Aligning PR with Storytelling for the “Happily Ever After”
I think that this is very well done and that it will be a wonderful storytelling resource for the PR community.
“I noted earlier in the month that we got the SlideShare religion, using the social media site to tell our story through an unconventional credentials deck.
After evangelizing SlideShare as an ideal platform for storytelling, it occurred to me that we should develop a deck on the power of storytelling in business.
So that’s what we’ve done.
Taking a mix of pop culture, levity, science, and our experiences nudging clients out of the corporate-speak box, we’ve created the following as a primer for storytelling in business:…”
Your Story’s Emotional Core (Hereby Known As: “The Emocore Story”)
That emotional connection between teller and listener, writer and reader, business and customer is what great storytelling is all about.
“Listen, we read and we write in part because we are compelled by feeling. If you ask me, we are compelled first by feeling, and second by thought. We’re emotional creatures. Our emotions, the way we feel, serve as our front-line defense (sometimes to our detriment). And so it is the first thing we respond to when experiencing a story, and it is — or, rather, should be — the first thing we respond to when we write a story. If such a response doesn’t exist, it’s perhaps because the emotional core isn’t there. Or, if it is, it’s a weak and uncertain thing: flickering like a fading bulb, guttering like candlefire.”
An excellent piece. Education is in goods hands as long as people like Meredith Stewart are teaching.
“The teacher of history and literature is first a storyteller. She tells the stories as they have been told to her, but this is not sufficient. She invites students into the stories, to see the ways in which their lives intersect with and add to the stories. She trains students in the skills they will need to make meaning from new texts that they encounter and to become storytellers themselves. She also leads students in questioning the stories they have been told, in exploring places where the narrative is broken or incomplete and in considering ways of addressing opposing narratives. Written texts are an important part of the narratives of communities, but so also are song, film, and images. But story is not limited to the humanities, science and math tell stories, too. Numbers and data points are unintelligible without narrative to accompany and often the same quantitative data can tell vastly different stories depending upon the storyteller.”
Scribes thrive on serial series: Novelistic stories hold challenges as well as rewards
“TV storytelling has shifted along with its finances, moving from syndication-friendly standalone episodes to extended storylines with the complexities of a novel, suitable for timeshifting or DVD.
“This is a key reason why I think we’re in a new golden age of television,” says Clyde Phillips, “Dexter” head writer and showrunner for the first four seasons. “We’re able to do more complex storytelling across bigger stretches of time.”
“Hypertextual continually returns to the theme of changing, transformation and role of narrative, perhaps in an attempt to draw the reader into questioning the future of narrative, specifically as it relates to new media.
Hypertextual wants to define narrative as giving a context in which we can explore — and subsequently come closer to understanding through further illumination – web behaviors and the numerical condition. We believe that narrative is a method through which we can isolate scriptor’s traits, project them beyond ourselves, and contextualize them in a medium which can be used to understand reading behaviors and cultural society.”
“I’ve been poring over, recently, what it means to be a storyteller, and what goes into picking how you tell your story. Do you pick a movie? A book? A radioplay? Television? I’ve believed for a little while now that there’s no such thing as a “storytelling medium.” Every medium can do a lot more when it isn’t reigned in by a story (see also: experimental films, poetry, sound collage).”
The #Promise and the importance of storytelling
“The work I do is about narrative, about storytelling … to me in an almost Joseph Campbell-y sense,” Norton said, in a way speaking both about his work as an actor and as an activist. With social and mobile media, utilized for a deeper purpose than networking or marketing, “[There’s] the opportunity to share our personal narrative: ‘This is what I’m doing. This is who I am. This is why I’m important. This is what I care about,’ ” he said. “The fumbling first steps of that created a white noise that was kind of intimidating initially. Hopefully, now that’s starting to mature, to help people do something else than just create social chatter.”
Drifting a little bit from ‘story’ with this particular post but I think you’ll be able to ‘bring it home’.
“Frames provide context. Unless the immense amount of communication coursing through a network is given context, it tends to be read as raw data by platform- and metrics-obsessed managers. Data is not narrative. Data is not theme. Data without a framing game to give it context is meaningless, like water without a container. All it does is evaporate. The molecules are still there, but its usefulness vanishes into thin air.”
Corporate Storytelling: The Partnership Story
The report (PDF) is quite good.
“I was hired to interview the key stakeholders and to prepare a report outlining the benefits and key factors involved in creating a successful partnership.
It was a fabulous project to work on. By talking to representatives of each of the partner organizations, I was able to understand the partnership from their individual perspectives. And I tried very hard when preparing the report to let their voices be heard.
Facts come to life when they are given a human voice. ”
Cindy Chastain-Thinking Like a Storyteller
I think that the folks at Apple understand this.
“Storytelling is all about engagement. Designing with a narrative in mind can make a difference between a product that merely functions will and one that engages the minds and emotions of users. This session will explore how an understanding of narrative techniques can make us better designers.”
