I found this story on Campfire's Blog, and I thought the post was a perfect way to describe how a storyteller or brand can use a brand experience to propagate the story further to other audiences:
In 1959, William Castle produced The Tingler, a B-movie horror film staring Vincent Price. Castle had every third seat in the theater wired with buzzers to give the audience a shock. He turned the audience into participants. If you went to see The Tingler, you walked in to see William Castle’s story, but you walked out with your own story to tell, because Castle turned you into a (minor) character in the Tingler myth. “The Tingler went into my theater and I felt it in my spine!”
This is a powerful way to think about constructing narratives online. Instead of thinking about how you will tell your story, think about how you can give people a piece of the story to tell.
This requires the storyteller to put the audience at the center, to give them an active role. It’s not something that comes naturally to traditional storytellers, because it requires ceding some control over how the story is told, but when done right it can be very effective on many levels.
Comments