Storybag

By Laura Fleming and John Connell Until just a few years ago, stories we were told mostly through  a single medium – it might be a book, a movie, a radio

Keith Ritchie, storyteller at Siemens, talks to Marketing about his role as a storyteller and just how powerful telling a story can be to engage clients, potential clients, and staff. What does story-telling mean to you?

"At the center of all marketers’ brand ambitions sits the hope of creating a fan base. All brands have customers, the people that buy the brand, but few have a substantial fan base. The difference between fans and customers is behavioural. Fans are the type of customer that feels they are brand stakeholders. They are part of and some create the brand story itself. Fans go out of their way to buy and use a brand. They talk about the brand for you, harnessing the power of story through word of mouth. They position your brand better than you will. To your other customers they are the authentic voice of the brand, more so than you."

"Storytelling for Presentations" was a short lesson I developed for my online Professional Communication and Presentation course. How do you teach storytelling

We live in a culture saturated with stories. From commercials lasting a few seconds, to TV shows lasting a few seasons, we are inundated with more tales every day than any other generation in history.

We can’t seem to get enough stories. We can’t seem to tell enough.

And brands are no exception.

Many brands want to have their stories told. Yet ironically, they (and their marketing teams) often aren’t quite sure what a story is. Marketing wisdom may extol the virtues of storytelling as a technique for engaging audience emotion, but much less is said about what elements make up a story. Or even more crucial, how marketers can use those elements to craft a compelling brand story.

The very best tip I’ve ever seen for good storytelling I wholeheartedly believe to be true. If you want to be a good writer and storyteller …read. I saw that admonition again most recently in my fourth time through “On Writing” by Stephen King.

There’s a reason the line “a picture is worth a thousand words” became a cliché.

To debate whether it’s 1,000 words or 1,055 words misses the point. A visual pulls the reader into the narrative and enhances the storytelling.

Photo sites like Flickr make it easy to add photos into your blog posts.

You can do better.

Here are six tips to upgrade your visuals from the garden-variety photos available in the public domain. Equally important, they don’t require design expertise, just a pinch of cleverness.

"Children are known for how much they love to play make believe, and StoryKid, an app introduced today during the Disrupt Hackathon in New York, takes this and gives it a new twist by offering a series of pictures as visual cues for a child to tell a story based around them. StoryKid is aimed at children aged 2 to 5 who are already talking but may either be too young or just starting to write. Created by two comparative literature PhDs from Columbia University, the idea is that this will, in turn, help bring children into the world of story telling and literature. And as co-founder Tianjiao Yu tells me, it can also be used by parents when they’ve run out of inspiration for their own made-up bedtime stories."

"You know that feeling, when you can’t wait to get home to tell your significant other about the crazy thing that just happened at work? The second you walk through the door, even before you kick off your pinchy-toe shoes, you’re saying, “You’re not going to believe this . . .” as you launch into the story, complete with revealing hand gestures, passion, and well timed pauses that effortlessly build to the riveting climax."

Learn how to find stories and spread the word of your success today with these tips.

On Sunday night, “Inocente” won an Oscar for Best Short Documentary Subject. The film is a moving coming-of-age story about an undocumented young woman inCalifornia, Inocente Izucar, who struggles with poverty and homelessness and finds resilience through art. As the trailer appeared on the big screen on the Oscar stage, it became crystal clear how infrequently we hear of the personal stories of undocumented youths or, dare I say it, of the healing power of storytelling. (You can watch the film here.)

[Photo: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images]

Some people talk about the “arc” of a story. Others talk about “coming full circle” and “forks in the road.” When we think about the emotional ups and downs inherent in a compelling story, our minds quickly form images of physical lines, curves, and other shapes.

Marketers and business owners would be wise to familiarize themselves with this infographic. Graphic designer Maya Eilam has given us all a gift by taking the time to beautifully render Kurt Vonnegut’s thinking into an illustrated model of 7 story archetypes.*  (Good-Bad-Good, etc.)  I’m already a big fan of how Vonnegut distills a story down to its essence, and have previously shared this video of him teaching story structures.

The 5 Levels of Digital Storytelling

When we think of introducing web-based tools into our classrooms, as teachers we often obsess over the technical side of things. We worry about setting everything up, about dealing with passwords, about computers crashing and our students not doing what they are supposed to do.