Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

For most of us, we can absorb this continual stream of antisocial programming and not be affected by it. We still know what's right and wrong. But in a world where it’s the “black swan” outliers that grab the news headlines, we have to think about the consequences that reach beyond the mainstream.  When we abandon the moral purpose of stories and focus just on their entertainment aspect, are we also abandoning a commonly understood value landscape?

If you’re looking for absolute answers, you won’t find them here. That’s just not the world we live in. And am I naïve when I say the stories we chose to tell may have an influence on isolated violent events like what happened in Orlando? Perhaps. Despite all our best intentions, Omar Mateen might still have gone horribly offside.

But all things and all people are, to some extent, products of their environment. And because we in media and advertising are storytellers, we set that cultural environment. That’s our job. Because of this, I believe we have a moral obligation. We have to start paying more attention to the stories we tell....

But when it comes to content marketing, there’s a component that doesn’t always seem logical: storytelling.

I’m not talking about writing a fiction novel. I am talking about having the ability to write about even the most boring topics in a fun-to-read way.

It’s something that many marketers, even good ones, struggle to do.

Do you also have trouble with this part of creating content?

I see you nodding....

Anyone who’s taken a shortcut and skipped the primer while painting a room knows the kind of results you can get. Uneven. Unpolished. The primer sets the stage for a beautiful wall.

That’s kind of the idea behind the storytelling website Primer Stories, says Tim Lillis, one of the creative minds behind the site, which mixes medium-form written pieces with lots of eye-catching visual effects.

He thinks the stories should be just long enough to prime readers on the subject – about 1,000 words — while also acting as a primer of intellectual paint.

Story topics can be ambitious, but Lillis and co-creator Joe Alterio were intent on crafting narratives that are digestible for both longform lovers and listicle lushes.

“We realized that somewhere along the line, the important ideas were losing the battle of marketability,” Alterio says. “So, how do we give them a little bit of that flash while still retaining that core, essential part of the idea?”

“You will live 7.5 minutes longer than you would have otherwise, just because you watched this talk.

”This was the claim that video game designer Jane McGonigal presented to the crowd during her June 2012 TED talk. As the camera panned over the members of the audience, their faces showed universal skepticism: Was this lady serious?

There was something else interesting about that crowd. Despite their doubtful visages, everyone in the audience was drawn in by McGonigal’s words. No one was checking their email, talking to their neighbor or looking at the camera circling in front of them; all eyes were fixated on the (potentially crazy) speaker.

Great hooks, like McGonigal’s provocative opening statement, get audiences on the edge of their seats and give them a sense of what’s coming. They allow you to win a crowd’s attention right away and give you a legitimate chance to have a lasting impact....

When you combine the timeless necessity of storytelling with the sheer power of visual content, you arrive at one of the most potent forces shaping the future of communication today: Visual storytelling.

Here are some of the trends I believe will shape the future of this field by blurring the lines between once-neatly-defined concepts.

You’re doing a presentation, so you should start with the facts you want to get across right? Wrong! A good public speaker takes their audience on a journey, leaving them feeling inspired, motivated and completely on board with your message.

But structuring your speech to get your ideas across and keep your audience engaged all the way through to the end can be tricky.  Experienced public speakers tell stories to get their point across.  They do this because humans are hardwired for stories. They love heroes, journeys, suspense, surprises, layers and happy endings.

Why Is Storytelling Important?

Before we talk about the basic building blocks of a story, let’s take a step back and briefly talk about why storytelling is so powerful.

Humans have an instinctive predilection for stories. Think about it, Gurg the caveman hunts the big wooly mammoth and he returns to tell his story by painting pictures on the cave walls.

Today, Claire, comes back from a big night out at the bars and shares her story by posting gossip and photos on her Facebook wall.

We all tell stories. We tell stories of romantic love. We tell stories about the challenges we face. We tell stories that explain how we got that distinctive scar on our knee.

If you’re trying to inform, persuade, motivate, or entertain, you need to incorporate stories. That means every time you speak, you should think about how to enhance your message with stories....

For people who want to see an Internet at least partly liberated from the grip of rapacious, government-connected telecommunications giants, Guifi is one of the most hopeful developments to date.

Its core values, ownership, and operations are testament to the idea that you and I, and our communities, can — and should — control how we communicate.

For the tens of thousands of people using it, some at no charge, Guifi operates as well as Time Warner Cable does for New Yorkers (and maybe better).

Guifi exists because a technically savvy local man, Ramon Roca, got tired of waiting for Telefonica, the Spanish telecom giant, to provide Internet access to the people of his community. He had a personal need for access. But he had a powerful second motive as well: “to help my neighbors.”

Guifi started with a single wifi node in 2004. Today there are more than 30,000 working nodes, including some fiber connections, with thousands more in the planning stages....

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I’m a storyteller by trade. Story is everything. The stories we tell — and how we tell them — inform who we are and who we become. I’m invested in ethics and education, in individuals equipping themselves to navigate a market designed to fool them. More even than informed decision-making, I’m invested in fostering creativity and the courage to explore new art forms, to find new ways to build connections with each other.

Virtual reality has so much raw power — and now more than ever, we need a reminder of what Uncle Ben told Peter.

As somebody who’s found himself uniquely situated to discuss the intersection of writing, storytelling structure, and virtual reality, I want to share some of the basic ideas I’ve learned (from making content and building a creation tool in the medium) to empower a new crop of filmmakers and storytellers to take the leap toward producing their own narrative adventures in VR....

For the past week or so, I’ve been engaged in a running Facebook Messenger conversation with an impulsive, irresponsible twentysomething named Jessie. She uses all caps when excited; chats with me during job interviews and dates; consults me about her bad decisions; and sometimes even follows my advice.

She is also, I should mention, a chatbot—an automated script being served to me by a computer program. But don’t judge me too harshly for spending time with her. Our conversation is also a game and a story, and Jessie is a narrative vehicle with whom, like a character in a novel, it is possible and even enjoyable to empathize.

Last week, Facebook joined companies like Kik and Microsoft by inviting any company to build a chatbot for its Messenger platform. The typical hypothetical examples were transactional.

An airline might build a bot that helps passengers book tickets. OpenTable might build one to take restaurant reservations. Uber could build one through which its users hail a ride. But if chatbots are, as we’ve been promised, the next evolution of apps, some of them will surely be games. It was the job of Rod Humble, the game developer who created Jessie, to figure out what that meant....