See a photo of Paul and John, their bios, Part 1 of this Q&A,Part 2, and Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.

Q&A with Paul Furiga and John Durante, Questions 11 and 12:

Q: Are there any current uses of storytelling that repel you or that you feel are inappropriate?

A: There are examples everywhere of inauthentic stories being told to influence or mislead (this remains a significant and well-paid endeavor in the marketing profession, sadly) and we believe that for most businesses, such an approach is dangerous. True storytelling is not direct selling or promotion. It is honest, open dialogue about products or services that helps frame an audience’s understanding and response. For these reasons we’ve always thought it was essential to make stories authentic. God bless Seth Godin and his followers, but it strikes us as inherently dishonest to write a book that’s called All Marketers Are Liars and then twist that title with another bit of misdirection late in the book to say that marketers aren’t really liars at all, but that consumers are huge liars and that they lie to themselves all the time — and that marketers are only honestly repeating the lies that consumers tell themselves when buying clothes or cars. So who then, is the real liar in that scenario? It’s hard to judge but not hard to understand that praising lying is praising the telling of inauthentic stories. We’re not at all suggesting that when a client or company tells a marketing story that they shouldn’t tell it in a way that makes them sound good. It just means that, if the audience wants to check it out (and today, with the Internet community, they can), it better be rooted in fact and told in a way that’s authentic.

Q: What future aspirations do you have for you own story work? What would you like to do in the story world that you haven’t yet done?

A: At WordWrite, we continue to see long-term promise in storytelling. To a certain degree, when and how this unfolds is linked to where global society is headed with social media and at what pace. At some point, storytelling as we are discussing it here and the current use of social media are going to fuse in a way that, we believe, will require the classical tenets of storytelling, though altered by the delivery capabilities (and limitations) of social media tools. While we can’t predict how it all turns out, we feel deep within our bones that storytelling will be an essential element of success for organizations seeking to thrive in a digital era. “What does it all mean to me?” is a question we hear often. There is no substitute for a strong story in delivering an answer.

This thinking has fueled our development of StoryCraftingSM — WordWrite’s proprietary method of building an authentic storytelling platform for clients based on the fundamentals of their day-to-day business. We are very high on StoryCrafting as markets shift toward a greater demand for truly authentic communication (not merely “inauthentic authenticity”).