See a photo of Jon, his bio, and Part 1 of this Q&A.

Q&A with Jon Buscall, Question 2

Q: The culture is abuzz about Web 2.0 and social media. To what extent do you participate in social media (such as through LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Second Life, blogs, etc.)? To what extent and in what ways do you feel these venues are storytelling media?

A: I like social media and participate through blogging and Twitter, but I’m not a fan of Facebook. I think I almost burst a blood vessel the day I got an invitation to be “friends” from someone that used to bully me at school. Still, it’s a useful way of keeping in touch with the friends I do have.

Blogs and Twitter are incredibly important, though, to the work I do, and I do think they are storytelling media. Each post shows your audience who you are; it helps you tell your story step by step, one post at a time.

I started out blogging back in 1999 on LiveJournal. It was anonymous and a way of sharing my diary with a small group of friends. As I readily embraced the Net, however, I moved more and more of my writing online. As part of a creative writing program I ran at Stockholm University between 2000-2004, I encouraged all my students to blog regularly.

Looking back I can see that we used those blogs to encourage each other in our writing journey but also as searchable online notebooks. This wasn’t storytelilng. It was a way of building a resource for “real” writing.

Nowadays I see blogs as having a variety of uses and one of them is storytelling for businesses. Blogs are wonderful ways of giving an insight into who you are and what you do. Even for companies, organizations, schools, etc. I helped a local senior high school, for example, turn to blogs to promote themselves and generate interest in who they are.

I also blogged the story of a litter of basset hounds, posting a picture each day at www.bassethounds.nu. This brought me into contact with buyers but also has led to things like an invitation to participate in a podcast about dogs. My long-term ambition is to combine more of my writing with my love of dogs so this has been very useful in helping me grow that side of my business.

Twitter is a much newer phenomena and one I’ve readily embraced in the last six months. Very quickly I’ve found it’s a way of entering into a dialogue with people. I don’t like the spammy aspect of it and don’t believe that regularly offering or promoting your services on Twitter works. But I’ve found that talking about the story of my daily life — whether that involves translating, journalism, breeding basset hounds, or consulting with businesses — has led to work. So, yes, I do see how Twitter can be a storytelling medium, one tweet at a time, building a variety of narratives, showing people what your story is.

In real terms I can say that in 2008 blogging and Twitter landed me three major deals that helped me grow my business.

I encourage any small business to embrace blogging and Twitter, but you have to be in it for the long haul. It takes time to build relationships and grow your online public story. People buy or hire your services when they get a sense of who you are and what you do. If your story fits theirs.