Tracy in Texas day three (part 1): what can we learn from story telling for social media engagement?

Day three at SXSW offered a real mix of sessions for me, from the art of storytelling in transmedia, to the future of location-based services and geo-social networking and gaming, through to the incredible Guy Kawasaki's session on enchantment. So, because there's so much ground to cover, I'm breaking them down into different parts. In this first part I'm going to reflect briefly on what we might be able to learn from story telling and narratives for our social media engagement activities.

The story telling and creative narratives in transmedia session that I attended focused mostly on what makes a good story. It was one of those sessions that I went to thinking it sounded broadly interesting but not entirely thinking about what I'd take away from it but with a couple of days in between, I think the lesson that I have really taken away from this is what we can learn from story-telling and narratives in the way that we approach communications activities. It's all about character and depth of character, about how we learn about others and our selves through relationships with those characters and our own emotional responses to them, and through the way that stories engage through the fluctuation of high and low points, and through the increasing pressures that occur in those stories, and the twists and turns that they take. For me, the point is that stories engage - nothing complex in this. Why is it that we watch the TV show, but leave during the ad breaks? Because ads rarely tell stories, and brands rarely have characters representing them. If we can replicate the art of story telling in our communications, particularly in social media spaces, then perhaps we can be more successful in engaging people with our brands. We can even make them co-creators in the stories if we're really smart about it. This, then, boils down to who those great characters might be and the great narratives that we can build or share about, around, or with them. We have them in our organisations, so why not communicate about them? Or perhaps we can create them. Aleksandr Orlov has 767,000+ fans on Facebook - I bet a page specifically for comparethemarket.com wouldn't get even close to this. Their whole approach introduces a character and a story, and because of that, it is successful.

We spend so much time in organisations thinking about message and consistency of message. But in stories (albeit movies, books, TV programmes or real life), while there is often some consistency, there is by far more twists and turns, false starts, changes of pace, changes of character and personality. Is it the differences and the changes that we experience - the 'journey' that we take, and the extensive range of emotional responses that we experience along the way, that maintains our interest and keeps us engaged. Surely there has to be a way to achieve this in brand communications and engagement activities...