How to find and tell your story

"Ready to start marketing your new company, product or brand? Before you create a blog, draft content for your brand-spanking-new website or start tweeting, first define your “brand voice."

Read the full article to find out how to use these four practices to help bring you closer to finding your secret sauce:

1. Build archetypes

2. Fill in the blank

3. Create a test group

4. Find your muse

"Leaders and managers are great ‘Big Story’ tellers: the annual staff day where the CEO delivers an upbeat PowerPoint about the great opportunities ahead, the monthly sales meeting, the annual appraisal, the staff newsletter and more! But most times leaders and managers don’t do small stories; they don’t like small stories. They get dismissed as ‘rumour or ‘gossip’. They’re seen as viral and uncontrollable, needing to be suppressed.

You can spend a whole lot of energy trying to eradicate Small Stories but you’ve got no chance! Give up trying to kill your organization Small Stories and embrace them instead!"

Small Stories don’t all need to be negative, there are great Small Stories too. What’s important is the balance between positive and negative.  Read the full article to find out more about:

- How to get into the Small Story business

- Be careful what your Small Stories are saying

Bitstrips is a popular website and Facebook app that has people making their own cartoons. It lets Facebook users create cartoon avatars of themselves and their Facebook friends, and place those characters into customized comic strips.  Using templates they can modify, users can tell stories or jokes online and share them with friends.

Employees are more than brand ambassadors; they're promise keepers.

Why should a customer do business with a company when even its own employees can’t explain what makes it different? And if the experience that customers have when interacting with your employees doesn’t match up with the stories you are telling, it won’t matter how much you invest in external marketing efforts to project a positive brand image.

Creating alignment is hard work, and it’s time consuming. But it’s critical that we get employees excited about our story. They have to believe it because, ultimately, they’re the ones who will be sharing it.

Read the full article to learn why we need to alter our recruiting processes to enable our internal teams to help tell our brand stories.

We all love a good story. Especially if they’re true.

Here are a few of the elements from a movie based on a true story that kept me engaged:

- Conflict (or characters at odds with each other)

- A setting that engages the senses

- Three-dimensional characters

- The element of surprise

- A new reality

As travellers in the digital age, with every image we share, with every post we write, we’re adding to the larger narrative of how travel and place are described around the world. We become, by default, storytellers.

A final note: As so much of travel media and the Internet is image-driven, or ‘visual storytelling’, the following points take ideas from image-based work and draw parallels with writing / journalism, or vice-versa.

Whether you just want to share your travels with friends and family, or you want to develop writing, photography, or video as part of your career (or even pursue a career in travel journalism), these simple tips can help supercharge your work.  Read the full article to find out about:

1. Good things happen at sunrise

2. Don’t just write when it’s convenient to your schedule

3. Simplify your composition

4. Focus on the key events or “windows” into your overall journey

5. Always put a subject in your images

6. People are what make a travel story

7. Carry a tripod

8. Imagine your narrative as a camera

9. Expect to lose or break something

10. People are just waiting to tell you their stories

A good story tugs at heartstrings, or gets the audience to do or feel something.  Read the full article to find out more about these tips to tell better ones:

1. Make a logical point

2. Learn how to transition

3. Be honest

4. Get your “pathy’s” straight

5. Value yourself

6. Tell a vision

7. Put a Stake in It

8. Create adversaries

9. The devil is in the details

10. Think long-term

You'll find that many of the memory blasts you jot down in a list can be fleshed out into full stories. The list can become a database of story-starters.

Read the full article to find out how to get started using these easy steps:

1) Designate a special notebook for your own memory blasts.

2) Jot down as many random memories as you can in 10 minutes.

3) Include things that were part of your early life.

4) Try to include how you felt.

5) Keep this list going for as long as you can.

6) You can refer to this list for details when writing stories from your life.

7) You can sprinkle these little memory blasts throughout your book.

Telling a good story is more challenging than you think. Read the full article to find out about these resources, tips and tools we’ve collected over the years to help you improve your online storytelling strategy:

Step 1: Getting Started - Knowing The Heart Of What You Do

Step 2: Making Your Story Strategic

Step 3: Make It Visual

And

- Other Resources, Tools And Tips

- Great Books On Storytelling

- Low Cost Or Free Storytelling Tools We LOVE!

Read the full article to find out more about these ways to tell a business story that proves engaging and informative:

- know your audience

- find a 'hero'

- have a point

- ...be newsworthy

- add value

- use the right media

"Your customers are wandering the desert of their journey looking for water, and you are uniquely qualified to help them find it. You know how to guide them, because you’ve been where they are and have found the path to a reliable, proven source.

Your customers want your help. They just need to know that this isn’t a mirage. And that’s why you need to share your story.

But what if people find your story uninteresting or boring? What if you aren’t the best storyteller around… in fact what if you’re down right terrible at telling stories?

You don’t have to build an oasis. Your customer is dying of thirst… an ordinary, tasteless, boring, glass of water will do…  When you share the story of how you found the water they crave, I assure you they will listen."

Read the full article to find out more about what to do the next time your story keeps you up at night worrying

- Recall your customer is thirsty for a guide

- Remember you know the path to water

- Lead them with your heart and your story

"Stories are a great tool in content marketing. Still, understanding the power of stories is one thing; knowing how to craft them... is another. So let's delve into some practical applications of story."

Read the full article to find out more about:

- Case Studies:  Story Power in Action

  - Start With Your Objectives

  - The Client Interview Is the Key to a Great Story

  - Story Genres

  - Crafting the Story

- Your Annual Report as Story

- Video: Seconds to Launch Complex Ideas

Whether you’re crafting a pitch, creating copy for a website, or offering fresh ideas for a blog, approach all of these outlets as different ways to tell a good story.

Look for the story behind the brand.  Read the full article to find 5 ways to tell a story that stands out.

1. Action

2. Emotion

3. Theme

4. Soul

5. Artwork

"GlobalGiving is merely a data curator, steward of stories and protector of storytellers' privacy, and builder of analysis tools for everyone to share. So how is an organization to know which questions work for their evaluations

Today I designed a card game version of our flexible storytelling forms that allows people to try out question-combinations and choose the best questions for their version of the storytelling project. All questions will work with all stories, but only some NGOs care about mapping the social conflict in a story, while others care more about crowdsourcing community solutions to social problems, and so on. This way everybody gets what they want answered in the margins because they agree to keep the core (prompting question) the same."

Find the rules & a downloadable set of the storytelling design game cards in the articles.  The goal:  To win, be able to summarize another player’s secret story solely from the questions you have asked him from a minimal set of cards.

A voice is about being human, displaying a personality and willing to be vulnerable.  Writing and creating from the “real” you is your voice. That can be daunting and  exposing.

Your persona and humanity is multi-dimensional and many faceted. It is a jumble of experience, thoughts, expression and passions.  Read the full article to find out more about these tips to find your voice:

1. Show your personality

2. Display your humor

3. Put yourself in your audience's shoes

4. Expose your imperfections

5. Reveal your passion

6. Tell your stories

7. Develop brand "you"

Our kids are natural storytellers.Use their enthusiasm and sense of adventure to your advantage. Not only can they share their own stories, but they can collect the stories of their family.

Use stories that elicit familiar memories of their own experiences: food, vacation, school field trips, etc. Next, give them a challenge. Not only should they share their own stories, but they need collect the stories of their family. They will be your family’s Story Superhero!