During the Australian election, Vibewire is training and supporting young citizen journalists in an effort to unearth voices and views that are normally marginalised. You can find out more about their electionWIRE project here.
As part of the training program, I delivered a short presentation on storytelling for social media. You can find it on Slideshare – or view it right here. Unfortunately the slides have not been incorporated into the talk – but you can see the talk in this clip – and check the deck below.
Next month, on Thursday August 12, the Walkley Foundation is holding a conference on the importance of telling a good story and getting it covered. For two days, What’s the Story will explore the importance of organisational story-telling as a powerful way to capture attention, engage an audience, and motivate people to act. If you are in a public affairs, public relations or communications role, this conference is a must-attend event.
I will be taking part in a panel discussion as part of the Content, Context, Communications and Culture stream. Joining me will be James Tuckerman, founder and editor of Australian Anthill and Julie Posetti, well-known journalist and journalism academic.
There are also streams on government relations and public impact and social media and reputation. It promises to be a fascinating two days. Download the full PDF program or call 1300 656 513 or email events@walkleys.com to register.
In 2001, ten-year-old Laura Buxton released a helium balloon. On one side she wrote “please return to Laura Buxton”, and on the other she wrote her address. Where would this balloon land? A tree outside her village in Staffordshire, UK? A lake? A field?
It was found by a man in his hedge in Wiltshire, 140 miles away. He read the name on the balloon and took it to the little girl next door. Excitedly she wrote to Laura Buxton to let her know that she had the balloon. The catch? The girl was also named Laura Buxton, and she was also 10 years old.
Understanding how we perceive these coincidences and how they help create a story is vitally important in a world inundated with “messages”. Read more in my latest MarketingProfs post.
One of the most powerful ways of engaging people, creating change and yes, transforming the world in which we live, is to tell stories. From Homer to Perez Hilton, from the Bible to the Simpsons, stories continue to shape our lives. And at the heart of the story has always been the desire to connect – between the author and the reader, the storyteller and the audience. This strange, sometimes antagonistic bond is as much part of the storytelling tradition as words themselves.
Interestingly, the production and distribution of stories also seems to have come full circle. We started with the bards who would memorise, distribute and share Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey for a few sheckels. One has to ask, “was the fall of Troy really a military victory or a massively successful word of mouth campaign?” It took Heinrich Schliemann centuries to uncover the truth.
Realising that knowledge and power were close bed fellows, the church accumulated vast stores of manuscripts. Cloistered away in abbeys across Europe, monks copied and created, philosophised and imagined – all the while contributing to a precious body of knowledge protected by the fortress-like walls of places like the Vatican Library.
Centuries of work would be swept away with the invention of the printing press, beginning a process which would not just share knowledge but transform our very notion of intelligence. Matching the newly literate population’s thirst for knowledge, whole industries sprang up – schools, printing houses, publishers – and of course, the mass media. Each of these cordoned off a market of their own in an attempt to capitalise on the changes coursing their way through society’s veins. Walls sprang up, money exchanged hands. The knowledge drug had us all hooked.
A century or two on, these walls are also crumbling. In minutes we can create our own blogs and websites, write our own stories and share them with the world. And with sites like Blurb.com, we can take these stories and share in the great literary and social phenomenon of authoring a book.
Last year, Mark Pollard and I, concerned at the mental health and substance abuse issues confronting young men, we reached out to colleagues, friends and family, asking for their stories and their experiences. We pulled it together into a powerful collection of short stories entitled The Perfect Gift for a Man. We published is using the Blurb.com self-publishing platform, donating the money raised to the Inspire Foundation’s Reach Out program.
Projects like this are now much easier for qualifying not-for-profit organisations. Blurb for Good enables citizen philanthropists to create, market and sell books – with a special page in the Blurb bookstore, and access to the BookShow widget (see below).
But how easy is it? I used the Blurb BookSmart software to create a family holiday picture book in about three hours. I had the photos and an idea and I got it done. You can too.
But the best thing about this, for me, is that NFP authors can apply to Blurb to receive an additional contribution from Blurb for every book sold. So, not only do you keep 100% of the profits from the sale of the book, you get access to a secure online shopfront, tools to help you market your book and a little extra cash to help change the world. Sound good? Check out Blurb for Good. Happy book making!
It is no simple matter activating a brand in a social space. I don’t mean setting up a Twitter account or a Facebook fan page – I mean bringing the brand to life by tapping into the subtle (and not so subtle) brand values that lend themselves to expression. On the “social web”, however, we aren’t just looking for (or expecting) your mission statement, your campaign aims or your branded entertainment. In the words of the Cluetrain Manifesto:
If you want us to talk to you, tell us something. Make it something interesting for a change.
Russell Davies and crowdsourced teams from around the world took this notion of “interestingness” to a new level with the Interesting conferences. (I was involved with the first two here in Australia – and they were fascinating!) But it is one thing to be interesting and quite another to push that interestingness to something that seems to live and breathe – and take on a life of its own. It draws on the art of storytelling – but goes a step further – there – into the unknown space where we might just get to learn a little about each other.
I have written about Marcus Brown before – his characters, storylines, commitment and energy. But there is plenty to learn in the way that he imagines, designs, inhabits and performs the characters that he creates. And this presentation is his own personal homage to the creative process – representing four years of “after work work”.
We have conditioned ourselves to a certain style of thinking and a certain style of communication. We have overpopulated our collateral with jargon, strangled it with acronyms and leeched any remaining meaning from its thinning blood. Is there any wonder that we now struggle to deal with the immediacy and impact of social media?
Communications in the social world are a different beast entirely. Your blog posts, your tweets, your messages have to be full-blooded. There must be a pulse in the language and a beat to the message. This is storytelling of a new order or magnitude.
You have to think outside the content square. It means thinking and acting CLEAN:
Clever – Play to your audience’s intelligence. Don’t dumb it down. Amp it up. Create content that flatter’s your audience’s knowledge and understanding.
Layer – The advertising adage – tell them, tell them and tell them again – just doesn’t work. You need to layer meaning. Invite your audiences in. Wink at them slyly. Nod to their expertise. Appreciate their engagement. Remember they’re not here for you – you’re here for them.
Engage – Engage your audience as if you are entertaining them. Even the driest content can be compelling if you inject personality and passion into its creation.
Active – It sounds basic, but provide some form of activation. Can your blog post be easily shared? Is there a video that can be embedded? What about a book that can be downloaded and passed on?
Nervous – Does your content make you nervous? Do you get a small thrill when you write it? Do you worry that people will respond in a way that is unpredictable? If so, you may be on the right path. To produce content that is remarkable – you need to invest something in it. You need to have an opinion. The best content makes you a little nervous as you release it to the public.
Here is a great example from Marcus Brown. What’s he doing? Is he keeping it CLEAN? You be the judge.
What happens when the cultural references of one generation echo into nothingness? What happens when a younger generation misinterprets an off-handed quip? Or tweet?
It’s not simply a few words that disappear into the ether. There are legions of stories, anecdotes and shared experiences that are erased.
So when I say, “I’m a little bit country”, what does it mean to you?
Regular readers will know that I love the idea of play. In fact, I love it so much I built a mnemonic around it – the P-L-A-Y framework for storytelling. But “play” goes so much further for me – it goes to the very heart of our existence. It manifests as what theorists would call a “libidinal drive” – something that compels us to do something – an action that creates an exchange.
But to “be” playful means inhabiting “playfulness”. It also means letting playfulness inhabit you. In many ways, this is what we call “personality” – those traits that show through while you are being yourself – being playful. Being serious.
Russell Davies has a great post on being playful – which actually leads in a different direction from what I was expecting (surprise #1). Rather than investigating playfulness, he looks, instead at “pretending” – and how our various consumer purchases open the door to our imaginary life.
Think, for example, of the link between an iPhone and a Star Trek communicator (so thoughtfully captured in this image!). You can’t tell me that iPhone and other gadget users don’t get a secret buzz out of living out their childhood fantasies. Brands that win are able to facilitate a sense of transference – allowing us to put ourselves into an imaginary space and project an alternative vision of ourselves. After all, I may ride a Ducati (or used to), but I’m never going to be a MotoGP world champion. As Russell points out:
But it's not just a matter of dressing up. A successful pretending object has to delicately balance pretending affordance with not making you look like an idiot. That's why so many successful pretending objects are also highly functional.
If the “pretending object” goes too far – it does indeed make us look idiotic. We become poseurs – mere representations of something more serious. But of the pretending object doesn’t go far enough – then it is trashed, considered lame, and discarded or ignored by its intended audience.
And this is the art in design and the fine line in communications. How do we allow people into the process of creating meaning without restricting their creativity unduly? I think the approach is to turn our “consumers” into Flaneurs. It’s about the experience – but on another person’s terms – not ours. It’s the placing of a product/service/offering in the service of another’s contextual experience. It means that the Flaneur’s experience is paramount – and the “thing-that-is-your-brand” will be recombined, re-absorbed and recontextualised according to its use-life.
If only all TV advertising could get the message across so eloquently and powerfully. Lovely. You can also join the Facebook group – and even though this was made for the Sussex Safer Roads Project, the message is universal. Wear your seatbelt. Embrace life.