Storytelling is hard-wired into our humanity, writes social media researcher Suresh Sood. Businesses have to use it to move their customers and other stakeholders emotionally.
Social media – blogs, social networking, wikis, tweets, photostreams, video-sharing podcasts and virtual worlds – means businesses can get close to consumers, listen to their conversations and participate in their stories. Social media offers brands the opportunity to transcend the identity of a product or company and assume their own cultural identity in a way that reflects the mores and subcultures of the community.
But for this to happen, businesses must reframe their brand messaging and learn to participate in rather than manage the conversation with their customers. Successful social media marketing is not a matter of embracing new tools and adopting new technologies. The x-factor is storytelling: spinning a good yarn with all the traditional values of a compelling tale – an emotional hook, a beginning, a middle and an end. And storytelling in the digital marketplace must be authentic, collaborative and participative.
This isn’t such a new world. Storytelling is hard-wired into our humanity. Since the advent of print, the narrative discourse has been dominated by the one-to-many: the storyteller (preacher, teacher, author, film director or television producer) to an audience of listeners. But this changed with the digital revolution, which brought about an absolute deluge of many-to-many communication platforms and which brings us closer, perhaps, to the origins of our oral tradition.
Today’s interactive, interruptible, opt-in modes of telling a tale have, arguably, more in common with the sharing of hunting tales around the campfires of our ancestors – where different players told the story from their own points of view – arguing, perhaps, about the size of the mammoth downed that day and which one of them actually struck the fatal blow.
That is what is happening online now, all the time. According to AC Nielsen’s BlogPulse, there are currently 125 million registered blogs – so 125 million people are sharing stories from their own points of view. That is more than 700 times the number of books published in the US in a year, and doesn’t account for the twitters, the video streams, the podcasts and the constant to-ing and fro-ing of text and email in which most of us constantly indulge to tell our tales or build on the tales of others, on a daily, hourly or minute-by-minute basis.
All this storytelling is not destroying the narrative, but it is without question undermining text-based stories and the conventions they represent. One-to-many was only ever a passing phase, however. Long-form text-based stories may be giving way to the chunked bricolage of small narrative bites that pull together links, photos, videos and comments from different social media, but it is still the power of a good story that engages an audience.
What is storytelling?
A successful story has a beginning, a middle, possibly a twist, and an end. It engages audience members’ emotions and interest and makes them care what happens.
‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn.’ wrote Ernest Hemingway in response to a bar room challenge to write a story in six words or less. He won his bet, so the story goes, and 80 years on, sparked an online phenomenon. Embraced by Smith Magazine, the six-word story has been taken up as a challenge by online storytellers and spread virally, on the ethernet and beyond, to live performances, podcasts, animated illustrations, even to a number of published books. (Business21C indulged in its own six-word story twist over the summer break: see story page 62).
Reality TV is another source of powerful stories. Take the internationally successful show, The X Factor or the various series of Idol. The audience adopts a hero and follows the trials and tribulations of his or her journey. Aristotle recognised the importance of striking a chord with the audience, dubbing it ‘catharsis’ or ‘proper pleasure’, a feeling that takes you by the throat and lets go only when you are cleansed or purged of emotion. Add to that good versus evil, as personified by the judges and their verbal brawls, and you have a compelling tale.
But the success of The X Factor – and similar shows – isn’t just the fact that they tell a good yarn. It is a good yarn that acknowledges the audience as participants. We contribute to the judging and comment on how it plays out. If a judge makes a call or a comment that jars with the audience, the twittersphere responds – and judges apologise, retract or change their behaviour.
What is storytelling in the 21st century?
Any notion of a passive audience may be in its death throes but storytelling lives on. Since we have all become narrators of our own experiences, we are far less likely to sit quietly to the end of someone else’s tale. Online, we can engage, interrupt, challenge, dominate. We can divert, bully, redirect, support, follow. We won’t be spun a line. We demand authenticity. We demand to participate. And we will move on without a second thought if our needs are not met.
In the battle for members between social network sites MySpace and Facebook, according to AC Nielsen’s March 2009 analysis, MySpace is ahead when it comes to attracting advertising revenue, with its environment well-suited to banner campaigns, but Facebook is winning the race to sign up members. AC Neilsen suggests that this may be because Facebook’s pages are less cluttered with advertising (other people’s stories), and thus people prefer to use it as the forum for telling their own life stories.
Successful storytelling in this context will continue to:
- be authentic;
- be interruptable / changeable;
- encourage participation, and understand that it is part of the storytelling
- context; and
- have a beginning, a middle and an end.
What does this mean for business?
Markets often know far more about products than the companies that produce them. Consumers understand that they can get assistance and information readily from other consumers by soliciting opinions or visiting significant web destinations. At best, one-way messages fed by marketing departments are going to be challenged; at worst, they’ll simply be ignored. Customers review their own books on Amazon; they are the travel reviewers on TripAdvisor; and they exert considerable power with their tales of purchasers’ experience on eBay, Yelp and Australia’s notgoodenough!
Social media makes it possible to get close to consumers and to listen to their conversations. Businesses must learn now to participate in the stories and to become associated with the stories – and the cultural identities that these stories represent.
It worked for Kimberley-Clark, whose ‘let it out’ campaign for Kleenex tissues took storytelling and made it central to a successful cross-media campaign launched in 2006 in the US and UK markets. Understanding that a thin white disposable tissue would be hard-pressed to win hero status in its own right, Kimberley-Clark chose to make the tissues the prop in a story – the scripting of which they handed over to the consumer.
The campaign began on television. In the UK, a sofa, a good listener and the streets of London co-starred with passersby, who were invited to sit and tell their stories. And they did. And they laughed, cried and reached for Kleenex. ‘Let it out’ then moved to radio. Twice a day, people were invited to call or email with their ‘let it out’ stories and the song that captured the Kleenex moment.
Ultimately the campaign moved online with Youtube videos and a dedicated website: letitout.com, through which people were encouraged to continue telling the stories of their ‘Kleenex moments’: ‘It’s time to let it out. It’s time to laugh until you scream, until you spit. Show your heart and show some tears. Sing at the top of your lungs. Jump for joy. And when tons of stuff stuffs up your nose, blow it loud and blow it proud. It’s time to let it out.’
But social media offers far more than a medium for marketing messages. It is a communications paradigm that links employees, management, customers and competitors in new ways. It will allow a new level of experimentation across the whole range of business activities, prompting different ways of doing business, of designing organisations and of product development. Research can be presented, tested and shaped by the constant feedback that is afforded by social media interactions. Social media channels can also afford customers a richer experience of an organisation as they consider whether or not to do business with it.
A decade ago, The Cluetrain Manifesto challenged business to respond to the emerging web environment. Its authors were among the first to articulate the capacity of the internet to enable markets comprising conversations in uncontrived human voices. In November 2009, MIT’s Media Lab established the Center for Future Storytelling. Its remit is to envisage what ‘storytelling’ will be in the 21st century; to consider creative methods, technologies and learning programs in response to the changing communications landscape. From innovative imaging technologies to morphable movie studies, the Center is well placed to reconsider how, where and in what context we will continue to tell our stories. But the one thing it does not challenge is the fact that we will continue to tell stories – and successful stories will continue to find an audience.
When businesses combine the power of the future of storytelling and an understanding of how their customers behave, they will harness the full power of social media to engage meaningfully with the communities within which they wish to do business.
