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There’s a lady at my church who is the best teacher I’ve ever seen. She works with a handful of people or a hundred with equal ease. The age of her students makes no difference: toddlers or teens, men and women–and hardest of all, groups with all ages together. In every case, she has them in the palm of her hand, listening, learning and participating enthusiastically. I’ve even seen her teach subject matter that was beyond her normal sphere of knowledge, yet she inspired her students to do great things.
And she never took a single class in college about how to be a teacher. She never went to an educators’ seminar.
How does she do it?
She tells stories about every day things.
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Gregg Morris shared this post on WordPress. (February 3, 12:22 PM) |
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Gregg Morris shared this post on Twitter. (February 3, 12:22 PM) |
Story and Narrative
Companies are always trying to create the perfect marketing tools--tools that will make brand history, generate buzz for products, and earn those products an unshakeable spot in customer's lives. Large companies have the luxury of throwing thousands of advertising dollars into marketing budgets, but small companies rarely can. I have found that the most powerful marketing device a small company can develop is its story 
In order to tell the story of Star Wars, George Lucas had to create a new technology company that was powerful enough to tell that story. The same thing has to happen in digital news publishing.
That’s the conclusion of Jim Bankoff, CEO and Chairman of Vox Media, whose sites The Verge and SB Nation have shaken up the world of tech and sports journalism.
“Story telling digitally is a native art just like broadcasting,” says Bankoff, who argues that publishers must build themselves in response to the shape of the web and its audiences. 
The Heider-Simmel experiment became the initial basis of attribution theory, which describes how people explain the behavior of others, themselves, and also, apparently, geometric shapes on the go.
More importantly, people explain things in terms of stories. Even in situations where no story is being intentionally told, we’re telling ourselves a tale as a way to explain our experience of reality.
Human beings are storytelling machines. Not only do we love to experience stories, our cognition is an amazing mix of stories we tell ourselves.
Think about it — our entire sense of self is based upon an ongoing narrative we tell ourselves based on our memories and conditioning, mixed with our current experience of life. We also tell various parts of that story to others so that they know who “we” are. 
Team Shareable has been toiling away in our sharing skunkworks for months working out how to launch our new book, Share or Die, being brought out in paperback (plus Kindle & iPad) by New Society Publishers in just a few days.
Being us, we didn't want to launch our book, well, in "the old way." We asked ourselves, "How would Shareable bring a book about sharing into the world?" And, "How do we engage our community in an authentic way?" And, "What would best serve the sharing movement?"
Those are a lot of questions and a high bar to meet. We finally landed on a contest that rewards well-told stories about sharing (enter the contest here), which isn't a perfect solution. In fact, there's some contradictions right off the bat (a contest about sharing?).
We realized, however, that we have an intelligent audience that's comfortable with contradiction and nuance. And that a storytelling contest fit the bill because it's a community storytelling effort that can catalyze a movement. 
The team at Story Worldwide has developed a very useful and scientific approach to categorizing and developing brand stories. It’s called the Storytelling Matrix and they describe it best in the video below.
As you watch the video and listen to the examples, think about where your specific brand stories may fall — and begin to look for gaps. For example, your customer success stories or case studies may be more linear — that is, you don’t offer a way for the reader to interact. That’s fine, it’s difficult to interact with a piece of collateral that you pick up at a trade show! But, what could you do to make it more interactive? What about offering a webinar or a video of the case study that your audience could then participate in or share with others? 
I am a big fan of storytelling. I'm also a big fan of movies. I'm also a big fan of video. Okay, so I'm not going to list all the different media types. I do love them all. Put into the hands of experts media can impact human beings in profound ways.
As we craft "instructionally sound" learning experiences aren't we really just acting as authors, and puppet masters, in the telling of a good story? Even if we do sort of ruin the story with a multiple choice test at the end? 
Create a dramatic story arc to keep your audience engaged
All classically great stories begin in a state of everyday life but then a trigger sparks a quest for resolution. The story then takes the audience on a journey to reach that resolution. Structuring your pitch in this fashion will keep your audience engaged and want to join your journey through to resolution. Good pitches can follow this structure by identifying a problem that needs solving and then explaining how they will achieve that goal. 
Does your brand tell a story? In Winning the Story Wars, globally recognized storyteller, designer and entrepreneur Jonah Sachs argues that only those brands that tell values-driven stories through the right channels will revolutionize marketing. 
The poet John Keats once described the ideal state of the psyche as negative capability — the ability “of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable teaching after fact & reason.” “The truth of life is its mystery,” echoed Joyce Carol Oates. This comfort with mystery and the unknown, indeed, is at the heart not only of poetic existence but also of the most rational of human intellectual endeavors, as many of history’s greatest scientific minds have attested. And yet, caught between the opinion culture we live in and our deathly fear of being wrong, we long desperately for absolutism, certitude, and perfect truth. 
What’s interesting to me is that these building blocks often parallel, beat by beat, Joseph Campbell’s throughline of the “hero’s journey.”
Herewith those beats in myth: the hero starts out unconscious, the hero receives a “call,” the hero ventures forth, meets outlandish characters, receives aid from unexpected sources (often divine or semi-divine), suffers, is lost, despairs, and finally returns home—often in a guise unrecognizable to others. The way you define yourself in your head is a powerful thing. I’m not talking about the façade we all put up to the rest of the world, I’m talking about the short set of words that we use to say to ourselves who we are.
Sometimes we lie to ourselves, and sometimes we’re forced to quickly reassess how we define ourselves because of outside circumstances.
Writers do a lot of self definition; for starters we call ourselves writers. That’s an important place to come to in our heads, where writing has become something that we are at our core as opposed to it being something we simply do as a hobby or even as a job. I think finding that definition of yourself is an important step towards being a professional. 
I think Gopnik is missing the point. First of all, college English departments hardly read stories anymore. They read literary theory. To the extent that they do read stories–like, say, Hamlet–it’s through dark veil of theory (i.e. was Hamlet gay?). Second, stories, by definition, make us more empathetic. They have to. The dictionary defines empathy as “the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.” This is exactly what a story does: It takes us inside another person’s world and help us understand how that person is feeling and why they react to certain dramatic events in the way that they do or why the take action to achieve a certain goal. 
Comics, cartoons, sequential art. Each of these words implies the same thing: stories told with words and pictures. Much has been written about about how storytelling affects the user experience, but little has been written about how visual storytellers craft that experience. Today, I’m going to share the tricks of the trade that comickers use to lead a reader’s eyes across a page. You can use these techniques to tell stories, sell widgets, promote an idea, help users find what they’re searching for – the possibilities are endless! |
[Nice roundup of articles.]
Storytelling is an art, and one that the best bloggers, podcasters, and web TV producers must learn to master online. Even business owners promoting their products on social media can benefit from learning about storytelling. 
Surprises are a magical thing. The problem is too many storytellers can’t help themselves and rush into them too quickly. A good surprise within a story is a great device to reinvigorate interest... 
In her book Storytelling & the Art of Imagination, author Nancy Mellon writes, "Storytelling gives us love and courage for life ... storytelling puts us in touch with strengths we may have forgotten, with wisdom that has failed or disappeared, and with hopes that have fallen into darkness."
Maybe the financial havoc wreaked by the recession has given post 50s a new appreciation for the courage, strength, wisdom and hope found in stories -- because 86 percent of baby boomers surveyed agreed that family stories are the most important aspect of their legacy 
The winning formula for consumer engagement is storytelling. It sounds simple, but we only need to look back through history to see the impact that stories have had on shaping our lives: how we live them, why we live them and what it means to be human.
Narratives as powerful as the Bible, to ancient myths and Shakespeare's prose, speak to the heart, teaching us how to relate to one another and guiding us into action. Let's not forget that stories are easier on the ear than detached advertising taglines. Studies of human psychology have found that if we are told something through narrative, we are more likely to relate to the message, absorbing it further and remaining engaged from start to finish.
For a brand to appeal to consumers and replicate this empowering engagement, its content must tell a story, one that draws us in, broadens our horizons and delivers added value to our lives.
But how do brands do it?
[Image credit: Jan Stromme/Getty Images] 
We’ve all done it. Searched for info online, landed on a site, started reading, then gave up halfway into the third sentence, and moved on to another site. Chances are, that web copy was all facts and no fun.
The story you tell in your marketing content piques interest and keeps prospects reading.
It’s the story you tell that creates the connection between prospects and your company. It’s your copy that turns prospects into customers.
And it’s the story that keeps clients returning again and again.
Transform your web copy from a 500-person lecture to an intimate 15-person discussion. Make them feel seen, appreciated, and heard. Above all, make your content relatable.
Here are three key elements to help you do just that… 
So you’ve decided to start working storytelling into your virtual communication toolbox!
Quick question: What qualifies as a “story?”
Experts quarrel and quibble, but for our purpose – using story effectively in the virtual classroom – we’ll define story as:
Anything but “once upon a time.”
We want to bestow meaning, provide context, help the audience retain the information we’re sharing… succinctly. We’re going for the illustration, metaphor, quote, anecdote, fable: anything that helps inspire and impart vision in lieu of spewing facts. (Simmons)
Here are the first five of 10 tips to consider as you add storytelling to your virtual training sessions. 
It's bed time... you go upstairs to the bedroom with your child and watch or help as he/she gets ready for bed. Once they are nestled in, a typical next step is a bedtime story.
But how often have you told a story? Not read a story, but TOLD one from memory?
It's an interesting question and points to a fact that we have as a culture lost a significant amount of the "oral tradition" that dates back to the dawn of history. People have always told stories. In words, songs, poems, etc. It was long the role of the bard, the troubadour, the storyteller to relay those stories and tell the tales. It was that way for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years. Recently, a young creative guy wanted to interview me. 
Now, the company’s efforts are all coming together with the launch of new media format that allows publishers, bloggers, Web personalities and others to create 60-second video stories that are embedded with other videos, images, maps and links. It’s like an interactive video slideshow that lets users click on other content throughout a narrated story, so they can choose how deep they want to experience the content.
The service has gotten a big endorsement from ABC News, which will use Qwiki to tell news stories online. The network has already started putting together stories, which also appear in its Qwiki channel. Other early advocates are Stylecaster and blogger Shea Marie. The service goes into private testing today with some early users and is expected to open to the public in a couple of weeks. 
A common theme this afternoon at the Front End of Innovation conference was using storytelling for powering innovation and navigating change. Noelle Chun, Storyteller & Digital Strategist for Yahoo!, provided “a highly tactical, practical useful guide to storytelling in a corporate setting”. In her presentation, she answered some common questions about corporate storytelling. 
It used to be, not so long ago, that I lived a dull existence. I would read stories quite passively; I would watch TV and movies as a spectator. Not that it’s possible really to be anything other than a spectator while doing that, but I think it’s possible to sit on the forward portion of the seat a little, if you know what I mean.
In other words I was just along for the ride, never thinking ahead of the story in terms of plot. Now that I’ve had a little practice constructing such things myself, I find I take in stories differently, whether in print or on the screen. It’s not that the surprise and delight are both gone; far from it. It’s that I’m a more active and aware participant in the stories I digest. I can appreciate a good subplot. 
As a camp counsellor doing regular runs to the library, I became a storyteller – and learned that little has changed since Homer...
I was raised by librarians. It’s like being raised by wolves, but wilder. When Toronto’s librarians went on strike this spring, I went down to the picket line by City Hall and told them fairy tales through a megaphone. It was a small way of thanking them for running the greatest municipal library system in the world and, more personally, for turning me into a storyteller. |
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