A few weeks ago, Gregg Morris shared with me a Twitter recruiting video. The blogger who initially posted it, Michael Batistich, had called it a “great piece of storytelling… [that] makes me want to work there.”

Maybe I’m getting more discriminating about my definition of storytelling, but this video didn’t quite reach the level of storytelling for me. It’s more about symbols and metaphors. In the video, various functional teams use costumes and props to depict what they do. We can see that the Twitter employees all look young, diverse, and casual. They look like they’re having a good time. But I’d call this video “proto-storytelling,” rather than storytelling.

As Marguerite Granat said (I quoted here recently here), “It’s not the best employer that attracts the most candidates; it’s the one who knows how to tell a story through its employment brand.”

Twitter gets that. Even if the story is more of a proto-story.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I recently recapped the “business novels” I’ve covered here on A Storied Career and then received an e-mail from Omar Adams with a link to 50 All-Time Best Business Novels.

I thus realized that perhaps I need to more specifically define the kind of business novel I’ve written about here. I write about novels that employ a story, parable, or fable to convey business principles or lessons. Of course, there are plenty of novels in business settings, but most aren’t explicitly trying to teach a lesson. On the list Omar shared with me, “my” kind of business novel is called “Business ‘Parable’ Novels, written by well-known business experts and consultants, aim to illustrate principles of success.” Interestingly, not one of the titles in this category has appeared in my previous entries about business novels.

Other list categories include Tales From The 18th and 19th Century; Novels With Philosophical Perspective; Stories of Personal Crisis, Disillusionment, and Sometimes Redemption; Business Novels With A Touch of Romance; and Business Novels With Mystery and Suspense. All worthy categories and examples of storytelling, but perhaps not applied storytelling.

Here are the parable-type novels from the list Omar shared:

The Goal Written in a how-to, piecemeal style wrapped in narrative fiction, Eliyahu Goldratt’s novel is able to delineate his philosophy through the story of a man who tries to build his marriage and business.

It’s Not Luck This is the sequel to Eliyahu Goldratt’s The Goal. Alex Rojo, the main character, must figure out the most profitable way to sell his companies while trying to manage his personal life.

Getting Naked Patrick Lencioni tells the story of fictitious consultant Jack Bauer. He learns to use the “naked service”model for his business, which changes his life forever.

Critical Chain Eliyahu Goldratt continues his series of business novels, building on the Theory of Constraints. This novel again questions the theories of conventional management.

Necessary but not Sufficient This is another novel by Eliyahu Goldratt about the Theory of Constraints. It discusses many of the pressures and challenges of high-tech companies.

The Deadline Consultant Tom DeMarco uses creativity with deep insight to deliver this story commenting on the principles that affect software development. Mr. Tompkins, the main character, divides his company into eighteen teams and force them to compete with each other and a deadline.

Selling the Wheel Business novel bestseller Jeff Cox uses a narrative approach to give advice on how to best sell a company to customers. Told from the point of view of Max, this story tells how four different types of business men help him reach success.

The Small Business Billionaire Frank Mills is struggling with his restaurant when a robbery takes place. Fortunately, a young millionaire comes along to give him advice.

The Cure The widget company Essential is on the verge of losing clients because of incompatibility between its employees. Will the three main players join forces just in time?

Under the Gun Jack Griffin is a young entrepreneur satiated with the sudden success of his company. However, will the same things that brought about his success bring consequences later down the line?

The Time Seller This hilarious quick read talks about selling time in a bottle.

Miller’s Bolt Jim Manion is a good worker, but he doesn’t seem to be appreciated by his co-workers. Fortunately, Peter is willing to help save his career.

Jack’s Notebook Jack Huber’s daydreams about starting his own business as a professional photographer. Unfortunately, he’s not too experienced–until a mentor comes along.

The Venture Michael DiGabriel’s video production group has been downsized. They decide to build their own production company while learning a lot on the way.

The Squeeze This novel tells about the struggle of a small family-owned Midwest manufacturer. Fortunately, he learns about sustainability.

Meanwhile, I came across yet another one, The Ginger Bread Man, “the story of a young man who leaves a faceless job in a cubicle to pursue the personal craft of baking. He faces several everyday challenges that help him follow his heart and grow into a life he truly enjoys. At its root the book is about learning who you are and finding joy in a career that suits your skills and personality. … The Ginger Bread Man is about our quest to live up to that creativity in our daily lives. … The book also contains several discussion questions suitable for book clubs and classroom use.” (The several typos in the book’s Web page, corrected here, concern me a bit about the book.)

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I recently read of someone’s passion for writing, and it gave me pause. Writing is integral to my existence, but do I have a passion for it? When people ask me what I do, I tell them I’m a writer. I have wanted to be a writer since third grade, when I wrote a story that was published in the school paper. The fact that my father was a writer was a key influence. Since I moved out of the retail and clerical realm, virtually all my jobs have had writing as a key element. I’ve written eight books and countless articles. But do I have a passion for writing?

I would have to say that my relationship with writing goes beyond passion. It’s simply part of my identity, part of who I am, something that is in my DNA. I often say writing is like breathing for me; it’s just something I have to do.

And that brings me to time management. Ever since our big move to Washington state, I’ve had a barometer of how “busy” I am. It’s an e-mail list I belong to that contains queries by reporters. Expert sources can publicize and promote their expertise by responding to appropriate queries. I receive e-mails three times a day from this list. Since we left Florida, I have deleted every one of these e-mails without reading it.

As I wrote about here, I’ve also often felt too busy to give this blog my best effort. I could rationalize by saying I come nowhere near making a living from this blog; the money I earn from the advertising it carries amounts to pocket change. Yet, if I truly had my druthers, I would spend the bulk of my days researching material for and writing for this blog.

My best friend is an expert at time management, and her favorite rule on this subject is “Do what you love. Don’t do what you hate.” What could comprise better time management than spending our time doing what we’re passionate about and avoiding what doesn’t make us happy?

Still, living in a rural woodland is pretty labor-intensive. My husband does a lot more work here than I do simply because he has skills I don’t have. But I have plenty of regular chores, as well as house-finishing activities that are within my skillset. The beauty of nature here also beckons, saying, “Come outside. Enjoy the beauty. Go for a bike ride or hike.”

In the end though, applied storytelling is my passion. Writing about it goes beyond passion. I must constantly strive to balance the have-tos of my life with the activities that stoke my passions. Today, I rededicate myself to doing what I love.

What’s your passion, and do you spend as much time on it as you want to?

PS: NPR recently ran a story on why writers write.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Every time I come across someone’s suggested story formula, I ask myself whether the structure could be applied in job-search stories. Most of the time, they can, and I’ve written about many of them.

Here’s another one posed by Marc Stoiber on MediaPost, along with my italicized comments on how each step could apply to a story told in, say, a job interview:

Foreboding — a vague sense that something isn’t right: You begin to sense a problem in your workplace that needs attention.

Triggering event — a moment that causes us to act: The problem comes to a head, and you decide to take action.

Epiphany — the curtains draw back and we see clearly: You figure out the best action to take.

Reconciliation — we act to bring reality in line with our vision: You take action to solve the problem.

Transformation — we grow based on the experience: You improve your workplace and develop yourself as a a valuable contributor.

Return and responsibility — we bring our new wisdom to daily life: You apply what you learned as a result of solving this problem to your everyday work life.

Meanwhile, on Glassdoor.com in an article called The Myth Of Transferable Skills, Liz Ryan complains about job-seekers who submit meaningless lists of their “transferable skills” in job-search communications (resumes, cover letters, applications, and more). “People are not actually ambulatory sets of disembodied, abstract skills,” Ryan writes. “Describing ourselves as packages of skills is about the worst way imaginable to get a hiring manager excited about us.”

Ryan protests that hiring managers have no reason to trust job-seekers when they say they have certain transferable skills. A hiring manager’s concept of a given skill could be very different from that of the candidate claiming to possess that skill. The hiring manager has no way of know how a claimed skill will manifest itself in diverse situations. Lists of skills a cliched. “Everyone claims the same ten, done-to-death skills (Communication, Negotiation, Teamwork, Organizational, Writing, Leadership, Technical, Administrative, Customer Service and Process Improvement),” she writes. “We won’t make our mark sounding like every other skill-toting job seeker in the pack.” Perhaps worst of all, lists of transferable skills lack context.

The solution to all these issues, of course, is to tell stories that put transferable skills in context and describe how the job-seeker deployed them. “We need powerful stories to convey our power, battle-tested and concrete, to the person who’s reading our resume,” Ryan says. Further:

Stories, in contrast to skills listings, are loaded with context. We’ll tell the reader about that business dragon we slew (a cost overrun in Production, or a drop-off in attendance at our teleseminars) with plenty of detail about the situation we faced as we brought that dragon down. That’s when our job-search pitch has power! … Trumpeting our fabulousness sans context, proof or relevance is a waste of time. Use your stories, instead, to make it clear how you’ve made a difference for your employers in the past.

I talk about transferable-skills stories and give examples in my book, Tell Me About Yourself, starting here.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

OK, I will admit I’m posting this entry in part because the article it references features my wonderful daughter (pictured).

My colleague Barbara Safani compiled this article about the trials and tribulations of being part of an airline flight crew after the incident in which JetBlue flight attendant Stephen Slater decided he’d had enough abuse from passengers and quit his job by sliding down the emergency-exit slide (around the same time as the hoax-but-still-a-good-story video in which the young woman supposedly quit her job via whiteboard).

The stories in Barb’s article illustrate how the frustrations of airline work could provoke a crew member into drastic actions like Slater’s.

My daughter’s situation is a little different because she doesn’t work for an airline but for a private plane owner. I still crack up over her story of “babysitting” expensive caviar for her former boss.

A related posting is this one from Gawker with readers’ most spectacular “I quit” stories.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Fiction is not atop my interests here on A Storied Career, but today, I’m dipping into two fiction-based story projects that have implications for storytelling outside fiction. Both of these are also mashups of fiction and social media.

Erik Hare has launched a fiction project called Mythnology, which he explains here. Here are some excerpts:

Many kinds of truth are best explored through fiction. … Mythnology is set up to be a novel written in blog form. … Each chapter, after the first three, is available only by subscription. I hope to develop a community of subscribers commenting and asking questions which help guide this process through to its completion. This should be a lot of fun as the process of writing a novel (really a novella) becomes a kind of performance art, as the ancient art of storytelling has long been. … The title Mythnology is a combination of Technology and Mythology. One is based on a system of faith where the other has a core of truth in it. … I happen to believe that myths, or stories that illuminate a grain of truth at the core of them, are the strongest connections between people. If a strong society is all about connections between people and people or people and ideas, our faith in technology is certainly going to test us in ways we probably do not understand very well yet. The ancient art of storytelling, or the crafting of myths, is how we usually fill the gaps.

Role Pages is “a fictional, in-character, role-playing social network where you can be anyone that you can imagine.” Here’s how the site works:

Our members include vampires, werewolves, demons, psychics, aliens, and elves. Sign up for an account, and tell the story of your own unique character by uploading pictures, videos, and written accounts of their adventures. You can also role play with our eclectic members, and participate in the creation of elaborate multi-player interactive stories.

Exploring fictional approaches can be an effective way to work through our storied realities.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I know that I have extolled the webinar-presenting prowess of Terrence Gargiulo on several occasions, but I really can’t express often enough how well he puts on a webinar.

That goes double when he teams up with Shawn Callahan of Australia’s Anecdote consulting firm. The two had presented an excellent webinar about a year ago, so I was eager to “attend” their most recent production, It’s a Marathon Not Magic: Deliberate Practice Approach to Developing Business Storytelling Skills.

I’ve talked before about what makes Terrence’s webinars so special, and this one last week enables me to add to the list:

• Terrence is wonderful about welcoming folks and chatting with them as they enter the webinar. Shawn noted that Terrence is “the master of saying g’day to everyone.”
• He (and his co-presenters) always stick strictly to the planned schedule, never failing to end on time — but this time, Terrence and Shawn invited folks to stick around if they wanted to continue the conversation.
• And “conversation” is key because Terrence and Shawn ran this webinar as more of a give-and-take discussion instead of a purely didactic presentation. They also involved participants in a couple of polls during the session. In one, a third of webinar participants felt it was not hard to notice stories in events and other aspects of everyday life. Asked how often they use a book or movie story to illustrate a point, participant responses were pretty evenly distributed among possible answers.

The webinar offered a number of valuable suggestions — not just by the presenters, but also by participants — for enhancing storytelling skills. Here are some of them (and of course, you can see all of them in the video of the webinar, embedded below):

• Noting that Ben Franklin rewrote his essays and then wrote them again in verse, the presenters suggested practice, repetition, and soliciting feedback are excellent ways to polish storytelling skills.
• Starting a story with a “relevance statement” (Why would you want to hear this story?) is an effective technique.
• Find a story in a book or on the Web. Work out its point and pinpoint the aspects of the story that make it work.
• Try telling the story of a book or movie in varying lengths of time.
• Jot down stories or notes about stories as you encounter them in real life. Participants suggested the applications Evernote and Whrrl as excellent tools for this kind of note-taking. (I wrote about Whrrl, a “storytelling application for the web and mobile that lets people share and remember their real-world stories as they happen,” here. I’ve gotten the sense from at least one tweeter that the app has changed since I originally wrote about it.) Writing stories down, of course, is more for clarifying them in your mind than for memorizing.
• Terrence offers a “circle” technique (best absorbed by viewing the webinar video), which prompted a participant to suggest mind-mapping as a good way to work out stories.
• Practice techniques are also listed here.
• A fabulous resource for finding appropriate stories in Anecdote’s StoryFinder.
• Care and intention, the presenters noted, make your story believable. You can open the doorway to your story by posing a question to the audience.

Meanwhile, Steve Denning has posted a related 3-minute video about how anyone can tell a story in business. “If we all do it, we can learn to do it better,” he says, echoing Shawn’s and Terrence’s theme. (The audio is a little hard to pick up in the video.)

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

When I was preparing to enter high school, my father told me I had to take Latin. I was not enthusiastic about the idea. I wanted to take French. My father and I compromised. I would take two years of Latin.

My Latin teacher, as it turned out, was fresh out of college and in his first year of teaching. He was only nine years older than I was (even now in his 60s, he still has a boyish look, as you can see in the photo at right).

And he was a fabulous teacher. Energetic, interesting, and passionate about his subject matter, he brought the allegedly dead language vibrantly to life. I immersed myself in studying Latin with Mr. Rhody, a.k.a. “Magister,” the Latin word for teacher. I was a good student in most of my subjects, but I worked especially hard in Latin and earned excellent grades. As you may have guessed by now, my compromise with my dad proved unnecessary because I eagerly took four years of Latin (I did also take French, but that experience was far less memorable). I enhanced my immersion in ancient Roman culture through involvement in Latin Club and two spring-break trips to Italy. At the end of the four years, I won the Latin Prize, an accomplishment I have always valued more than most (even though I kind of thought my cousin Vicki deserved it more than I did; she earned straight A’s for all four years of Latin, where I had gotten a B in the first grading period because I had mono).

Even after the years of high school, college, and graduate school, David Rhody remains — by far — my favorite teacher and one of my greatest influences.

Not that many students take Latin today, and many schools don’t even offer it. (I would have invoked the same requirement for my two children that my father did for me, but Latin was not offered at their highschool.) That’s a shame. As my Magister taught me, 60 percent of the English language comes from Latin. Mr. Rhody assigned us to keep “derivative notebooks” to catalog the English words derived from Latin. My four years of Latin were an enormous boon to my vocabulary and my life as a writer. A knowledge of Latin helps a person figure out the meaning not only of unfamiliar English words, but also words in any of the Romance languages.

But I digress … I have kept in touch with Mr. Rhody over the (too many) years since high school, and last year, we became friends on Facebook. He has been retired for several years now, but I like to think his legacy lives on just as vibrantly in the classroom (jokingly referred to as the “Latin wing” of our high school) since his successor is one of his students.

A few weeks ago, I received a Facebook friend request from Larry Smith, co-founder of SMITH Magazine, which I’ve written about many times in this space. Larry had noticed we had a mutual friend — David Rhody. Turns out Larry had had the Magister experience 15 years after I had.

It’s fascinating to speculate about whether anything about our mutual high-school or Latin experience led us both to storytelling. In fact, Larry told me Latin class did influence him, noting that he couldn’t remember where his passport was but could vividly remember Hannibal crossing the Alps on elephants. For me, The Aeneid mesmerized me with its storytelling by the poet Vergil.

I have a good chance to learn more about Larry’s Latin-storytelling connection as he has agreed to participate in a Q&A soon.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Earlier this year, Ning, the site that allowed anyone to create a social network at no cost, announced that it was ending its free service. Administrators (known as Network Creators) of roughly 300,000 Ning networks were faced with either paying for their networks or moving them to different platforms. (See details here.)

I belong to several Ning groups and have just begun to receive notices from administrators announcing their plans to deal with this transition.

John Caddell, Network Creator of The Mistake Bank, announced he was shutting the site down.

Shawn Callahan, Network Creator of Worldwide Story Work, asked members to contribute to the cost of the network. I have not yet learned if member response has reached the levels Shawn hopes for. UPDATE: Shawn writes: “… we had a very good response from members donating more than enough money to keep the site going. We have 500+ members, so it only needs a small percentage to help out to keep the whole thing going. Very similar to the amount of conversation you get in a community of practice. It would be interesting to see if the people who donate are also the people who speak.”

Kevin Cordi of The Storybox Project, told members he was considering either seeking grant funding or would find another platform for the network.

It’s unfortunate that Ning’s business model (primarily supported by Google ads) eventually put the company in such straits that these kinds of choices have become necessary. I always felt Ning was an excellent resource for those seeking to start their own online networks.

I hope we don’t lose more storytelling networks as a result of the transition.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Not that I get a huge number of comments anyway, but just wanted to let regular readers know this blog underwent a huge spam attack on Aug. 22, so I disabled the comment function.

Trying to get it back but having difficulty. If you are champing at the bit to comment, thanks for your patience.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I have to admit, at this time of heated debate over religious freedom, that my knowledge of Islam is virtually nonexistent. Although I unconditionally support religious freedom, I admit to feeling slightly uneasy about Muslims.

Knowledge is, of course, the way to eradicate uneasiness and fear.

In a highly thoughtful essay, The Power of Storytelling: Creating a New Future for American Muslims, Wajahat Ali talks about the exalted position of storytelling and storytellers in early Muslim culture. Throughout history, of course, stories have “inform[ed] and influence[d] a cultural citizenry of its values and identity.”

But in the US today, stories of Islam and Muslims have devolved into “daily stories of vile stereotyping, fear-mongering, and hysteria,” prompting Ali to predict, “If these stories persist with such simplistic, one-dimensional caricatures and formulaic narratives, then the predictable third act can only end in tragedy.”

The answer, Ali suggests, is “finally telling our own stories in our own voices and using art and storytelling as a means of healing and education.”

The second half of Ali’s essay offers a number of resources in which Muslims are telling their stories. Writes Ali:

These stories will ultimately influence the greater American narrative reminding fellow citizens that no group is a cultural monolith worthy of being painted with only black and white colors, and that even Islam is capable of benefitting America with its unique spiritual and cultural gifts.

I, for one, would like to make an effort to learn more about Islam through its stories and those of its followers.

Ali’s piece is superb. I recommend it.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I have heard the term “net neutrality” for years, but I can’t say I really paid attention to it or even understood it.

But a guest posting by John S. Johnson on the site Hope for Film not only explained the term but offered up storytelling — and a free, downloadable communications guide — as a way to preserve it.

First, what it is and why it’s threatened:

… this principle of net neutrality that allows all sites, services and applications on the Internet to have equal access to consumers, and vice versa, is being fundamentally threatened. Today the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is looking to revise rules that have kept Internet Service Providers (ISPs) at bay for decades. These companies, like AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner, and Verizon, would love to become the gatekeepers of the Internet, reserving preferential bandwidth for those sites and services that make them the most money.

Johnson goes on to note that “service fees [could] force all but the super-rich from accessing and producing online content.” The answer, Johnson says, is to tell “the compelling story of how the loss of an open Internet will affect our daily lives” and “harness the power of entertainment and mass media to tell stories about key social issues, such as the fight for net neutrality, that will resonate with a broad audience and promote action.”

To that end, Johnson’s organization offers FTW! Net Neutrality For The Win: How Entertainment and the Science of Influence Can Save Your Internet, which “explains how we can use the untapped potential of narrative to increase support for net neutrality. Telling stories about how vital the open Internet is to our livelihoods is the key to getting people to take notice and take action.” You can download the free guide here.

Although the guide is very specific to the issue of net neutrality, its techniques can be adapted for other causes. In fact the technique, which Johnson’s research group the Harmony Institute calls “Entertainment-Education,” is explained in generic terms in the back of the guide, with examples of how it has been used for other issues.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Tonight I am making my theatrical “comeback,” after not having acted on the stage in some 35 years.

I enjoyed acting as a teenager and thought I was kind of good at it. I always felt I might like to try it again someday. I auditioned for a production of Woodland Theater Productions here in Kettle Falls, WA, in part because I wanted to get involved in the community. Despite extreme shyness, I wanted to cultivate some social life because I feel as though when my husband and I have only each other to interact with, we have the potential to get on each other’s nerves.

I was cast in a small role in one of three one-act plays comprising “Readers Theater,” which is more or less synonymous with a staged reading. Readers Theater usually entails “no memorizing, no props, no costumes, no sets.” In our production, we are using minimalist sets.

I didn’t really think of the production as having that much to do with storytelling until I got an e-mail promoting the plays to the public. It read:

Like storytelling, reader’s theater can create images by suggestion that could never be realistically portrayed on stage. Space and time can be shrunk or stretched, fantastic worlds can be created, and marvelous journeys can be enacted. Reader’s theater frees the performers and the audience from the physical limitations of conventional theater, letting the imagination soar! [These words apparently come from the site above that defines Readers Theater.]

I’m telling myself to “break a leg,” not only for my comeback but for participating in a storytelling activity.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Kate Bolick writes for The Altantic about a woman she knew peripherally at a former workplace. Bolick didn’t know the woman well — they worked in different departments — and both of them eventually left the company.

The woman later friended Bolick on Facebook, and in fact dominated Bolick’s news feed with tales and photos of her active and exciting social life. Next, the women, whom Bolick calls “S” in the article, embarked on a long-distance relationship with a man in London, and Bolick followed the narrative of their romance and eventual engagement. At about this point, Bolick writes …

… A year had passed since S had friended me. We never exchanged messages, or commented on one another’s postings, or saw each other in person (save for one early, awkward encounter in a furniture store, during which it took me a moment to place who she was). Yet I thought about her often, even when I wasn’t on Facebook, as I would any close friend in a similar joyful circumstance. More, in fact: her news thrummed inside my chest as if it were my own. I wondered where the wedding might take place, what she would wear.

Then, Bolick was in a house-sitting/pet-sitting situation with very limited Internet access. During a moment of access, in a torrent of e-mails, Bolick found one from a former colleague who announced that S had died. Bolick writes:

A loud sob broke out of me, like a bark. It was a frightening sound in that too-quiet house. I stood up, heart racing, and paced the rooms, switching on any lamp I could find. But the rooms weren’t familiar to me, and their features — shelves sagging with books I’d never read; ropes of garlic garlanding a cupboard; decades of dirt caking the floor seams — only enlarged my sense of unreality. Even the smudged windows framed a night so black that I could see nothing there but my own pale face. How do you cry for someone you hardly know?

Now here’s the kicker with which Bolick ends her article:
And for what was I crying? S or her story?

Wow. Nowhere have I seen better evidence that social media is storytelling media. Given that Bolick had met S, it’s possible Bolick was crying for the person rather than the story. Most likely, she cried for both.

But I immediately thought about all my friends on Facebook whom I’ve never met. (Out of curiosity, I calculated that 31 percent of my Facebook friends are people I’ve never met.) Two in particularly stand out as women I would most emphatically grieve for if they passed on. I can imagine feeling sad if any of my never-met virtual friends died, but I believe I would have the kind of emotional breakdown Bolick did about these two specifically. Why these two? Because I know their stories. I have gotten to know them, followed their lives, rejoiced at their triumphs, tut-tutted at the things that annoy them, and empathized with their difficulties.

Stories create powerful emotional connections.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

About a month ago, Facebook launched Facebook Stories to mark the addition of Facebook’s 500 millionth user.

Now Twitter is launching Twitter Tales, which the microblogging site describes as “a growing set of articles that highlights creative individuals and businesses from all corners of the world that help make Twitter awesome,” adding that Twitter expects that “the examples of great Twitter use will also likely inspire others to use the service in innovative and interesting ways.”

When I learned of Twitter Tales, I groaned, thinking these stories would be limited to 140 characters. But Twitter and Facebook seem to be playing a role reversal in their launches of stories and tales. Where Facebook Stories are limited to 420 characters, Twitter Tales are detailed narratives several paragraphs in length. Where Facebook Stories are stark text blocks, Twitter Tales are presented in a graphically attractive layout with sidebars and images.

For the next several weeks, Twitter plans to offer a new story to the Twitter Tales homepage that users can access by clicking on the Twitter Tales icon on the sidebar of the Twitter Blog.

The first three entries focus on:

• Life: @natashabadhwar is a mother/filmmaker/photographer/writer from New Delhi who sees Twitter as a form of self therapy
• Community: @caltrain is a crowd-sourced Twitter account where people can help others avoid pitfalls on their daily commute
• Humor: @thebloggess provides a witty and honest behind the scenes look into her blog writing

I continue to find it significant that these social-media giants are deploying stories to engage users.

Update (Aug. 20, 2010): Didn’t realize that Google also has stories.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Recently, storyteller Eric James Wolf turned the tables on me. I’ve conducted more than 57 Q&As with story practitioners — and now Eric has done a Q&A with me. I thought it would be worthwhile to excerpt some of it here because it explains some of my philosophies and approaches with this blog.

In this entry, Eric asked me how I define “storytelling” and why I’m interested in it:

I am among the storytelling fans who do not like to be boxed in by a specific definition of “story” or “storytelling.” I’ve found in the more than 57 interviews I’ve conducted with storytelling practitioners that most of them, perhaps surprisingly, prefer not to define “storytelling.” (However, a few feel a strict definition is vitally important.) Of the definitions offered by the practitioners who prefer to define story/storytelling, I’ve liked some more than others. One of my favorites is: “Story is context.”

I think I have been interested in storytelling for most of my life, but I didn’t really recognize the passion until I began my PhD program. I was taking an organizational-behavior course that focused on postmodernism. While researching the concept of postmodernism, I discovered an entire academic (and applied) discipline I had never heard of: organizational storytelling. This field instantly resonated with me, causing me to realize how much I had always loved storytelling, going back to eating up the anecdotes in Reader’s Digest as a child. I was so intrigued by organizational storytelling that I made it the centerpiece of my doctoral dissertation, which combined my professional background in career management and job search with storytelling.

While in my PhD program, I started [this] blog as part of my coursework. As I completed my doctoral program, my storytelling interests began to expand. Organizational storytelling was too narrow to encompass my interests, so I broadened the blog’s scope — and my own passions — to the field of “applied storytelling,” a term I first heard from Michael Margolis.

My work on the blog was sporadic for its first three years; I would go long stretches without blogging. But in February of 2008, I made a commitment to blog 7 days a week. I have mostly lived up to that commitment, although I have skipped some days during my recent major, cross-country move.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I wrote recently about the site scholar David Boje has set up, StoryOrgs, where folks can ask questions about the organizational storytelling concepts he researches and writes about.

Another of the vast resources Boje offers online popped onto my radar recently and is worth sharing: David Boje’s Annotated Bibliography on Storytelling and Consulting.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Welcome to Perrier Mansion, a swanky and retro venue where you can follow American burlesque artist, model, and actress Dita Von Teese into the edifice and play slightly naughty games with her (as you might guess from Dita’s photo at right).

This decidedly R-rated Web story/game has been tweeted as the best Web production of this year. The production values are spectacular.

To enter the mansion, the user must enter his or her birthdate — presumably an attempt to keep younger voyeurs out. Dita performs a mild striptease as she walks into the mansion. (There’s no actual nudity, just a bit of exposure and lots of sensuality.) In a sort of choose-your-own-adventure (a.k.a, choose your own story) style, the user gets to a point of selecting between two rooms — The Dark Room and Roll the Dice. The Dark Room is quite remarkable; a camera graphic is superimposed on the screen, and the user sees the resulting still upon clicking this virtual camera. In Roll the Dice, the user clicks to — you guessed it — roll the dice, which tell Dita to do naughty little things like lick her lips. In the final activity, the user is instructed not to click on (“touch”) Dita. My hand was nowhere near my mouse, but a cursor on the screen clicked on Dita, who threw Perrier on me. Ultimately, I was unceremoniously asked to leave the Perrier Mansion for clicking on her. I have to wonder if some users get to stay, and if so, how.

The production is gorgeous, sumptuous, and engaging. But … target audience? I looked at some articles and blog entries about the piece and found that many people were bewildered by it. One anonymous commenter said “upscale, classy and sober image. Should appeal to a broad 20s and up male target audience.” I asked my PhD-in-marketing husband his thoughts. We thought the gamer aspect might be at odds with the retro look of the piece in terms of the age group Perrier is targeting. Perhaps the retro look is meant to align with the fact that Dita is a latter-day burlesque star.

I was surprised not to find more commentary in the blogosphere about this provocative production. You can read more about Perrier Mansion here, here, and here (for a compilation of links about the piece).

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Came across a couple of additional postings that relate to the upcoming Social Story: How To Tell Your Story Through Social Media Conference (Aug. 24 in Denver).

Anthony Townsend is annoyed that “There aren’t any stories” on venues like Twitter and Facebook. “Some conversations become really good stories,” he writes, “but unless you follow them in real-time you’re S.O.L. They dissipate and hang there in the cloud like a cool blue mist of vaporized bank notes.” Further:

… since there’s no way to link updates or layer metadata to create a narrative structure, you have to manually sort through timelines and excavate that structure like a cyberspatial Sherlock Holmes.

I know many who would disagree that no stories exist on social-media venues, but most would probably agree that social-media stories are fragmented and, as Townsend points out, useless unless followed in real time. Folks would also probably agree that the perfect social-media venue for supporting storytelling has yet to emerge.

When it does, Townsend suggests, it will become the Next Big Thing:

My forecast is — social networks and the real-time web are either a) going to morph into storytelling media that provide tools to construct narrative on top of the update stream, or b) are going to stop growing as people seek out a different set of tools that are better for communication and storytelling than social networks, which do a mediocre job at both.

(Part 2 of Townsend’s post discusses some venues that are moving in predicted directions — gaming and location-based apps.)

While we’re waiting for the perfect social-media storytelling mashup, Ian McGonnigal has offered a list of tips to apply to social-media storytelling He wrote a few months ago about “how critical storytelling is to successful brand engagement on the social web as well as at face-to-face events.” You can read more details of each tip in his posting:

1. Have a purpose.
2. Clearly articulate the theme.
3. Keep it simple.
4. Ensure your story has a structure and a well-defined plot.
5. Use the right tools to tell your story.
6. Engage your audience.
7. Choose the right protagonist.
8. Defeat the antagonist.
9. Communicate like a human being.
10. Be Authentic.

As I’m running this storied-brand-in-social-media series in conjunction with the upcoming Social Story conference, here’s the second in a series of videos about the conference from Sean Buvala. You can see the first in the series here:

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Not all TEDTalks contain storytelling, but terrific stories are at the heart of most of these superb presentations. In fact, TED generally frames the presentations as stories.

For the uninitiated, TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader, as you can see here. Check out this article Fast Company has just published about TED

TED is doing a cool thing during its annual two-week vacation — posting playlists from the TEDTalks archive. Each playlist has a theme; yesterday’s, for example, was fan favorites. Others have included unconventional art, living online, risk and reward, playthings, body art, childish thinking, living breathing architecture, and life stories.

You can see all the playlists here.

Another cool TED goodie: You can download a spreadsheet of 700+ TEDTalks. The spreadsheet gives the URL for each talk, its title, name of presenter, a summary of the content, length of presentation (most are 18-20 minutes), and date it was published on TED.

And one more collection of TED Talks: The blog AmazingWomenRock shared a list of 7 Inspirational Storytellers [all women] Who Have Captivated Audiences Worldwide.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I’ve written more than once about Bernadette Martin’s book, Storytelling about Your Brand Online & Offline: A Compelling Guide to Discovering Your Story. The book was “forthcoming” in those posts (and also had a slightly different title), but now it’s here, published in both hard-copy and ebook formats, and I’m mentioning it in conjunction with the Social Story Conference coming up later this month.

Much has been written about personal branding in recent years, but Bernadette’s book adds some nuances I haven’t seen before. For one, it’s the first branding book I know of to overtly connect personal branding with storytelling. (Well, my own book, Tell Me About Yourself, does that, but just in one chapter whereas the theme is pervasive in Bernadette’s book). The book is also the first I know of to explicitly break down offline and online personal-brand storytelling. Product brand storytelling; corporate, NGO, and non-profit storytelling; and corporate leadership storytelling also get a meaty mention along with personal brand storytelling.

I have mixed feelings about Bernadette’s use of Reach Personal Brand Process. Founded by William Arruda, who wrote the forward to this book, the Reach process was one of the first to guide folks in discovering their personal brand. Well-respected and widely used, the process is even attached to a certification that enables practitioners to become Reach Personal Brand Strategists. Given that many professionals have advanced their own ideas for processes to develop one’s personal brand, Bernadette was wise, I think, not to reinvent the wheel; however, the Reach process doesn’t work well for me personally.

I’m always on the lookout for story prompts, especially those that help an individual get at his or her personal story, so I love Bernadette’s 35 Storytelling Inspiring Questions and wish there were even more. Emotional intelligence (EQ) stories, personal social responsibility (PSR) stories, and story-building around assessment results are novel and fascinating inclusions.

Bernadette offers a highly useful VISIBILITY BRANDING STORYTELLING TOOL (VBST) that helps users select 5-7 key stories, develop these in more detail and structure them, choosing the ones that will resonate most with the user’s target (often an employer). She recommends the well-known Situation—>Action—>Result (SAR), Problem—>Action—>Result (PAR), Challenge—>Action—>Result (CAR) formulas — but adds Key Attributes and Testimonials to them.

The book’s online chapter offers elements I haven’t seen in personal-banding or storytelling works: Storytelling on Google, Video Storytelling, and Storytelling in 3D Virtual Worlds and provides samples of storied online portfolios.

The offline chapter echoes the job-interview and networking themes of Tell Me About Yourself, while adding a helpful section on icebreaker stories. That chapter also introduced me to a new term, “verbal graffiti,” “the term used for fillers, non-words, modifiers, condescenders, verbal tics … basically anything that can dilute the message of your storytelling” — and Bernadette tells readers how to eliminate them. (She recommends Toastmasters, an organization I plan to get involved in soon.)

The book’s chapter on branded bios is important because it provides the foundation for effective online profiles. Lots of meaty info in this chapter, which may just be the most powerful one in the book.

The book is also nicely peppered with interviews with experts.

Here’s the book’s table of contents:

Part I The Power of Storytelling
Introduction
Mind Map
Neuro Research and Storytelling
Storytelling about the “Brand Called You”
Product Brand Storytelling
Corporate, NGO and Non-Profit Storytelling
Corporate Leadership Storytelling
Personal Brand Storytelling
The Reach Personal Brand Process
A Personal Story

Part II The “Art” of Storytelling and Extracting the Stories
The “Art” of Storytelling
Storytelling Inspiring Questions
Emotional Intelligence (EQ) Stories
Leadership Storytelling
Personal Social Responsibility (PSR) Stories
Story Building around Assessment Results
The 360°Reach Assessment
References
The Visibility Branding Storytelling Tool (VBST)

Part III 2.0 Storytelling — Communicating Your Story Online
Storytelling 2.0 or Digital Storytelling
Storytelling on Google
Video Storytelling
Storytelling in 3D Virtual Worlds
Case Stories: Online Portfolio Examples

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Back in the spring, M. Amedeo Tumolillo, a.k.a., Flying Flashlight, published lists of storytelling tips by three well-known storytellers, the late novelist Kurt Vonnegut, playwright David Mamet, and screenwriter/screenwriting teacher Robert McKee.

While the authors of these tips work(ed) primarily in the fiction realm, these tips work equally well for nonfiction story applications.

Add to those this juicy nugget from Jenny Munn (which reminds me a lot of Annette’s Simmons’s advice for sensory details in storytelling):

The secret is specificity. Give out a few meaty, juicy, specific details and people will remember what you have to say. Here’s an example I got from watching Oprah the other day:

Oprah’s show was on the documentary Food, Inc. and Oprah was spreading the message of knowing where your food comes from. She also interviewed Alicia Silverstone (the Clueless star) who is an outspoken vegan. Alicia was telling the audience what happened to her when she started her vegan lifestyle. She didn’t just say, “I felt better” or “my appearance improved.” Alicia talked about how her brittle nails got stronger and the white marks on them disappeared; how her eyes got brighter and the white parts whiter; how her skin got firmer and her complexion drastically cleared up; how easily she um, had bowel movements. These details gave her credibility and helped the audience engage and understand.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Recently, storyteller Eric James Wolf turned the tables on me. I’ve conducted more than 57 Q&As with story practitioners — and now Eric has done a Q&A with me. I thought it would be worthwhile to excerpt some of it here because it explains some of my philosophies and approaches with this blog.

In this entry, Eric asked me about the characteristics I look for in a Q&A interviewee:

When I first began sending out invitations for the Q&A series in the summer of 2008, I focused on applied-storytelling practitioners that I knew, or knew of, and admired. I was familiar with them through their books (for example, those of Terrence Gargiuolo and Annette Simmons), through their presentations at conferences (for example, Madelyn Blair, Michael Margolis, and Svend-Erik Engh), and through encountering them on the Web (for example, Shawn Callahan and Stephanie West Allen). Once I had invited all the best-known story luminaries — and most of them accepted the invitation and participated — I didn’t really have to search hard for new interviewees. I encountered them through my ongoing research for blog material. I’m excited that for the most recent series of Q&As, I’ve received nominations and self-nominations of people who want to participate or want to recommend a participant. I had always hoped that would happen, and I’m thrilled that is has.

In the interview series, I have tended not to focus on oral-performance storytellers, people involved in transmedia storytelling, storytellers in film and TV (such as screenwriters and people who teach screenwriting), people in comic-book storytelling, and folks into the storytelling of gaming. It’s not that I’m not interested in these areas. I just feel that other bloggers and writers — like Eric James Wolf — do a good job of covering those fields and their practitioners, so it’s better for me to have a narrower focus. So many forms and uses for storytelling exist, and I can do a better job if I don’t try to cover all of them.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I always especially appreciate content about storytelling related to employment. While my personal crusade is about storytelling in the job search, I’m also interested in the flip side — how employers use stories to entice, retain, and engage employees. Employee engagement is a major hot-button topic in HR, and some companies are using stories to excellent effect in this quest. One of them is Juniper Networks, reports Martha Finney, who interviewed Juniper’s Stacey Clark Ohara about the organization’s use of storytelling to transmit values. Noting that top-down values programs for employee engagement don’t work, Finney paraphrases Ohara: “It’s the experience of the employees, and the stories they tell about their experiences, that really keep the culture on track, she notes. … ‘we chose storytelling as the best way to inspire, inform and align the organization.’”

For executive stories in particular, Juniper chose video as the storytelling medium. Through Finney, Ohara offered tips to other companies that seek to instill values and engage employees through storytelling:

• Get executives on board. When they are willing to share their experiences through storytelling, others will be more likely to take the risk as well.
• Find the natural storytellers among your employees and recruit them first.
• Give your people time to prepare and rehearse their stories — but not so much that over-rehearsal causes the stories to sound wooden and inauthentic.
• Keep the stories short. [No indication here how short Ohara means, although the next bullet provides a clue.
• Keep the videos shorter. Just a few minutes is all that’s needed to get the main message across.
• Be clear about your purpose. Naturally, you won’t know if you’re successful unless you know what results you’re after. When you’re asking employees to open up and speak from their hearts, they’ll also want to know what the hoped-for outcome will be.
• Start small and build from there. If you’re just initiating this venture in a culture where stories haven’t been typically told, make the initial scope and objectives set as modest as you can. This will keep the process from becoming overwhelmed by overblown expectations.

Qualcomm provides its own spin on “communicate and reinforce the company’s culture and values, disseminate information, identify trends, share attitudes and behaviors, and on-board new employees,” as Tamar Elkeles reports.

Qualcomm’s program, begun five years ago, is called 52 Weeks. Elkeles describes the program: T

old from the employee perspective, stories provided insights about the company, business decisions, technology milestones, leaders, work teams, employees and products. To make them more personal, stories typically included pictures of the person the story is about or of teams and products referenced.

The 52 Weeks program initially started as a way to communicate company culture and values to new employees. All new hires at Qualcomm were automatically registered on their first day and, for the next year, received a weekly e-mail with a new story submitted by employees or initiated by the employee communications team, which reports to the Qualcomm Learning Center. Since its inception, the 52 Weeks program has expanded and evolved. What began with just an e-mail grew into a 52 Weeks Web site. In addition to new hires, thousands of Qualcomm employees have registered to receive the weekly e-mails and links to the site.

Each story is reviewed before posting by the employee communications editorial committee, which decides if it meets the following criteria:

Does the story fit into one of the company’s values, such as execution or innovation?

Does it meet some other organizational goal?

Is it memorable?

If the 52 Weeks Web site still exists, I can’t find it (perhaps it’s on a company intranet). but you can see a number of the stories from the program in this PDF of a presentation by Elkeles.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I’ve come across (somewhat) recently four ways storytelling is being used in healthcare. Here are some perspectives on those approaches:

• Patient stories are widely available on the Internet but are not always trustworthy: In a guest post on e-patients.net, Lisa Gualtieri, PhD, notes three kinds of patient stories that can be found on the Internet:
• unedited user-generated stories in online health communities and patient blogs;
• professionally edited or “as told to” support stories;
• and promotional stories.

But, Gualtieri cautions, “Unless you know the author of a story, you never know for sure if it is true. … patients want to believe stories because they are desperate for information. Ultimately, most stories are from real people sharing authentic experiences, and the best way to weed out the others is to use common sense, be skeptical, check with a trusted medical professional …”

• Storytelling can promote health literacy:
In The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, Vivian Day discusses “the use of storytelling to present healthcare information in an easily understandable and captivating manner.” Citing the US Department of Health and Human Services’s definition of health literacy — “the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions” — Day notes that more and more health information is out there, but it’s not always easy for the average person to interpret it. Storytelling provides an avenue through which an individual can “takes a new event, applies its meaning to past experiences, and visualizes future possibilities.” It “allows hearers to reflect on the story told and actively apply it to their life situation,” Day writes. The author lists several ways of using storytelling toward health literacy, such as having patients create books about their specific health problem, encouraging patients to tell stories in support groups, and sharing stories about loved ones who’ve learned that someone they care about is terminally ill. Day writes:

Hearing the stories of others, reflecting on these stories, and determining how these stories can be applicable to one’s life may be more beneficial than simply reading written information or watching an educational video.

• Narratives from physicians’ clinical experience transmit socially embedded knowledge, and webinars are an effective venue for those narratives: Katherine D. Ellington created American Medical Student Association (AMSA) National Book Discussion Webinars. A diverse group of physicians have discussed their books, writing pursuits, work experiences, and lives. The AMSA National Book Discussion Webinars offer a unique online experience between physician-authors and medical students to encourage reading beyond the medical school curriculum, both for professional development and for personal enrichment.” A significant part of the content conveyed in these webinars can be characterized using the words of one of the commenters to Ellington’s blog entry, citing a book called Expertise in Nursing Practice: “[N]arratives from clinical experience transmit socially embedded knowledge,” to which Ellington responded by also quoting the cited chapter: “[T]he function of narrative in a practice in revealing and creating social memory, skilled ethical comportment and the role of first-person narrative in community and culture building.”
• Patient records are more than just that; they are the patient’s story. Regina Holliday, a DC-based patient-rights arts advocate, writes, speaks, and creates art depicting her family’s nightmare journey through the medical system during her late husband’s cancer care. Her large mural titled “73 cents” became part of the national healthcare debate and was covered by the media. Holliday consistently uses story to illustrate the need for clarity and transparency in medical records. She writes poignantly about story here An excerpt, in which she likens a patient’s medical record to his or her story (emphasis added):

  I now sit in meetings for hours and watch power point lectures about electronic medical records. I listen to people dissect HIPPA regulations and incentive time tables. I hear arguments comparing ICD-9 code to ICD-10. And sadly, I hear many people tell me that patients should never see the entire medical record. … For too long the medical record has been considered a billing document or a legal document: property of the physician or institution, instead of what it is, the story of the patient.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Recently, storyteller Eric James Wolf turned the tables on me. I’ve conducted more than 57 Q&As with story practitioners — and now Eric has done a Q&A with me. I thought it would be worthwhile to excerpt some of it here because it explains some of my philosophies and approaches with this blog.

In this entry, Eric had asked me about the relationship between storytelling and postmodernism.

I view the current storytelling movement as an outgrowth of postmodernism. Postmodernism is characterized by critique, irony/ionic humor, mockery, parody, playfulness, disorientation, things that are symbolically rich and meaningful, multiple perspectives, conflict, the discontinuity of traditions, contradiction, ambiguity, paradox, metaphors, a strong aesthetic dimension, diversity and multiplicity, fragmentation, as well as questioning pre-established rules, values, expectations, right vs. wrong, good vs. bad, and underlying faith in reason and science.

In part, story becomes a way to make sense out of and find meaning in fragmented postmodern life.

Postmodernism means seeing organizations as texts, narratives, discourse, stories. David Boje, arguably the scholar who has most significantly connected storytelling with postmodernism, writes that “Stories are not indicators [of an organization], they ARE the organization.”

Boje writes:

The postmodern turn has several key method assumptions. First, humans as storytelling animals act toward their organization and environments based upon their storied interpretations of self, other, organization, and environment. Second, story making is a collective process of social interaction in which story meanings change over time. Third, story meaning changes with the context of the telling as storytellers select, transform, and reform the meanings of stories in light of the context of the telling. Fourth, in [storytelling organization] theory the individual is part of the collective enterprise of constructing and transforming stories told to the world and stories of the environment being constructed. This is different from a structural-functionalist model of organizations in which story functions as measures of variables of an abstract structure. Fifth, the inquirer is a story-reader who upon entering the story-making world changes the story-making processes by being there at all.

Postmodernism also means fusing modern techniques with traditional concerns. We can never get away from traditional oral narrative culture because we think in story; that’s how our brains are wired. But a postmodern view says that story does not come from an authority on high but belongs to everyone. It’s collective and distributed, and many people and perspectives participate in constructing stories (think about social media and blogs). Postmodernism also means rejecting the idea of an objective “reality;” there is only the reality we construct with others through discourse — by telling our stories.

Probably my best attempt at connecting postmodern storytelling with traditional oral narrative culture is in an essay I wrote as part of my PhD program.

Having said all that, I am less interested in postmodernism than I used to be. Postmodern theory provided my entry point into storytelling, and [this] blog still carries the tagline “Kathy Hansen’s Blog to explore traditional and postmodern forms/uses of storytelling,” but it’s not a big part of my current thinking.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I’ve been fascinated for awhile about whether we construct our stories (identities, personas) differently online than we do offline.

Back in the spring at the conference Digital Storytelling ‘10, Molly Flatt of the agency 1000Heads looked at “look at how — and if — social media is changing the way we tell our own stories, brands tell their stories, and how the two collide.”

Here are some highlights of her exploration:

I think social media encourages a architectural, multi-media way of storytelling similar to graphic novelists. I find this most powerful when fewer words are used (we’re all fighting for space and attention in the online world, after all), but they are deepened and complexified by their link-rich context.

I’m not a comics geek as Flatt says she is, so I’m not sure I agree with the graphic-novel analogy. I resist the “fewer words” prescription simply because I tend to be verbose, but I agree that in the online world, the fewer words we use, the more likely we will be to get read. I find it really fun to figure out how to edit down to a certain word limit — a 100-word bio, for example, such as the one I have here. Twitter provides the ultimate 140-character discipline. (Here, Flatt went on to talk about augmented reality, but I won’t get into that because I have not educated myself about augmented reality.)

In social media, we’re all the heroes of our own stories, and we’re uploading fragments of our stories all the time.

This fragmentary quality challenges the sensibilities of storytelling purists. Because these fragments generally lack beginnings, middles, and ends, we do not often see them as stories. But taken in the aggregate, do they successfully tell our stories? They certainly become building blocks in constructing our identities.

We constantly and shamelessly use brands to express our identity online — the general has become the specific.

I hadn’t thought before about this aspect, but it’s certainly true in my case. My fierce allegiance to, for example, Apple products, is surely part of my story, and I’m certain I could come up with lots of other brands that I regularly integrate into my online story.

When we don’t have face-to-face instincts to rely on when building trust, only digital words and images, what do we rely on to capture our attention or empathy? Stories.

Stories build trust even when we are face to face, so their power when we aren’t is a given.

Flatt, who uses Isobella Jade as an example of an online storyteller/identity constructor who has integrated all the above themes into her online story, has nicely characterized some aspects of our online stories.

Meanwhile, I learned a new term — IRL (in real life) — in a post by Alexandra Samuel entitled 10 Reasons to Stop Apologizing for Your Online Life. Samuels essentially asserts there is no difference between our online and offline lives:

If we still refer to the offline world as “real life,” it’s only a sign of deep denial — or unwarranted shame — about what reality looks like in the 21st century. The Internet’s impact on our daily lives, experiences and relationships is real. Our world is deeply affected by networks. From the moment you wake up to news that was gathered online to the minute you fall asleep listening to a podcast, the Internet shapes how you experience the world around you.

In giving her 10 reasons to stop apologizing, Samuels hits on several that relate directly to our need to tell stories [my comments in brackets]:

It’s time to start living in 21st century reality: a reality that is both on- and offline.

Acknowledge online life as real, and the Internet’s transformative potential opens up.

When you commit to being your real self online, you discover parts of yourself you never dared to share offline. [Telling your story is one way to be your real self.]

When you take the idea of online presence literally, you can experience your online disembodiment as a journey into your mind rather than out of your body.[Online presence and online story = synonymous?]

When you focus on creating real meaning with your time online, your online footprint makes a deeper impression.[Stories are the best way to create meaning.]

When you spend your online time on what really matters to you, you experience your time online as an authentic reflection of your values. [Stories are an excellent medium for authentically reflecting values.]

I am interested in conducting research — yes, probably of the academic ilk — on more differences in the ways we use stories to construct our online identities versus our offline identities. I haven’t seen much, if any, scholarship on this topic. If you’re aware of research on this theme, I’d love to hear about it.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Gregg Morris yesterday turned me on to what he thinks might be the first job posting ever to use “story” in the way this posting does. It is certainly the first one I’ve seen that does so. The posting is for the position of Social Media Specialist.

Here are some snippets showing how Cancer Treatment Centers of America seeks someone who can tell its story, as well as someone to begin his or her story with the organization:

Stories of Life. Stories of Hope.

Imagine a place where your talent can make a meaningful difference in peoples’ lives. Where a sense of mission and a promise to patients marks a culture of people who look forward to the challenge of each day … where you can help create stories of life, stories of hope, and amazing stories of triumph — big and small — that unite everyone around a worthy goal. That place is real. It’s why we are here.

Cancer Treatment Centers of America® (CTCA) is one of the fastest-growing networks of cancer hospitals in the country. We offer the most sophisticated forms of oncology treatment, combined with complimentary therapies that support the entire person. It’s a place where your contributions can create new stories that embody our exceptional standard of care known as the Mother Standard® model of care — meaning that all staff provides the same level of care to each patient that we would want for our own loved ones. And for those of you who can see how rich and fulfilling this mission-driven, patient-centric, cutting-edge work experience can be, we hope your story starts here.

Start your story at our corporate offices in Schaumburg, IL as a: Social Media Specialist … If you’re interested in starting your own story with us see our website at http://www.cancercenter.jobs/ for a full job description and to apply.

The job posting is interesting for several reasons. It recognizes the growing recognition of the connection between social media and storytelling — that social media at its best is essentially a storytelling media. The employer clearly recognizes stories as the primary way to convey its message (of life and hope). And the employer envisions a career as a story, as I discussed here.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

In an exuberant blog entry called The Chemistry of Storytelling, Marguerite Grant has created an inspiring list that answers the question, “Why story?”

We don’t just buy a product, we buy the story behind it.

We don’t just join a company, we join because of its story.

We don’t just join a cause, we join the story behind it.

We don’t just vote for a presidential candidate, we buy into his story of what the future holds.

We don’t just follow the leader, we buy in to the story behind her vision.

We don’t learn best by hearing a theory or concept, we learn best by hearing stories that demonstrate the concept.

We don’t just see a movie or read a novel, we lose ourselves in a good story.

Based on the fact that we buy stories, it’s not the best product that will sell; it’s the product with the best story behind it. It’s not the best employer that attracts the most candidates; it’s the one who knows how to tell a story through its employment brand.

How have you’ve applied good storytelling in your life?

I especially like the fact that Grant is blogging on the blog of Talent Culture, a careers-related community that offers “the latest perspectives of what it means to find meaningful careers and use them to grow.”

Her statement, “It’s not the best employer that attracts the most candidates; it’s the one who knows how to tell a story through its employment brand,” can be turned around for job-seekers: It’s not the best candidate that gets the job; it’s the one who knows how to tell a story through his or her personal/career brand brand.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Though I am unlikely to be able to attend, my friend Trey Pennington is putting on a mighty tempting conference later this month. It’s called Social Story: How To Tell Your Story Through Social Media, and another friend, Sean Buvala, will present there. While I suspect that the conference will be oriented toward businesses and solopreneurs, I feel like most of the principles that apply to these groups also apply to individuals and job-seekers who want to tell stories in social media about their personal brands.

For example, Trey recently posted an entry on his blog entitled TIP: Use Facebook to tell your “who we are” story by giving fans behind-the-scenes access in which he wrote:

Wondering how to put Facebook to work building connections with prospects and customers? You can use unused photos from your catalog photo shoot to give catalog recipients behind-the-scenes access. When you do, you use the power of social media to help customers experience your “who we are” story for themselves. You make it possible for them to personalize your story and make it their own. Encourage comments. More importantly, ACKNOWLEDGE comments.

So how might we adapt this tip to an individual/job-seeker so that you “use the power of social media to help [employers] experience your “who [I am]” story for themselves? Instead of unused catalog photos, the individual could post photos of being engaged in a workplace project. And the individual can (and should) certainly encourage and acknowledge comments.

A while back, Georgina Laidlaw talked about some of these same principles of storied personal branding in a series highlighting characterization, plot, and narrative.

In the characterization piece, Laidlaw writes:

We all know that there’s a plethora of options for communicating your character though personal branding, including:

the channels you use

the language you use

your profile data

the photos you publish of yourself and others

your interests, pastimes, and the topics you focus on, including links and other content you promote

your frequency and depth of public engagement with others

the places you like to visit or meet others

The other side to the characterization coin is to work out which pieces of information most clearly define the key aspects of your character. Few of us have time to transmit every piece of the minutiae of our days or nights, so we need to choose what we’ll communicate. How do you know what will best illustrate your character to your contacts?

The answer for Laidlaw, she says, is to communicate things you’re passionate about.

Here’s an excerpt from the plot piece:

In a personal branding story, plot is news and events. If each day is an adventure in the story of your life, then each event has the potential to form part of the plot.

Storytellers leave certain aspects out of plot (no one uses the bathroom in a movie, for example, unless something crucial to the storyline happens in there). They do this because some events are irrelevant to the story they’re telling. Those events waste time and distract the audience from the critical pieces of the story.

So for you as an individual trying to build a personal brand, your plotline is your news: what happens every day, and what it means to you. If you have multiple plotlines (reflecting different facets of your life), those events may have a range of impacts on your life. Which parts you choose to communicate, and the ways in which you communicate them, is up to you as the storyteller.

And from the narrative piece:

…[N]arrative is the way you tell stories. It’s the glue that ties your characters to the plot events in your story. As well as elements like scene setting, narrative includes description, so we’ll deal with these aspects together.

You are the key narrator in your own personal branding story, though other characters may have a part in narrating from time to time (for example, a guest blogger narrates part of your brand story while you’re on vacation, or away at a conference).

Since you’re the narrator, the way you tell your story will be driven largely by your character. The channels you choose, and how effectively you use them to narrate your story, will also depend on your character.

While I have a bit of difficulty — in practice — in distinguishing the difference between Laidlaw’s plot and narrative concepts, I find this series an excellent treatment bringing together storytelling, social media, and personal branding.

I’ll be interested to learn the extent to which the Social Story conference views these concepts the same way Laidlaw does. I hope participants produce some meaty writeups for those of us who can’t attend.

In the days leading up to Trey’s and Sean’s conference, I’ll be posting more about this topic.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I’ve long been interested in storytelling in presentations and have followed the SlideShare presentation contests (especially the Tell a Story incarnation), as well as storytelling-in-presentation gurus like the guys at ethos3, Nancy Duarte, and Joyce Hostyn.

Somewhere in the midst of my study of this subject, reader Raf Stevens brought me up short by asking what exactly constituted good storytelling in presentations. I looked extensively into possible answers to that one but never felt I was quite there.

Most recently, I wished that Lou Hoffman’s superb presentation about storytelling had more story in it.

For that, to me, has been a holy-grail kind of quest: A presentation that not only has storytelling as its centerpiece but that is actually about storytelling — one that sells the idea of applied storytelling by telling a story.

Today I learned of a presentation that might just be that holy grail. The auteur is Gavin Heaton of Servant of Chaos. The bulk of the presentation is a compelling story. The images are absolutely gorgeous. Type on the slides is minimal. Best of all, it’s a storytelling presentation about storytelling.

Bonus: The slideshow pretty much stands on its own without a presenter to elucidate it.

When I got to near the end of the slide deck, where Heaton introduces a second story — one from Mad Men — I knew exactly what story it would be: the riveting, unforgettable scene from Season 1 in which Don Draper pitches an ad campaign for Kodak’s Carousel slide projector.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Since the early days of this blog, I’ve been fascinated by the concept of the “business novel” or fable and have blogged about every one I’ve come across.

At the end of this entry, I’ve listed all the biz novels (I think) that I’ve ever featured in this space, with links to the original posting about each.

I’m also adding a new one to the roster: The Go-Giver: A Little Story About a Powerful Business Idea, by Bob Burg and John David Mann. Here’s a description:

In 2008 a “little story about a powerful business idea” took the business world by storm with its message: that shifting our focus from getting to giving is the simplest, most fulfilling and most effective path to success in business and in life.

Rapidly going from national bestseller to global phenomenon, The Go-Giver soon gained a devoted following in its original English and in more than sixteen foreign-language editions. From schools, churches and hospitals to law firms and information technology companies, individuals and groups around the world have applied the book’s Five Laws of Stratospheric Success to their organizations and businesses, relationships and personal lives.

The Go-Giver tells the story of an ambitious young man named Joe who yearns for success. Joe is a true go-getter, though sometimes he feels as if the harder and faster he works, the further away his goals seem to be. And so one day, desperate to land a key sale at the end of a bad quarter, he seeks advice from the enigmatic Pindar, a legendary consultant referred to by his many devotees simply as the Chairman.

Excerpt from the book:

Pindar smiled. “Please don’t misunderstand me. There’s nothing wrong with making money. Lots of it, in fact. It’s just not a goal that will make you successful.” Reading the bewilderment on Joe’s face, he nodded and put his hand up to signal that he would explain.

“You see,” Pindar continued, “the majority of people operate with a mindset that says to the fireplace, ‘First give me some heat, then I’ll throw on some logs.’ Or that says to the bank, ‘Give me interest on my money, then I’ll make a deposit.’ And of course, it just doesn’t work that way.” Joe frowned, trying to parse the logic of Pindar’s examples.

“You see? You can’t go in two directions at once. Trying to be successful with making money as your goal is like trying to travel a superhighway at seventy miles an hour with your eyes glued to the rearview mirror.”

This year, the authors published a follow-up book, Go-Givers Sell More. “The new book is not a parable or story,” the authors write, “that is, not exactly a sequel to The Go-Giver. (A “real” sequel to the story is also in the works, but that’s going to be a surprise for 2011.) Instead, this book is more like a Go-Giver Companion, a set of short, essay-like chapters about applying the Go-Giver principles to real-world situations, especially in the context of sales and selling. The book is also punctuated by several dozen real-life stories of people we know who live these principles.”

By the way, the authors offer downloadable and other goodies here.

Business novels and fables previously featured on A Storied Career:

• The Napkin, the Melon & the Monkey, by Barbara Burke
• EDGE! A Leadership Story, co-authored by Corey Blake
• Navigating the Growth Curve: 9 Fundamentals that Build a Profit-Driven, People-Centered, Growth-Smart Company, by James Fischer
• There’s More to Life Than the Corner Office, by Lamar Smith and Tammy Kling
• Recognizing Richard Rabbit, by Peter Weddle
• Squirrel Inc.: A Fable of Leadership Through Storytelling by Stephen Denning
• The Imperfect Board Member, by Jim Brown

Barbara Fillip of Knowledge for Development, LLC, is also fascinated with business novels and compiled a helpful list of examples. I posted an entry with her a link to her list, but her posting has a new address since I first posted in 2008.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Up until a week or so ago, I felt I was playing a massive game of catch-up following our cross-country move and completion of our new house in Washington. I purposely lined up a slew of new Q&A interviews with story practitioners to run during this period when I felt I might not have time to meet my personal commitment of 7/365 blog entries.

During some of its life, the purpose of this blog has been to curate storytelling news and bring it to the attention of fans of applied storytelling. That’s a purpose I mostly haven’t been able to fulfill during these hectic months. Fortunately, other bloggers/tweeters like Gregg Morris, Michael Margolis, and Cathryn Wellner are doing a better job with that function than I’ve been able to.

Another function I’ve tried to fulfill with this blog is to synthesize and analyze story news. To find connections among various items about storytelling. To speculate about what it all means. To look at one story application and imagine how it could be applied to a different function. We could call this process “remixing” timely story topics.

I also noticed recently that readership of this blog is down significantly over last year. Speculations:

• Natural attrition that probably happens to most blogs.
• Readers are tired of the Q&As. I was running a lot of Q&As at this time last year, though, when readership was higher.
• Readers see my entries as lame and/or rushed.
• Readers prefer to get their story news sooner — hot news as opposed to warmed-over.

I employ several techniques for keeping up with the storytelling world and have kept all these communication channels open during the time I’ve been preoccupied. I could simply skip the last five months during which I was not consistently monitoring the storytelling world. After all, in the social-media world and the blogosphere, content becomes stale incredibly quickly.

But maybe I can revisit story content from the last five months and add a new twist, a new insight, a new synthesis, a new application.

Let’s try it and see how it goes. I welcome your input and feedback.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.