Storytelling in a Digital Age

I came across the Digital Storytelling Cookbook [Download Cookbook] from a Blog that Margery Nabors contributes to at the University of Washington through her Masters program called Flip the Media. This Cookbook gives us different stories that we might tell about ourselves or the brands that we are working on. Using a framework like this is a great way to ignite an idea that might be interesting enough to drive talk value through propagation planning:

Important Person
Character Stories, Memorial Stories

Important Events
Adventure Stories, Accomplishment Stories, Story about a Place, Story about what we do

Other Stories
Recovery Stories, Love Stories, Discovery Stories

With each of these stories types there are seven different ways to tell the same story. After you have an idea of the digital story to tell think about different ways to tell it:
1. Point of View
2. A Dramatic Question
3. Emotional Content
4. A Gift of Your Voice (think NIN or Radio Head allowing fans to remix their music)
5. The power of a soundtrack
6. Economy (think about an exclusive offer for those that participate in the narrative)
7. Unique Pacing

My favorite passage in the PDF is actually at the beginning. This passage was excerpted from Writing for Your Life by Deena Metzger:

Stories move in circles. They don’t move in straight lines. So it helps if you listen in
circles. There are stories inside stories and stories between stories, and finding your
way through them is as easy and as hard as finding your way home. And part of the
finding is getting lost. And when you’re lost, you start to look around and listen.

Comments

[MargeryNabors]

Whether you read the "Digital Storytelling Cookbook" or Aristotle's "Poetics," you will get the idea of how to tell a better story. What you won't get is why the skill is proving ever important in our media environment today.

In short, stories are enabling companies to build consumer trust and loyalty. The are starting viable conversations. I would even argue, compelling stories have the capacity to effect a company's bottom line. If a story, whether it be communicated through a slideshow, video, or weblog can engage your audience's attention, then it is inviting them to stay a while. Ultimately, their time is money. "Page views" is a metric of the past and "time spent" is a metric of the future.

Further reading: Seth Godin's book, "All Marketers Are Liars."