New App Integrates Storytelling with Social Media

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

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

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

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

Consider These Rules of Engagement for Career Storytelling

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

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

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

Job-Search Storytelling to Rev Up Your Network Contacts

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

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

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

As Tahmincioglu writes:

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

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

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

Jump-starting the Storied Resume: Resume Storytelling Checklist

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


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

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

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

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

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


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

So Many Barely Explored Opportunities to Tell Interesting Stories in New Ways

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

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

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

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

Five Perspectives on Storytelling in Social Media

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

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

In a piece that compares the relative storytelling success of various social-media campaigns, Dan Morrill notes:

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

Morrill asserts that failed attempts at social media — abandoned blogs, Twitter accounts, and Facebook profiles, for instance — result when the story behind these efforts fails to engage audiences. I’m sure that’s often the case. It was for a client of mine who recently put his blog on hiatus. But I would suggest that a bigger reason for abandoning social media is simply that people are busy and overwhelmed, and maintaining these venues becomes tiresome. Most social media requires at least some commitment to writing, and I’ve found that the writing obligation fills many people with enormous angst.

  1. Social-media harnesses stories your audience is already telling. “Your fans are already out there in the world, sharing their stories every day, without any prompting from you,” writes Jesse Stanchak. Social campaigns simply put that drive to work.” Stanchak offers three guidelines for making the most of the stories audiences are already telling: 1) Catch them at the moment of excitement; 2) If your fans don’t have a soapbox, build one; and 3) Be ready to respond.
  2. Social media is an example of “quantum narrative.” So says Mike Bonifer, who in his piece, Quantum Narrative, suggests a dichotomy comparing “Newtonian Narrative” with Quantum Narrative. Quintessentially postmodern, quantum narrative “redefines storytelling by ripping up and recomposing the stuff stories have been made of since the first cave dweller showed her companions how to build a fire (and got thrown out of the cave not long after by another cave dweller who claimed the secret of fire for himself). … It has no beginning, middle or end. It has unlimited numbers of beginnings, middles and ends. It is generative instead of repetitive. It is participatory instead of authored. There’s no traditional storyteller-audience relationship; in the Quantum Narrative, everyone is responsible for creating the story. It does not foster consumption as much as it invites customization,” Bonifer writes (and I encourage you to read the rest of his fascinating characterization). In addition to social media as an example of quantum narrative, Bonifer sees glimmers of the phenomenon in

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

    By the way, I’ve previously cited this “quantum” characterization — in an entry on a piece by Frank Mills about “quantum storytelling.”

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

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

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

Tell Stories in Performance Reviews, Salary/Raise Negotiations, Too

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

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

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

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

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

Stories Heal in Diverse Ways

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Meaty Storytelling Goodies — Yours Free for the Asking

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

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

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

    • A fairly new discovery, Spoken Stories, which I’ve been enjoying a lot recently, has a wonderful page of Storytelling Sources/Websites. These skew somewhat toward oral-performance storytelling, but there’s something for all storytelling fans. Categories of materials include General Storytelling; Storytelling Organizations/Discussion Lists; Warm-up Exercises; Creative Dramatics; Tale Type, Motif Indexes, and Folklore Research; Personal Narratives; Oral Tradition; Ethics Resources; Copyright; Storytelling-Related Codes of Ethics; Grants and Funding; Working with Audiences; Storytelling in Schools and Curricula; Programming Resources; Special Populations; Props and Storytelling; Folk and Fairy Tales; Storytelling through Music; Poetry Resources; Beauty and the Beast and Bluebeard Sources; Storytelling in the Movies; Environmental/Ecology Story Resources; Family Stories; Holiday Stories; Oral History; Peace and War Story Resources; University Oral History Projects; Urban Legends; Worklore & Business Leadership Storytelling; Multicultural Stories; Mythology; Digital Storytelling/Globalization; Samples of Digital Stories; Storytelling and International Festivals; Terms and Definitions; Storytelling Resources; and Storytelling Quotes.
  • For folks who enter their name and e-mail address here, story coach Lisa Bloom offers her e-book, 5 Common Mistake People Make That a Good Story Can Fix, in the form of a new chapter every two days. At the end of this email series, readers have the opportunity to download the entire book in PDF format.