Pam Hoelzle has developed what she calls a “visual and quick outline to aid in business and organizational storytelling.” Especially given the nifty graphic she’s developed to go along with the outline, I think we can safely call it a “model.”

I was naturally intrigued to apply this model to my favorite type of business storytelling, storytelling in the job search. What follows is Hoelzle’s outline with my adjustments (in bold)

1. What’s the BIG Idea that inspires you as an employee or prospective contributor to an employing organization?
2. Who is the target employer or type of employer?
3. Now, what is the problem/opportunity (stated in the employer’s words, such as in a job posting)?
4. What is it that differentiates you from other candidates?
5. What is YOUR PROMISE? What is the one sentence that clearly states what you have to offer prospective employers, particularly the targeted employer? (You can think of the response to this question as your personal branding statement.)
6. Now, what are your high-value innovative solutions? How have you solved for past employers similar problems to those the prospective employer is faced with or addressed opportunities similar to those the prospective employer has?
7. Values and Personality: What are your values, your preferred workplace culture, personality, tone of voice, likes, dislikes?
8. Keywords. These are the keywords of your story. These are the words you want to engage in and around online and in real life. These are the words you will be found around, listen for, engage with. [I’m really glad Hoelzle includes keywords because they are extremely important in the job search and should appear on your resume.]
9. Reviewal and Storytelling. All of your past employers’ testimonials, excerpts from performance reviews, and stories should be retold in written form, video, audio so that they are easily shareable across today’s media and networks. [All of this might be a bit much for the job search, but recommendations, testimonials, and success stories can certainly appear on your LinkedIn profile and other social media.
10. Engaging. Engaging happens as we share, listen and relate, online and in real life.

In Hoelzle’s posting about her outline/model. she provides examples from her own business. If you’re more interested in using the model for its intended purpose — business storytelling — than for job search, you’ll want to check out “her posting.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

…. Well, with Facebook anyway. I’ve written about many forms of Twitter storytelling, but Snipisode is the first storytelling app I’ve come across for Facebook. Snipisode, developed Agency Zen, lets you type or paste in a whole story and then with a click of a button snip up the story either by line or by punctuation — periods, question marks, or exclamation points. Then you choose a frequency for snips of the story to appear as status updates — daily or every two days.

The story then unfolds on your status line. Visitors can click the Full Story link by the status to see all your status posts for the story, including comments, on one page.

In an 8:41 video (below), inventor Dan Zen describes Snipisode and tells how to install and use the app. (I wish he sounded more enthusiastic.)

What personal, business, and creative applications can you think of for Snipisode? Maybe a new-product launch that tells the product’s story as a series of snips/status updates … A resume or bio broken into snips … A fictional story told episodically?

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

What characteristics comprise good stories used in the job search (in resumes, cover letters, portfolios, personal branding, interview responses, and, as discussed in yesterday’s entry, networking communications)?

Melinda Briana Epler, in a piece not long ago on Best Practices in Storytelling, provided a set of Storytelling Rules of Engagement that are well-suited to job-search stories. Here they are with my comments on how they apply to the job search:

1. Authenticity: The employer should see and understand the real you in your job-search stories
2. Transparency: Your stories must be honest and verifiable
3. Emotional Investment: The most effective job-search stories will inspire emotional investment from your audience — employers or members of your network
4. Personally Aligned Values: Your stories must illustrate how your values fit with those of the employer
5. Community Ownership: Although I’m not 100 percent sure what Epler means by this one, my interpretation for the job search is that your stories should make you seem as though you are already part of the employer community.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

As I learned from the Career Diva blog of Eva Tahmincioglu, Tom McAlister created a comic book strip, Brandman to the Rescue, with himself as the superhero, Brandman.

The comic, which you can see here, tells the story of McAlister’s career and accomplishments.

Hiring managers, Tahmincioglu explains, weren’t the main target of the comic. McAlister distributed it to members of his network “to reenergize the key people that could help him land a job — his network of friends and former colleagues.”

As Tahmincioglu writes:

Many of the employed individuals out there may be experiencing a bit of help-a-friend-who’s-out-of-work fatigue. That’s why I think it’s a brilliant idea to think of ways you can get your networking circle to get excited about recommending you. McAlister would give the comic strip to his contacts or to people he knew at companies he wanted to work for, and those contacts would be pumped about passing it along…much more pumped than they would have been just passing along a boring resume.

Eventually, McAlister created a print version that he distributed to contacts and folks he’d interviewed with. It was through that distribution that McAlister eventually landed a job — after the comic was passed along to a hiring manager by a former boss.

McAlister also has a bio and a resume on his Brandman site; the resume is available in both comic and traditional formats.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I’ve explored the idea of the storytelling resume many, many times in this space, always on the lookout for what the ideal storied resume would look like. I still don’t know the exact form the perfect storytelling resume would take, but one place to start is with an existing resume.

Karen Siwak (pictured), about whom I wrote here (be sure to read her comments on the entry), has formulated a checklist to gauge the storytelling quality of a resume. In a guest blog post on HRMargo, Karen notes, “I am a fanatic about resumes that tell an interesting story, and frankly, most don’t. In fact so many resumes fail spectacularly when it comes to story telling, that having to screen through a stack of resumes has been likened to water torture.”

Here are the first few items on Karen’s 12-item checklist, the rest of which you can read in the guest post:

Here is my storytelling check list, and I can tell you that less than 10% of the resumes I’ve critiqued over the years have met even half of these criteria:

• Is there a target job title and a profile or summary that speaks to a specific target audience?
• Is the summary laden with warm and fuzzy “plays well with others” self-aggrandizements, or does it contain factual statements that show why this candidate is the perfect solution to a specific kind of challenge?
• Is there an easy-to-read “table of contents” outlining the candidate’s top 10 to 12 core skills and expertise?

The next step for the job-seeker would be seeing what perfect, storied execution of the dozen items on Karen’s checklist would look like on a storytelling resume.

[Thanks to Terrence Gargiulo for alerting me to Karen’s guest post.]

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Today, the quote from Peggy Nelson that ended Sunday’s entry is our headline and the springboard for a look at some new ways of telling fictional and true stories with new media/social media/transmedia:

• Reader Stephanie Pride turned me on to a “‘micro-community’ of 17th century voices” that have clustered around the Twitter account @samuelpepys, the diarist Samuel Pepys (pictured). As reported here, “He kept a diary. Of everything. And what a diary it was — Pepys was a compulsive chronicler. EVERY DAY, for decades, he wrote something about what happened to him that day — from a few sentences to a couple of pages.” For this Twitter project:

  … they have taken the online archive of Samuel Pepys diaries, parsed them for a daily segment that best represents the activities of Mr. Pepys for that day in history, and converted it to be posted as a “Twitter Tweet” … Oddly enough there has been a growing micro-community of 17th century “voices” on Twitter that play off of Pepys’ Diaries– characters mentioned often in the main diary series (such as Mr. Pepys’ wife) now have their own accounts as well, and they appear to interact with each other from time to time.”


• Over on Facebook, the profile Henio Żytomirski tells the life story of a little Jewish boy, born in 1933 in Lublin, whose name was Henio Żytomirski (pictured).
• I have not been able to discover the name behind the blog StoryCentral DIGITAL, but she (he?) is a PhD student working on “a transmedia [romantic-comedy] fiction which will be the first rom com/chick lit transmedia story to be published in book form as well as on a host of digital platforms.
• I’ve covered several Twitter stories and novels in this space. As described here by Martin Bryant, Meet Mr Keihl is a novel that launched Nov. 22, 2009, and will take two years to complete at a rate of seven tweets per day. “The story is a spy epic set in the year 2130 that recounts the exploits of a legendary agent,” Bryant reports. Candyfloss and Pickles is another Twitter novel that Bryant cites. Bryant also references another type of Twitter storytelling, the fake Twitter account. Behind @dinner_guest is “an artist exploring the use of Twitter to let fictional characters tell their stories in a new way,” Bryant writes. The eight characters of the social-media Love Story November in Manchester each have their own Twitter feeds and blogs, Bryant notes. The story spanned November 2009.
• Also billed as a social-media love story is Crushing It, “a romantic comedy for the Twitter age. It’s a week long ‘live’ semi-improvised story told by the characters themselves using social networking.” The story unfolded between Feb. 1 and Feb. 5. The user was to decide how it all ends.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I’ve had several entries about storytelling in user-experience design (UX) recently, and now a book on the subject is imminent.

Whitney Quesenbery reports that the book she co-authored with Kevin Books, Storytelling for User Experience, is now in production, and those interested can sign up to be notified when it’s available.

You can read the table of contents here.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Much is being written these days about social-media storytelling. Here are five perspectives that have popped up on blogs recently:

1. Social media extends the ways you can tell your story. Social media is easier to execute and more effective when you or your organization are oriented toward storytelling to begin with. Roger Burks and Mercy Corps, for example, already focus on storytelling. Thus, Burks writes, “Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube an extension of what we were already doing and saying. For Mercy Corps, that meant storytelling … So we used Facebook and Twitter to syndicate the stories and other content we published on our website — particularly the Mercy Corps Blog, a new feature we launched last May. We used YouTube to publish videos that supported and extended that content. In nearly all cases, we linked back to our website. Social media became another place to tell our story, to engage readers and attract new supporters.” Burks notes that Mercy Corps extended both its audience and donations while telling the stories of the earthquake in Haiti, in part through social media.

2. Effective social-media storytelling engages audiences and inspires action.
In a piece that compares the relative storytelling success of various social-media campaigns, Dan Morrill notes:

The better the story the more people that will engage with the subject and the better your social media efforts will be. Social media people must be excellent story tellers that can engage and get an audience participate in the story so that it becomes theirs. The major issues with that are getting people to [take] action.

Morrill asserts that failed attempts at social media — abandoned blogs, Twitter accounts, and Facebook profiles, for instance — result when the story behind these efforts fails to engage audiences. I’m sure that’s often the case. It was for a client of mine who recently put his blog on hiatus. But I would suggest that a bigger reason for abandoning social media is simply that people are busy and overwhelmed, and maintaining these venues becomes tiresome. Most social media requires at least some commitment to writing, and I’ve found that the writing obligation fills many people with enormous angst.
3. Social-media harnesses stories your audience is already telling. “Your fans are already out there in the world, sharing their stories every day, without any prompting from you,” writes Jesse Stanchak. Social campaigns simply put that drive to work.” Stanchak offers three guidelines for making the most of the stories audiences are already telling: 1) Catch them at the moment of excitement; 2) If your fans don’t have a soapbox, build one; and 3) Be ready to respond.
4. Social media is an example of “quantum narrative.” So says Mike Bonifer, who in his piece, Quantum Narrative, suggests a dichotomy comparing “Newtonian Narrative” with Quantum Narrative. Quintessentially postmodern, quantum narrative “redefines storytelling by ripping up and recomposing the stuff stories have been made of since the first cave dweller showed her companions how to build a fire (and got thrown out of the cave not long after by another cave dweller who claimed the secret of fire for himself). … It has no beginning, middle or end. It has unlimited numbers of beginnings, middles and ends. It is generative instead of repetitive. It is participatory instead of authored. There’s no traditional storyteller-audience relationship; in the Quantum Narrative, everyone is responsible for creating the story. It does not foster consumption as much as it invites customization,” Bonifer writes (and I encourage you to read the rest of his fascinating characterization). In addition to social media as an example of quantum narrative, Bonifer sees glimmers of the phenomenon in

   transmedia, massive multiplayer games, distributed production models, theme parks … alternate reality games, activist brands, smart badges, business in China, remixes and mashups, augmented reality, micro-loans and the video of your dance in the musical, Hair.

   By the way, I’ve previously cited this “quantum” characterization — in an entry on a piece by Frank Mills about “quantum storytelling.”
5. Social Media provides a way to construct stories from the information-flow firehose. Peggy Nelson’s work would seem to epitomize the quantum narrative that Bonifer writes about. In a Q&A with Nelson by Andrea Pitzer, Nelson describes her work as “new media art with a focus on decentralized, episodic storytelling,” as well as “experimental storytelling” — storytelling for a world in which “people are so fractured and they only have 15 seconds to look at something anyway” and “every Twitter account is a character, every Twitter account is a performance.” (Check out Nelson’s Twitter projects, @AdeleHugo, and @enoch_soames.) In that world, we need a filter so we can drink from the firehose of information coming at us. “We still need someone to construct the stories out of all the information coming in,” Nelson says. New media, of which I’m guessing social media is a subset, may provide the way to construct these stories.

I close with Nelson’s inspiring words: “[T]here are so many just-barely explored opportunities to tell interesting stories in new ways.”

[Thanks to Thaler Pekar and Madelyn Blair for alerting me to some of these perspectives. Image credit: Erika Hargreaves.]

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Telling stories of your accomplishments is effective not just for the job search, but also when you are in your performance review and when you’re negotiating an initial salary or, later, a raise.

In the salary-negotiation portion of a job interview, be prepared “with stories to tell that illustrate your accomplishments and values,” writes Susan Adams on Forbes.com, citing the advice of Orville Pierson of the outplacement firm Lee Hecht Harrison.

My newest discovery among kindred spirits who link storytelling with career and job search is George Dutch, who writes in his blog:

A successful career transition or a job search requires some storytelling competence, not for its own sake, but for the sake of the listener, i.e., your next employer or client. A story does not exist in a vacuum. It is part of a social or cultural context.

The context Dutch refers to comprises the issues, challenges, problems, mission, and goals of your employer or prospective employer. Tune into those so you know the right stories to tell — those that illustrate how well you can address the context — or how well you have addressed it if you’re in a review or salary-negotiation.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

One of the best pieces I’ve read about how stories heal is by Allison Cox, who not only describes several ways storytelling heals, but also guides practitioners in telling healing stories and lists books about therapeutic storytelling. Here’s a choice snippet from Cox’s article:

During storytelling, listeners let go of defenses and relax into the known, safe environment of story. A shift in consciousness takes place. Those who listen, actually live the story adventures in their imagination. The audience is offered a chance to measure their own experience in the light of the immortal tale… immortal because people often forget important details of their lives, but will remember a story they heard as a child.

Cox notes that “story lends narrative structure to events that might otherwise seem random and meaningless.” Stories tell us we’re not alone when faced with life-changing devastation and struggle, as the people of Haiti currently are and the victims of the 2005 Indian Ocean Tsunami have been. The site Surviving the Tsunami provides “stories of compassion, hope, and dignity. They highlight the resilience of communities in the face of catastrophe and the impact of humanitarian efforts.”

Cox writes about stories as “survival tools [in] an increasingly complex society.” Stories are part of an empowerment movement that, as Bonnie Rochman reports on TIME.com, many are calling Patient 2.0. Rochman cites, for example, Association of Online Cancer Resources, or ACOR.org, an umbrella site for information and shared experiences. One example is a site under ACOR’s auspices, Stories and Faces, a clearinghouse of stories of children with cancer. The site PatientsLikeMe enables people to learn from the real-life experiences — stories — of patients like them.

While there’s virtually nothing on the site The HIV Story Project except what you see in the graphic below, the planned short film compilation and online storytelling component sound as though they will provide the same kind of mental healing that comes from sharing experiences through story. Cox writes about storytelling as a prevention tool. Prevention may not be the primary motive of the HIV Story Project, but I’m guessing that it will be one of the outcomes.

Update, Feb. 20: No sooner had I published the foregoing entry than I came across information about an upcoming symposium in Scotland, Storytelling as a Healing Art, June 13-19. You can download a flyer about it here: Symposium-Condensed-Info.pdf.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I continue to marvel at the generosity of the storytelling community. Storytelling fans can find so many wonderful freebies out there. Here are three I’ve come across recently.

• [Thanks to Thaler Pekar for alerting me to this one.] Stephanie Tolan has a new Web site, StoryHealer.com, where she’s offering a free e-book on a theme that has fascinated me for several years — Change Your Story, Change Your Life, which is also the title of the 145-page book. The only cost is the ink or toner to print the book out if you’re like me and don’t want to read it on screen. I haven’t printed mine yet (and thus haven’t read much). She also offers an excerpt — the first chapter — in case you want to preview it before downloading the full book. Here’s what Tolan wrote in an e-mail announcing the new site and book download:

The book describes what I call Story Principle and provides methods for putting it to use to improve one’s life experience. It can be downloaded as a free PDF under a Creative Commons license. On the website there is also an excerpt that allows people to sample the material; a list of “Resources”—the books I read over the fifteen years during which I came to understand the power of consciousness to affect experience—and a page devoted to “Stories That Work.” These are stories sent to me by people who read early drafts of the book and began using Story Principle to make changes in their lives.

• A fairly new discovery, Spoken Stories, which I’ve been enjoying a lot recently, has a wonderful page of Storytelling Sources/Websites. These skew somewhat toward oral-performance storytelling, but there’s something for all storytelling fans. Categories of materials include General Storytelling; Storytelling Organizations/Discussion Lists; Warm-up Exercises; Creative Dramatics; Tale Type, Motif Indexes, and Folklore Research; Personal Narratives; Oral Tradition; Ethics Resources; Copyright; Storytelling-Related Codes of Ethics; Grants and Funding; Working with Audiences; Storytelling in Schools and Curricula; Programming Resources; Special Populations; Props and Storytelling; Folk and Fairy Tales; Storytelling through Music; Poetry Resources; Beauty and the Beast and Bluebeard Sources; Storytelling in the Movies; Environmental/Ecology Story Resources; Family Stories; Holiday Stories; Oral History; Peace and War Story Resources; University Oral History Projects; Urban Legends; Worklore & Business Leadership Storytelling; Multicultural Stories; Mythology; Digital Storytelling/Globalization; Samples of Digital Stories; Storytelling and International Festivals; Terms and Definitions; Storytelling Resources; and Storytelling Quotes.

• For folks who enter their name and e-mail address here, story coach Lisa Bloom offers her e-book, 5 Common Mistake People Make That a Good Story Can Fix, in the form of a new chapter every two days. At the end of this email series, readers have the opportunity to download the entire book in PDF format.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

It seems like at least monthly a career guru is predicting the death of resumes — or even pronouncing them already dead. The latest is Ryan Rancatore, who poses the question, “Will Resumes Be Extinct By 2020?”

These gurus rarely use the word “story” to describe what’s lacking in resumes or what will replace them, but their characterizations of what’s currently missing suggest that stories will fill the bill nicely.

Rancatore, for example, notes that resumes are “a woefully inadequate representation of a person’s life, career, and skill set.” Clearly, stories could better showcase those aspects. A commenter to Rancatore’s posting said, “Employers need better more concrete ways of seeing you as you really are and if you are worth their investment.” Another said: “People will want something much more personal than a piece of paper.” What better and more personal way than storytelling to enable an employer to see you as you really are?

Some of the communication vehicles that Rancatore and his commenters suggest will replace resumes — such as LinkedIn profiles, online portfolios, blogs, and VisualCVs — lend themselves better to storytelling than resumes do.

Still, Rancatore and his readers need to be careful what they wish for. Rancatore predicts that “by 2020 I suspect the average [social-media] ‘profile’ to include tons of video and interactivity.” Videos certainly are potentially story-rich, but does Rancatore have any idea how time-consuming it would be for hiring decision-makers to go through those tons of video and interactivity? Recalling my experience in reviewing just three videos submitted for Ink Foundry’s contest to choose a social-media intern based on 3-minute videos submitted by candidates, it took me more than 10 minutes to review these three videos. It would have taken no more than a couple of minutes to skim their resumes.

Yes, resumes will change, evolve, morph, and perhaps even die. Everything that hiring decision-makers say about what they want instead of resumes convinces me that they hunger for stories from candidates. The trick is to find a medium in which job-seekers can reveal their authentic selves in a storied way that hiring deciaion-makers can easily process.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

First: Internship Story Has Happy Ending

My recent involvement with Ink Foundry’s contest to choose a social-media intern based 3-minute videos submitted by candidates reinforced the value of story-rich social media in the job search. Readers might want to know how the contest came out. The candidate whom I felt created the video of highest (and most storied) quality, Lauren, got the fewest votes in the contest. Her competitor, Rachel, was clearly skilled at rallying votes and won in the voting. Rachel deserves a lot of credit for harnessing social media to win the contest. I learned yesterday that Ink Foundry hired both Rachel and Lauren. An outsider like me could conclude that the agency’s decision recognizes that in social media, quality content is just as important as the ability to reach great numbers of people.

Next: Two bloggers Offer Guidelines for Storied Social-Media Campaigns

A couple of bloggers have recently posted entries that also cite the importance of story-rich, quality content. Park Howell, who runs an eponymous green marketing agency, proposes a social-media-campaign “recipe” that is “7 parts strategy, 6 parts storytelling, and 4 parts tactical channels.” Job-seekers, in my opinion, can apply most of this recipe to deploying social media in the job search, Here’s my version of his recipe, adapted for individuals mounting a social-media campaign to bolster a job search:

I. Strategy for Job-Search Social Media

1. Describe your brand in one sentence

2. Communications goal

• What are you trying to accomplish? [Probably something like: “Communicate my unique value to employers.”]

3. Where is your audience relative to what you have to offer as an employee?

• Awareness: How familiar are they with you and your qualifications?

Interest: They’ve heard of you but have not interacted with you.

Action: They’ve taken at least one action because of your campaign — perhaps contacted you or invited you for an interview

Advocacy: Howell says advocates are fans of your brand and perhaps even evangelists. In the realm of job search, this level of awareness probably comes only when the audience/employer hires the job-seeker

4. How does your audience use social media?

• Although Howell’s question is appropriate for job-seekers, his characterization of how audiences use social media (which comes from Forrester Research’s Technographic Ladder) is probably not quite on target. Audiences, Howell says, are Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators, and Inactives. I would characterize the employer audience as Seekers when it comes to hiring; employers are routinely searching LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter as a low-cost way to find candidates.

5. What makes your story unique and shareable?

6. How will you become more approachable?

7. How will you know you have won? [presumably when you receive a job offer]

II. Telling Better Accomplishments Stories

Accomplishment stories are the meat and potatoes of getting an employer’s attention. Employer want to know that you can achieve the same results for them that you have attained for past employers. Howell’s story formula needs a bit of tweaking for accomplishments. Here’s my version:

1. Describe the hero (you, the job-seeker/protagonist)

2. Describe a situation, challenge, or problem you faced.

3. Who/what stood in your way (Antagonists, Obstacles)?

4. What did you have to overcome?

5. What was the result; what did you achieve?

Howell provides a library of resources to help you become a better storyteller.

III. Activating Your Career-Marketing Social Media Plan

1. Realistically, what do you have to do to activate your plan?

2. Who needs to buy in and champion your cause? [employers and network contacts who can refer you to employers]

3. How long will it take to launch?

4. What social media channels will you launch first? [such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, your own blog]

Meanwhile, Rick Braddy makes a strong case for using stories when launching anything to an audience. His examples of “anything” include products, companies, websites, or political candidates), so a launch can clearly apply to a job-seeker. “These stories,” Braddy writes, “answer important questions for the audience,” which I’ve again slightly tweaked to apply to a job-seeker launching himself or herself to an audience of employers:

• Who is this candidate and where did he or she come from?
• Why should my organization care?
• What’s in it for my organization? What can this person contribute
• Why should I listen to you, the candidate?
• Why should I take action and actually interview you or consider hiring you?
• Why should I act now instead of delaying or just doing nothing instead?

Continues Braddy:

Stories provide an interesting way to answer these (and other) questions people have about what’s being launched and how it could affect them. Stories can be conveyed in a variety of ways, including blogging, videos, newsletters, and emails.

These are all some great starting points for ensuring that both story-rich content and strategy for reaching audiences are optimal for the job search.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Still basking in that Valentine’s Day afterglow? Looking to start your workweek with a smile?

Enjoy Terrence Gargiuolo’s beautiful, brief video, Organizational Relationships.

Terrence kicks off by asking some thought-provoking questions about technology and whether it has brought us closer together or hindered relationships. He wonders whether we can fulfill our basic human need for connection within organizations, workplaces. One way we can, of course, is by sharing stories — carefully.

Some words and ideas from the video:

There may be no short cuts to forming relationships but the shortest distance between two people is a story.

Draw the stories of people around corporate imperatives and watch how people are drawn to each other and become more engaged performers.

Be vigilant in your story endeavors. The path to relationships is wrought with traps… We tend to see the stories we expect. Tell the stories we need. And only listen when we need to make sense.

By the way, Terrence offers some other nice videos on Vimeo.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Francisco Inchauste’s eagerly anticipated Part 2 of his Better User Experience with Storytelling article kicks off with interviews with four practitioners in the field — Dorelle Rabinowitz, Curt Cloninger, Christian Saylor, and Cindy Chastain (You might want to read Inchauste’s comments illuminating my entry about Part 1 of his article.)

He asks each his or her approach to storytelling in user experience design, how they feel storytelling ties into business’s profit motive, and what resources each recommends for those who want to learn more about storytelling in user experience design. Among those resources — plus some tools that Inchauste recommends:

• Personas Template
• Experience Themes Matrix
• Whitney Quesenbery’s Storytelling for User Experience Design (book to be released this year, co-authored by Kevin Brooks).
• Experience Themes by Cindy Chastain
• The Art of Storytelling by Christian Saylor
• A Case for Web Storytelling by Curt Cloninger

• Storytelling: A Compelling Design Tool
• Experience Themes: An Element of Story Applied to Design

Some snippets of the expert interviews that resonated with me:

• Rabinowitz: “I realized that storytelling facilitates communication, that people respond emotionally to stories, bond over stories and share stories again and again, and that the more I integrated storytelling into my work the better the work was.”
• Cloninger: “… narrative design … means allowing the user to have some kind of personal say in completing her experience.”
• Chastain: “Brand message is no longer the thing that sells. Experience sells. If the intangible pleasure, emotion or meaning we seek can be made tangible through the use of story and narrative techniques, we will build more compelling product experiences.”
• Saylor: “I strongly believe that everything has a story associated with it. Every business, social group, concept, methodology and relationship is desperately seeking out better ways to engage with its audience. Some just happen to do it on a large scale (Apple), while others quietly create a pattern of life that goes unnoticed until it disappears (the remote control). From packaging that sits on the store shelf to the applications that follow us throughout our days, story influences just about every aspect of our lives. Story is all around us. It gives us a sense of understanding and knowledge of the people and things that are important to us.”

Later in the article, Inchauste offers examples of storytelling applications in several design realms: Packaging: Apple; Technology: Microsoft Courier; Marketing: Six Scents Perfume; Architecture: HBO Store; and Websites: Showtime Sports

[Illustration credit: I’m pretty sure Inchauste designed the “Good design tells a story” graphic.]

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Golden Grahams cereal is soliciting ridiculous job-search stories for a contest. Weekly drawings will eventually result in 75 winners getting a dozen boxes of Golden Grahams cereal each.

Given that entrants must tell their “stories” in even fewer characters (122) than they could on Twitter (140), I question the narrative quality. As Antoinette Coleman, marketing manager for Golden Grahams, explains in an interview on SmartBlog on Social Media, the 122-character limit is of course so entrants can tweet and share their stories virally. The funniest stories, however, will be animated and published on the site.

You can see at right the one that made me laugh out loud.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Here’s the latest entry in my (unintentionally) ongoing series on how to learn and master a story so your oral delivery of it sounds natural.

Heather Summerhayes Cariou, author of the acclaimed memoir about her sister, Sixtyfive Roses, responded to the most recent entry in this series, writing:

As a former professional actor, I would suggest that storytellers find a local acting class and attend it. What they might learn there will help immensely in terms of oral storytelling — and even reading their work aloud.

Cariou noted that she’ll be teaching “Presenting and Promoting Your Work” this summer at the 33rd International Writing Guild Conference at Brown University, the first week of August and that the workshop will include instruction in how to read aloud.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I learned two new things from a Worldwide Story Work teleconference this week presented by Malcolm Jones, an expert in ideation and sketching. Well, probably a lot more than two, but these were the ones that really stood out.

1. An affinity for visual storytelling over text-based storytelling (or vice versa) probably reflects one’s learning style. Yes, that’s kind of a “duh” statement, and I’m sure I knew it on some level, but I hadn’t thought about it before Jones’s teleconference (even though Wednesday’s entry was about learning styles). I found it difficult to personally relate to Jones’s assertion that writing is very difficult for many people; yet, that observation is true to my experience. Writing comes incredibly easily to me, but I know from six-plus years of teaching business communication to college students that writing is agony for many. Some find linear storytelling to be a painful process, Jones says, and visual storytelling is less linear and more spatial than written storytelling. He also points out that the brain takes in visual stories differently than it takes in linear, written stories, yielding different insights. And an affinity for one over the other reflects differences in right- or left-brain dominance. Especially intriguing was Jones’s reminder that some 60 percent of people are visual learners. Given that stat, it’s almost surprising that visual storytelling isn’t more dominant over text-based storytelling.
2. Like other kinds of storytelling, visual storytelling is now being used in business — in business comics, games and other forms of play, and a field that was completely new to me, graphic facilitation. Jones cited Kevin Cheng as a major name in using comics for User Experience Design and later shared with me links by and about Cheng: The Power of Comics: An Interview with Kevin Cheng, Communicating Concepts Through Comics from Cheng’s own blog, and Examples of Comics in Designing Customer Experiences. In graphic facilitation, Jones says, a graphic artist works with a facilitator to create a visual story of what goes on in a group meeting. A site describing an upcoming workshop on Graphic Facilitation also provides a good description: “Using graphics to lead group process in a highly engaging, interactive way. … Participants learn to draw, create large-format displays, record, and practice facilitating and receiving feedback. They also design a meeting process and learn about methods of documenting visual meetings” and Graphic Facilitation is all about “applying visual language to group processes.” (A couple of resources on Graphic Facilitation: The Center for Graphic Facilitation, Graphic Facilitation Focuses A Group’s Thoughts — and apparently the definitive book on the discipline is David Sibbet’s Graphic Facilitation: Transforming Groups with the Power of Visual Listening). Jones also noted that storytelling literally comes into play in business in the form of games and role-plays. He reported that corporate groups are building things out of LEGOs to solve business problems, using a process called LEGO Serious Play. Jones cited a book on business play, which seems to cover more than just LEGOs, Serious Play.

Jones talked a bit about comics and storyboarding and recommended three tools:

• WittyComics, one of Jones’s favorites
• StripCreator
• DesignComics (Jones wasn’t very enthusiastic about this one).

To that list, I would add ComicLife, the comic software app for Mac. I’ve never used ComicLife for an actual comic, but I use it lots of other graphics functions since I don’t have and don’t know how to use Photoshop. As Jones notes, these tools can help one tell a story with comics — but necessarily a good story.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I’ve gotten very caught up in Ink Foundry’s contest to choose a paid intern based on the videos candidates have submitted (here and here).

I’ve become a fierce champion of candidate Lauren Barnard, who is trailing in the votes at this writing.

See here why I think her video is the most deserving and the most storied.

I hope you’ll agree and vote for Lauren here, by midnight (Eastern) tonight.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Family history, a strong interest of mine, is a rich source for stories.

I don’t have to go far back in my family tree, for example, to uncover the story of my maternal great-grandfather’s mysterious disappearance or my great-grandmother’s many years in an insane asylum.

Yesterday, I polished my coin-silver tea set in preparation for packing it for our upcoming move (coin silver was the standard before sterling). My father handed down the tea set to me on his 70th birthday (he must have somehow known that he was near the end of his life because he died a few months later). My dad expressed his wish that I would pass the tea set down to my eldest child someday (I plan to do it on my 70th birthday). Before my father had the tea set, it had sat on the buffet of his parents’ dining room and had been passed down through the family via his mother’s lineage.

One piece in the set that tells of its origins is a chalice. Now, I can’t tell you why a chalice is part of a tea set. Inscribed on the chalice are the initials ECH and the following:
In memory of her sister, Mary A. Hartt
Died July 21, 1845
Aged 15 years, 7 months
(You can see a detail of the chalice inscription in the photo.)

So, the tea set came down to my grandmother through this Hartt clan. Just one problem … Extensive genealogical research has revealed no Hartts in our family tree. The story of the tea set is veiled in mystery:

• How am I related to Mary A. Hartt?
• If I’m not related to Mary A. Hartt, how did my family come into possession of the tea set?
• Who was ECH? H was obviously Hartt. If we consider popular 19th-century names, we might conclude that E was for Elizabeth or Emily.
• Was it customary in 1845 for people to be given tea sets or other keepsakes in memory of dead siblings?
• What was the story of Mary A. Hartt and her brief 15 years of life? How did she die?
• Why is a chalice part of a tea set?

I’ve conducted some research on Mary A. Hartt on Ancestry.com and have come up empty.

Given that stories are how we make sense of the world, it’s not surprising that my mind wants to spin stories in response to the tea set’s mysteries.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

A few weeks ago, I presented the dilemma of blogger Jared (Moon Over Martinborough), who recently began podcasts and was concerned that his oral delivery didn’t sound sufficiently “campfire-story”-esque.

I tossed around a few thoughts on achieving a natural-sounding delivery, including suggesting Jared not even read from his written text (did I really say that?). Jared’s dilemma affects many of us who want to deliver spoken content in a way that sounds natural and conversational but don’t want our words to sound read or memorized. Some people can speak wonderfully off-the-cuff, but Lord knows, I’m not one of them. We often depend on written text to help us feel confident in our delivery and ensure we don’t forget what we want to say. Look at President Obama, whose legendary dependence on teleprompters is so extreme that he uses them in classrooms of schoolchildren.

Thankfully, a wiser voice than mine has suggested that there’s no one way to master a story or other content. Karen Dietz, in an article called The Trick To Learning A Story, relates mastering a story to learning style, noting that techniques that work for one person may not work for another. “[S]ome people need to write it down,” Dietz writes, “but there are plenty of others who can simply visualize the story and follow the chain of images to tell it. Some people just need to repeatedly listen to a story to learn it. So it really depends on your learning style as to which method will work for you.”

Here’s Dietz’s discussion of learning styles and the technique that aligns with her styles and works for her:

[W]hen building your storytelling skills, you also need to determine your best method for learning and remembering your stories so you can easily recall and tell them.

What learning style are you — Kinesthetic (I have to do it and get the physical feel of it) or Auditory (I have to listen to it) or Visual (I have to see it)?

Most people are a combination of the three with one or two that are dominant. For me my strongest learning styles are Kinesthetic and Visual. If I can see the images in my minds eye, and then feel the images physically, then I’m half-way home.

My best method for learning stories is to think about the story I want to tell and how I want to tell it. Then I get out my 3x5 index cards and create a BRIO (brief reminder of image order), a technique I learned from storyteller Doug Lipman [www.storydynamics.com]. On each card I write a keyword of the image, or draw a stick figure/diagram/picture of it. No artistic talent is required. These are just my own scribbles. This is my visual learning style.

Then I go on a walk and start telling the story out loud. This is where I get to see if the order I THINK the images should go actually work out that way; 99% of the time they DO NOT, and as I walk I reorder them.

What I love about this method is that by walking and practicing out loud, I kinesthetically build the story into my body. I find I can recall that story when I need to, and tell it in ways that I know will get results. Once I get to this point, I’m then ready to practice telling the story with a listening partner.

Terrific advice. Adapt your story mastery to your learning style. Mine are auditory and visual — decidedly not kinesthetic. For me, I believe auditory dominates, so I’d like to develop a mastery technique that suits that style.

And while I’m praising Karen Dietz, I should point out that she has revamped her Web site and is offering excellent, free story-related tools here.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

It’s been at least two months since I’ve looked at storytelling items that are getting significant buzz on Twitter — usually in the form of multiple retweets. The primary application I use to alert me to storytelling items on Twitter has been out of commission, and my alternate methods aren’t quite as user-friendly. So, the following isn’t a comprehensive compilation — nor is it totally up to date — but I present some highlights of the storytelling conversation on Twitter:

• Henry Jenkins, leading expert on transmedia storytelling (and, I believe originator of the term), enjoyed many, many retweets of his Revenge of the Origami Unicorn: Seven Principles of Transmedia Storytelling.

• Rob Mills got tons of comments and retweets of his December blog entry, Storytelling on the Web, which suggests that storytelling has gotten lost in cyberspace.
• Through Twitter I learned of a 50+-page downloadable PDF Literature Review by Patricia McGee, PhD., on using storytelling for teaching and learning.
• My good friend Thomas Clifford had a popular blog entry in his Boosting Employee Engagement With Multimedia Storytelling, and interview with Jim Hauden, author of The Art of Engagement: Bridging the Gap Between People and Possibilities. Here’s what Hauden has to say about storytelling:

  A number of companies are starting to see the difference between using multi-media to “tell and sell” and using it to create insight and to model examples of success. One company calls their examples “proof points” of what behavior looks like when it is in concert with a new strategy. Multi-media can be a powerful way to answer one of the most profound questions that people rarely ask regarding strategy: “What does it look like?” As long as people are concerned that what they think it should look like might be different from what leaders are picturing, they’ll sit back and wait for others to go first. But if leaders can vividly create insight through multi-media in terms of what it looks like when strategy is being executed, we can start to close that gap. We begin to reduce the apprehension that people feel when it comes to taking the risk to bring new strategies to life.

• Three Reasons Why Storytelling is the Key to Social Media Marketing Success by “Guarav” was a popular post that included these words:

  Given how central storytelling is to the human condition, it’s not a surprise that social media is most powerful when it is used for storytelling. These stories can be about the organization and its brands, but they are more powerful when they are stories about the role these brands play in the lives of their consumers. The most powerful stories are about what these brands stand for, if they stand for a larger social object: a lifestyle, a cause, or a passion.

  The resources at the end of the post are especially valuable.
• And two quotes I liked from the last couple of months: @jshelley78 (who subsequently changed his Twitter account to @jamesshelley) said: “What ‘actually happened’ does not define us nearly as much as the story we choose to believe” and (I believe) from my friend @treypennington: “Look for strong linkages [among] #socialmedia, #knowldgemgmt & #storytelling to emerge in 2010.”

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Updated Feb. 13: Michael Margolis has just introduced a new article, How to Brand Yourself as a Thought-Leader: Seven Must-Ask Questions, which is also the topic of a recorded telecall from Feb. 10 and a PDF of the article. Michael says of the topic: “Whether you’re an independent professional or part of a larger firm, the article will encourage you to think about your story and positioning in a fresh perspective.”

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

You may have noticed tiny icons that appear before many of the links in my postings. They look like the icons pictured at right — although not exactly like these.

An application called Apture is responsible for these icons. When readers mouseover the icons, a little window pops up with a snippet of the Web site, document, Twitter feed, or whatever. Thus, readers can check out the links without having to leave my blog entries.

I’ve actually had Apture for awhile, and these icons have appeared from time to time. Now, however, Apture has made it easier to insert the icons, so I’m experimenting with integrating more of them. I have a bit of concern that Apture is slowing down the load time of A Storied Career, so do let me know if you notice problems.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I’ve been following (here and here) the efforts by the marketing agency Ink Foundry to choose a paid intern based on the videos candidates have submitted. I suggested that candidates tell stories in their videos.

The submission deadline for the videos has now passed, and Ink Foundry is inviting the public to vote on which of three finalists should get the internship. (The agency intended to have 10 finalists but got fewer submissions than expected. “When you ask people to do something exceptional, like create a video resume, only the exceptional step up,” is the agency’s explanation.)

All three finalists — Rachel T, Lauren B and Tyler M — tell stories in their videos. All three have their strengths, and my critiques of them have little to do with their storytelling.

Tyler wins points for brevity; both of the other two videos go over the 3-minute limit, while Tyler’s is well under — but maybe that’s because Tyler doesn’t address all the elements Ink Foundry asks him to. Tyler, in my opinion, gives the most natural delivery, but that also means he sprinkles his speech with “likes” and “ums.” He also takes what I believe is a big risk by suggesting that he has engaged in underage drinking. If Ink Foundry were bothered by that admission, it would not have chosen Tyler as a finalist, but not every employer would be as tolerant. Tyler’s video had the weakest production values — dark lighting and an unclear picture. Tyler seems very likable.

Rachel’s black-and-white video has great production values, but she lost me somewhere in the middle of her too-long video; at 3:44, it’s the longest of the three. Rachel focuses too much on what the internship can do for her instead of what she can contribute to Ink Foundry. She needs to smile more and project more enthusiasm. She does a good job of selling herself as a social-media junkie. She does more than the other two to encourage people to vote for her video (and at the time of this writing, she’s leading by 1 vote).

My favorite video, Lauren’s (embedded below) offers excellent production values. She’s the only one of the three to include footage beyond simply her talking head. She’s also the only one to use background music and special effects. Lauren’s video is the most story-rich, and she tells her stories well. I personally would hire her over the others in a heartbeat because she completed a previous internship with The Hoffman Agency, which focuses on storytelling. Of course, that emphasis on stories may not be as important to Ink Foundry as it is to me. Lauren does the best job of the three of explaining what she can do for Ink Foundry. My only critique of her is that her shirt is too low-cut.

You can vote here, and the deadline is midnight, Friday, Feb. 12.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

User-experience (UX) storytelling was one of the storytelling applications that was new to me in 2009. I interviewed Whitney Quesenbery (who is writing a book on the subject) and wrote about Cindy Chastain.

Now, along comes Francisco Inchauste, who has published a wonderfully written and illustrated blog entry that not only explains the basics of storytelling in UX but also serves as a basic primer for many other storytelling applications. Best of all, Inchauste’s blog entry is just Part 1, so we can look forward to one or more installments.

Although I don’t entirely agree with Inchauste’s assertion that the fragmentation of today’s information flow has diminished the personal touch and opportunity for personal connection, I heartily support his statement: “Using storytelling, however, we can pull these fragments together into a common thread.” He says “user experience professionals and designers are using storytelling to create compelling experiences that build human connections.”

Inchauste begins by noting that all stories follow the same mythic archetypes. Think Star Wars, whose special effects dressed up the Hero’s Journey. He borrows a grid from the Star Wars Origins site that shows common mythic elements in movies such as Star Wars and The Matrix. He asserts, “Great stories, though, don’t just happen randomly; they are designed.”

Donald Norman’s book Emotional Design is Inchauste’s source for the three levels of How the Brain Processes an Experience — through visceral design, behavioral design, and reflective design — this last seemingly most relevant to storytelling in that “we associate products with our broader life experience and associate meaning and value to them.”

Having laid that foundation, Inchauste writes: “Knowing that emotion is so vital to how we think makes it more important to create not just a functional and usable experience, but to seek and make a meaningful connection,” which is his lead-in to the basics of storytelling for user experience:

At a basic level, storytelling and user experience have common elements — like planning, research, and content creation — that can be utilized for effectively developing an experience. Storytelling offers a way for the team to really understand what they are building and the audience that they are creating it for. Stories allow for the most complex of ideas to be effectively conveyed to a variety of people. This designed product/experience can then offer meaning and emotion for its users. … With storytelling, a diverse team creating a website or application can collectively link together the tangible elements and create something that is a meaningful experience and is more than just bits and bytes.

A point of controversy, at least for one commenter to the blog entry, is Inchauste’s explanation of how designers should define the users for whom they are designing experiences: “By building a fictional representation of the user that is based on real research and observation, we are able to empathize with them and really understand their needs. Using the created personas and then creating stories about them, we are able to cast a more meaningful vision of the project.” He presents a very detailed profile of such a fictional representation of the user. Reader Josh Walsh demurs on the fictional aspect:

I disagree. Personas should definitely not be fictional in any way. The names may be changed, but the motivations, experiences and disciplines of people should not be averaged into a fictional character. When measure how real people interact with your design, you should keep people as real as possible.

While I know little about user-experience design, Walsh’s view on this point makes more sense to me than does Inchauste’s.

The benefits of deploying storytelling in User-Experience Design, Inchauste says, are that storytelling:

• Puts a human face on dry data
• Can simplify complex ideas for a team
• More efficient team collaboration and purpose
• Insight into the key users
• Setting a project direction faster
• Better communication within large agencies/organizations
• Experience delivers meaning and value to users

Like many of the commenters to the blog post, I’m really looking forward to Part 2.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

The folks behind Lemonade, an inspirational film about 16 advertising professionals who lost their jobs and found their calling, now want to create Lemonade (The Book). The volume “will assemble a collection of essays from people telling stories of reinvention in their own words. Only this time, it won’t be limited to the advertising industry,” the site states.

From the site:

Imagine all the inspirational personal triumphs that arose after the auto industry crash. Think of all the school teachers, engineers, and finance professionals who have found their life’s work thanks to being downsized. Those of us in advertising provide just one, very sheltered viewpoint of what’s possible in unemployment. If you lost your job but found your calling, we want to hear from you.

Please submit a 1-paragraph abstract (about 100 words) about yourself. At this stage, I want this to be more about the quality of your story and less about the quality of the writing. If your story is inspiring enough, we’ll get it written.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Yesterday’s mail brought news from three well-known names in applied storytelling: Thaler Pekar in partnership with Svend-Erik Engh and Michael Margolis.

And, wow, this year’s Washington, DC, storytelling weekend is starting even earlier — and in New York City! Kind of the opposite of previewing a show on the road before it opens on Broadway.

Thaler and Svend-Erik are offering two programs in NYC before traveling to DC to open this year’s Smithsonian Institution Conference on Organizational Storytelling:

• Motivate & Communicate through Story, Wednesday, April 14, 8:15 AM to 9:30 AM; limited to 25 participants. Fee is $75 — $55 if you register before March 1. Continental breakfast will be served.
• StorySharing™: The New Communication Paradigm, Wednesday, April 14, 1 PM to 6 PM, plus optional dinner; Limited to 6 participants. Fee is $775 — $675 if you register before March 1. Hearty snacks will be served, and the group will dine together afterwards (each at our own cost). The registration fee includes two weeks of pre- and another two weeks of post-program coaching.

Both programs will be held at Rockefeller Center in midtown Manhattan, 1230 6th Avenue at 49th Street. Register here.

Here’s Thaler’s pitch for the events: This is a rare opportunity for leaders to re-discover and enhance their ability to harness the power of story to solve problems and achieve success. Participants will benefit from both my deep expertise in persuasive communication and organizational story elicitation and Svend-Erik’s mastery in crafting and performing stories. Svend-Erik is the author of Tell a Story: Be Heard, Be Understood, Get Action (Fokus). He has consulted with Microsoft Denmark, Maersk Container Industry, and Novo Nordisk, among other international companies. You can learn more about Svend-Erik Engh. See Thaler’s summary of How Story Helps smart leaders and their organizations and PhilanTopic essays Stories are a Vital Source of Knowledge and The Trouble with Values.

Motivate & Communicate through Story will enable leaders to:

• Communicate more effectively — more persuasively and efficiently, and with more satisfaction
• Inspire and sustain action from employees
• Find and craft stories to achieve specific goals and objectives.

As a result of participating in StorySharing: The New Communication Paradigm, each leader will significantly improve his or her ability to:

• Attract and retain more customers and donors
• Strengthen his or her institution’s — and personal — brand and competitive advantage
• Reduce misunderstandings and wasted time and money
• Improve the quality of relationships with customers, donors and staff.

Meanwhile, even though Michael Margolis’s Get Storied site is relatively new, he has already revamped it — to put much greater emphasis on content. Here’s what he says about his intent: “Say goodbye to sales-y consultant speak, and say hello to - Content, Content, Content. That’s the experience we all crave on the web isn’t it? We’re looking for a fresh voice and an honest perspective that we can relate to, or that provokes us in welcomed ways. That’s my intention with Get Storied. To give you regular installments of new ideas, practical tips, and relevant trends.”

He offers a sample list of content categories with a representative piece of content from each:

• Brand storytelling — Content + Perception = Value
• Innovation — The Business Case for Storytelling
• Culture — Burgers Make Great Stories
• Social Change — Every Story Needs a Hero
• Story 2.0 — Big Publisher Rethinks the Story

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

What do you get when you cross oral history with digital storytelling?

The blog TC3 Idea Exchange explores the notion of using technology to present oral histories. I can’t find the name of the individual blogger, but the T3 Consortium “is a diversified LLC enterprise supporting key business-to-business and business-to-consumer services.”

The very comprehensive post touches on how to conduct and oral-history interview, presentation software and equipment that can be used to present the history, and how to search for more information.

It’s a terrific post for those seeking creative ways to tell stories of people and events.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I’m reading — via audiobook — a terrific book, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America by Timothy Egan, about the biggest wildfire in US history, which in 1910 consumed 3 million acres in eastern Washington, Idaho, and Montana, destroying five towns and killing at least 85 people.

Narrative comes into play in the subtitle — the Fire that Saved America — in that, in the aftermath of the fire former president Teddy Roosevelt felt he must come up what author Egan calls a “master narrative” to garner popular support for the US Forest Service, the then-radical idea of conserving public lands, and ways of preventing and managing forest-fire threat.

Roosevelt, assisted by his close friend Gifford Pinchot, who had been the first head of the Forest Service but was fired by Roosevelt’s successor William Howard Taft, built this master narrative on what had transpired during and after the fire. A faction of lawmakers and businesspeople (who felt the forests’ resources should be exploited for commercial interests) had opposed the Forest Service and ensured that its funding was stripped to the bare bones. Consequently, rangers who played key roles in containing the fire got no sick leave and no assistance with medical expenses. No compensation was offered to families of those firefighters who lost their lives. Roosevelt told the story of the heroism of the rangers who fought walls of fire. He and Pinchot personalized the story of the fire, Egan writes. Particularly in a speech in Osawatomie, KS, Roosevelt (with speechwriting by Pinchot), told of the classic plotline, the “conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess…” (Read the text of the speech).

Leading the competing narrative was US Senator Weldon Brinton Heyburn, who blamed the Forest Service rangers for the fire and then, perpetuating a long tradition that continues today in the likes of Pat Robertson, said the fire was “God’s will” and that the deity obviously intended to clearcut all the trees from the forests.

In an interview with Smithsonian magazine, Egan tells how the fire — or more precisely, the “master narrative” Roosevelt and Pinchot told about it — “saved America:”

It saved America in this sense: it saved the public-land legacy. Now, people think public lands are national parks, but they’re really a small part of it. The Forest Service is the primary landlord of the American West. We have nearly 200 million acres of national forest land. At the time of this fire, Roosevelt had left office and Congress was ready to kill the Forest Service. So the fire had the ironic effect of saving the Forest Service, therefore saving America’s public-land legacy.

The fire and the master narrative not only saved the Forest Service but shaped its mission and “helped cement an antifire ideology in the Forest Service,” says John Galvin, writing about the fire as part of a list of 10 Worst Disasters of the Last 101 Years in Popular Mechanics (!). Galvin continues: “Congress poured money into the effort … The service created its own army to fight fires, replete with ground troops to dig trenches and set backfires, elite smoke jumpers to parachute into remote areas and an air force of tankers, reconnaissance planes and helicopters.”

Not only does Egan describe how storytelling changed public sentiment, but he engrossingly weaves the many stories of the fire and characters involved with it. I heartily recommend the book.

Read more about the fire and see pictures.

And here’s Egan talking about the fire and the book:

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

The portion of the Finer Minds Web site that promotes Chris Cade’s free downloadable workbook, “Using the Power of Stories to Attract Your Ideal Relationship” notes that folks can “attract and experience their most loving and empowering relationship through the simple and fun art of storytelling.”

Cade’s workbook and the approach it represents were new discoveries for me, but his approach reminds me of that of Louise Hay (You Can Heal Your Life), which helped me at a difficult moment of my life. Both focus on the notion that when people hurt us, it’s not really their fault because they’ve been hurt, too. As Hay puts it, “We are all victims of victims.” Both also provide exercises that involve visualization and repetition of affirmations.

Cade’s approach also reminds me of the “change the story, change your life” approach in that it involves composing future stories that enable you to visualize what the story would like like in your life.

Cade says that “after you finish [the] 2 short exercises in this downloadable workbook, you will:

• Discover who your perfect partner is and if you’re already in a relationship, whether or not you are in a healthy one.
• Pinpoint and break the limiting beliefs that may have held you back from experiencing the full spectrum of a beautiful and empowering relationship.
• Experience a creative visualization process that uses the core principles of the Law of Attraction, imagination, and storytelling to bring you one step closer to your ideal relationship.”

Cade hopes you’ll buy materials for his larger Inscribe Your Life program. The Web site for the program is one of those that reminds me of a text-heavy old-school direct-mail piece with bold, brash headlines in color and copy that seems to go on forever (it seems old-school but I still see these kinds of direct-mail pieces all the time). If you try to close the page, you get a couple of messages to the effect of “Are you sure?” I always have a hard time believing this marketing technique works, but given its prominence, I guess it must.

Does Cade’s storytelling approach work? Well, you can’t beat a free download to check it out and see what you think.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Following up on my entry from last week in which I noted that the marketing agency Ink Foundry seeks personality in its intern applicants and is thus asking them to submit videos instead of print/text resumes …

I suggested that a great way for candidates to show their personalities in their submission videos would be to tell stories.

Had a nice comment in response from Ink Foundry’s Carin Galletta about this hiring process and also started following the organization on Facebook so I can keep up with the search.

Gallatta not only agreed that storytelling would be a terrific approach for prospective interns, she also cited and endorsed my blog entry on Ink Foundry’s own blog. Here’s part of her comment on my entry:

We are using the video application process as an opportunity to really get to know the candidates better through their own voices and we love your insight about using storytelling in the video submission. Great, great advice.

In the past, It has been very challenging to make the perfect choice when the initial tool, the resume, simply isn’t up to the task. We’re hoping video will change that.

Building a successful happy marketing agency team is so much more than where an individual has worked and his/her education level. We’ve had some really smart, innovative word of mouth marketing team members who didn’t work out simply because they were not a good fit for the Ink Foundry culture. We want to try to avoid the mismatch by using a video platform.

Later on Ink Foundry’s blog, Galletta cited two videos as great examples of the kind of submission the company seeks (by the way, how great is it when an employer tells job-seekers exactly what it’s looking for?) While I found the videos imperfect, both of them offer stories in ways that text-based resumes can’t.

The first, called A Walk in my Shoes from “Melody” is good because it targets a specific employer; in fact, a specific hiring decision-maker. She also offers the employer a free trial of her work. Occasionally text appears on the screen that adds humor because it encapsulates Melody’s own inner thoughts about the video. She sings at the end of the video, and the song is the origin of the “A Walk in my Shoes” title. I like the camera angles and expressions. On the downside, there’s something a bit unnatural about Melody’s delivery. And at 3:14, the video is a tad on the long side. But above all, I like how Melody kicks off the video with the story of one of her accomplishments with her current employer.

The second, G’s Video Resume from Gautam Banerjee (embedded above), won vault.com’s monthly video resume contest for May 2007. He, too, kicks off his video with a story — about working in Japan when he didn’t know a word of Japanese. I like the brevity of Banerjee’s video — 2:25 — and the fact that he injects personality by talking about what he likes to do in his non-working hours. I would have liked to see him smile a little more and bob his head less.

I have long been skeptical of video resumes as a truly viable and enduring form of career-marketing communication for two reasons: They are time-consuming to view, and they may expose candidates to discrimination.

But video resumes can work well in certain situations — such as when the employer specifically requests them. And they can clearly work well as storytelling vehicles.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.