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Tag Archives: social media

Geschichten als Gestaltungsräume für moderne Marken.

20 Saturday Feb 2016

Posted by Herr Dennehy in Business Story, experiences, StorycodeX, Storytelling, Storytrain, What is STORY?

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

advertising, authentic, brand journalism, brand storytelling, business storytelling, change, Content Marketing, conversations, corporate storytelling, DACS, digital storytelling, expectation, hero, Human, Marketing, social media, story, Storytelling, surprise, Truth, Werbung

Vor gut eineinhalb Jahren hatte ich Freude und Ehre, im Rahmen der Vortragsreihe “DACS Show and Share” der Münchner Architekten Dina Andersen und Christian Schmid zu sprechen.

Es war ein heißer Juliabend, der erste heiße Abend nach vielen Wochen ungewöhnlicher Kälte und Regen im Juli. Das war cool. Einerseits, denn die die Atmosphäre im Hinterhof der Türkenstraße 21 in Münchens Studentenviertel war an diesem Abend mediterran, einladend ausladend, ausgelassen gelassen, geschichtenträchtig. Andererseits hingegen, was macht man an so einem heißen Sommerabend in Minga, gerade nach einer gefühlten Eiszeit? Genau: Biergarten. Dem geschuldet (so nahmen wir selbstsicher an) kamen statt der angemeldeten 80 Gäste gerade mal 35…

Enttäuschung? Nur im ersten Moment. Denn die, die kamen, wollten’s wirklich. Setzten erfreuliche Prioritäten, nahmen kurze wie längere Wege auf sich, um beim Vortrag “Geschichten als Gestaltungsräume für moderne Marken” über das immerheiße, immergrüne Geschichtenerzählen (neudeutsch: Storytelling), Bedeutung und Chancen für Imagebildung, Imageschärfung, Dialogfähigkeit und Geschäftsunterstützung moderner Marken (erfolglos) der Hitze zu entfliehen. Verschmähten Hoibe und Brezn, tauschten sie gegen Flaschenbier und Hirnschmalz, eingerahmt von Bob Dylan, Tracy Chapman, Mr. Jones und Guy Clark. Ein Traum von Sommer in der Stadt.

Screen Shot 2016-02-20 at 23.23.58.png

Warum denke ich gerade jetzt an diesen Abend zurück? Sicher, weil’s draußen grad mal wieder eklig regnerisch windet und in schwachen Minuten gar schneit. Aber auch, weil mir folgendes Video, das im Vorfeld dieses Vortrags entstanden ist, zwar nicht in die Hände, aber doch virtuell zufällig vor die Augen fiel, als es schüchtern aus seiner Verbannung hinter den Gittern von Vimeo heraus lugte.

Alles noch so wahr wie damals, so wahr wie gestern und vorgestern, so wahr wie heute und morgen, so wahr ich dort stand):


<p><a href=”https://vimeo.com/99722916″>DACS_Storytelling_Tobias_Dennehy</a&gt; from <a href=”https://vimeo.com/user6666630″>Christian Schmid</a> on <a href=”https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a&gt;.</p>

 

Und wen’s interessiert, so fand’s die tapfere Teilnehmerin Susanne Kleiner:

“Starke Marken erzählen starke Geschichten”

 

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Wonder Why Your King Content Performs Like a Wicked Jester? The answer is simple …

06 Monday Apr 2015

Posted by Herr Dennehy in Business Story, experiences, Ideas, StorycodeX, Storytrain

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

authentic, Boccaccio, brand journalism, brand storytelling, business storytelling, change, cluetrain manifesto, Co-creation, content, conversations, corporate storytelling, Dante, digital storytelling, Friedrich Schiller, Günter Grass, Gehalt, Heinirch Böll, Homer, Inhalt, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Literature, narration, social media, Storytelling, surprise, Thomas Mann, Truth, Zufrieden

Ever since I made my first professional walking attempts in the digital world (20 years ago that must be #feelslikeyesterday), I heard this mantra everywhere in the pre-dotcom bubble euphoria of Cluetrain afficionados, would-be Internet prophets, and notorious panjandrums:

CONTENT IS KING! They all said.

Wicked Jester

I had been studying Storytelling for five years, long before I even knew it was Storytelling. Back then they called it literature. So it seemed a little odd to hear these Internet geeks regurgitating their royal mantra when I had just meticulously learnt about the history, structure and perennial powers of stories told by early-day classics like Homer, Cervantes, Dante or Boccaccio, classic classics like Goethe, Schiller or Lessing or modern classics like Grass, Mann or Böll. Admittedly, I was also getting carried away by this millennial the-end-of-business-as-usual atmosphere of imminent change. Felt somehow audacious to dust off the venerable Germanstik patina in favour of some fresh … ehem, content?

It was only many years later, after necessary detours through the fires of corporate Mordor, that I realized one ring, I mean thing: The business world was (sorry: IS!) overly attracted by the glare of technological possibilities and features, fanatically prone to wanna-be-first- and because-we-can-itis. And thereby narrowly and one-sidedly interpreting the word “content”, neglecting other, much more elementary facets – facets that become clearest in the three different German translations the word “content” offers.

Back in the late 90’s, corporate content creation had nothing to do with journalistic research or writing talent. Its creators literally were content “managers”, i.e. project managers for pieces of content that they 1:1 transferred from paper to HTML and pinned to the newly discovered digital blackboard called website. Period. Their job was simply about the most general interpretation of content: words and pictures on a screen, publishing material. The (most probable and wide-spread) German translation for this aspect of content would be:

INHALT.

Or: “Something that is to be expressed through some medium, as speech, writing, or any of various arts … something that is contained.” (dictionary.com)

But it this Inhalt automatically something meaningful? Something that goes deeper than letters strung together by punctuation marks? Something that links beyond the surface not to just another succession of trivialities and soulless pixels, but to true substance? Mostly not. This is where in recent years (in continental Europe) or maybe decades (in Anglo-American dominated countries) the bandwagon of storytelling has already been able to do a lot for the greater good of meaningful content. If understood well and deployed according to the storycodeX of Expectation, Surprise and Change. The (a lot less wide-spread and more rarely spotted) German translation for this aspect of content with substance would be:

GEHALT.

Or: “Significance or profundity; meaning” (dictionary.com)

But interesting: Gehalt also means “salary” in German. So maybe in the end all just about the dough, be the content meaningful or not. Surely, what did you think? Now let’s once and for all get past the naïve, childish, even insulting notion that any one corporation on this planet has a different purpose than making money. And the more they want you to believe that they’re sustainably trying to save the world, “do something good” on the side with CSR and foundations, a little like a Hollywood actress doing charity, the more they’re deceiving you.

The labyrinth of linguistics … Whatever. What I actually wanted to say was: Meaningful content with substance is a good thing. But is it enough? No. Not today anymore, that’s for sure. Inhalt and Gehalt were a great, successful and sufficient, but nevertheless rare combination in the pre social media age. When the third facet of “content” didn’t really matter. It was the age of broadcast after all, old-school Shannon-Weaver style.

Bad news: those days are over. Interactivity, ubiquitous commentaries, likes and forum discussions have changed the recipient side practically over night (in a historical sense of time).

People and the conglomerates they form called audiences (NOT users!) will no longer be satisfied with consuming content-turned-into-great-stories and commenting on it in a more or less intelligent and fruitful discussion with fellow audience members or members from other audience groups. They will first of all want to be able to dig deeper behind your story, deeper into the spider web, find proof for your story, get in contact with the heroes of your story, and maybe some day also with you. If they’re not disappointed on their journey.

But, even more substantial, they will want to become an active part of a company’s business story and stories, not as actors or heroes, but as co-authors. After all, they are the other half of the corporate truth, the devil on the corporate shoulder, internal versus external perception. Devils who might become angels when they turn into a renowned and emancipated member if a brand’s story creation team. Only then will they be what the third, most vital and rarest facet of German translation attempts hints at:

ZUFRIEDEN.

satisfactionOr: “Satisfied with what one is or has; not wanting more or anything else … Archaic: willing.” (dictionary.com)

Yep, content is also an adjective, not only a noun.

And the central question is: Who is it that you want to satisfy with your content? Yourself? Your bosses? Your bosses bosses? Or maybe, only very maybe … your customers? Your customers’ customers? Your audiences? Maybe even a targeted small portion of your audience? Certainly, your answer will be: Of course my customers! Of course my audiences! Plus the fact, now I have all these big and massive and powerful data, I now even know what my audience wants before it knows that it wants it! Ha! There you go, eat this!

I’m eating …

Only: Lies are hard to digest. And all the easier to unmask. As written in the world’s most successful example of purposeful storytelling: “Thou shalt not lie!”

Which brings me to the answer of above-asked headline question: As long as you betray yourself and thereby the people you are apparently creating your content for, there will be no sustainably successful content! Take all your pig data, winnow the refuse from the valuable gold nuggets, take an honest and disarraying look at them, shuffle your cards anew, do away with your organization’s and your management’s old shibboleths, dare, launch a pilot, let go, and see what happens.

There is an even older mantra from our economy’s service sector, way back from the days when storytelling was still literature, when relevant content didn’t need to be called king, when it in fact was a rarity due to its scarcity, not due to its abundance. Back then, the saying went:

Der Kunde ist König. The customer is the King.

Aha. So, so. Let’s try that for once, what do you say?

I can’t get no satisfaction, he says? All the better; let that be your stimulant.

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Will Transmedia eat itself for lunch? Or is it the end of Storytelling as we know it?

08 Friday Aug 2014

Posted by Herr Dennehy in experiences, Ideas, StorycodeX, Storytrain

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

App Film, ARG, authentic, Authenticity, Blair Witch Project, brand journalism, brand storytelling, business storytelling, change, cluetrain manifesto, conversations, corporate storytelling, digital storytelling, Disney, drama, expectation, Human, listening, Marketing and Advertising, narration, Ong's Hat, plot, social media, Storytelling, surprise, Transmedia Storytelling, yalda uhl

S T O R Y T E L L I N G …
probably mankind’s oldest communication megatrend.

T R A N S M E D I A …
probably one of the most used communication megatrend buzzwords in mankind’s recent history.

T R A N S M E D I A  S T O R Y T E L L I N G …
probably the most promising combination of communication megatrends for the future.

Some may ask: “WTF’s that supposed to be again???”

Here’s an attempt from The Source of Internet Wisdom:

“Transmedia storytelling (also known as transmedia narrative or multiplatform storytelling) is the technique of telling a single story or story experience across multiple platforms and formats using current digital technologies.

From a production standpoint, it involves creating content that engages an audience using various techniques to permeate their daily lives. In order to achieve this engagement, a transmedia production will develop stories across multiple forms of media in order to deliver unique pieces of content in each channel. Importantly, these pieces of content are not only linked together (overtly or subtly), but are in narrative synchronization with each other.“

 

A lot of story stuff involved, so I tend to like it, naturally. But also a lot of (digital) technology, channels, platforms. So, really something new? Or just an evolution version of our oldest megatrend, a Storytelling x.0?

Let’s take a look at where the concept stems from:

Transmedia as an idea of collaborative, multi-platform creation and narration origins in the 70’s and 80’s of the last century, in the area of telematic art, where artists experimented with collaborative narration and defined the idea of transmedia.

It soon moved on to the gaming industry, creating so-called Alternate Reality Games (ARG). These are  games that, based on the Internet as a main hub, use(d) multiple other technological platforms like telephones, email and real offline mail to tell and simultaneously create different parts of the game’s story in those medial habitats relevant to the players. So not just transmedia telling,  but transmedia engagement that requires interaction from every gamer in order to bring the game’s plot to the next level. In other words: “Players interact directly with characters in the game, solve plot-based challenges and puzzles, and collaborate as a community to analyze the story and coordinate real-life and online activities.” (Wikipedia) An early example being Ong’s Hat.

The next transmedia stop was cinema, bringing the whole idea of alternate realities not only to the screen itself (where we had long been used to getting immersed in alternate worlds), but also connecting these to our real, every day lives. The most prominent example certainly being 1999’s “Blair Witch Project”:

 

This was not only a mocumentary, i.e. a piece of fiction pretending to be documentary, but also accompanied by a variety of additional, supporting pieces of content such as faked diaries, police reports or interviews that in itself engaged the audience in a captivating manner, adding to the cinema story’s apparent verisimilitude.

That was 15 years ago, and just the beginning …

Since a couple of years, also the commercial world of business communications has started to smell the rat? As always, the more consumer-oriented businesses are on the fore-front here with pioneers like Nike or Lego, but it won’t be long before the so-called B2B world will catch up.

So what could all of this mean for business communications and marketing? What can we learn from arts and entertainment?

I recently read this article on transmedialab.org that instinctively made me want to caution a “because we can” attitude that often pairs with technological advancements. The article basically was about the next big thing in cinema and henceforth modern storytelling. Not an R&D future project, but already on the audiences’ threshold.

The article begins with a short analysis of the film “APP”. http://www.indiewire.com/article/watch-now-exclusive-trailer-for-app-second-screen-thrillerAPP is the first-ever movie that was written and produced with a 2nd-screen experience in mind, regularly adding content to your phone app while the of the film’s content unfolds on the traditional 1st cinema screen, and thus interrupting the movie’s actual narration.

Hmm, I thought.

Do I like this? Not too sure.

I’ll have to find out…

 

The article moves on with a glimpse into the labs of Disney’s experiments. These are currently limited to 2nd-screen “content interruptions” to back-catalog films like “The Little Mermaid”, but plans are to integrate the transmedia storytelling idea into the initial screen writing of future film productions.

http://www.transmedialab.org/en/the-blog-en/cinema-and-second-screen-applications-focus-on-the-film-app-and-the-disney-second-screen-experience/

Hmm, I thought, again.

Ambiguity crawling in …

The angel (or is it the devil?) on my shoulder says something like Yalda Uhl who states that “it is very important to engage children in a narration, and that is very difficult to do nowadays with all the distractions and stimulations that surround them. Adding a distraction in cinemas will definitely not help studios to achieve their goal of creating value or attracting an audience that will return to the cinema in the future”. Yes, says the angel (or devil)! REDUCE the distractions! Foster concentration spans! Concentrate on true narration and storytelling to immerse audiences in your story! Don’t just do stuff, because you technically can, audiences will soon get tired and will want to go back to good old traditional storytelling! Transmedia will eat itself for lunch! I knew it!

Then there’s this devil (or angel?) on the other shoulder talking about “story engagement” instead of boring one-way “story telling”. Making it clear to me that the potential of transmedia entertainment and the disruption of handed-down reception models is not only exiting, but in fact the only way to go. For entertainment as much as for business communications, both of them dealing with humans in the end. That today’s young and thus tomorrow’s adult generation will continue to literally gag for regular interruptions in their lives’ routines … and that linear, beginning-to-end storytelling is over, that no one will listen anymore, if there’s not more interactive engagement, audience involvement and multi-channel disruption.

Listening to both of them I begin to see, as with many things, there will be developments that we can’t stop, that will simply happen (because we CAN and because we as humans will simply WANT it), whether I personally like them or not.

Maybe the following

THREE COMMANDMENTS OF TRANSMEDIA STORYTELLING

can help steer technological developments into the right direction:

1. CONCENTRATE ON A GOOD STORY (ALONG THE PATH OF THE STORYCODEX).
Not matter which medium, no matter how many of them; not matter how fragmented and scattered:  A well-told, convincing narration offering a high degree of the “Like Me” effect will always work. It doesn’t have to be chronological, but it needs Expectation, Surprise, Conflict and Change. What will change is the people who will create this expectation, add the surprise and conflict spice, foster the narration’s change – this will not be a classical narrator instance anymore, this will be multiple parties engaging in different parts of a story from different angles and perspectives, in different places. But a story it will still be.

2. DON’T LET TECHNOLOGY LEAD THE WAY OF A STORY.
No matter what technological developments the future holds, no matter what devices will surface: Technology is simply an enabler, an easer, a multiplier, distributer, a vehicle. The true power lies in the human nature of communication, conversation, and storytelling.

3. TURN STORY TELLING INTO STORY ENGAGEMENT.
Do listen to, observe your audiences, and maybe(?) realize: The age of (traditional) story TELLING could be over. Never the age of STORY itself, but maybe tomorrow’s audiences will really want fragmentation, want to be stimulated from multiple sources and in multiple places. Of course, THE CONCEPT OF STORY will and cannot change, it’s genuinely human, but: Maybe the future is indeed more about story ENGAGEMENT, involving audiences actively in plot creation or character development. This would radically influence scripting, e.g. by taking devices and reception environments into consideration when writing a story’s various chapters.

Again, all of this holds true not only in arts and entertainment, but also in business, along the infamous, much recited “customer journey”, a journey that is getting more and more complicated, but – if you listen and truly get involved – ever more rewarding for all story and hence conversation participants.

Devil or Angel. Angel or Devil. Both?

Exciting, to say the least.

Hmm, I say.

Again.

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What if Giving up Control were not a Threat, but an Opportunity?

04 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by Herr Dennehy in experiences, Ideas, Storytrain

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Bob Dylan, brand journalism, brand storytelling, Business, business storytelling, change, Christopher Locke, cluetrain manifesto, Co-creation, conversations, corporate storytelling, David Weinberger., Deep Space Nine, Doc Searls, Edgar Allen Poe, Human, listening, loss of control, Rick Levine, social media, Star Trek, Truth

Copyright: article.wn.com

 

Let’s admit it: We’re all losing control.

First of all, in the part of life that we call private life.

Where the day starts with an always-charged, smart-ass smart phone coldly grinning at me, relentlessly turning Beethoven’s wonderful “Klavierkonzert Nr. 5 Es-Dur” into my own personal groundhog-day experience. Gladly, this hasn’t spoilt my love for this concerto yet: For years now, I prefer being carried from the land of peaceful sommeil et rêves to the gates of daylight by Ludwig’s silent power than by Steve’s awful ringtone selection or distressingly well-tempered radio hosts.

Still, Beethoven aside, that’s the first loss of control of the day. Over my morning. A control (I thought) I used to have, at least before my own school days when there was just me and eternity. And also after school’s early-bird-my-ass 13 years, at university, when I could freely decide whether to get up for some early-morning lecture, or not. Probably that was an illusion, too … Aaah, whatever!

But now control’s definitely gone, along with the good-night’s sleep from pre-children days that used to precede the alarm bell’s toll.

The rest of an average day just goes with a flow that doesn’t seem to be mine (or ours, more correctly) anymore: Shower, tooth-brush, razor. Wardrobe, kitchen, espresso machinetta. Wake up kids, dress up kids, breakfast kids. School, kindergarten, metro. First mails, social channel check, maybe a little Spotify or FM4 on the train, blocking the rest of the underground world with my on-ears. Then it’s on to the office with its own very special affluent of Outlook, multiple phones, meetings, inter-desk chats, occasional join lunch breaks and … social channel checks.  Metro back home, social channel check, more in a rush than in the morning. Dinner, kids to bed, cleaning up. 2100 hrs sharp: time for twosomeness, music, movies or … maybe writing a blog post?

But then: Swoosh! In comes this invisible force from out of nowhere, hangs leaden weights to my eye lids, message clear: Don’t fight it! You’re tired! Go to sleep … maybe last chance for a social channel check, then … zzzzzz.

OK, I may be overegging the pudding a little, but the point is clear: Life has taken control of me, not visa versa. But it’s never too late to fight back!

If only I weren’t so tired … 🙂

TIRED

 

Then there is this other part of life that we call business life.

And I’m not speaking work-life balance here, that’s an outdated, unrealistic concept anyway in the age of smart iDevices (not “i” as in internet, but “i” as in “i am the device and the device is me”).

I’m talking about the life of a business, of a company, of a cooperation, call it what you like.

Whereas I personally admit to the fact that I’m losing control and maybe have slight hope of escaping as time goes by, (most) enterprises actually still believe they are in control – a control they have literally already lost, and will never get back. In control of the products they produce and sell (Henry Ford’s many heirs still alive, producing cars in various shades of black: Shut up, eat your spinach, it’s good for you!). In control of the people they can hire, retain, or fire. And (this is most obviously the biggest heretic belief) in control of their brands, their reputation, their communication efforts.

Will anybody out there please wake up, open your eyes, put an oversized espresso machinetta on the stove, extra strong, and realize that the times they are a-changing, or better: have already a-changed???

Read a brief history of the Internet, then come again. It’s been a long time coming …

… So: What does this mean?

“Companies that don’t realize their markets are now networked person-to-person, getting smarter as a result and deeply joined in conversation are missing their best opportunity.” (cluetrain.com, Thesis 18)

Opportunity is the right word. Not threat, as many still see it. Challenge maybe, yet a threat only for companies who decide to remain lonely regents of Shannon-Weaver Island. But opportunity for those who recognize that the sender-recipient model has served it’s time.

In private-life situations where networked kids are getting smarter, no longer just say “SIR, YES, SIR!” when you tell them what to do, but – like it or not – want to understand, want discourse, want dialogue, want to be taken seriously, and embark on a life-long conversation journey with their parents. And this is quite admirable, actually.

And in business-life situations all the same holds true for companies and their “kids”, which they disparagingly call stakeholders, users, target groups. But they’re actually people, human beings. Employees, customers, investors, journalists, bloggers, talents, politicians, etc.etc.etc. And as my kids are getting smarter by the day with their own real-life Internet (still very offline, gladly), so are a company’s kids, aided by the powerful global conversation that has begun through the Internet, “getting smarter – and getting smarter faster than most companies.” (cluetrain.com)

Whereas the Cluetrain Manifesto was at the time (very far-sighted, considering it was 1999) describing what was going on in a (compared to nowadays limited) community of Internet users and how this would need to impact the way corporations talk and act towards these networked, conversation-driven markets, I would like to take this notion a step further:

What if the future of companies, corporations and brands is a future, in which their brand story and their image no longer belongs to them?

What if these networked communities would not only co-create campaigns or isolated contents for companies (as they already do increasingly often today), but co-create and co-develop entire brands, communicatively manipulate a brand’s genes, its DNA? Co-write their history, story and stories?

What if reputation management wasn’t a thing a company could do by itself or have an expensive agency do, but something that is taken over by its “stakeholders”?

And now, while this still sounds like a threat, like a mob raging outside my fortress walls, here’s another thought:

What if … the above were all things a corporation would DELIBERATELY do?
Meaning: Go from telling “Who We Are!” to asking “Who Are We?” or “Who Should We Be?”

Imagine the outcome!

Imagine the level of relevance, content (as in “Zufriedenheit”), and respect you could harvest!

Imagine that you couldn’t imagine who you would be as a brand in, say, 50 years!

Imagine you could build a business not on ROI (Return on Invest), but on ROT (Return on Trust) or ROL (Return on Love)!

“And in the end, the love you get is equal to the love you give.” (The Beatles, “The End”)

Gee, scary thought.

The recipient would become the sender, the sender the recipient. The crowd would become part of the communications, marketing and brand department, and corporate comms would diffuse in the crowd. True emancipation, the foundation stone for every lasting relationship that makes love and trust its pillars.

Taking Poe’s “Man of the Crowd” to the next level: The follower doesn’t simply watch his target vanish into the crowd, but would actually follow. Dive into a kind of Great Link like DS9’s Odo and his fellow shape-shifters, a place where sender and recipient, comms department and target groups, brands and stakeholders amalgamate, for the benefit of both …

Copyright: treknews.net

Freakin’ esoteric stuff!

So let’s better round this off with something more down-to-earth.

With the famous words of Robert Zimmerman:

“Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown

And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you
Is worth savin’

Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'”

 

Thank you, Bob! Right on!

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The End of Advertising is the Beginning of Content Co-Creation

03 Thursday Apr 2014

Posted by Herr Dennehy in What is STORY?

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

authentic, big story, brand journalism, brand storytelling, Content Co-Creation, conversations, corporate storytelling, Crowdsourcing, digital storytelling, listening, Marketing and Advertising, Nike, Simon Pestrigde, social media, social web, story, story in social media

In 2009, Nike’s Simon Pestridge said:

“We don’t do advertising anymore.
We just do cool stuff.”

Of course, these words sound more far-reaching than they actually are, and Nike’s marketing activities since then imply that Pestridge was actually referring to classical “one-way” advertising only. Still: It’s a bold statement and I admire him simply for making it. And I second the way his quote from this interview with marketingmagazine.co.uk continues:

“Advertising is all about achieving awareness, and we no longer need awareness. We need to become part of people’s lives, and digital allows us to do that.”

It’s great, if a company can say that. Not too sure, if it is ever really true, that a brand doesn’t need awareness, but whatever: bold statement, deliberately and successfully provocative. But what is true (not rocket science, but a truth long evident, yet still hidden to blindfold marketers from the last century) is the fact that digital is becoming more and more important for leveraging a company’s brand awareness and reputation. One day, it may become the (main) place, but it’s not yet.

Digital in the 21st century, digital in the so-called 2.0 age of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and all the many platforms around today (and the unknown one’s that will pop up tomorrow) is not about broadcasting, about messaging, about patronizing uneducated audiences. It’s about interaction, about engagement, about openness, verifiable authenticity, and consequently about conversations. The end of the age of broadcasting and (classical one-way) advertising has long begun, as has the beginning of the age of shared content creation with audiences. Audiences meaning people, human beings with emotions and opinions, with maybe better ideas closer to your product’s true core than any single person in your marketing department could have.

This power of the crowd and its potential is still heavily unused and underrated, like diamonds laying out in the open and mistaken for plastic accessories, apparently worthless, of minor quality, maybe even dangerous. Oooh, scary!

Nike has made this move very consequently, as David Moth kindly summarized last year at econsultancy.com. The people who experience the brand (in marketing speech: target group) and wish to interact with the company and its people, are not only allowed to do just that, they are actually encouraged to do it. To become part of the brand and even help create its future perception by being an inventive part of what it does today. And not only in the digital world; Nike’s effort cross the borders of online and offline, as their audiences do, too.

Here is one of my favorites from Moth’s collection, mainly because it does exactly that: bridge the artificial gap between digital and analogue:

 

The true power of tomorrow’s communication with (and not marketing for!) people takes place everywhere where these people are, regardless of online or offline, above the stupid line or below it, internal or external, blue-collar or white-collar, or whatever artificial distinction we have made up for decades to pigeonhole he stuff we do and the people we do it for. [By the way, Nike does not limit its co-creating approach to marketing and communications, they also integrate customers in the creation process of their actual products, see here.]

Apart from having the right people with the right visions and insights around at the right time to create such a shift from glossy TV and print broadcasting to customer-engaging digitally crowd-sourced advertising, Nike has or at least claims to have one massive advantage compared to other companies, especially in the B2B area:

“We know who we are. We know what we want to achieve and we go for it 100 per cent of the time.”
Says Pestridge, again.

If only that were true for more brands. How much more courageous, engaging and entertaining would advertising and corporate communications be.

I truly believe that THIS is THE CORE and foremost homework any company needs to do: find out who they are, what their BIG STORY aka their identity is. That’s a massive undertaking that requires quite some investments, both time and budget-wise. Sometimes this undertaking is a tedious one, as it requires a lot of relentless self-reflection and open, honest introspection.

But also a great deal of listening. To people in touch with your company, it’s products, its people, its communications – everything. And once you’re through the results of these listening exercises into one data bucket, analyze them and put your cards on the table, you’ll see: It’s worth it.

Finding your BIG STORY is the prerequisite to purposeful storytelling about your brand, your people, your products – and to any truly and sustainably meaningful conversation, the best-case result from good storytelling. All corporate stories that don’t follow a company’s big story, its identity, its DNA, are just meaningless debris in the vast web space of content overload.

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

04 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by Herr Dennehy in Ideas, Storytrain

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

brand journalism, brand storytelling, business storytelling, Christopher Locke, cluetrain, cluetrain manifesto, conversations, corporate storytelling, David Weinberger., digital storytelling, drama, expectation, social media, story, storytrain, surprise

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. 🙂

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When is a speech a story? When simply great rhethoric? When just utterly boring?

23 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by Herr Dennehy in experiences

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

anecdotes, ankur jain, brand storytelling, business storytelling, change, corporate storytelling, digital life design, digital storytelling, DLD14, drama, expectation, hero, Human, HUMIN, jan koum, jay-z, kayne west, Mahbod Moghadam, nancy duarte, rapgenius, social media, steve jobs, Storytelling, surprise, Whatsapp

I had the privilege to be a participating part of the acclaimed DLD (Digital Life Design) Conference in Munich this week. “A global network on innovation, digitization, science and culture which connects business, creative and social leaders, opinion-formers and influencers for crossover conversation and inspiration”, the website says. And that it is.

First time ever for me. Its legendary reputation had traveled eons and light-years to my doorstep as the IT place (as in IT girl, not I-Tee) to be, if you’re even only remotely connected to the Internet and interested in the way digital life continues to change our analogue lifestyles. Worth every minute.

In many ways …

One of these ways I would like to spend a couple of lines on here. Not the networking, not the illustrious guests, the see-and-be-seen aspect or the really inspiring insights I gathered from almost each and every panel or presentation, not even the red-carpet, see-and-be-seen-even-more late-night party, although I quite enjoyed that one, too.

No, it’s the way speeches were held at this conference (as at most I’ve ever been to) and the very rare examples of good storytelling applied in these speeches that I will ponder over a little. I’m not talking about the contents, I’m talking about their structures or non-structures that are mainly based on power point hooks, not narratives. I mean, it’s really amazing: You have so many bright minds, freaks and geeks, young talents and old stagers summoned in one place for three days. They speak about their latest apps, business models, technology, their visions of the future … and all too often you can hardly avoid noticing that most of them do indeed have a story to tell. BUT: They don’t! They don’t apply any storytelling techniques to making their visions, facts and insights less bullet-pointy, less complete, but more compelling, more memorable, more narrative. There was even a panel on “Digital Storytelling”, a very promising title, but in the end merely a discussion over video formats, technologies, platforms and, again, business models. OK, maybe the latter is a very understandable and legitimate topic in a world where traditional businesses are eroding and everyone is desperately looking for straws to clutch at, but it’s not always entertaining for the audience.

So what did many of those speakers do wrong? Easy: They were mainly speaking facts, figures and features. And data and dollars. All in the name of the user’s experience (will always hate that defamation of a word for humans!), but it was mostly the experience of an arbitrary abstract being using technology they were speaking about. Not about concrete human beings, heroes or anti-heroes, their emotions, their dramas that led to the creation of this app or that service (even though maybe the rhetoric of many speeches was dramatic and good and suggested a narrative, where, however, there was none). And I’m not saying that they were not interesting or inspiring regarding facts and ideas transported – after all, you had preachers preaching to Catholics anyway, so ears and brains wide open. I’m just stating the lack of story narrative in the way they were presenting.

Although there were some remarkable exceptions to this rule – or maybe in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king?

Mahbod Moghadam, Co-Founder of www.rapgenius.com, a website that only at first sight is something for rap fans, actually unveils the curtain to probably every art’s and even every brand’s future. It allows fans and enthusiasts to make their own annotations to any kind of rap lyric, enriching it with their own stories that connect them personally, to a song and its content. “Annotate My Brand” was the title of the panel Mahbod was on, and he not only used his 45 minutes on stage and his youngster charms well to exchange business cards with Hublot’s Jean-Claude Biver and Missioni’s Angela Missioni. He most of all ignited the audience with his enthusiasm and the great stories he had to tell of the platform’s early days and collaborations with notable rap performance such as Jay-Z or Kayne West. name-dropping was maybe a cheap trick that helped, but his stories stuck. Left me hoping for the extension of his ingenious annotation site to my musical preferences as well as with the notion that: Not only as an artist, you’re work becomes a public good, open to recipients’ annotations; the same holds true for brands. Control is over. Your story isn’t your story anymore, it’s everyone’s. And everyone can and will use this opportunity, and that’s not a threat, it’s a great opportunity to crowd-source your own brand and your company’s reputation. Intriguing thought.

Then there was Ankur Jain, Founder and CEO of HUMIN, “a technology company working to make technology more human”, as his website says. And he started his speech perfectly in this sense: With a human story. With a hero (himself) and a “do you remember when” introduction, pulling the audience (at least those over 25) into their own past, enabling identification with a situation everybody knows: Once upon a time, it took you ages to find out the telephone number of a girl you were interested in, once you had it, you had to take a walk to the nearest telephone box to try to call her with your last coins (as you’re parents were kind of anal on the phone bill issue in the pre-flat-rate era), then dialing the number you had researched, waiting for the ring, hoping her dad wouldn’t pick up the phone, then he did, you hung up, money gone, off back home. Just an anecdote, maybe, but a good, personal intro into explaining what his app was supposed to do: seamlessly connect you with all your contacts on all your various social platforms and address books. Left me entertained and willing to download his app and try it. Which I did.

Or Whatsapp’s Co-Founder and CEO Jan Koum. His visions for his very successful messaging service as well as the sympathy level for him as a person and his work stayed on a low-level for me, even though I love his app, UNTIL: He told the very touching and comprehensible story of this young man emigrating from Ukraine to the USA who missed his parents and family so much, but couldn’t afford regular calls, let alone trips home – so he invented Whatsapp to stay in touch with the people important to his life, instantly, whenever, and economically. I bought into the idea and rationale, and understood even better why I make such frequent use of this little green tile on my iPhone.

What I’m getting at, and what is my personal take-away from three days of insights into digital trends for life and business and business life, is best summed up with one of the many great quotes of one of the great lost storytellers and story-understanders, Steve Jobs: “No matter how good the technology, it will not turn a bad story into a good story.” [http://goo.gl/H1ZCuy] Or a bad speech into a good speech, I might add.

So I’d like to end this stream of thoughts with two videos that are better tutorials for a good speech than anything I could write here:

Steve Jobs’ legendary 2005 Stanford Commencement Address, which is any prime example of perfectly structured story-in-speech, not filmed, not written, but spoken aka told (even if not off by heart, but from the heart). Three little stories turning into one big story at the end, leaving a clear message without needing to name it. Please enjoy this one from beginning to end:


And this more tutorial-like video by Nancy Duarte, an American writer and graphic designer, well-known for her two best-selling books “Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences” and “slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations”. A very nice summary of how you can mix pure facts with story in a power point, as you mostly need to do in business presentations or speeches, nevertheless not bore to death with report style, but also not get lost in anecdotia or storyland.


So, what do you think? Agree? Disagree? Why?

In any case: I’m happy to see you again soon, here, where the story goes on … soon.

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

08 Wednesday Jan 2014

Posted by Herr Dennehy in Ideas

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Aristotle, Authenticity, boardwalk empire, brand storytelling, business storytelling, corporate storytelling, documentary, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, Martin Scorsese, social media, Steve Buscemi, story structure, storyteller, true story, Truth

“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.

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Markets are Conversations are Storytelling

21 Saturday Dec 2013

Posted by Herr Dennehy in Ideas

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Christopher Locke, cluetrain, conversations, David Weinberger., Doc Searls, markets, Rick Levine, social media, social web, Storytelling, target groups

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.

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Social Media = Storytelling

18 Wednesday Dec 2013

Posted by Herr Dennehy in Ideas

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Aristotle, brand journalism, brand storytelling, Business, business storytelling, change, conversation, corporate storytelling, digital storytelling, drama, expectation, hero, Marketing and Advertising, social media, story in social media, Storytelling, surprise, video storytelling

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.

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