Recently in Entrepreneurial Storytelling Category

I get very frustrated when Web sites either have no About Us page or have About Us pages that really reveal nothing. A classic case in point of a tell-nothing About Us page is Twitter’s. Now, I know what Twitter is, what it does. But I’d like the perspective of the folks who run it. How did it start? Where did the idea come from? What it Twitter’s story?

At the blog Buzz Canuck, Sean Moffitt writes:

“Search high and low and if you scan 100 websites, you’d be challenged to find one good story about the company or brand it supports. Even the good ones in my recent search, can hide themselves behind the trivial stuff. A good story should be there smack dab on the front page attracting you like a mosquito to the nightlight.”

The blog of Caterina, co-founder of Flickr (whose About page, by the way, is a fun bulleted list), turned me onto the story of Plum (“Plum is a free online service that lets you collect and share all of the cool, interesting, and important stuff in your digital life. We started Plum because we think that collecting and sharing on the web is really fun and useful — but much too difficult to do.”)

Curiously, the Plum story isn’t on its About Us page but is in its blog (by Hans Peter):

Plum was born because making it easier for people to capture their knowledge and share it with their communities could help make the world a better, more connected place.
For me, a personal story illustrates this. In 1999, my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and my siblings and I (at the time living in Anchorage, San Francisco, New York, and Oslo) sought information and insight. We used the web for research and email to share our findings with each other. Our research led us to become informed and armed with questions and even some suggestions as we discussed his condition and care with the doctors and our parents. I firmly believe that the information and knowledge we shared helped both extend my dad’s life and maximize the quality of his last days with us.
Two years later, a good friend emailed me. Her boyfriend’s dad had been diagnosed with the same cancer, and she remembered that we had done tons of research and wondered if I would share it with her. I pulled out my tweezers and went through my old email, but sadly was only able to recover a small amount of the information we had gathered. I would gladly have shared the collected information and resources we had pulled together with anyone who had an interest in the subject. But other than hand-crafting a personal web site to collect the links, the emails, and the additional notes we found and shared with each other, there was no simple way for me to do so. Our cumulative knowledge and information was lost.
The next time someone emails me to ask “do you still have the research you did on this topic?” I want to be able to simply point them to the collected information. One reason I jumped back into the startup world is because with Plum, such collected knowledge and information will be easy to make and keep accessible. We’re still evolving and refining the service, working to make it simpler than ever to collect and share all kinds of knowledge and information that we care about, stumble across, or need. I think this has the power to change the way we use the net, and I hope it will change the world, if even just a little bit.

The blog Geekpreneur has a nice, comprehensive piece on telling your organization’s story on your About us page, stressing that the story should stick in reader’s minds and “leave important messages in the listener’s memory.”

Finally, somewhere in all these pieces about organizations telling their stories, I came across the Squidoo lens Arrowsmith Printing: Entreprenuership in Small Town Iowa in Mid /Century, which tells the wonderful, detailed story — complete with video — of a small family business. The profile of author Margo Arrowsmith provides a glimpse at the mentality that created this fascinating lens:

I was born into a small business, I believe that small business and entrepreneurs are the backbone of America and what has made us great. They are what made us great and will save us in these unsure times, when corporations are outsources to any place where the labor is cheap.

I’ve been interested in entrepreneurial storytelling since I taught an entrepreneurial seminar using storytelling as the central theme.

If I were teaching it now, I might direct my students to a blog entry and podcast by author and marketing expert Lisa Johnson of Reach Group Consulting offering a framework for entrepreneurial stories:

  1. Start by identifying a defining story that either highlights the market need for your business or your personal abilities.

  2. Next, explain your personal connection to the business. Describe how your business allows you to use your talents, pursue your passions, and/or work with people you care about.

  3. Finally, show how your background and past experiences have brought you to where you are today. What key markers affected your decision and ability to run your own business, such as trial-and-error, mistakes, serendipity, etc.

These guidelines also translate to the job-seeker telling the story of how he or she meets the employer’s needs, how he or she uses his or her passion in his or her career, and how the job-seeker has arrived at where he or she is today.

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Also on the subject of entrepreneurial storytelling, the office of NASSCOM (a global trade body with more than 1,200 members, of which 250+ are global companies from across US, UK, EU and A-Pac) in Chanakyapuri, New Delhi, India, holds experience-sharing talks on the second Friday of every month.

The idea is to get people from emerging companies to share their best practices in the areas of technology, marketing, business strategy, entrepreneurship etc., so that others could learn from them without having to reinvent the wheel.

No need to travel to New Delhi if you live far away, however; NASSCOM archives the sessions.

Yet another posting about entrepreneurial storytelling is from a blog post in MarketingDeviant by David Kam:

Practice on telling a good story about your business (how it started, why you are doing it and the twist and turns of your business) because many legends and old stories have survived due to great storytellers. A good story about your business makes it very marketable. Pave a way of success through storytelling about your business.

About
A Storied Career

A Storied Career explores intersections/synthesis among various forms of
Applied Storytelling:
  • journaling
  • blogging
  • organizational storytelling
  • storytelling for identity construction
  • storytelling in social media
  • storytelling for job search and career advancement.
  • ... and more.
A Storied Career's scope is intended to appeal to folks fascinated by all sorts of traditional and postmodern uses of storytelling.

About
Dr. Kathy Hansen

Kathy Hansen, PhD, is a leading proponent of deploying storytelling for career advancement. She is an author and instructor, in addition to being a career guru. More... emailicon.jpeg
 

Pages

The following are sections of A Storied Career where I maintain regularly updated running lists of various items of interest to followers of storytelling:

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Links below are to Q&A interviews with story practitioners. Links will go "live" when each interview is published:

  • Molly Catron Q&A
  • Jessica Lipnack Q&A
  • Terrence Gargiulo Q&A
  • Jon Hansen Q&A
  • Svend-Erik Engh Q&A
  • Loren Niemi Q&A
  • Gabrielle Dolan Q&A
  • John Caddell Q&A
  • Shawn Callahan Q&A
  • Stephanie West Allen Q&A
  • David Vanadia Q&A
  • Tom Clifford Q&A
  • Sharon Lippincott Q&A
  • Ardath Albee Q&A
  • Sharon Benjamin Q&A
  • Carol Mon Q&A
  • Ron Donaldson Q&A

The pages below relate to learning from my PhD program focusing on a specific storytelling seminar in 2005. These are not updated but still may be of interest:

Links

Organizational Storytelling

Annette Simmons' Group Process Consulting

Molly Catron, Storyteller

Storytelling: Passport to the 21st Century

Steve Denning: The website for business and organizational storytelling

Pelerei

MakingStories.net

Anecdote

Story at Work/Golden Fleece

Center for Narrative Studies

Storytelling in Organizations

Storytelling -- It's News: Business Articles

Storytelling Organization Institute

David Boje

Corporate Storytelling

Corporate Storyteller

Storytelling Power

Storytelling, a part of EduTech's Knowledge Sharing Service

Story - Storytelling - Business - Research

International Storytelling Center

Seth Kahan

Moving Pictures

NASA's ASK (Academy Sharing Knowledge)

Organizational Democracy

Storytelling in Organizations section of ChangingMinds.org

David M. Armstrong

The Storytellers


Interdisciplinary

Storytelling, Self, Society Journal

Narrative and Learning Environments

Tim Sheppard’s Storytelling Resources for Storytellers

The Co-Intelligence Institute

sc'moi

Transformative Language Arts Network

The Story of Everything

Brevity

Nieman Narrative Digest

Narrative Psychology

Narrative Inquiry Journal

Virtual Chautauqua

Storytelling at a Distance

Beyond Usability and Design: The Narrative Web

The Elements of Digital Storytelling

Distributed Narrative

George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling

Narrative Magazine

Divine Caroline

Stories for Change

School of Storytelling, Emerson College, UK

Confessions of an Aca-Fan

Storycatcher


Storytelling and Career

A Storied Career's Blog-within-a-Blog, Tell Me About Yourself

AboutMyJob.com

CareerHero

10 Career Stories


Journaling and Personal Storytelling

Good Books about Journal and Memoir Writing

The Elder Storytelling Place

Reader's Digest Stories

OurStory

Dandelife.com

The Circle Project

The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing

ThisDayInTheLife.com

This American Life

This I Believe

The Story

Your Unique Story

StoryCorps

Smith Magazine

British Library: National Life Stories

Life Story Telling

The Remembering Site

Memory Writers Network blog

Tera's Wish

Fray

Story Circle Network

PNN (Personal News Network)

About Personal Growth Stories Section

The Experience Project

Telling Our Stories

The Moth

Story Salon

First Person Arts

Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard)

Boomer Cafe


Blogging

Into the Blogosphere

The Art of Blogging

Grassroots KM (Knowledge Management) through blogging


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