across the uk, in a desperate last ditch attempt to make something. Watch me hardly touch on this pseudo world building in the tiny paragraph I gave myself. More god merch as easter eggs.

Woden graffiti. At the time, his identity was a mystery, and technically, in world, still would be. Not much else to say other than I enjoyed writing the banter, which stemmed from me actually not really knowing what Woden did (cue headfirst dive back into the comics). Rip is written on the wall, because, everyone fucking dies in Wic Div.

Finally, an image of the underground, because it’s London af. Originally, the train lights were more eye like, to dubiously suggest The Morrigan. It’s not really a visual associated with her, couple that with being ridiculously large, I moved against it. Instead, it’s the shadows cast, you can make out the outline of The Morrigan with a crow. I toyed with touching on will o’ the wisps, to further root in folklore, but efficiency of words and all that. I applied homemade filters, messed with the colours, all to push an analogue fuzziness.

My persefumone joke. Says it all really. I am a bad person and I don’t remotely care. Crimes against comedy ☑︎

With all this said, it’s up to you if I’m using the word jaunt legitimately or ironically…

THE TRANSCRIPT

We managed to get our hands on the full page ad of the pretentiously named “Pom”. This proposed persephone perfume, promised perfection it was not permitted to provide. The product ran into a lot of problems, and went dark for a while. But nothing, could save us from that steely gaze that follows you around the room. It’s back, not quite as fresh, in our segment “spotted in the wild”.

Spotted in the Wild

[see left] Discovered at Camden Market this weekend, a fantastic likeness of dear Persephone.

Wait till you get those proofs back before you run the ads eh?

Heads up (I know, I know, I’m so witty), apparently this one contains chemicals unsanctioned by most known governments… that’s adult speak for this shit is poison. Sounds like someone’s been reading the Hades playbook and wants to invite you all for a jaunt in the underworld. Stay clear of this one.

Unless you want to use the head as an ornament… then pour it out and place it on the mantel. Classy.

Everyone’s favourite Woden? Someone’s favourite? Probably? What is it he does exactly? I don’t know… I love my job don’t fire me.

[EDITOR’S NOTE : Woden is a producer, as in he makes. The job is indifferent to you frankly. I, on the other hand, think you’re…. ok. You’re safe. For now. ]

Thank the gods! ;) praying emoji. Tell me, oh benevolent overlord, in your infinite wisdom, is that huginn or munnin?

[EDITOR’S NOTE : Dont. Push. It.]

Another day, another eagle-eyed (or should that be crow uhurr hurr) reader claiming to have photo evidence of the ever elusive Morrigan.

“Evidence”.

Well… at least the potato that captured such classics as 'alien autopsy 56' and 'bigfoot goes on holiday' survives to this day.

Don’t tell them it’s the lights of an oncoming train okay? Leave a little magic in the world will you? For me?

[EDITOR’S NOTE: How did he not make a perfume/Persephone joke. Persefumone. Forgive me. I am deeply sorry.]

I enjoyed what I did, working to an outline, deadlines. I don’t think I’ll be doing a zine in the immediate future, I’m concentrating on my own projects, particularly on ways to avoid, you know, actually doing them.

You read all that? Want a hug? I know, that boy sure does chat shit. He’s gone now, he can’t hurt you anymore.

[doomedandstoned]

Rendezvous with Italian Doom Trailblazers Messa

~By Calvin Lampert~

As much as I enjoy retro-rock and old school doom (or whatever else you want to call it), I think you’d lie to yourself if you claimed that innovation was one of the biggest virtues of the genre. Usually it’s enough to do what is tried and tested well, but to do something new is rare. I remember a few years back when a band called MESSA and their music video for "Babalon" was making the rounds. Suddenly, there was this young Italian band that combined occult rock with drone metal, and heads were turning left and right.

Clearly, Messa was onto something with their debut Belfry, and it went beyond the fantastic songwriting and Sara's sublime vocals. Something Messa would reiterate with their excellent sophomore record Feast for Water last year, which boldly flirted with elements of doom-jazz and even black metal. So prior to their special set at Roadburn 2019, for which they had brought along their saxophonist Lorenzo, I sat down with Sara (vocals), Marco (guitar & bass), Alberto (guitar & keys), Rocco (drums & additional vocals) and Lorenzo to talk roots, plans, and what it takes to come up with a new sound in a traditional genre. The transcript of our conversation follows.

How are you?

We’re fine.

Where are you actually based? I know it’s somewhere in Northern Italy but I’ve got no details.

Sara: We live about an hour away from Venice, near the mountains. One of the closest mountains around us is Monte Tomba and one of the songs on our first record is named after it. A little bit of Messa trivia.

And how did you all get together? Is there an established music scene in that region?

Sara: We were all in different bands before Messa but knew each other through the local music scene.

Alberto: And we’re the same age.

Sara: Yeah, three of us were born in '92 and we went to school together. Knew each other since we were 14, but we never played in a band together before. And there’s a lot of bands in our area, everything from black metal, to progressive and stoner rock. We all have different musical backgrounds and different genres that inspire us.

So, could you talk about the different bands you were in?

Rocco: Well, I play black metal, and it’s also what I usually listen to. When I started playing for Messa I first had to get used to playing so slowly. But I wanted to try something new, experience something different, and I really enjoy what we’ve been doing.

Lorenzo: Well, I think I’m the alien of the group because my background is so different as a saxophone player. That being Jazz of course. The funny thing is that when I was young, I used to sing for a rock band. Had long hair and all.

Sara: I’d love to see some pictures of that.

And what about you, Sara?

Sara: Well, I’ve always played hardcore punk and fast music in general. I still play bass in Restos Humanos, which is a deathgrind band with Spanish lyrics, as our singer is originally from Colombia. And I’ve got a studio project called Sixcircles that’s psych-folksy kind of stuff. But my main background is playing bass in hardcore punk bands.

Alberto: I’ve been in several surf rock bands and I have a '70s prog band. I went to a conservatory to study jazz guitar. That’s also where I met Lorenzo. And I met the rest of Messa through a stoner rock band I was involved in.

Marco: I’ve always been in rock bands. I had a band called The Sade that was a mix of Danzig and The Hellacopters, you know that Scandinavian rock sound. Been doing that for 10 years and then Messa came about.

And when you first started Messa did you go into it with a concept in mind, or did the sound clarify itself through jamming together?

Sara: We had a certain idea in mind. We knew we wanted to play doom because it’s something none of us had ever done before. And the more we developed the music the vision developed with it. It went hand in hand.

Still, I’ve heard my fair share of old school doom bands and practically none have ever been as adventurous as you. I had always assumed there was some degree of deliberation behind that, but did it really just come about like that?

Marco: I think we’re very different minds with different musical interests.

Rocco: And we fully put ourselves into it.

Sara: And we work together very closely. We’re bound to each other when we work on songs. But at the same time, we don’t want to be held back by boundaries and get stuck into something. Like using the Rhodes Piano. We just went for it. Said “Why not, let’s do that.” There’s a lot of great '70s doom bands out there that we love, but we as musicians wanted to create something different.

Would you not wanting to get stuck in something also explain the slight shift in sound between 'Belfry' and 'Feast for Water'?

Marco: Well, for Belfry it was first just me and Sara wanting to do something different with doom. After a few months we shared our work with Rocco and Alberto and started jamming. And for Feast we had a similar approach, wanting to do something new, not be satisfied with the first shot, the first riff.

Sara: And I’d say it was natural that there was change. Belfry was composed rather quickly in a few months. Feast took more time to be developed. We got to know each other better as musicians in between the two records. And like I said, we’re very close and still are growing together, on an individual level, on a musical level and a spiritual level.

And how long was Messa a band before you went into the studio to record 'Belfry'?

Sara: As a serious band? Less than a year. We first got together in November, recorded in August 2015, and Belfry was released in 2016.

Marco: It was very straight forward. We went into the studio with the entire material written and recorded Belfry instead of playing the material live and see how people react to it and then try to make an EP and wait. No big demos. Just straight into the studio.

Put it in the can and you’re out again.

Rocco: One shot, one kill.

Marco: But yeah, straight into the studio, really low budget. But we were sure of what we had done, we believed in our work.

And were you already signed to Aural Music at that point?

Marco: We sent out some stuff and we made a Bandcamp that had a rehearsal recording with some black and white pictures as cover, really simple. And then Emiliano from Aural music wrote us. Said “Please, I want to hear more. It sounds really interesting.” He was also interested because despite being Italian himself, he’s only got like three Italian bands on his label.

Feast for Water by Messa

And what is the local music scene in general like in your region? You said that you were all based in pretty much the same area, right?

Sara: Well, three of us live a maximum of 10 kilometers away from each other. And we live in tiny places, there’s no huge city. It’s a five minute drive to rehearsals. For some of us it’s a bit longer, like an hour.

Rocco: And there’s a lot of musicians in our area, from all kinds of different genres.

Marco: As far as doom and stoner rock goes though, maybe not as much in our own region, but in the whole of Italy there’s some bands that we want to mention. There’s Grime from Trieste, who play sludge metal. There’s Naga from Naples, a great blackened doom band who are friends of ours.

Sara: Super nice guys, but devastating, especially live. One of the best Italian bands at the moment, in my opinion.

Marco: Thing is, you gotta drive at least one hour to get to most concerts in Italy. What’s happening music-wise is usually restricted to the big cities.

A bit of a thematic jump, but what are some defining records or bands for you?

Sara: I think for each one of us there’s gotta be some Led Zeppelin record in our lists.

Marco: Yeah, I think we gravitate more towards Zeppelin than Sabbath.

Sara: Well I like them both, but I’d say Messa is way more influenced by Led Zeppelin than Black Sabbath. As for other records, the first –- no, all records from The Devil's Blood. I think that goes for Marco, as well.

Did you catch the Molasses (the new band of The Devil's Blood vocalist Farida Lemouchi) set yesterday?

Sara: I loved it.

Marco: I think it was missing some of that darkness.

Sara: But I think that was intentional, it was going for something different. It’s a rib of The Devil's Blood. They can’t be the same. The concert was great. Farida's voice is amazing.

Marco: As a project beside The Devil's Blood it was super good concert. If you just treat it as its own thing and don’t think about it coming from The Devil's Blood. The drummer was great.

I really enjoyed the guitars and unusual structures.

Sara: And the Rhodes Piano and guitars. I love twin guitars. How can you not love them?

Alberto: Disraeli Gears by Cream.

Sara: So, we’ve got Zeppelin, The Devil's Blood, Cream. Ah, Transilvanian Hunger by Darkthrone.

Rocco: Oh, yeah. I used to listen to that one a lot when I was younger. It’s still good.

Lorenzo: I’d say the biggest influence for me was Lush Life by Joe Henderson. Best record I ever listened to in my life. But I love all the jazz greats and can listen to another one each day.

Marco: One band we haven’t mentioned so far that really changed how we wrote music was Bohren & Der Club of Gore. I cried the two times I’ve seen them live. We exchanged bands when we started writing and Bohren was one of them, and they really got us excited to experiment with music. So, that’s one of the central bands that gave us the push in the direction Messa was going.

Sara: It was game-changing.

See, I was almost waiting for you to name drop Bohren. If I have to explain Messa to somebody Bohren is sure to be mentioned, too.

Marco: Thinking of, there’s this band that also takes cues from Bohren who have released a new record recently. But they’re originally from the whole screamo/post-hardcore scene, and they mix a bit of that into it. They’re called Radare. They’re great, check them out.

I’ll be sure to do that. What was the preparation for Roadburn like? They must’ve approached you first to come and play, right?

Sara: Yeah, they asked us to play. We’re super happy to be here and being able to play at these great venues, work with professionals and play with a lot of awesome bands. It’s such a cool opportunity to be here.

Rocoo: Yeah, it’s quite surreal. I won’t really believe it happened until after the show tonight.

Marco: As for preparations, we rehearsed a lot with Lorenzo to get ready for the show.

So, will you perform more often Lorenzo in the future then?

Marco: We’ll see how it goes. It depends on his price. He’s an expensive dude (laughs).

Sara (to Lorenzo): Are you ready to sleep on a floor for five days and have no showers?

Lorenzo: Yeah, we’ll see how it goes.

Sara: We had a lot of rehearsals for this and we worked hard to arrange the songs and tracklist in way that it flows nicely. We’ll play material from both records as well as a song we never performed live before. We’re anxious and happy to get on stage.

Marco: And shortly after Roadburn, we've got a 10-day tour with Sabbath Assembly.

Sara: And we’re playing Hellfest this summer and after that we’ll see what happens.

And is this the first time you’re playing with the full line up?

Sara: Actually the second time. The first time was the release show for Feast for Water.

Marco: We did that show in our rehearsal space, which is in an old church. it was a friends only thing, no facebook event, just invitation by email.

Rocco: And we played together with Gorrch, which is a great black metal band and good friends of ours.

Belfry by Messa

So, what sets have you already seen at Roadburn and which ones are you trying to catch tonight?

Marco: Well, Gold is playing soon, so definitely them.

Sara: Triptykon. We saw Twin Temple.

Rocco: I’ll see Midnight.

Alberto: Heilung.

Rocco: Petbrick was fucking freaky.

Marco: AA Williams.

Sara: Craft is playing tonight but we’ll unfortunately miss them.

Yeah, I was thinking about watching them too, but alas there are clashes. What are your plans for the future? Can we expect some new music soon?

Sara: We haven’t really worked on any new music so far. We’ve been concentrating on preparing for Roadburn and the tour in general mostly. Of course, sooner or later the call for new music will come. I have some ideas I’d like to develop and I think the same goes for the rest of the band.

Last question. Which five objects would one have to lay in a pentagram to summon you?

Rocco: A beer. A piece of wood.

Sara: A burning fire.

Rocco: A burning fire for sure. Something from nature. So I guess water and sand.

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[mittensmorgul]

5.16: *cue horrifying yet somehow disturbingly humorous montage of all of Sam and Dean’s deaths to this point* *shakes fist at 3.11 and 4.08*

Yep, this is another one of those episodes I have really already covered, and recently, in multiple posts on s12... *waves hello at Dabb again* *gee I wonder why this episode has had so much relevance in s12? we may never know >.>*

Heaven, the Samulet, Joshua, the incredibly squicky idea that John and Mary were “soul mates” based on the gross cupid touch making them into the “perfect couple” because they weren’t “perfect” until after Mary was dead, Dean and Sam’s VASTLY DIFFERENT notions of “happy memories” and the fact their heavens are sort of each other’s version of hell (i.e. Sam and Dean are not soul mates, they are absolutely repulsed by each other’s heavens), the fact that Heaven is a construct that we apply our own personalities and experiences to in order to perceive it:

*again under a cut, because wtf is wrong with me, I keep saying “I have already talked this into the ground” about every episode, but apparently I’m trying to talk it straight through to the other side of the planet. I suspect I’ll be bobbing up in the Indian Ocean any minute now*

This is why, once Dean “broke out of his heaven” and set out on the Axis Mundi to find Sam’s heaven, it didn’t look like a pristine white corridor the way Heaven seems to look to the angels (or just in s10 and later, or whatever).

Castiel: Some people see a tunnel or a river. What do you see? Dean: Nothing. My dash. I’m in my car. I’m on a road. Castiel: Alright. A road. For you it’s a road. Follow it, Dean. You’ll find Sam. Follow the road.

Because we were seeing Heaven from Dean’s perspective here, we also saw the road. But he had Cas to give him the secret hack on how to get out of his heaven to find Sam’s heaven.

Ash later underscores this, and strangely 10.17 proves him out. We saw “Bobby Singer” land (like Ash described “Winchester Land” as a section of heaven. We saw ALL the Bobby Singers grouped together in one long corridor. Not ONE BIG HEAVEN COMPARTMENT. All those Bobby’s were NOT soul mates.

Okay? Okay.

I think I’ve seriously talked plenty about this episode. Have my tag for it if you’re interested in the metaphysical nitty-gritty of it, 

http://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/tagged/spn%205.16

or my tag for Heaven stuff (and all the other realms) heaven hell purgatory and the empty

Dean actually didn’t wake up when someone sneaked right up to his bed and stole his gun out from under his pillow? Incredible. But hey, at least he woke up quick and figured out what was going on before Roy and Walt shot him and Sam...

Seriously one of my favorite Dean lines in the entire series, because Roy and Walt think it’s bravado, but Dean 100% ain’t kidding here:

Roy: Killin’ Sam was right but Dean... Walt: He made us and we just snuffed his brother, you idiot. You want to spend the rest of your life knowing Dean Winchester’s on your ass, ‘cause I don’t. Shoot 'im. Dean: Go ahead, Roy, do it. But I’m going to warn you, when I come back I’m going to be pissed. C’mon! Let’s get this show on the road.

Just like Charlie thought she was “dreaming” in 9.04 when she was dead in and heaven, Dean thinks he’s dreaming here now...

Until something “breaks through” his dream in a traumatic way, trying to get his attention and alerting him to the fact that no, he is definitely not dreaming. Cas “disrupts” Dean’s memory with a reminder of his own death and then tries to communicate with him on the radio.

Dean: I’m dead. Cas: Condolences.

and then when he realizes:

DEAN: Heaven? How did I get to heaven? CASTIEL: (on radio) Please, listen. This spell, this connection, it’s difficult to maintain. DEAN: Wait. If I’m in heaven, then where’s Sam?

NOT because he assumed Sam would be in his personal heaven with him, because HE WAS TERRIFIED THAT SAM DIDN’T GO TO HEAVEN AT ALL. I mean, just two episodes ago he was detoxing Sam off the demon blood again and watching Sam control demons enough to kill the Horseman Famine. I mean... >.>

(Dean was terrified that Sam was actually in Hell here, not wibbly over Sam not being WITH HIM)

Meanwhile Sam is experiencing Awkward Thanksgiving with Complete Strangers, and has no idea he’s dead or in heaven, because Cas wasn’t able to connect to Sam the way he did to Dean to pass that info along... hmmmm

Dean was then able to “Call” Cas through the tv, but as the transcript describes the connection:

“Dean and Sam move over to the TV. They can see Castiel but the picture rolls and is filled with static. His voice fades in and out and is sometimes distorted.”

He heard Dean “praying” to him, but his connection isn’t as solid as it was in Dean’s actual Heaven.

I’m not actually making any real s12 meta points here, just riffing on all the destiel-y bits because it’s late and the rewatch is actually cutting into my nightly writing time now... I should probably try to stay on point and just get to the point here...

Cas thinks he’s got a couple of “Inside Men” who can get information for him that can only be obtained in heaven... which heck sounds an awful lot like 10.17, called Inside Man... I wonder why... Oh, right, it was also written by Andrew Dabb. What a coincidence.

CASTIEL: (on TV) It’s called the Axis Mundi. It’s a path that runs through heaven. Different people see it as different things. For you, it’s two-lane asphalt. The road will lead you to the Garden. You’ll find Joshua there. And Joshua… can take us to God. (The pictures starts to break up badly.) The Garden. Quick. Hurry.

The Road, that Dean drove on to reach Sam’s heaven. It’s ENTIRELY METAPHORICAL, because Heaven is a construct. And Zachariah is officially messing with Sam and Dean.

SAM: Dean. What are you doing? DEAN: Looking for a road. SAM: You… (Dean opens the closet under the stairs) You think the road is in a closet? DEAN: (turns on the light) We’re in heaven, Sam, okay? I mean, our memories are coming true. Cas is on TV. Finding a road in a closet would be pretty much the most (he sees something on the floor) normal thing to happen to us today.

(Dean finds the road in the closet)

And we’ve talked this scene to death recently as well, now that Mary’s back.

Sam is FREAKING MISERABLE watching Dean and Mary interact as if he didn’t even exist, Mary cutting the crusts off his sandwich and giving him pie, but even one of Dean’s “greatest hits” memories includes the fact that Mary and John were fighting, because he got to care for Mary and tell her she was loved, that he loved her.

And that’s it, the only time in canon Dean has ever said “I love you” to anyone.

SAM: I just never realized how long you’ve been cleaning up Dad’s messes.

And speaking of messes that Dean had to clean up, Sam finds the next “road,” on a post card.

Sam is GIDDY to find his dog from when he ran away, and DEAN IS FREAKING MISERABLE.

*HEAVILY IMPLIED THAT DEAN IS STILL HIDING JUST HOW AWFUL THINGS WERE FOR HIM WHEN “DAD CAME HOME” AND FOUND SAM GONE HERE*

Dean walks out the door of the trailer, while they are STILL IN SAM’S HEAVEN, because they haven’t yet found another “road,” and walks straight into what Dean considers one of the worst nights of his life, and Sam considers one of the best...

SAM: Dean, I’m sorry. I just, uh… DEAN: I know. You didn’t, you didn’t think of it like that. SAM: Dean! DEAN: C’mon! Your heaven is somebody else’s Thanksgiving. Okay. It’s bailing on your family. What do you want me to say? SAM: Man, I never got the crusts cut off my PB & J. I just don’t look at family the way you do.

And then we see how Ash hacked heaven. 

ASH: See, you gotta stop thinking of heaven as one place. It’s more like a butt-load of places all crammed together. Like Disneyland except without all the anti-Semitism.

...

ASH: Pretty much. A few people share—special cases. What not. DEAN: What do you mean ‘special’? ASH: Aw, you know. Like, uh, soul-mates. (Silence greets his statement. Dean and Sam don’t look at each other.) Anyway. Most people can’t leave their own private Idaho’s. DEAN: But you ain’t most people.

Yet Ash found Sam and Dean together... and he made some assumptions. He didn’t know that Cas had been giving Dean the “ain’t most people” cheat codes to Heaven.

But Zachariah’s already got Sam and Dean trapped:

MARY: Honey. Why are you up? DEAN: Look. I’m-I’m sorry. I love you but you’re not real and we don’t have time— MARY: Did you have another nightmare? Tell me. DEAN: I gotta go. MARY: Then how 'bout I tell you my nightmare, Dean? The night I burned. ... MARY: Don’t you walk away from me. (Dean stops) I never loved you. You were my burden. I was shackled to you. Look what it got me. (She blinks and her eyes turn yellow.)

And about this point Dean and Sam both realize that Heaven can be just as good at torture as Hell can...

MARY: And then, finally, I was dead. The one silver lining was that at least I was away from you. (She takes a big breath.) Everybody leaves you, Dean. You noticed? Mommy. Daddy. Even Sam.

But that is NOT THE REAL MARY. That’s not even her ghost or spirit or soul or whatever. Zachariah calls it a “Blessed Memory” of her, and honestly that’s pretty much what Dean has always thought of his memories of Mary. 

They finally meet Joshua and arrive at the garden, where we learn that God talks to Joshua, but it’s really only a one sided conversation. It wasn’t until 11.20 when Metatron was allowed to talk BACK to God (and I mean that in the sense that he back-talked at God) and push him to accept his responsibility for EVERYTHING, and it STILL took three more episodes after that before he finally acted on it at the 11th hour and because of Dean’s direct influence on both him and Amara:

JOSHUA: He knows what the angels are doing. He knows that the Apocalypse has begun. He just doesn’t think it’s his problem. DEAN: (stunned) Not his problem? JOSHUA: God saved you already. He put you on that plane. He brought back Castiel. He granted you salvation in heaven (he turns to face Sam directly) and after everything you’ve done too. It’s more than he’s intervened in a long time. He’s finished. Magic amulet or not, you won’t be able to find him.

And back to the “magic amulet.”

Proof to Dean about his own “deadbeat dad” from way back in 3.09, and now proof to Cas about his “deadbeat dad” in 5.16. And that was just one deadbeat dad too many for Dean. When he first gave Cas the amulet in 5.02, he warned Cas not to lose it, and then asked for it back later... but now, 

Dean’s first act on reviving from being dead is to call Cas. And he has to watch Cas’s moment where his faith in God breaks completely, and he returns the amulet and disappears...

Sam is still talking about finding another way to end all of this, but Dean’s losing his faith in himself, and throws the amulet in the trash...

Now in s12, Dean does have faith in himself again. He doesn’t doubt his instincts anymore. He’s not dealing with things so far above his pay grade that he can’t even get straight answers and is getting dragging around by the nose by middle management angels.

God has made Dean pancakes and told him he and Sam can take care of Humanity now... (with Cas’s help of course, because God keeps bringing Cas back for them).

The one thing Dean has to reclaim for himself is Mary. She’s absolutely not this warped Torture Hallucination Version that Zachariah presented him with, but she’s also not just that “Blessed Memory” version that Dean had presented himself... Nor are Sam and Dean the little boys that she thinks she remembers from her own version of Heaven. They’re just as fake as Dean’s childhood memory of Mary was in his heaven.

And to continue this already ridiculously long rant with more from the continuing series of Chats With Lizbob:

mittensmorgul maybe dean will tell mary what heaven's really like, since she's got this weird idea her whole family was there with her... he needs to set her straight, tell her that NONE of them actually share a heaven because he and sam have been there that it's just your memories and not real

elizabethrobertajones yeah, I can almost hear that - "It's not real Mary, WE are£

mittensmorgul: that PEOPLE are real, that the Dean and Sam on earth here with her are real. Heaven was just memories

(I love that there’s an accidental typo of a pound symbol there, like a random reminder I’m talking to a British Person, in case I was forgetting to read Lizbob’s parts in an English accent...)

mittensmorgul well, she's already brought up heaven twice, once saying she didn't remember it, the next saying she was there with John and her little boys, and now I think she needs to hear the truth

elizabethrobertajones DOROTHY Dream? Charlie, you died. Don't worry about it, though. You're not a real hunter until you've died and come back again. CHARLIE Slow down. Why would you think I died? DOROTHY Heaven -- it's your dream life.

Because as much as Mary knows, I’m not sure she really understands all of this yet. And I think she really needs to in order to be able to finally let go of the past, for better or worse.

Okay, now I have officially used up more than an hour of my writing time on this episode I’m gonna go see if I can’t write some fic instead. :P

[goodra-king]

Transcript of Great Experiences Make for Loyal Customers

Transcript of Great Experiences Make for Loyal Customers written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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John Jantsch: This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Klaviyo. Klaviyo is a platform that helps growth-focused eCommerce brands drive more sales with super-targeted, highly relevant email, Facebook and Instagram marketing.

John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Micah Solomon. He’s the bestselling author and one of America’s most popular keynote speakers on building bottom line growth through customer service. And we’re going to talk about his newest book, Ignore Your Customers (and They’ll Go Away), the simple playbook for delivering the ultimate customer service experience. So Micah, welcome back.

Micah Solomon: Oh, it’s great to be here, John.

John Jantsch: I can hear some people snickering saying, “Really, will they go away? Is that’s all it takes is ignoring them and they’ll go away?” But that’s not what we’re here to talk about, is it?

Micah Solomon: Well, I got that reaction once or twice and yeah, it can feel like that at the end of a long day, can’t it?

John Jantsch: It can sometimes, but again, we need those customers. Customers are King. Why is it that this is the part that is so hard for people to get right.

Micah Solomon: I think that by any objective standard customer service has improved over the years, but the thing is our customer expectations have skyrocketed as well. It’s not good enough to just do an okay job. And there’s so much value in doing a fantastic job because we’re no longer in the mad men era where Don Draper and Peggy Olson could convince you that Lucky Strikes were good for your throat, we’re not in that era anymore. We’re still interested in marketing, but only if it’s consonant with our experience as customers and the experience that our friends and the people we listen to online are having.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think the hard part about it is, I mean, really at the end of the day, businesses love their customers. They want to treat them well. They don’t want to provide bad service. But I think people underestimate just how hard it actually is to do it elegantly.

Micah Solomon: That’s exactly right. And I like to say I might… You’re interested how I’m a keynote speaker, I’m also a consultant. In fact, Ink crowned me the other day, Ink Magazine, as the world’s number one customer service turnaround expert. And then, which was so sweet and then he admitted I’m also the only one he’s ever met. But what I do is I walk into companies and I mystery shop them and see how they’re doing. And then I work with them to transform their customer experience, and what I find is most of the companies that hire me are already doing pretty well. They already understand the value of stuff, but they want to reach that exceptional level that you’re talking about. And it is hard. It is really hard. There’s many aspects to it.

John Jantsch: Yeah, that’s an interesting point because I know over the years a lot of the companies that have hired me to do marketing consulting are ones that kind of outwardly look like they’re doing all right. But it’s-

Micah Solomon: Yeah, exactly.

John Jantsch: … it’s the mentality of, but I want to invest in this that I think is really what you’re experiencing probably as well, isn’t it?

Micah Solomon: Yes. That sounds right.

John Jantsch: The kind of phrase or buzzword out there now is to be a customer first company. How do you take that beyond just the-

Micah Solomon: Smiling harder?

John Jantsch: … Team meeting?

Micah Solomon: Customer first, it’s a little bit of a misnomer, at least when I’m talking about it. I would say arguably employees should be first because they’re going to be delivering the service. But what we’re talking about with customer first, if we’re talking about the right way, is to take the customer’s perspective. I call this Micah’s Red Bench Principle, and it’s that the customers really only care about themselves. They care about their kids for sure and their spouse and their dog and so forth, but they don’t care about us as much as we wish they would. We need… Sadly, it’s true. So we need to see things from their perspective and understand they’re not really interested in our organizational chart, they’re not interested in any of that. If you can frame things in your mind and in your processes and in your attitude from a customer’s perspective, you’re going to do a lot better.

John Jantsch: All right, so that leads us right to how do you get in their head? I mean, how do you get that perspective?

Micah Solomon: Well that is an excellent question. You hire someone like me and I mean, there’s many different ways to do it, but you can hire someone like me to be your customer and see how it goes. And I can learn a lot. You could do this yourself as well. I would check all these things that you think are running fine and probably aren’t like… John, you’re like me, so you probably check this. But most companies never check their web forums to see if anyone actually answers those inquiries, the answers usually never. You check all those things. You make sure that it’s working the way a customer would want it to. On the website, you may want to hire a user experience person because that stuff’s really important too.

John Jantsch: Yeah, yeah. Our customers get to publish now. How has that dynamic changed not only customer service but certainly the need to be intentional about it?

Micah Solomon: I think of customer service as the new marketing and if you do a great job, if you provide a good customer experience and a warm customer service, then people are going to talk about you and they’ll also talk about you if you’re efficient and you’re in the right location and all that. But one thing they love to talk about is how they’ve been treated, so it’s extremely valuable. It’s also, I mean it’s arguably free. The staffing right, and so forth is not actually free but you do what you’re supposed to be doing and you get this free marketing as well, and of course it can go the other direction as well.

John Jantsch: Who in your mind, and I know you profile some bigger companies in particular that are household names in the book, but who do you think’s getting it right? That’s part A, and then maybe talk about a not so well known company that you think has gotten it right and that that’s made a difference.

Micah Solomon: The companies I cover in my book, Ignore Your Customers (and They’ll Go Away) range from ones that we all think about, Nordstrom’s, Zappos, we spent some time with both of them, USAA, which is huge in insurance and financial services and a lot of other stuff. Virgin Hotels, which actually will eventually be an enormous chain, but right now is only just a couple of hotels, we spent some time with them. Safelite Auto Glass, which if you think about it, they come into your life probably on a challenging day. I mean, best case is a rock hit your window and you need a new windshield. Worst case, someone actually intentionally broke your window because they broke into your car and replacing the windshield is only one of your problems. They come into your life on a bad day and they don’t only strive to make things okay, they strive to delight you. I spent some time with Safelite Auto Glass.

Micah Solomon: Some companies that I can see, John, neither of us need this but Drybar, which is for women and maybe men who are in hairbands, they’re the people who have done so well by offering a blow out and styling, we spent a bunch of time with them. MOD Pizza, which is growing like gangbusters and a voice over IP company named Nextiva. All of those, I would say are doing a spectacular job in very different industries.

John Jantsch: I want to remind you that this episode is brought to you by Klaviyo. Klaviyo helps you build meaningful customer relationships by listening and understanding cues from your customers. And this allows you to easily turn that information into valuable marketing messages. There’s powerful segmentation email auto-responders that are ready to go. Great reporting. You want to learn a little bit about the secret to building customer relationships? They’ve got a really fun series called Klaviyo’s Beyond Black Friday, it’s a docu-series. A lot of fun quick lessons. Just head on over to klaviyo.com/beyondbf, beyond black Friday.

John Jantsch: Tell me a little bit about Safelite? Because I had one of those experiences where I had to replace my windshield. And I will tell you that I think the entire experience, I wouldn’t… I’d love for you to talk about the delight part, but I will just tell you from a get the job done part, it was delightful. I scheduled, they came out at the scheduled time, they replaced it, everything went great. I mean, from my standpoint it was so convenient, I was able to schedule the entire thing online, pay for it online. The person came out, I didn’t even know they were there and it was done. I mean, from that standpoint it was as frictionless as possible, but what did you find that they do that you feel is over and above that?

Micah Solomon: That’s a lot of it. And to pull that off is harder than I would imagine. They have to have the part ready, they have to marry the part to the work order. And then they’ve worked really hard on the scheduling part. They first did something that was too restrictive where they told you exactly when the driver was show up, but what they found was that the drivers out in the field wanted a little more control over it because maybe another job is going a little longer, they involve the drivers in that. They’ve done some things for people who are really worried about personal safety. You now get a little photo of the person, a little bio and so forth. I guess someone shows up, they’re a totally different person, you could head it off at the pass. The delight part. I think it’s most of those things that you talked about the frictionless, but it’s also the customer service training that they’ve gone into to make sure that they are treating you well on a personal and personable level.

John Jantsch: Let’s talk about silos inside of organizations.

Micah Solomon: Oh, no.

John Jantsch: A lot of organizations have marketing and sales and service, as separate arms of the organization. Maybe you’ve not encountered any of these, but I’m told they exist still today. When it comes to the idea of customer service, or a perspective about this customer first thinking, what role do marketing and sales play in that? Again, I know that’s a really loaded and big question, but I guess in some ways, another way I could ask that is as how do you get every marketing, sales and service kind of all on the same page?

Micah Solomon: Well this is really important and many people have studied this. You don’t want the salesperson who over sells beyond what the customer support team can really bring to life. Marketing, you don’t want to over sell your product and then have it be beyond what your company can provide either. That’s very important. And then having the salespeople really know the product, really know the team that’s supporting the product. I think all of that’s extremely important. Now, John, you live way out in the country, so doesn’t it potentially get a little bit sick when people talk about silos and it’s entirely a metaphor at this point?

John Jantsch: That is a good point. I grew up on a farm, so we put grain in those silos.

Micah Solomon: Totally.

John Jantsch: All right, let’s talk about generations. I have four millennial aged children and their buying habits or the way that they consider who they’re going to buy from, who they’re going to stay with are substantially different than mine, I think. Or at least a different setup. I wouldn’t say there’s… We have the same values and connection with companies. But I think that, for example, if they go on a website, it doesn’t work the way they think it’s supposed to work, that’s the end of the story. Whereas I might go, ah, this is clunky, but they’re a good brand. I like them and I might fight through. From a service standpoint, how do you work with companies that A, have multi-generational employees maybe or B, certainly customers?

Micah Solomon: I tend to focus on the customer side. And what I would say is that all of us are becoming millennials. If a business can delight John’s kids, are they girls? Are they?

John Jantsch: Yes. All four girls.

Micah Solomon: Four girls and two of them are millennials, that’s awesome. My feeling is if you can delight the millennials, then pretty soon you’ll delight their older brothers and sisters and then you’ll delight John as well. I was talking with Herve Humler, who’s one of the actual founders of the Ritz Carlton Hotel Company and he said that’s how we do it. If a millennial is asking for something, we’ll figure that mom and dad are going to ask for it pretty soon. And I think that’s very important. There’s even a group on Facebook called My Life’s Officially Over, My Parents have Joined Facebook.

Micah Solomon: What do millennials want? They want it to work. They expect it to work. I mean, I think of millennials as technologically savvy is sort of true, but what they really are is what you said John, they’re technologically intolerant. When I describe having a 1984 Mac, yeah, I talked to millennials, they’re like, “Oh, that’s really cool.” And then I say, “Well yes and no. Can you believe that to install Microsoft Word, I had to switch in these floppy disks for five hours?” And they’re like, “No, that computer is dead to me. I like the old rainbow logo, but that’s about it.” They’re technologically intolerant, but I think that really keeps us on our toes. They’re also very interested in what is perhaps incorrectly called authenticity, but they’re okay with businesses with a little bit more of the warts showing because it’s more personable and they are good with what I call an eye level or peer on peer style of service.

Micah Solomon: They don’t want you putting on airs like we see in Buckingham Palace and all those historical shows with the one arm behind the back and stuff. It’s more like… And I was interviewing millennial traveler for one of my books and she said, “What’s comfortable for me is someone who’s serving me, but we are on a level, I understand that next week if I was short on money, maybe I’ll be working as a barista. That’s the style of service that’s most comfortable for them.”

John Jantsch: Couple of great points there. All right, let’s talk about hiring for customer service. I think that some of the best customer service people are just born that way, and you may dispute that. But I mean, how do you keep a… If as your company grows and you’ve built this brand on people love us, we serve them well how do you keep that culture alive with the fact that you have to get bodies in seats, in some cases.

Micah Solomon: Sometimes the reason, and I can speak from experience, having literally started in my basement, sometimes the owner is so great about customer service and not totally because it’s their personality. But because you have a proverbial loaded gun to your head, I mean, because we know the value of every customer. You need to get this across that every individual customer is irreplaceable. I would actually argue that customers in the plural sort of doesn’t exist, that our only customer is the one that’s in front of you right now. Born that way is a very important point. If you can hire for traits, it’s ideal. Now, if you’re in a very technical field, Google, you also have to hire for technical aptitude and maybe even in technical training, but for customer facing positions, if you can hire for traits you’ll do best. Do you have a second for me to tell you the traits you want?

John Jantsch: Yes, I do. I’d love it.

Micah Solomon: All right, so I’m going to give you a rule of thumb. I will, however, say it’s better to go in with one of these great companies like Gallup that has a more involved methodology. But a lot of people aren’t going to do that, so I’ve got a rule of actually all five fingers. Here’s how to remember it. Picture the superstore, Petco. All right? And then outside of Petco, put a big wet dog. All right, so John, what is the superstore?

John Jantsch: Petco.

Micah Solomon: Right. And is the dog dry or is it wet?

John Jantsch: It is wet and in fact it’s getting ready to shake.

Micah Solomon: All right, so you have this big wet… So the reason you want to remember this is because my five traits that make you really good at customer service, spelled wetco, W-E-T-C-O. It’s silly but it works. W is warmth, this just means they like other people. E is empathy, this means they can sort of, well not sort of, they can actually sense what another person’s thinking without them saying it. T is teamwork, this is a willingness to involve your entire team to find a solution for the customer. C is conscientiousness, this means detail orientedness and O is optimism. Specifically, it’s what Marty Seligman calls an optimistic, explanatory style. If you get someone with an pessimistic explanatory style customers they can have a bad day and they can bite your head off and you have to be like, “Oh my goodness, I must’ve done something horribly wrong.” You’re going to call in sick for the rest of the day. Go home, never come back to work. Understandable but not ideal.

Micah Solomon: What you want is someone who will say, “Oh, well that was a challenging conversation. I hope she feels better tomorrow.” Maybe I could have done better. I’m going to talk it over with my manager, but I’m also going to dust myself off, go back to work. Warmth, empathy, teamwork, conscientiousness and optimism. Those are the traits to hire for. However, most of us have already hired, however we’ve hired. And so we’ve got these people, well, what can we do? Well, some of these things can be trained for, there’s a kind of empathy that can’t be trained for, that’s called dispositional empathy. And that’s just the born that way part. But there’s another kind, which is called situational empathy. And this can absolutely be trained for.

Micah Solomon: For instance, in health care, sometimes I consult with hospitals. One of the issues they have is that those nice, hopefully nice people on the phone doing the scheduling, they’re generally in a different building from where the patients are. They don’t encounter a patient all day and almost none of them has ever been an inpatient in a hospital. You have these two barriers to the dispositional empathy that they need. What do you do? Well, you realize it’s a problem, or as we call in the biz, a challenge and then you get working on it. You simulate clinical moments. One thing I’ve always suggested for nurses, and none of them have ever taken me up on this, but with nurses, I say, “Hey, you want to know how long it seems between when that buzzer’s pressed and when you show up? How about this? Drink four liters of water.” No one has taken me up on it. But you get the idea, right?

John Jantsch: Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that’s interesting. I thought you were going to suggest that they were going to inoculate them with some infectious disease or something so that they would all have to spend two weeks in a hospital or something.

Micah Solomon: Oh gosh, no. But there are things like that you can do if you want to think about your customers who have disabilities, there are these heavy boots that you can wear to give you a feeling. And so yes, so some of that, but mostly it’s going to be role-plays and video and in person training.

John Jantsch: Speaking with Micah Solomon, his latest book is Ignore Your Customers (and They’ll Go Away). Micah, tell us where people can find out more about you, your work and your books.

Micah Solomon: Come to my website if you don’t mind, you’re going to have to be masterful at spelling biblical names. It’s micahsolomon.com which is M-I-C-A-H at M-I-C-A-H-S-O-L-O-M-O-N. There’s no a and solomon.com or if that’s just too much for you. Here is my favorite. John, this is very Abby Hoffman, I have a URL just for the book and it is ignorethisbook.com.

John Jantsch: Oh, that’s awesome. Well, Micah, thanks for dropping by and next time you talk to Ira, tell him you were on a show that’s more popular… Probably not more popular, somebody thought was more influential than him. Hopefully we’ll run into you soon next time I’m out there on the road.

Micah Solomon: Thanks for everything John.

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Transcript of Getting the Most Out of Your Content

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John Jantsch: Producing content’s become a marketer’s primary job. But how do you maximize your reach? How do you make sure that there’s some ROI every time you hit publish? Well this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I speak with Pamela Wilson, author of Master Content Strategy, and that’s what we’re going to talk about. How to make content drive the bottom line.

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast is brought to you by Klaviyo. Klaviyo is a platform that helps growth focused e-commerce brands drive more sales, with super targeted, highly relevant email, Facebook and Instagram marketing.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, this is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Pamela Wilson. She’s the founder of Big Brand System, and the author of a book we’re going to talk about today, Master Content Strategy: How to maximize your reach, and boost your bottom line every time you hit publish. Doesn’t that sound wonderful? Pamela, thanks for joining me.

Pamela Wilson: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. That is definitely the goal, right? To maximize your reach and get your ideas out into the world.

John Jantsch: All right, so let me start with a word that’s in the title. What is content strategy look like? I’m sure a lot of us marketers have been talking about you need a content strategy, but define that for somebody who maybe isn’t a marketer.

Pamela Wilson: You know, it might be easiest to say what it’s not. It is not throwing pasta at the wall to see what sticks. It is approaching your content with some kind of over-arching goal for the people you want to reach, and what you want it to accomplish for your business. The way I talk about it in the book is that the needs of your website change during the lifecycle of your website. So, what you need in the early days of your website is very different than what you need if your sight has been live for six, eight, 10 years.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and you know, I actually think that you can take it a step farther, and I mean, one of the strategies might be what can you actually get done? Or, how can you actually do things in a way that allows you to get more done, or to be more efficient in producing your content? Because I think for a lot of my listeners, and a lot of small business owners, this whole need to produce content has become the biggest task of all.

Pamela Wilson: Right. Yeah, and I recognize that, when I talk about the lifecycle in the book, I talk about how one of the big goals in the first year of your site is to just become a better content creator. Just to tain confidence. The way you do that is producing a lot of content. It’s like anything else in life, you get better at it, the more you practice. My recommendation for the first year is to write a new piece of content every single week as your minimum goal. Which sounds really overwhelming, but if you do it on kind of a schedule, and you get yourself into this routine where you’re producing and publishing content on the same day every week, it’s not that bad, and the more you do it, the better you get at it. Plus, as you know, the search engines love that you’re just putting out this nice, fresh content every single week. So, you’re giving your website a chance to get found.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think that ultimately you look up after a year, and you’ve built an asset. I think that that’s the part that is so hard when you don’t have a strategy, and you’re just throwing like you said … You use pasta at the wall. I mean, I think if you look at this as this is a long-term game … What will I have at the end of a year? You kind of map it out accordingly, I think you end up building something that’s going to serve you for a long time.

Pamela Wilson: You’ll have 50 pieces of content, plus a lot more confidence and skills that you can then build on. That’s what I talk about in the book, that once you have those basic skills in place, then going forward you can do slightly more sophisticated things with your content, because you have those skills to count on.

John Jantsch: One of the things, and you already alluded to this … I think a whole first section of the book, in fact, is called, “The Lifecycle Approach to Content Marketing,” so you want to unpack that?

Pamela Wilson: Yes. The Lifecycle Approach basically recognizes that your site needs different things at different points in its life. In the first year, what I recommend is what we just talked about which is try to publish a new piece of content every single week. This is going to build your skills, it’s going to build this content asset. As you said on your website, search engines will find you, I mean there are all these positive things that will come out from that really big push that you do in the first year. Then, in the second year, what I call your second through fifth year, this is your growth time. This is where you can kind of build on the skills that you’ve developed that first year. In some cases, if you have managed to publish every week in the first year, you might be able to dial it back to publishing every other week.

But, what I’m asking you to do in the book is to write deep dive content. Write content that goes into more depth, it’s longer, maybe it starts to incorporate things like multimedia, so maybe you start exploring video or audio, or you build some slide shares, and you weave them into the post or you incorporate images. It’s just asking you to take your content quality to a slightly higher level. If that means that you have to publish less often, that’s fine, during those growth years. Years two through five.

Then what happens, and this point was driven home for me when I took over managing the copy blogger blog back in 2015, what happens is, you get to this point, somewhere around year six. If you have kept this up consistently, where you need to start changing your strategy yet again, because you just have a ton of content, and some of the pieces of content that you’ve created over time you want to resurface those for people who never got a chance to see them.

You’re going to be going back and refreshing things, updating them, in some cases putting a new publishing date on them, and republishing them so people see them again, and you may go back for your most popular posts, and you may add again multimedia. Something that was maybe you did it in your first year, and it was very popular, lots of people are still hitting that piece of content, maybe you add a video to it. Maybe you interview a thought leader in your space, and you add that video to it. Or, you create a slide share. You just kind of polish it up, and give it a new life on your website.

John Jantsch: You mentioned video a couple times, and I do think that there is a need for short form, long form, video, images. How do you reconcile giving people advice on … I mean now, I not only have to produce all this content, I have to have it in all these different formats.

Pamela Wilson: Right. Exactly. And that’s where we come back to this concept of a lifecycle. I am not asking you to do all of this in year one. I just want you to develop skills so that you feel confident, and you can build on those skills very organically over time. Just like any new skill that you’re learning. You learn the basics, and then you start to learn the more complex skills as you go along.

The one thing that I tell people when they’re thinking about multi-media is do not try to master everything at once. Find something that builds on your existing skills. Maybe you feel very comfortable working with images. Maybe you just start by adding more images to your longer posts. You break them up with images that maybe every 400, 500 words you add an image, just to break up the page a little bit.

Or, maybe you are somebody, one of those rare unicorns, who feels incredibly comfortable in video. I’ve met a couple, but there aren’t that many of us. You just do a camera … You talking to the camera on video, where you just chat a little bit about the content of the article, or maybe it’s even a podcast episode. That’s the other thing I talk about is when you’re thinking about multi-media, it’s not so much that you’re always adding video, for example. It’s that you are taking the existing piece of content and changing it into something else.

For example, here we are, we’re recording a podcast. We could take this podcast and turn it into an ebook. It’s audio and it becomes something written. That’s the idea is to repurpose it, so that you turn it into something that has a slightly different format, and it’s going to appeal to a different audience that way.

John Jantsch: Want to remind you that this episode is brought to you by Klaviyo. Klaviyo helps you build meaningful customer relationships by listening and understanding cues from your customers. This allows you to easily turn that information into valuable marketing messages. There’s powerful segmentation, email auto-responders that are ready to go, great reporting.

You want to learn a little bit about the secret to building customer relationships they’ve got a really fun series called Klaviyo’s beyond black Friday. It’s a docu-series, a lot of fun, quick lessons. Just head on over to Klaviyo.com/beyondBF. Beyond black Friday.

Let’s talk about topics. You mentioned that you work with a lot of folks starting up an online business. Is there foundational content that you need to produce first, or could you keep talking about year two, and year three, but a lot of times, if I’m starting a business, what content is going to serve me now?

Pamela Wilson: Right. Well, typically people go into creating an online business and they’ve been asked questions about their area of expertise. They’re building a business around some kind of expertise that they have, or passion, or interest. They’ve heard questions. You and I have heard this lots of times. It’s a really solid piece of advice. Think about the questions that people typically ask you about your area of expertise, and start at just answering those. That can provide a really great guide for when you are just starting out.

For example on Big Brand System in the early days, I was talking a lot about design, and branding topics. My first 10 posts were called design 101. It was all questions that I had been asked by clients over the years, and all things that I sort of wish they knew, because it was this foundational knowledge. I always recommend that people go back to what is the foundational knowledge, what are the questions that you get from people who are really beginners with this topic that you want to talk about and that you want to build a site around.

John Jantsch: Yeah, it’s funny. I work with a lot of content producers, and a lot of times people will hire a marketing person say at a technical company and tell them, “Go produce content.” They’re like, “Well, I don’t know this stuff.” It’s amazing how much content is in the sent emails of the technicians, and the engineers, and sometimes that can be a great place to find content.

Pamela Wilson: Customer service. Right? You attack your customer service people and you find out what people are asking. Sometimes if the person writing is kind of a beginner, that actually puts them in a wonderful position to know what the very basic questions are.

John Jantsch: You have a chapter called, “The Four Day Content Creation System,” and that seemed like the closest thing to a magic bullet that everybody is looking for. Why don’t you describe the Four Day Content Creation System.

Pamela Wilson: You know, I came up with this, because when I made this recommendation for people to write a piece of content every week, it sounds so daunting. But this is a way to approach it that it breaks the process down over several days, and what I have found in all creative work that I … I’ve done creative work my entire career, right? So whether it’s design or writing. Any kind of creative work really benefits from being left alone to rest for a little while, and having you come back to it with what I call fresh eyes. You see it with fresh eyes. That’s what this system builds on. It’s this idea that you take a break from your piece of content, and then you come back to it.

Day one, what you’re trying to do is create some kind of a backbone for your piece of content. This could be written content, but it could also be a podcast. Day one what you want to focus on is writing your headline, and your subheads. Once you get your headline written, and this … It could change in your final piece, but you want to have a working headline that you’re pretty happy with, and your basic subheads that sort of lay out the premise of what you’re going to be talking about. It’s basically an outline straight from English class in middle school. But we’re not going to call it an outline, we’ll call it a backbone, because it sounds less daunting.

That’s day one. You do that, and then you walk away. Then on day two what you want to do is write your first draft. Start to finish, I always tell people write forward, don’t write backward. Don’t go back and try to edit, you have a whole day for that. But on day two, just get your first draft written. Once you’ve done that, you come back on day three, and you edit. You polish. You get it all ready to publish on the next day, and then on day four you’re publishing it, and you’re promoting it, and you’re really putting it out there, because it’s fresh new content. You want to get out there, and kind of advocate for it on the fourth day.

John Jantsch: I spent the first maybe 10 years or so of my blogging career writing every day.

Pamela Wilson: Oh wow. Yeah.

John Jantsch: I wrote a post every day, including Sundays. I didn’t have the luxury of doing that, but a lot of times, I wish I did, because another thing that your system does is it probably avoids silly mistakes.

Pamela Wilson: You know, the thing is the mistakes kind of … They jump out at you on the page. Right? You can see them, because you’ve given yourself a break, and you haven’t looked at it for maybe 24 hours, and then when you come back to it, it’s like, “Oh well, clearly this is a grammatical error, or clearly I have not supported my argument here, and I need to just add more information, this part isn’t clear.” I mean, things just really jump out when you give yourself a break.

John Jantsch: Back in 2005, ’06, ’07, ’08, I had the grammar police that would come on and make comments, back when we used to have commenting turned on, on all of our blogs.

Pamela Wilson: Right.

John Jantsch: I would hear from people very loudly. But I had fun with it, because I figured that was part of the format.

Pamela Wilson: Yeah. Absolutely. And that makes people feel useful. What can you do?

John Jantsch: One of the things that I like … I like when books do this, and you’ve done a good job with this. You have all of these checklists in the back of the book that kind of walk people through not only the stages, but then each fit promotions to your content strategy, the body of work approach to content creation. I love those. Pamela, where can people find out more about Big Brand Systems and about where they can find your book?

Pamela Wilson: The best place is go to bigbrandsystem.com. They can find my website there. There’s all sorts of great stuff. I have a page where I’m … I’ll send you a link … Where I have lots of free stuff. I have it all gathered on one page. It’s bigbrandsystem.com/goodies.

John Jantsch: We’ll have that in the show notes, too.

Pamela Wilson: Yes. Absolutely. They can find the book right on the website.

John Jantsch: Well, Pamela, thanks for joining us, and hopefully we’ll run into you someday soon out there on the road.

Pamela Wilson: That sounds great. Thanks John, it was good to chat with you.

http://bit.ly/2T2FIGE

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Transcript of Getting the Most Out of Your Content

Transcript of Getting the Most Out of Your Content written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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This transcript is sponsored by our transcript partner – Rev – Get $10 off your first order

John Jantsch: Producing content’s become a marketer’s primary job. But how do you maximize your reach? How do you make sure that there’s some ROI every time you hit publish? Well this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I speak with Pamela Wilson, author of Master Content Strategy, and that’s what we’re going to talk about. How to make content drive the bottom line.

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast is brought to you by Klaviyo. Klaviyo is a platform that helps growth focused e-commerce brands drive more sales, with super targeted, highly relevant email, Facebook and Instagram marketing.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, this is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Pamela Wilson. She’s the founder of Big Brand System, and the author of a book we’re going to talk about today, Master Content Strategy: How to maximize your reach, and boost your bottom line every time you hit publish. Doesn’t that sound wonderful? Pamela, thanks for joining me.

Pamela Wilson: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. That is definitely the goal, right? To maximize your reach and get your ideas out into the world.

John Jantsch: All right, so let me start with a word that’s in the title. What is content strategy look like? I’m sure a lot of us marketers have been talking about you need a content strategy, but define that for somebody who maybe isn’t a marketer.

Pamela Wilson: You know, it might be easiest to say what it’s not. It is not throwing pasta at the wall to see what sticks. It is approaching your content with some kind of over-arching goal for the people you want to reach, and what you want it to accomplish for your business. The way I talk about it in the book is that the needs of your website change during the lifecycle of your website. So, what you need in the early days of your website is very different than what you need if your sight has been live for six, eight, 10 years.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and you know, I actually think that you can take it a step farther, and I mean, one of the strategies might be what can you actually get done? Or, how can you actually do things in a way that allows you to get more done, or to be more efficient in producing your content? Because I think for a lot of my listeners, and a lot of small business owners, this whole need to produce content has become the biggest task of all.

Pamela Wilson: Right. Yeah, and I recognize that, when I talk about the lifecycle in the book, I talk about how one of the big goals in the first year of your site is to just become a better content creator. Just to tain confidence. The way you do that is producing a lot of content. It’s like anything else in life, you get better at it, the more you practice. My recommendation for the first year is to write a new piece of content every single week as your minimum goal. Which sounds really overwhelming, but if you do it on kind of a schedule, and you get yourself into this routine where you’re producing and publishing content on the same day every week, it’s not that bad, and the more you do it, the better you get at it. Plus, as you know, the search engines love that you’re just putting out this nice, fresh content every single week. So, you’re giving your website a chance to get found.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think that ultimately you look up after a year, and you’ve built an asset. I think that that’s the part that is so hard when you don’t have a strategy, and you’re just throwing like you said … You use pasta at the wall. I mean, I think if you look at this as this is a long-term game … What will I have at the end of a year? You kind of map it out accordingly, I think you end up building something that’s going to serve you for a long time.

Pamela Wilson: You’ll have 50 pieces of content, plus a lot more confidence and skills that you can then build on. That’s what I talk about in the book, that once you have those basic skills in place, then going forward you can do slightly more sophisticated things with your content, because you have those skills to count on.

John Jantsch: One of the things, and you already alluded to this … I think a whole first section of the book, in fact, is called, “The Lifecycle Approach to Content Marketing,” so you want to unpack that?

Pamela Wilson: Yes. The Lifecycle Approach basically recognizes that your site needs different things at different points in its life. In the first year, what I recommend is what we just talked about which is try to publish a new piece of content every single week. This is going to build your skills, it’s going to build this content asset. As you said on your website, search engines will find you, I mean there are all these positive things that will come out from that really big push that you do in the first year. Then, in the second year, what I call your second through fifth year, this is your growth time. This is where you can kind of build on the skills that you’ve developed that first year. In some cases, if you have managed to publish every week in the first year, you might be able to dial it back to publishing every other week.

But, what I’m asking you to do in the book is to write deep dive content. Write content that goes into more depth, it’s longer, maybe it starts to incorporate things like multimedia, so maybe you start exploring video or audio, or you build some slide shares, and you weave them into the post or you incorporate images. It’s just asking you to take your content quality to a slightly higher level. If that means that you have to publish less often, that’s fine, during those growth years. Years two through five.

Then what happens, and this point was driven home for me when I took over managing the copy blogger blog back in 2015, what happens is, you get to this point, somewhere around year six. If you have kept this up consistently, where you need to start changing your strategy yet again, because you just have a ton of content, and some of the pieces of content that you’ve created over time you want to resurface those for people who never got a chance to see them.

You’re going to be going back and refreshing things, updating them, in some cases putting a new publishing date on them, and republishing them so people see them again, and you may go back for your most popular posts, and you may add again multimedia. Something that was maybe you did it in your first year, and it was very popular, lots of people are still hitting that piece of content, maybe you add a video to it. Maybe you interview a thought leader in your space, and you add that video to it. Or, you create a slide share. You just kind of polish it up, and give it a new life on your website.

John Jantsch: You mentioned video a couple times, and I do think that there is a need for short form, long form, video, images. How do you reconcile giving people advice on … I mean now, I not only have to produce all this content, I have to have it in all these different formats.

Pamela Wilson: Right. Exactly. And that’s where we come back to this concept of a lifecycle. I am not asking you to do all of this in year one. I just want you to develop skills so that you feel confident, and you can build on those skills very organically over time. Just like any new skill that you’re learning. You learn the basics, and then you start to learn the more complex skills as you go along.

The one thing that I tell people when they’re thinking about multi-media is do not try to master everything at once. Find something that builds on your existing skills. Maybe you feel very comfortable working with images. Maybe you just start by adding more images to your longer posts. You break them up with images that maybe every 400, 500 words you add an image, just to break up the page a little bit.

Or, maybe you are somebody, one of those rare unicorns, who feels incredibly comfortable in video. I’ve met a couple, but there aren’t that many of us. You just do a camera … You talking to the camera on video, where you just chat a little bit about the content of the article, or maybe it’s even a podcast episode. That’s the other thing I talk about is when you’re thinking about multi-media, it’s not so much that you’re always adding video, for example. It’s that you are taking the existing piece of content and changing it into something else.

For example, here we are, we’re recording a podcast. We could take this podcast and turn it into an ebook. It’s audio and it becomes something written. That’s the idea is to repurpose it, so that you turn it into something that has a slightly different format, and it’s going to appeal to a different audience that way.

John Jantsch: Want to remind you that this episode is brought to you by Klaviyo. Klaviyo helps you build meaningful customer relationships by listening and understanding cues from your customers. This allows you to easily turn that information into valuable marketing messages. There’s powerful segmentation, email auto-responders that are ready to go, great reporting.

You want to learn a little bit about the secret to building customer relationships they’ve got a really fun series called Klaviyo’s beyond black Friday. It’s a docu-series, a lot of fun, quick lessons. Just head on over to Klaviyo.com/beyondBF. Beyond black Friday.

Let’s talk about topics. You mentioned that you work with a lot of folks starting up an online business. Is there foundational content that you need to produce first, or could you keep talking about year two, and year three, but a lot of times, if I’m starting a business, what content is going to serve me now?

Pamela Wilson: Right. Well, typically people go into creating an online business and they’ve been asked questions about their area of expertise. They’re building a business around some kind of expertise that they have, or passion, or interest. They’ve heard questions. You and I have heard this lots of times. It’s a really solid piece of advice. Think about the questions that people typically ask you about your area of expertise, and start at just answering those. That can provide a really great guide for when you are just starting out.

For example on Big Brand System in the early days, I was talking a lot about design, and branding topics. My first 10 posts were called design 101. It was all questions that I had been asked by clients over the years, and all things that I sort of wish they knew, because it was this foundational knowledge. I always recommend that people go back to what is the foundational knowledge, what are the questions that you get from people who are really beginners with this topic that you want to talk about and that you want to build a site around.

John Jantsch: Yeah, it’s funny. I work with a lot of content producers, and a lot of times people will hire a marketing person say at a technical company and tell them, “Go produce content.” They’re like, “Well, I don’t know this stuff.” It’s amazing how much content is in the sent emails of the technicians, and the engineers, and sometimes that can be a great place to find content.

Pamela Wilson: Customer service. Right? You attack your customer service people and you find out what people are asking. Sometimes if the person writing is kind of a beginner, that actually puts them in a wonderful position to know what the very basic questions are.

John Jantsch: You have a chapter called, “The Four Day Content Creation System,” and that seemed like the closest thing to a magic bullet that everybody is looking for. Why don’t you describe the Four Day Content Creation System.

Pamela Wilson: You know, I came up with this, because when I made this recommendation for people to write a piece of content every week, it sounds so daunting. But this is a way to approach it that it breaks the process down over several days, and what I have found in all creative work that I … I’ve done creative work my entire career, right? So whether it’s design or writing. Any kind of creative work really benefits from being left alone to rest for a little while, and having you come back to it with what I call fresh eyes. You see it with fresh eyes. That’s what this system builds on. It’s this idea that you take a break from your piece of content, and then you come back to it.

Day one, what you’re trying to do is create some kind of a backbone for your piece of content. This could be written content, but it could also be a podcast. Day one what you want to focus on is writing your headline, and your subheads. Once you get your headline written, and this … It could change in your final piece, but you want to have a working headline that you’re pretty happy with, and your basic subheads that sort of lay out the premise of what you’re going to be talking about. It’s basically an outline straight from English class in middle school. But we’re not going to call it an outline, we’ll call it a backbone, because it sounds less daunting.

That’s day one. You do that, and then you walk away. Then on day two what you want to do is write your first draft. Start to finish, I always tell people write forward, don’t write backward. Don’t go back and try to edit, you have a whole day for that. But on day two, just get your first draft written. Once you’ve done that, you come back on day three, and you edit. You polish. You get it all ready to publish on the next day, and then on day four you’re publishing it, and you’re promoting it, and you’re really putting it out there, because it’s fresh new content. You want to get out there, and kind of advocate for it on the fourth day.

John Jantsch: I spent the first maybe 10 years or so of my blogging career writing every day.

Pamela Wilson: Oh wow. Yeah.

John Jantsch: I wrote a post every day, including Sundays. I didn’t have the luxury of doing that, but a lot of times, I wish I did, because another thing that your system does is it probably avoids silly mistakes.

Pamela Wilson: You know, the thing is the mistakes kind of … They jump out at you on the page. Right? You can see them, because you’ve given yourself a break, and you haven’t looked at it for maybe 24 hours, and then when you come back to it, it’s like, “Oh well, clearly this is a grammatical error, or clearly I have not supported my argument here, and I need to just add more information, this part isn’t clear.” I mean, things just really jump out when you give yourself a break.

John Jantsch: Back in 2005, ’06, ’07, ’08, I had the grammar police that would come on and make comments, back when we used to have commenting turned on, on all of our blogs.

Pamela Wilson: Right.

John Jantsch: I would hear from people very loudly. But I had fun with it, because I figured that was part of the format.

Pamela Wilson: Yeah. Absolutely. And that makes people feel useful. What can you do?

John Jantsch: One of the things that I like … I like when books do this, and you’ve done a good job with this. You have all of these checklists in the back of the book that kind of walk people through not only the stages, but then each fit promotions to your content strategy, the body of work approach to content creation. I love those. Pamela, where can people find out more about Big Brand Systems and about where they can find your book?

Pamela Wilson: The best place is go to bigbrandsystem.com. They can find my website there. There’s all sorts of great stuff. I have a page where I’m … I’ll send you a link … Where I have lots of free stuff. I have it all gathered on one page. It’s bigbrandsystem.com/goodies.

John Jantsch: We’ll have that in the show notes, too.

Pamela Wilson: Yes. Absolutely. They can find the book right on the website.

John Jantsch: Well, Pamela, thanks for joining us, and hopefully we’ll run into you someday soon out there on the road.

Pamela Wilson: That sounds great. Thanks John, it was good to chat with you.

from FEED 9 MARKETING http://bit.ly/2T2FIGE

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Transcript of Getting the Most Out of Your Content

Transcript of Getting the Most Out of Your Content

Transcript of Getting the Most Out of Your Content written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Back to Podcast

Transcript

This transcript is sponsored by our transcript partner – Rev – Get $10 off your first order

John Jantsch: Producing content’s become a marketer’s primary job. But how do you maximize your reach? How do you make sure that there’s some ROI every time you hit publish? Well this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I speak with Pamela Wilson, author of Master Content Strategy, and that’s what we’re going to talk about. How to make content drive the bottom line.

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast is brought to you by Klaviyo. Klaviyo is a platform that helps growth focused e-commerce brands drive more sales, with super targeted, highly relevant email, Facebook and Instagram marketing.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, this is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Pamela Wilson. She’s the founder of Big Brand System, and the author of a book we’re going to talk about today, Master Content Strategy: How to maximize your reach, and boost your bottom line every time you hit publish. Doesn’t that sound wonderful? Pamela, thanks for joining me.

Pamela Wilson: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. That is definitely the goal, right? To maximize your reach and get your ideas out into the world.

John Jantsch: All right, so let me start with a word that’s in the title. What is content strategy look like? I’m sure a lot of us marketers have been talking about you need a content strategy, but define that for somebody who maybe isn’t a marketer.

Pamela Wilson: You know, it might be easiest to say what it’s not. It is not throwing pasta at the wall to see what sticks. It is approaching your content with some kind of over-arching goal for the people you want to reach, and what you want it to accomplish for your business. The way I talk about it in the book is that the needs of your website change during the lifecycle of your website. So, what you need in the early days of your website is very different than what you need if your sight has been live for six, eight, 10 years.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and you know, I actually think that you can take it a step farther, and I mean, one of the strategies might be what can you actually get done? Or, how can you actually do things in a way that allows you to get more done, or to be more efficient in producing your content? Because I think for a lot of my listeners, and a lot of small business owners, this whole need to produce content has become the biggest task of all.

Pamela Wilson: Right. Yeah, and I recognize that, when I talk about the lifecycle in the book, I talk about how one of the big goals in the first year of your site is to just become a better content creator. Just to tain confidence. The way you do that is producing a lot of content. It’s like anything else in life, you get better at it, the more you practice. My recommendation for the first year is to write a new piece of content every single week as your minimum goal. Which sounds really overwhelming, but if you do it on kind of a schedule, and you get yourself into this routine where you’re producing and publishing content on the same day every week, it’s not that bad, and the more you do it, the better you get at it. Plus, as you know, the search engines love that you’re just putting out this nice, fresh content every single week. So, you’re giving your website a chance to get found.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think that ultimately you look up after a year, and you’ve built an asset. I think that that’s the part that is so hard when you don’t have a strategy, and you’re just throwing like you said … You use pasta at the wall. I mean, I think if you look at this as this is a long-term game … What will I have at the end of a year? You kind of map it out accordingly, I think you end up building something that’s going to serve you for a long time.

Pamela Wilson: You’ll have 50 pieces of content, plus a lot more confidence and skills that you can then build on. That’s what I talk about in the book, that once you have those basic skills in place, then going forward you can do slightly more sophisticated things with your content, because you have those skills to count on.

John Jantsch: One of the things, and you already alluded to this … I think a whole first section of the book, in fact, is called, “The Lifecycle Approach to Content Marketing,” so you want to unpack that?

Pamela Wilson: Yes. The Lifecycle Approach basically recognizes that your site needs different things at different points in its life. In the first year, what I recommend is what we just talked about which is try to publish a new piece of content every single week. This is going to build your skills, it’s going to build this content asset. As you said on your website, search engines will find you, I mean there are all these positive things that will come out from that really big push that you do in the first year. Then, in the second year, what I call your second through fifth year, this is your growth time. This is where you can kind of build on the skills that you’ve developed that first year. In some cases, if you have managed to publish every week in the first year, you might be able to dial it back to publishing every other week.

But, what I’m asking you to do in the book is to write deep dive content. Write content that goes into more depth, it’s longer, maybe it starts to incorporate things like multimedia, so maybe you start exploring video or audio, or you build some slide shares, and you weave them into the post or you incorporate images. It’s just asking you to take your content quality to a slightly higher level. If that means that you have to publish less often, that’s fine, during those growth years. Years two through five.

Then what happens, and this point was driven home for me when I took over managing the copy blogger blog back in 2015, what happens is, you get to this point, somewhere around year six. If you have kept this up consistently, where you need to start changing your strategy yet again, because you just have a ton of content, and some of the pieces of content that you’ve created over time you want to resurface those for people who never got a chance to see them.

You’re going to be going back and refreshing things, updating them, in some cases putting a new publishing date on them, and republishing them so people see them again, and you may go back for your most popular posts, and you may add again multimedia. Something that was maybe you did it in your first year, and it was very popular, lots of people are still hitting that piece of content, maybe you add a video to it. Maybe you interview a thought leader in your space, and you add that video to it. Or, you create a slide share. You just kind of polish it up, and give it a new life on your website.

John Jantsch: You mentioned video a couple times, and I do think that there is a need for short form, long form, video, images. How do you reconcile giving people advice on … I mean now, I not only have to produce all this content, I have to have it in all these different formats.

Pamela Wilson: Right. Exactly. And that’s where we come back to this concept of a lifecycle. I am not asking you to do all of this in year one. I just want you to develop skills so that you feel confident, and you can build on those skills very organically over time. Just like any new skill that you’re learning. You learn the basics, and then you start to learn the more complex skills as you go along.

The one thing that I tell people when they’re thinking about multi-media is do not try to master everything at once. Find something that builds on your existing skills. Maybe you feel very comfortable working with images. Maybe you just start by adding more images to your longer posts. You break them up with images that maybe every 400, 500 words you add an image, just to break up the page a little bit.

Or, maybe you are somebody, one of those rare unicorns, who feels incredibly comfortable in video. I’ve met a couple, but there aren’t that many of us. You just do a camera … You talking to the camera on video, where you just chat a little bit about the content of the article, or maybe it’s even a podcast episode. That’s the other thing I talk about is when you’re thinking about multi-media, it’s not so much that you’re always adding video, for example. It’s that you are taking the existing piece of content and changing it into something else.

For example, here we are, we’re recording a podcast. We could take this podcast and turn it into an ebook. It’s audio and it becomes something written. That’s the idea is to repurpose it, so that you turn it into something that has a slightly different format, and it’s going to appeal to a different audience that way.

John Jantsch: Want to remind you that this episode is brought to you by Klaviyo. Klaviyo helps you build meaningful customer relationships by listening and understanding cues from your customers. This allows you to easily turn that information into valuable marketing messages. There’s powerful segmentation, email auto-responders that are ready to go, great reporting.

You want to learn a little bit about the secret to building customer relationships they’ve got a really fun series called Klaviyo’s beyond black Friday. It’s a docu-series, a lot of fun, quick lessons. Just head on over to Klaviyo.com/beyondBF. Beyond black Friday.

Let’s talk about topics. You mentioned that you work with a lot of folks starting up an online business. Is there foundational content that you need to produce first, or could you keep talking about year two, and year three, but a lot of times, if I’m starting a business, what content is going to serve me now?

Pamela Wilson: Right. Well, typically people go into creating an online business and they’ve been asked questions about their area of expertise. They’re building a business around some kind of expertise that they have, or passion, or interest. They’ve heard questions. You and I have heard this lots of times. It’s a really solid piece of advice. Think about the questions that people typically ask you about your area of expertise, and start at just answering those. That can provide a really great guide for when you are just starting out.

For example on Big Brand System in the early days, I was talking a lot about design, and branding topics. My first 10 posts were called design 101. It was all questions that I had been asked by clients over the years, and all things that I sort of wish they knew, because it was this foundational knowledge. I always recommend that people go back to what is the foundational knowledge, what are the questions that you get from people who are really beginners with this topic that you want to talk about and that you want to build a site around.

John Jantsch: Yeah, it’s funny. I work with a lot of content producers, and a lot of times people will hire a marketing person say at a technical company and tell them, “Go produce content.” They’re like, “Well, I don’t know this stuff.” It’s amazing how much content is in the sent emails of the technicians, and the engineers, and sometimes that can be a great place to find content.

Pamela Wilson: Customer service. Right? You attack your customer service people and you find out what people are asking. Sometimes if the person writing is kind of a beginner, that actually puts them in a wonderful position to know what the very basic questions are.

John Jantsch: You have a chapter called, “The Four Day Content Creation System,” and that seemed like the closest thing to a magic bullet that everybody is looking for. Why don’t you describe the Four Day Content Creation System.

Pamela Wilson: You know, I came up with this, because when I made this recommendation for people to write a piece of content every week, it sounds so daunting. But this is a way to approach it that it breaks the process down over several days, and what I have found in all creative work that I … I’ve done creative work my entire career, right? So whether it’s design or writing. Any kind of creative work really benefits from being left alone to rest for a little while, and having you come back to it with what I call fresh eyes. You see it with fresh eyes. That’s what this system builds on. It’s this idea that you take a break from your piece of content, and then you come back to it.

Day one, what you’re trying to do is create some kind of a backbone for your piece of content. This could be written content, but it could also be a podcast. Day one what you want to focus on is writing your headline, and your subheads. Once you get your headline written, and this … It could change in your final piece, but you want to have a working headline that you’re pretty happy with, and your basic subheads that sort of lay out the premise of what you’re going to be talking about. It’s basically an outline straight from English class in middle school. But we’re not going to call it an outline, we’ll call it a backbone, because it sounds less daunting.

That’s day one. You do that, and then you walk away. Then on day two what you want to do is write your first draft. Start to finish, I always tell people write forward, don’t write backward. Don’t go back and try to edit, you have a whole day for that. But on day two, just get your first draft written. Once you’ve done that, you come back on day three, and you edit. You polish. You get it all ready to publish on the next day, and then on day four you’re publishing it, and you’re promoting it, and you’re really putting it out there, because it’s fresh new content. You want to get out there, and kind of advocate for it on the fourth day.

John Jantsch: I spent the first maybe 10 years or so of my blogging career writing every day.

Pamela Wilson: Oh wow. Yeah.

John Jantsch: I wrote a post every day, including Sundays. I didn’t have the luxury of doing that, but a lot of times, I wish I did, because another thing that your system does is it probably avoids silly mistakes.

Pamela Wilson: You know, the thing is the mistakes kind of … They jump out at you on the page. Right? You can see them, because you’ve given yourself a break, and you haven’t looked at it for maybe 24 hours, and then when you come back to it, it’s like, “Oh well, clearly this is a grammatical error, or clearly I have not supported my argument here, and I need to just add more information, this part isn’t clear.” I mean, things just really jump out when you give yourself a break.

John Jantsch: Back in 2005, ’06, ’07, ’08, I had the grammar police that would come on and make comments, back when we used to have commenting turned on, on all of our blogs.

Pamela Wilson: Right.

John Jantsch: I would hear from people very loudly. But I had fun with it, because I figured that was part of the format.

Pamela Wilson: Yeah. Absolutely. And that makes people feel useful. What can you do?

John Jantsch: One of the things that I like … I like when books do this, and you’ve done a good job with this. You have all of these checklists in the back of the book that kind of walk people through not only the stages, but then each fit promotions to your content strategy, the body of work approach to content creation. I love those. Pamela, where can people find out more about Big Brand Systems and about where they can find your book?

Pamela Wilson: The best place is go to bigbrandsystem.com. They can find my website there. There’s all sorts of great stuff. I have a page where I’m … I’ll send you a link … Where I have lots of free stuff. I have it all gathered on one page. It’s bigbrandsystem.com/goodies.

John Jantsch: We’ll have that in the show notes, too.

Pamela Wilson: Yes. Absolutely. They can find the book right on the website.

John Jantsch: Well, Pamela, thanks for joining us, and hopefully we’ll run into you someday soon out there on the road.

Pamela Wilson: That sounds great. Thanks John, it was good to chat with you.

http://bit.ly/2T2FIGE

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Transcript of Getting the Most Out of Your Content

Transcript of Getting the Most Out of Your Content

Transcript of Getting the Most Out of Your Content written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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John Jantsch: Producing content’s become a marketer’s primary job. But how do you maximize your reach? How do you make sure that there’s some ROI every time you hit publish? Well this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I speak with Pamela Wilson, author of Master Content Strategy, and that’s what we’re going to talk about. How to make content drive the bottom line.

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast is brought to you by Klaviyo. Klaviyo is a platform that helps growth focused e-commerce brands drive more sales, with super targeted, highly relevant email, Facebook and Instagram marketing.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, this is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Pamela Wilson. She’s the founder of Big Brand System, and the author of a book we’re going to talk about today, Master Content Strategy: How to maximize your reach, and boost your bottom line every time you hit publish. Doesn’t that sound wonderful? Pamela, thanks for joining me.

Pamela Wilson: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. That is definitely the goal, right? To maximize your reach and get your ideas out into the world.

John Jantsch: All right, so let me start with a word that’s in the title. What is content strategy look like? I’m sure a lot of us marketers have been talking about you need a content strategy, but define that for somebody who maybe isn’t a marketer.

Pamela Wilson: You know, it might be easiest to say what it’s not. It is not throwing pasta at the wall to see what sticks. It is approaching your content with some kind of over-arching goal for the people you want to reach, and what you want it to accomplish for your business. The way I talk about it in the book is that the needs of your website change during the lifecycle of your website. So, what you need in the early days of your website is very different than what you need if your sight has been live for six, eight, 10 years.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and you know, I actually think that you can take it a step farther, and I mean, one of the strategies might be what can you actually get done? Or, how can you actually do things in a way that allows you to get more done, or to be more efficient in producing your content? Because I think for a lot of my listeners, and a lot of small business owners, this whole need to produce content has become the biggest task of all.

Pamela Wilson: Right. Yeah, and I recognize that, when I talk about the lifecycle in the book, I talk about how one of the big goals in the first year of your site is to just become a better content creator. Just to tain confidence. The way you do that is producing a lot of content. It’s like anything else in life, you get better at it, the more you practice. My recommendation for the first year is to write a new piece of content every single week as your minimum goal. Which sounds really overwhelming, but if you do it on kind of a schedule, and you get yourself into this routine where you’re producing and publishing content on the same day every week, it’s not that bad, and the more you do it, the better you get at it. Plus, as you know, the search engines love that you’re just putting out this nice, fresh content every single week. So, you’re giving your website a chance to get found.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think that ultimately you look up after a year, and you’ve built an asset. I think that that’s the part that is so hard when you don’t have a strategy, and you’re just throwing like you said … You use pasta at the wall. I mean, I think if you look at this as this is a long-term game … What will I have at the end of a year? You kind of map it out accordingly, I think you end up building something that’s going to serve you for a long time.

Pamela Wilson: You’ll have 50 pieces of content, plus a lot more confidence and skills that you can then build on. That’s what I talk about in the book, that once you have those basic skills in place, then going forward you can do slightly more sophisticated things with your content, because you have those skills to count on.

John Jantsch: One of the things, and you already alluded to this … I think a whole first section of the book, in fact, is called, “The Lifecycle Approach to Content Marketing,” so you want to unpack that?

Pamela Wilson: Yes. The Lifecycle Approach basically recognizes that your site needs different things at different points in its life. In the first year, what I recommend is what we just talked about which is try to publish a new piece of content every single week. This is going to build your skills, it’s going to build this content asset. As you said on your website, search engines will find you, I mean there are all these positive things that will come out from that really big push that you do in the first year. Then, in the second year, what I call your second through fifth year, this is your growth time. This is where you can kind of build on the skills that you’ve developed that first year. In some cases, if you have managed to publish every week in the first year, you might be able to dial it back to publishing every other week.

But, what I’m asking you to do in the book is to write deep dive content. Write content that goes into more depth, it’s longer, maybe it starts to incorporate things like multimedia, so maybe you start exploring video or audio, or you build some slide shares, and you weave them into the post or you incorporate images. It’s just asking you to take your content quality to a slightly higher level. If that means that you have to publish less often, that’s fine, during those growth years. Years two through five.

Then what happens, and this point was driven home for me when I took over managing the copy blogger blog back in 2015, what happens is, you get to this point, somewhere around year six. If you have kept this up consistently, where you need to start changing your strategy yet again, because you just have a ton of content, and some of the pieces of content that you’ve created over time you want to resurface those for people who never got a chance to see them.

You’re going to be going back and refreshing things, updating them, in some cases putting a new publishing date on them, and republishing them so people see them again, and you may go back for your most popular posts, and you may add again multimedia. Something that was maybe you did it in your first year, and it was very popular, lots of people are still hitting that piece of content, maybe you add a video to it. Maybe you interview a thought leader in your space, and you add that video to it. Or, you create a slide share. You just kind of polish it up, and give it a new life on your website.

John Jantsch: You mentioned video a couple times, and I do think that there is a need for short form, long form, video, images. How do you reconcile giving people advice on … I mean now, I not only have to produce all this content, I have to have it in all these different formats.

Pamela Wilson: Right. Exactly. And that’s where we come back to this concept of a lifecycle. I am not asking you to do all of this in year one. I just want you to develop skills so that you feel confident, and you can build on those skills very organically over time. Just like any new skill that you’re learning. You learn the basics, and then you start to learn the more complex skills as you go along.

The one thing that I tell people when they’re thinking about multi-media is do not try to master everything at once. Find something that builds on your existing skills. Maybe you feel very comfortable working with images. Maybe you just start by adding more images to your longer posts. You break them up with images that maybe every 400, 500 words you add an image, just to break up the page a little bit.

Or, maybe you are somebody, one of those rare unicorns, who feels incredibly comfortable in video. I’ve met a couple, but there aren’t that many of us. You just do a camera … You talking to the camera on video, where you just chat a little bit about the content of the article, or maybe it’s even a podcast episode. That’s the other thing I talk about is when you’re thinking about multi-media, it’s not so much that you’re always adding video, for example. It’s that you are taking the existing piece of content and changing it into something else.

For example, here we are, we’re recording a podcast. We could take this podcast and turn it into an ebook. It’s audio and it becomes something written. That’s the idea is to repurpose it, so that you turn it into something that has a slightly different format, and it’s going to appeal to a different audience that way.

John Jantsch: Want to remind you that this episode is brought to you by Klaviyo. Klaviyo helps you build meaningful customer relationships by listening and understanding cues from your customers. This allows you to easily turn that information into valuable marketing messages. There’s powerful segmentation, email auto-responders that are ready to go, great reporting.

You want to learn a little bit about the secret to building customer relationships they’ve got a really fun series called Klaviyo’s beyond black Friday. It’s a docu-series, a lot of fun, quick lessons. Just head on over to Klaviyo.com/beyondBF. Beyond black Friday.

Let’s talk about topics. You mentioned that you work with a lot of folks starting up an online business. Is there foundational content that you need to produce first, or could you keep talking about year two, and year three, but a lot of times, if I’m starting a business, what content is going to serve me now?

Pamela Wilson: Right. Well, typically people go into creating an online business and they’ve been asked questions about their area of expertise. They’re building a business around some kind of expertise that they have, or passion, or interest. They’ve heard questions. You and I have heard this lots of times. It’s a really solid piece of advice. Think about the questions that people typically ask you about your area of expertise, and start at just answering those. That can provide a really great guide for when you are just starting out.

For example on Big Brand System in the early days, I was talking a lot about design, and branding topics. My first 10 posts were called design 101. It was all questions that I had been asked by clients over the years, and all things that I sort of wish they knew, because it was this foundational knowledge. I always recommend that people go back to what is the foundational knowledge, what are the questions that you get from people who are really beginners with this topic that you want to talk about and that you want to build a site around.

John Jantsch: Yeah, it’s funny. I work with a lot of content producers, and a lot of times people will hire a marketing person say at a technical company and tell them, “Go produce content.” They’re like, “Well, I don’t know this stuff.” It’s amazing how much content is in the sent emails of the technicians, and the engineers, and sometimes that can be a great place to find content.

Pamela Wilson: Customer service. Right? You attack your customer service people and you find out what people are asking. Sometimes if the person writing is kind of a beginner, that actually puts them in a wonderful position to know what the very basic questions are.

John Jantsch: You have a chapter called, “The Four Day Content Creation System,” and that seemed like the closest thing to a magic bullet that everybody is looking for. Why don’t you describe the Four Day Content Creation System.

Pamela Wilson: You know, I came up with this, because when I made this recommendation for people to write a piece of content every week, it sounds so daunting. But this is a way to approach it that it breaks the process down over several days, and what I have found in all creative work that I … I’ve done creative work my entire career, right? So whether it’s design or writing. Any kind of creative work really benefits from being left alone to rest for a little while, and having you come back to it with what I call fresh eyes. You see it with fresh eyes. That’s what this system builds on. It’s this idea that you take a break from your piece of content, and then you come back to it.

Day one, what you’re trying to do is create some kind of a backbone for your piece of content. This could be written content, but it could also be a podcast. Day one what you want to focus on is writing your headline, and your subheads. Once you get your headline written, and this … It could change in your final piece, but you want to have a working headline that you’re pretty happy with, and your basic subheads that sort of lay out the premise of what you’re going to be talking about. It’s basically an outline straight from English class in middle school. But we’re not going to call it an outline, we’ll call it a backbone, because it sounds less daunting.

That’s day one. You do that, and then you walk away. Then on day two what you want to do is write your first draft. Start to finish, I always tell people write forward, don’t write backward. Don’t go back and try to edit, you have a whole day for that. But on day two, just get your first draft written. Once you’ve done that, you come back on day three, and you edit. You polish. You get it all ready to publish on the next day, and then on day four you’re publishing it, and you’re promoting it, and you’re really putting it out there, because it’s fresh new content. You want to get out there, and kind of advocate for it on the fourth day.

John Jantsch: I spent the first maybe 10 years or so of my blogging career writing every day.

Pamela Wilson: Oh wow. Yeah.

John Jantsch: I wrote a post every day, including Sundays. I didn’t have the luxury of doing that, but a lot of times, I wish I did, because another thing that your system does is it probably avoids silly mistakes.

Pamela Wilson: You know, the thing is the mistakes kind of … They jump out at you on the page. Right? You can see them, because you’ve given yourself a break, and you haven’t looked at it for maybe 24 hours, and then when you come back to it, it’s like, “Oh well, clearly this is a grammatical error, or clearly I have not supported my argument here, and I need to just add more information, this part isn’t clear.” I mean, things just really jump out when you give yourself a break.

John Jantsch: Back in 2005, ’06, ’07, ’08, I had the grammar police that would come on and make comments, back when we used to have commenting turned on, on all of our blogs.

Pamela Wilson: Right.

John Jantsch: I would hear from people very loudly. But I had fun with it, because I figured that was part of the format.

Pamela Wilson: Yeah. Absolutely. And that makes people feel useful. What can you do?

John Jantsch: One of the things that I like … I like when books do this, and you’ve done a good job with this. You have all of these checklists in the back of the book that kind of walk people through not only the stages, but then each fit promotions to your content strategy, the body of work approach to content creation. I love those. Pamela, where can people find out more about Big Brand Systems and about where they can find your book?

Pamela Wilson: The best place is go to bigbrandsystem.com. They can find my website there. There’s all sorts of great stuff. I have a page where I’m … I’ll send you a link … Where I have lots of free stuff. I have it all gathered on one page. It’s bigbrandsystem.com/goodies.

John Jantsch: We’ll have that in the show notes, too.

Pamela Wilson: Yes. Absolutely. They can find the book right on the website.

John Jantsch: Well, Pamela, thanks for joining us, and hopefully we’ll run into you someday soon out there on the road.

Pamela Wilson: That sounds great. Thanks John, it was good to chat with you.

http://bit.ly/2T2FIGE

[piatty29033]

Transcript of Getting the Most Out of Your Content

Transcript of Getting the Most Out of Your Content

Transcript of Getting the Most Out of Your Content written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Back to Podcast

Transcript

This transcript is sponsored by our transcript partner – Rev – Get $10 off your first order

John Jantsch: Producing content’s become a marketer’s primary job. But how do you maximize your reach? How do you make sure that there’s some ROI every time you hit publish? Well this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I speak with Pamela Wilson, author of Master Content Strategy, and that’s what we’re going to talk about. How to make content drive the bottom line.

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast is brought to you by Klaviyo. Klaviyo is a platform that helps growth focused e-commerce brands drive more sales, with super targeted, highly relevant email, Facebook and Instagram marketing.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, this is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Pamela Wilson. She’s the founder of Big Brand System, and the author of a book we’re going to talk about today, Master Content Strategy: How to maximize your reach, and boost your bottom line every time you hit publish. Doesn’t that sound wonderful? Pamela, thanks for joining me.

Pamela Wilson: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. That is definitely the goal, right? To maximize your reach and get your ideas out into the world.

John Jantsch: All right, so let me start with a word that’s in the title. What is content strategy look like? I’m sure a lot of us marketers have been talking about you need a content strategy, but define that for somebody who maybe isn’t a marketer.

Pamela Wilson: You know, it might be easiest to say what it’s not. It is not throwing pasta at the wall to see what sticks. It is approaching your content with some kind of over-arching goal for the people you want to reach, and what you want it to accomplish for your business. The way I talk about it in the book is that the needs of your website change during the lifecycle of your website. So, what you need in the early days of your website is very different than what you need if your sight has been live for six, eight, 10 years.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and you know, I actually think that you can take it a step farther, and I mean, one of the strategies might be what can you actually get done? Or, how can you actually do things in a way that allows you to get more done, or to be more efficient in producing your content? Because I think for a lot of my listeners, and a lot of small business owners, this whole need to produce content has become the biggest task of all.

Pamela Wilson: Right. Yeah, and I recognize that, when I talk about the lifecycle in the book, I talk about how one of the big goals in the first year of your site is to just become a better content creator. Just to tain confidence. The way you do that is producing a lot of content. It’s like anything else in life, you get better at it, the more you practice. My recommendation for the first year is to write a new piece of content every single week as your minimum goal. Which sounds really overwhelming, but if you do it on kind of a schedule, and you get yourself into this routine where you’re producing and publishing content on the same day every week, it’s not that bad, and the more you do it, the better you get at it. Plus, as you know, the search engines love that you’re just putting out this nice, fresh content every single week. So, you’re giving your website a chance to get found.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think that ultimately you look up after a year, and you’ve built an asset. I think that that’s the part that is so hard when you don’t have a strategy, and you’re just throwing like you said … You use pasta at the wall. I mean, I think if you look at this as this is a long-term game … What will I have at the end of a year? You kind of map it out accordingly, I think you end up building something that’s going to serve you for a long time.

Pamela Wilson: You’ll have 50 pieces of content, plus a lot more confidence and skills that you can then build on. That’s what I talk about in the book, that once you have those basic skills in place, then going forward you can do slightly more sophisticated things with your content, because you have those skills to count on.

John Jantsch: One of the things, and you already alluded to this … I think a whole first section of the book, in fact, is called, “The Lifecycle Approach to Content Marketing,” so you want to unpack that?

Pamela Wilson: Yes. The Lifecycle Approach basically recognizes that your site needs different things at different points in its life. In the first year, what I recommend is what we just talked about which is try to publish a new piece of content every single week. This is going to build your skills, it’s going to build this content asset. As you said on your website, search engines will find you, I mean there are all these positive things that will come out from that really big push that you do in the first year. Then, in the second year, what I call your second through fifth year, this is your growth time. This is where you can kind of build on the skills that you’ve developed that first year. In some cases, if you have managed to publish every week in the first year, you might be able to dial it back to publishing every other week.

But, what I’m asking you to do in the book is to write deep dive content. Write content that goes into more depth, it’s longer, maybe it starts to incorporate things like multimedia, so maybe you start exploring video or audio, or you build some slide shares, and you weave them into the post or you incorporate images. It’s just asking you to take your content quality to a slightly higher level. If that means that you have to publish less often, that’s fine, during those growth years. Years two through five.

Then what happens, and this point was driven home for me when I took over managing the copy blogger blog back in 2015, what happens is, you get to this point, somewhere around year six. If you have kept this up consistently, where you need to start changing your strategy yet again, because you just have a ton of content, and some of the pieces of content that you’ve created over time you want to resurface those for people who never got a chance to see them.

You’re going to be going back and refreshing things, updating them, in some cases putting a new publishing date on them, and republishing them so people see them again, and you may go back for your most popular posts, and you may add again multimedia. Something that was maybe you did it in your first year, and it was very popular, lots of people are still hitting that piece of content, maybe you add a video to it. Maybe you interview a thought leader in your space, and you add that video to it. Or, you create a slide share. You just kind of polish it up, and give it a new life on your website.

John Jantsch: You mentioned video a couple times, and I do think that there is a need for short form, long form, video, images. How do you reconcile giving people advice on … I mean now, I not only have to produce all this content, I have to have it in all these different formats.

Pamela Wilson: Right. Exactly. And that’s where we come back to this concept of a lifecycle. I am not asking you to do all of this in year one. I just want you to develop skills so that you feel confident, and you can build on those skills very organically over time. Just like any new skill that you’re learning. You learn the basics, and then you start to learn the more complex skills as you go along.

The one thing that I tell people when they’re thinking about multi-media is do not try to master everything at once. Find something that builds on your existing skills. Maybe you feel very comfortable working with images. Maybe you just start by adding more images to your longer posts. You break them up with images that maybe every 400, 500 words you add an image, just to break up the page a little bit.

Or, maybe you are somebody, one of those rare unicorns, who feels incredibly comfortable in video. I’ve met a couple, but there aren’t that many of us. You just do a camera … You talking to the camera on video, where you just chat a little bit about the content of the article, or maybe it’s even a podcast episode. That’s the other thing I talk about is when you’re thinking about multi-media, it’s not so much that you’re always adding video, for example. It’s that you are taking the existing piece of content and changing it into something else.

For example, here we are, we’re recording a podcast. We could take this podcast and turn it into an ebook. It’s audio and it becomes something written. That’s the idea is to repurpose it, so that you turn it into something that has a slightly different format, and it’s going to appeal to a different audience that way.

John Jantsch: Want to remind you that this episode is brought to you by Klaviyo. Klaviyo helps you build meaningful customer relationships by listening and understanding cues from your customers. This allows you to easily turn that information into valuable marketing messages. There’s powerful segmentation, email auto-responders that are ready to go, great reporting.

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Let’s talk about topics. You mentioned that you work with a lot of folks starting up an online business. Is there foundational content that you need to produce first, or could you keep talking about year two, and year three, but a lot of times, if I’m starting a business, what content is going to serve me now?

Pamela Wilson: Right. Well, typically people go into creating an online business and they’ve been asked questions about their area of expertise. They’re building a business around some kind of expertise that they have, or passion, or interest. They’ve heard questions. You and I have heard this lots of times. It’s a really solid piece of advice. Think about the questions that people typically ask you about your area of expertise, and start at just answering those. That can provide a really great guide for when you are just starting out.

For example on Big Brand System in the early days, I was talking a lot about design, and branding topics. My first 10 posts were called design 101. It was all questions that I had been asked by clients over the years, and all things that I sort of wish they knew, because it was this foundational knowledge. I always recommend that people go back to what is the foundational knowledge, what are the questions that you get from people who are really beginners with this topic that you want to talk about and that you want to build a site around.

John Jantsch: Yeah, it’s funny. I work with a lot of content producers, and a lot of times people will hire a marketing person say at a technical company and tell them, “Go produce content.” They’re like, “Well, I don’t know this stuff.” It’s amazing how much content is in the sent emails of the technicians, and the engineers, and sometimes that can be a great place to find content.

Pamela Wilson: Customer service. Right? You attack your customer service people and you find out what people are asking. Sometimes if the person writing is kind of a beginner, that actually puts them in a wonderful position to know what the very basic questions are.

John Jantsch: You have a chapter called, “The Four Day Content Creation System,” and that seemed like the closest thing to a magic bullet that everybody is looking for. Why don’t you describe the Four Day Content Creation System.

Pamela Wilson: You know, I came up with this, because when I made this recommendation for people to write a piece of content every week, it sounds so daunting. But this is a way to approach it that it breaks the process down over several days, and what I have found in all creative work that I … I’ve done creative work my entire career, right? So whether it’s design or writing. Any kind of creative work really benefits from being left alone to rest for a little while, and having you come back to it with what I call fresh eyes. You see it with fresh eyes. That’s what this system builds on. It’s this idea that you take a break from your piece of content, and then you come back to it.

Day one, what you’re trying to do is create some kind of a backbone for your piece of content. This could be written content, but it could also be a podcast. Day one what you want to focus on is writing your headline, and your subheads. Once you get your headline written, and this … It could change in your final piece, but you want to have a working headline that you’re pretty happy with, and your basic subheads that sort of lay out the premise of what you’re going to be talking about. It’s basically an outline straight from English class in middle school. But we’re not going to call it an outline, we’ll call it a backbone, because it sounds less daunting.

That’s day one. You do that, and then you walk away. Then on day two what you want to do is write your first draft. Start to finish, I always tell people write forward, don’t write backward. Don’t go back and try to edit, you have a whole day for that. But on day two, just get your first draft written. Once you’ve done that, you come back on day three, and you edit. You polish. You get it all ready to publish on the next day, and then on day four you’re publishing it, and you’re promoting it, and you’re really putting it out there, because it’s fresh new content. You want to get out there, and kind of advocate for it on the fourth day.

John Jantsch: I spent the first maybe 10 years or so of my blogging career writing every day.

Pamela Wilson: Oh wow. Yeah.

John Jantsch: I wrote a post every day, including Sundays. I didn’t have the luxury of doing that, but a lot of times, I wish I did, because another thing that your system does is it probably avoids silly mistakes.

Pamela Wilson: You know, the thing is the mistakes kind of … They jump out at you on the page. Right? You can see them, because you’ve given yourself a break, and you haven’t looked at it for maybe 24 hours, and then when you come back to it, it’s like, “Oh well, clearly this is a grammatical error, or clearly I have not supported my argument here, and I need to just add more information, this part isn’t clear.” I mean, things just really jump out when you give yourself a break.

John Jantsch: Back in 2005, ’06, ’07, ’08, I had the grammar police that would come on and make comments, back when we used to have commenting turned on, on all of our blogs.

Pamela Wilson: Right.

John Jantsch: I would hear from people very loudly. But I had fun with it, because I figured that was part of the format.

Pamela Wilson: Yeah. Absolutely. And that makes people feel useful. What can you do?

John Jantsch: One of the things that I like … I like when books do this, and you’ve done a good job with this. You have all of these checklists in the back of the book that kind of walk people through not only the stages, but then each fit promotions to your content strategy, the body of work approach to content creation. I love those. Pamela, where can people find out more about Big Brand Systems and about where they can find your book?

Pamela Wilson: The best place is go to bigbrandsystem.com. They can find my website there. There’s all sorts of great stuff. I have a page where I’m … I’ll send you a link … Where I have lots of free stuff. I have it all gathered on one page. It’s bigbrandsystem.com/goodies.

John Jantsch: We’ll have that in the show notes, too.

Pamela Wilson: Yes. Absolutely. They can find the book right on the website.

John Jantsch: Well, Pamela, thanks for joining us, and hopefully we’ll run into you someday soon out there on the road.

Pamela Wilson: That sounds great. Thanks John, it was good to chat with you.

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