Category Archives: Ideas

Three Arrows. Three Words. One STORYCODEX.

03 Monday Mar 2014

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People often ask me: What is a story? And what isn’t?

Where to begin? Where to end? How to convey the essence of this ancient concept in a so-called elevator pitch – which is even much shorter than the infamous management summary?

Epic’s have been written, filmed, recorded about this topic. From Aristotle to McKee. All very well, all very correct. But also: all very long.

This is my elevator-pitch attempt at less-than-twitter brevity, a visualisation of story motion. Three arrows. Three words. My storycodeX in a nutshell:

herr dennehy's storycodeX

You can always apply more detail. More academia. And I’m sure I will, bit by bit.

But for me: This is it.

Agree?

Disagree?

Why?

Let me know!

cheers
herr dennehy

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The Storytrain Manifesto: the end of corporate messaging as usual.

04 Tuesday Feb 2014

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15 years down the virtual road, it’s time to take the Cluetrain Manifesto to the next level.

cluetrain wordle, created by Tobias Dennehy on wordle.net

Back in 1999, it predicted “the end of business as usual”, caused by “a powerful global conversation [that] has begun through the Internet.” Talking a lot about why “markets are conversations and getting smarter”, “markets that consist of human beings”, conversations that need to be “conducted in a human voice [which is] unmistakably genuine [and] can’t be faked.”

About the fact that these “markets [actually] want to talk to companies.” And about the genuinely human constituents of these markets who will only talk to any company or institution on one condition:

“If you want us to talk to you, tell us something. Make it something interesting for a change.”

Tacitly accepting the risk of redundancy and repetitiveness here: I truly believe that this “something interesting” is the core of the Cluetrain Manifesto. A core without which the conversations that these markets are about, would be impossible.

Why?

Thesis 75 not simply states or claims something, or tells corporations what to change, which many of the other theses do in an at times slightly patronizing way; it actually hints into the direction of how to solve the corporate dilemma posed by the internet and social media paradigm shift.

This “something interesting” is, has always been, and will always be: STORY.

The right story told to the right people at the right time and in the right way will create open ears, open minds, loyalty and stickiness on the sides of the people you’re talking to. Even if it’s just one single person who is more open and susceptible to what you have to say than before you said it, and that’s the one single person you want to reach – isn’t that a beautiful thing?

I mean, let’s be honest: It’s not always about the mass of anonymous, meaningless Facebook friends or the 10 million views on your YouTube video that makes communications efforts successful – even though we all love to pretend otherwise in our “Oh my project was such a great success” power-point attacks on human intelligence. It’s what happens AFTERWARDS that proves if there’s any meaningful outcome to what we said, wrote or showed. [Side note: Do you know how long you need to watch a video on YouTube before the platform counts your action as a ‘view’? FIVE seconds. So much for that as a relevance KPI! Ha!]

So, what does it take to make your train of stories not only leave the station on the right platform and the right track, but also pick up passengers along the way who really like the direction you’re going and actually want to follow you?

A Storytrain that ideally never reaches its final destination, but gathers many a compelling story and fellow storytellers and passengers along the way?

A Storytrain that never returns home, but bit by bit is actually driven by its passengers to destination unknown, merely aiming at never-ending on a dead-end track?

Find it out when you jump on the bandwagon of The Storytrain Manifesto RIGHT HERE at storytrain.org.

Become a passenger, blind or seeing. Be my guest. My co-pilot. My chief guard. Help me make this work! Thanks. 🙂

“What IS story? And what ISN’T?” … Part 3: The Truth Aspect

08 Wednesday Jan 2014

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“Never let truth get in the way of a good story.”
Nucky Thompson

Now that’s a sledge hammer statement, I’d say.

More truth behind it, however, than you find in most of the business “stories” out there, that’s a fact. A truth that’s just as old as story itself. Especially in the context that Steve Buscemi’s character utters it in Episode 1 of Terence Winter’s and Martin Scorsese’s no less fascinating mob series “Boardwalk Empire” – which is politics.

Unfortunately, this has no less been true for the sphere of economics and business ever since we started to trade mammals for firewood way back in the days – or bonds and shares for lies on Wall Street just recently. And as we all know, business is nothing but politics, so in a way you could say that corporate messaging is suffering the same slow death as capitalism is, or at least the locust version that brought down the Lehman Bros: People don’t buy it anymore! They want (cognitive or emotional) proof, either from
– own experience
– a friend’s recommendation (or disapproval), or
– a gut feeling that a corporation is telling a true story.

And the latter gut feeling can, today, always be unmasked as false by a friend’s or so-called “user’s” – what an irrespective word for a person getting in touch with your corporate content, I’ve always hated it … just a gut feeling … 🙂 – disapproval, or also own experience. Recapitulating: Social Media = Storytelling and Social Media unmasks every corporate lie aka bad messaging story attempt, sooner or later!

OK, but: truth is not always the same in good and true storytelling. The way I see it, there are two dimensions of truth in story:

Authentic / documentary / historic / objective / non-fictional truth
This is the kind of obvious truth we all know: What is told in a story (film, book, theater play, you name it) is indeed authentic, i.e. it REALLY TOOK PLACE. The protagonist is A REAL PERSON whom we are either witnessing during a positive or negative, but in any case dramatic (in the literary sense) part of his life that is at that moment REALLY TAKING PLACE – or who is acting as a witness of this drama that REALLY HAS TAKEN PLACE sometime in the past. The classical documentary. There is a truth behind every documentary that we can investigate (if we find time and pleasure to do so), that we can prove or refute. Any well-told and well-researched history book or TV program falls into this category as much as any animal documentary or social reportage.

Inner-fictional logic and subjective truth
If objective truth was the only dimension of truth that made a good story a true story, then all Hollywood films, all great novels of literary history, every poem, every comic, etc. would be “un-true”. Which they are not. They all have an inner logic, an inner truth which they follow to the most meticulous extent – if they are well-built and well-told. Everything COULD HAVE TAKEN PLACE the way it is described, the protagonist COULD HAVE existed and experienced the described drama, even though in another or maybe even a fictional world.

Take Garcia Marquez’ “Love in the Time of Cholera” – one of the greatest love stories of the 20th century – as an example: Young Florentino Ariza and lovely Fermina Daza COULD HAVE really fallen in love with each other, secretly living this forbidden love through an orgasm of passionate love letters despite the forced separation by Fermina’s father. Florentino’s love COULD HAVE kept growing ever fonder and deeper and undying despite Fermina’s marrying handsome Dr. Juvenal Urbino, at first under arranged circumstances, then with real affection and love, which led her to exclude her former lover Florentino from her life. And after almost a century of undying, in fact evermore flourishing love to this evermore unreachable lover, Florentino COULD HAVE waited all those years for his true love, and the two of them COULD HAVE met decades later after Urbino’s tragic death to renew their old love just before the end of their lives, on an old Mississippi steamboat …

51e2eOuVQBL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_

Gee, I’m getting carried away … you SHOULD read this book, true recommendation! Simply reliving the memory of reading this novel gives me goose pimples, although the plot is of course fiction, it did NOT really take place, but it is so well told that I am convinced it COULD HAVE – and maybe has?

What I mean by all of this and what Florentino’s ordeal d’amour has to do with business story: In general, a real and good story can have either an objective, provable plot, or a truth made true by the inner logic of a fictional narrative. Both need not only the classical elements of story structure (a future post on this blog will elaborate a little more on this aspect, rest assured!), but also a capable narrator.

OK, and this is where most business stories fail, miserably:
– First of all: They have no story structure
– Then: They very seldom make use of capable and experienced narrators and storytellers; they rather use brain-washed, submissive agencies or brain-washed, inexperienced employees
– They – what is worst in the context of truth – mix truth (real people like employees or customers and real products) with fiction (corporate messaging bullet point as pre-scripted storyline and treatment structure elements that claim to be authentic) without transparently distinguishing the blurring barriers for the viewer or (abused) user.

So, to come to an end here:

If you’re a business storyteller, stick to the truth and nothing but the authentic, documentary, objective and provable truth.

If you’re a screenwriter or novelist or poet or painter or whatever artistic inventor of truths, make sure you adhere to the inner-logic of this fictional truth. But you can also – and that’s kind of unfair – not only invent truths, but also combine invented truths with real, authentic, objective and historically provable truths and still tell a great and credible story. Grrr, damn these artists!

But then again: Life ain’t fair, so get over it, oh Business Storyteller!

And if you DO mix objective truth with fictional elements, you better be as intelligent, bold and open about is a the desirable brand Jaguar in their recent advertising feature film for its new F-type model called “Desire” – a “story worth watching” I actually wanted to write about today, but to tell you the truth: I got carried away with writing about truth. 😉

Very well then, I’ll do that next time, because:

The story goes on … here … soon.

“What’s IS story? And what ISN’T?” … Part 2: The Human Touch

29 Sunday Dec 2013

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Just before tradition forced me to vanish into a (non-white, sometimes rainy, sometimes spring-like warm, but very nutritious) Christmas break, I had touched upon the human touch of stories. In my eyes one of the most amusing and annoying misunderstandings in today’s business communication, the “human element”, right …

A misunderstanding that started off with two seemingly positive and delectable developments, for privateers as well as inside corporations great and small:

  1. Technology (once again), especially the ubiquity of HD-ready devices:
    Just a couple of years ago you needed a real pro with a real pro equipment to produce a pro piece of film for you, privately or as a brand. But today: Camcorders, digital cameras, even smart phones, available at reasonable prices, easy to handle, one-button simplicity and … Tadaah! Here’s your great video! Or at least a moving image with an .mpeg or .mov or .whatever file ending. Or at least something that conforms to the minimum standards of standard video players and standard video platforms. But does that make it a good video, let alone a good, interesting, appealing, relevant piece of communications collateral? More on the nay side, I would say.
  1. Storytelling, the latest magical bandwagon for marketers (and bloggers, haha!) to jump on, mostly without a valid ticket, let alone a driving license:
    I remember, Hippocampus, here we go again: It was some time in the winter of 2008, I was invited to give a 15-minute impulse speech at a conference of top communications managers from all over the world, about the potential of storytelling in business-to-business communications. Very few slides. No flow charts. No processes. No figures. That already scary enough for advertising dinosaurs and communicator-wannabe engineers. Just a couple of quotes, trying to give them an idea of what the heck this humanist and literary scholar was a) doing here and b) talking about. After my 15 Warhol minutes and some drinks at the hotel bar: I thought they had gotten the idea, theoretically.

Unfortunately, I was wrong, I had failed. It turned out that the distilled gist they had taken away was not plot, change, suspense, surprise, conflict or other story dynamics of that kind; it was “the human element”. Not a bad thing at all, don’t get me wrong, and surely a valuable ingredient for a good story full of identification potential and stuff, but: If you think putting one or two humans onto screen, slide or paper turns messaging into story: wrong end of the stick.

Example one:
Interview your real Sales manager human being in front of his real product for a real product website talking about the product’s really great features: Ain’t no story.
Change of approach: Find out who this Sales guy person is, where his passion comes from, what he’s been through to get to where he is today, what he loves to do in his leisure time which might in a way be related to the benefits of his great product? More like it, story-wise, at least some potential story angles there.

Example two:
Show a real cute girl patient in a hospital climbing into a CT scanner, two grown-ups with concerned looks on their faces, underlay some emotional music and a compassionate voice over for a 30-second TV spot: Ain’t no story.
Change of approach: Dig deeper and tell that girl’s (hi)story, her ordeal, the ups and downs she and her family had to go through until they finally found a way to access this unique, life-saving medical device … Bang! There’s your story!

Let’s add another perspective to this human element thing:

Do you think you could lament for the fate of an ant?
http://youtu.be/jB8wKvI0_8E

Could you anxiously witness every minute of a toy’s story?
http://youtu.be/7MM1k1SSlWs

Or an alien’s?
http://youtu.be/_7-2PB4jj2o

Or a machine’s?
http://youtu.be/9rlI3Xg9g_A

Gee, took me long to get my thoughts together here, must be the turkey still weighing on my concentration … so, what I’m getting at:

  1. You don’t need a human being for a good story, you need an element of humanity. And there are many business communication products out there with many humans, but lacking humanity, hence: They don’t work.
  2. Whoever is the hero of your story – man, machine or animal: Whatever happens to him (or her) needs to resonate with human emotions, needs to offer human identification, needs to feel humanly familiar.
  3. Oh and – I may have mentioned it before: Something needs to actually HAPPEN, before you decide whom it happens to.

Yet, the good news at the end of a long post and year: There’s hope and quite a number of really interesting storytelling projects out there in the business world already, rays of hope in a dark, loud and boring corporate messaging world.

So, I’d like to start 2014 with my personal top 5 selection. Permitted that New Year’s Eve is gentle to me …

In any case:

The story goes on … here … soon.

“What IS story? And what ISN’T?” … Part 1

23 Monday Dec 2013

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Went for a walk this morning (well, wasn’t really morning, but pretty much felt like it) and maybe it was the unexpected and unwonted amount of oxygen rushing through my synapses, but: After about half an hour of contemplating over the best way to maybe start a series of “What IS story? And what ISN’T?” posts, the plethora of oxygen carried my Hippocampus back 20 years in time.

Back to my first days at university, just after the first intro session with my future literature science professor, where he answered every freshman’s burning question “What should a Germanist read?” with a brief but sharp “Everything!”. I’ve tried for the past 20 years, I really have, but …

See what happens when you get too much oxygen and stuff??? What I wanted to get to is: Just a semester or two later, I was able to counter and at least give new first-semesters two answers to the question “What are the most important things you will learn during your studies?”:

  1. Secretaries are more important than professors.
  2. You don’t need to know a lot, you only need to know someone who knows or somewhere to look it up.

… And suddenly, after about 45 minutes of absent-minded walking, I knew where to start. With my man Kurt Vonnegut (humanist, pacifist and influential “counterculture novelist” of the twentieth century, as the NY Times called him after his passing in 2007) who probably indirectly gave the most accurate and at the same time most entertaining definition of story and non-story that at least I have seen or read to date – and remember: I haven’t even come close to my professor’s everything goal!

Take time for and enjoy these 4:37 minutes, they’re worth every invested second.

My lessons from this piece of infotainment are (business people hear, hear, we got some lessons learned, bullets, and guidelines coming your way right here):

  1. Stories move in waves. Every piece of content that doesn’t move beyond the B-E Meridian is NOT a story.
  2. Acknowledge the Negative. Either as starting point, turning point, climax or – and that scares the shit out of Hollywood as much as the Marketing work – as denouement.
  3. With the words of one of the world’s most acclaimed screenwriting lecturers Robert McKee: “Essentially, a story expresses how and why life changes.” (http://hbr.org/2003/06/storytelling-that-moves-people/).Meaning: No change, no drama, no story. A flat B-E Meridian has the same consequence for a story like a flat ECG wave for a human being: It’s dead.

Oh yes, human … that’s another marketing must of the last couple of years. Show people in your video, and there you have a story. Yeah, right.

Why it’s not quite as simple as that, but much more rewarding when you go the hard way, and why this is just the tip of the storyberg: Next time.

The story goes on … here … soon.

Markets are Conversations are Storytelling

21 Saturday Dec 2013

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It’s already a couple of years ago that I was taking my kids to the „Deutsches Museum“ in Munich, Germany. Of course, the attraction for little girls is less the impressive planes or ships, let alone any technical innovations of the past or present. The burner: The interactive technology experience playground down in the basement. After hours of deafening children’s screeching and soaking wet from these lovely water games, I announced: “Now it’s time for some REAL culture!” taking them up to a special exhibition about life in the 1950’s.

Old cars, vespas, vacuum cleaners and washing machines, strange dresses and shoes and sun glasses … all nice, my girls giggling, me becoming Mr. Nostalgia. BUT the following scene from that day is what made this exhibition so rememberable for me: A roughly 12-year-old boy standing on front of this ancient TV screen, massive with a greenish screen and classic wooden shells, when I overheard the following dialogue:
Boy: “Wow, they surfed the Internet with these things?”
Mother: “That’s a TV, back then, there was no Internet.”
Boy: “What do you mean: There was no Internet???”

Interesting. A generation that was born when the Internet was already mainstream standard. A generation that can’t remember having to walk to distant telephone boxes in the freezing cold to speak to your girlfriend, back then when there was no Skype, no What’s App, no Facebook or phone flats. Only 20 years ago. A generation that was born just before the 2001 .com bubble crash, around the time when four fare-sighted guys /Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger) from the U.S. hammered their 95 commandments to a digital wall named www.cluetrain.com.

cluetrain.com

What this has to do with storytelling? Everything. Let me mark out just a couple of Cluetrain theses which I believe significantly direct business humans working in and for corporations and especially in marketing and communication departments in the right cardinal point, directly to the power and inevitability of story in the social web age:

“Markets are conversations.” (Thesis 1)
The boiled-down essence of The Cluetrain. Meaning: “Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.” (Thesis 2) Meaning: Target groups, clients, users, readers, viewers are humans. Not some alien, abstract mass of lemmings waiting for a message to follow. And these markets (or humans) are constantly engaged in conversations, with each other, with other corporations – and conversations are meta level of stories, or vice versa: stories are the molecules of conversations.

“People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.” (Thesis 5)
If that is so – and it is –, then corporations can’t talk, can’t tell stories, can comment, can’t post, chat, respond or share information, only their employees can. And no products, no solutions, no services, no companies can be heroes, only people can – and in the sharing web that finally really helps Kant’s Aufklärung blossom, corporate fake will be unmasked in the tweet of an eye. And “as a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally.” (Thesis 10)

“A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.” (Thesis 75)
There’s nothing to add here, they wrote this in 1999, and look at many companies, especially in the B2B area: They’re still lagging behind on the smartness front like ever before.

Last but not least, the bulls-eye thesis for the importance of storytelling in the technically interconnected world:
“If you want us to talk to you, tell us something. Make it something interesting for a change.” (Thesis 75)

And this “something interesting” is an interesting, relevant, credible, authentic, true story.

And what IS a real, true story? And what ISN’T?

The story goes on … here … soon.

Social Media = Storytelling

18 Wednesday Dec 2013

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Recently at a conference, someone asked me why the hell everyone in business is talking about the need for this new thing called storytelling in communications and marketing. First of all, I told him, I’m happy that they are finally getting it. Or are they? If they call storytelling ‘new’, they surely aren’t…

Thing is: People, and I specifically mean business people, think that a little bit of emotional music, a couple of real humans and a raw look and feel makes a piece of communication authentic, relevant and, yes, a story. Ever heard a colleague come up with a “great story” he wants to write about, or show you a video that portraits “our unique story”? And once you take a closer listen or look, you hear or see nothing but a paraphrased or moving-image message triangle, patronizing the recipient in 20th-century advertising manner, telling him what to think or feel or, in the end, do. No hero, no drama, no expectation, no surprise, no identification.

The great thing about today: In the digitally connected world, people are getting back to the roots of human conversation, gagging for true, real and surprising story, something outstanding, something new to enjoy and share. Ergo: This whole social media thing is nothing but an extended remix version of an old, very successful song.

Why’s that?

Well, sharing aka telling stories has been man’s unique selling point and leisure pleasure ever since he (or she) could communicate (non-verbally or verbally) – around campfires in the Neanderthal or at medieval markets, at children’s bedsides or you name it. In other words: being social, embarking into (however purposeful) conversations with other people. Sender tells, recipient receives, recipient becomes sender, becomes recipient, becomes sender and so on. Being social is having conversations, and conversations are never one way. In the vernacular we call this: Dialogue. Thereby follows Equation #1:

Social = Conversation

And if this is so, that being social and having conversations is the most ancient human trait we can think of, what makes social media or the so-called web 2.0 so special, so revolutionary? Again, easy: Technology. Whenever mankind creates something big, it’s either mimicry or an enhancement of what nature already has in store. As in the case of the Internet and its second-generation 2.0 version, technology has enabled us to bring human conversations from a personal to a global (and sometimes hence impersonal, but that’s a different topic) level. Leading me to Equation #2:

Social Media = Global Conversation

After all this, the end (or beginning?) of this story (or message?) is no rocket or internet science, it’s mere logic: If we only embark in conversation with people that have something interesting to tell, something we can relate to, something that touches either our hearts or our minds or both, the power is not in great rhetoric or bullet points of a fact sheet. It’s the stories we hear about real people with real challenges, real successes, real failures, yes: real lives. Why should this be different in social media’s global conversations? So in the end comes Equation #3:

Social Media = (Global Conversation =) Storytelling

If this is so – and I get a strange feeling I’m not completely wrong here –, then this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to successful communication and marketing in the 21st century, be it for a company or your own personal brand. Like: What is and what is not a story? Where the roots are and what can we learn from them? What do Aristotle and the Cluetrain Manifesto have in common?

The story goes on … here … soon.