Generosity, Thy Name is Terrence Gargiulo

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I’m not sure how I managed NOT to attend Terrence Gargiulo’s latest free webinar this week, but I missed it.

As usual, he is offering the recorded webinar, Facilitation Techniques with Stories, free to people like me who missed it (also embedded below).

He also offers a downloadable Facilitator Guide: Helping Others Make Sense of Stories and a paper, Nine Ground Rules of Working with Stories in Groups.

Terrence’s generosity is part of the culture of the storytelling community. We believe in sharing. Still, I constantly amazed at the incredible storytelling riches that are out there free for the asking.

 

Webinar: Facilitation Techniques with Stories from Terrence Gargiulo on Vimeo.

 

If Resumes Are Where Personalities Go to Die, Stories Are Where They Go to Thrive

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Declaring that “we think resumes are where great experience and personality go to die,” the marketing agency Ink Foundry goes on to say: “In the 10 years that we’ve been in business, we’ve read hundreds of insanely boring resumes from some really talented marketing people.”

The agency’s stance on resumes inspired it to conduct a search for a social-media-marketing intern by asking candidates to create and upload a video (and then asking site visitors to vote on whom Ink Foundry should hire). [See the job posting.]

Naturally, my mind turns to storytelling as the centerpiece I’d advise would-be interns to integrate into their videos. I can’t think of a better way to express one’s personality than through stories.

The agency doesn’t specifically ask for stories, but most of the elements the agency asks for in its posting could be expressed in stories in the required 3-minutes-or-less video describing “how this is the perfect internship for you:”

  • Your name
  • Your experience with social media
  • Any work experience
  • Education
  • Your three best skills
  • Why you want to work at Ink Foundry
  • Three social media thought leaders or bloggers who you admire
  • Demonstrate your creativity, sense of humor, fun spirit
  • Describe your perfect work day

Candidates could also develop stories to illustrate the skills required for the job (knowledge about social media and its use for marketing; savvy research skills;
excellent writing skills; creativity, artistic skills as well as detail skills; passionate about learning social-media marketing; enormous pride in your work, and in the shared accomplishment of the team; strong organization skills, attention to detail, and a strong work ethic; confident, communicative, responsible.)

Since the agency is making submitted videos available for voting, I will be interested to see if any candidates use storied approaches. After all, storytelling goes hand in hand not only with expressing one’s personality but also with social-media marketing. (I will also be interested in knowing how many submissions Ink Foundry gets; even at 3 minutes or under, these videos will require much more time to review than resumes would. As much as I applaud a hiring approach tailor-made for storytelling, I worry that Ink Foundry is setting itself up for a very labor-intensive hiring process.)

“60 Minutes” Creator’s Story Prompt Can Inspire Job-seekers

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Joining the growing chorus of career practitioners who are encouraging job-seekers to tell stories in their job-search communications, my colleague Billie Sucher has just written a blog post inspired by the recent edition of “60 Minutes” dedicated to its creator Don Hewitt.

Storytelling was Hewitt’s trademark, and he wanted his reporters to “Tell me a story.” Sucher suggests that job-seekers imagine they are being interviewed for a “60 Minutes” profile, and she offers a STORY acronym to help candidates remember how to apply storytelling in, for example, an interview situation:

S  haring your skills and successes, supported by specific examples of how you shape and strategize solutions, set standards and solve problems in a simple, straightforward style.

T  argeting the text that you teach and tell your audience about your target goals, areas of interest, and why you are the top talent to do the task.

O  ffering information and opening up about your originality, opportunities and options.

R  ecalling and remembering the reasons you rock and freely reciting your results, rewards, and realities without repeated reminders.

Y ielding a yes for You and your viewing audience!

Two Nice Storytelling Slideshows

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Came across two good slideshows recently that illustrate two applications for storytelling.

Organizational storytelling: I don’t know how Tell Us Your Story: Cultivating an Organizational Storytelling Culture by Teresa Bailey ended up on my desktop, but there it was after I researched storytelling at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for this entry. Although the presentation doesn’t quite stand on its own without narration, the viewer can glean solid information about how storytelling developed at JPL and how it works.

Online Storytelling in Nonprofits: I’ve written previously about Roger Burks and his campaign against what he calls “poverty porn” in favor of “humanitarian storytelling. Burks, senior writer at Mercy Corps, gives a nice presentation that illustrates how humanitarian storytelling is executed at Mercy Corps (which has more than 2,000 stories on its site), how it engages its audience, and how the approach developed after the late-2004 tsunami. It’s called Online Storytelling at Mercy Corps, and it’s embedded below. This show is easier to follow than the JPL one because it has an audio track. Burks talks about why storytelling is effective, how to choose stories, how Mercy Corps integrates storytelling into its Web site (and makes the action step — donating — more prominent), how the storytelling approach has resulted in much greater donations than similar organizations elicit, and how its latest strategy involves authentic but not necessarily polished entries on it blog, especially useful for real-time disaster coverage, as Mercy Corps is currently providing about Haiti.

Visual (Video) Storytelling: Complete Narrative with Just Music and Images?

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Can you tell a story with just a visual — without words? Of course. I’ve written about visual storytelling in art frequently in this space. I’m not sure, though, if I’ve written about visual storytelling on video that attempts to tell a story without narration or dialogue.

Two bloggers have recently explored that question. In an entry on 10,000 Words, How to create video storytelling that actually tells a story, Mark S. Luckie presents three videos that, he says, “prove that you don’t have to have clip after clip of an interviewee of telling the story for you — sometimes the story just tells itself.”

 

Escape From Tomorrow (A Day In the Life With Nigel Sylvester) from 13thWitness™ on Vimeo.


Well, I’m sure it’s true that video stories can be told without narration or dialog, but I’m not sure Luckie’s examples truly reach the level of storytelling. The first two, Another night in Beijing and Escape from tomorrow, are more like slices of life than stories. Both have excellent background music, with the music in Escape from tomorrow especially well-synched to the action in the film. (Embedded above because it’s my favorite of the videos I looked at here.) The third,
PostSecret: Confessions on Life, Death and God, is more of a person-on-the-street interview series in which subjects are asked to share their secrets. It’s tied to a site I’ve written about, PostSecret, “an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a postcard.”

 

Story fares a bit better in the videos examined by Tom Kennedy on Kennedy | Multimedia. Kennedy notes that “visual storytelling can offer a complete narrative with music and images alone” and gives as examples four TV commercials, one of which has been removed from YouTube for terms-of-use violations. The first of these, an ad for a Volkswagen, and the last, an ad for Mini Cooper, decently tell stories. The third, an ad for Mexican beer, isn’t much of a story, in my opinion.

The line of inquiry is fascinating, though, and it makes me wonder what elements are required to create a video that offers a complete narrative with music and images alone, and what are some good examples of these?

How About a Storied Press Release?

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By way of an online discussion group, my friend Stephanie West Allen alerted me to an unusual press release written as a story.

It’s the story of an attorney who is taking down her shingle to become a life and executive coach. There’s more to it; as the press release notes, it’s “a story that involves fleeing from another country, working for the CIA, and being involved in a shooting, not to mention short appearances by the then President of the United States, several Foreign Consulates, and a stuffed animal named Batts Maroo.”

I once made quite a practice of analyzing press releases when I was an editor who reviewed dozens of these documents daily. I developed a nice set of guidelines for how not to write a press release based on the mistakes I typically saw. I put on my editor’s hat to determine whether this press release would intrigue me and inspire me to run the story the release represents (while some publications print releases verbatim, most publications would either edit the release or report their own story using the release as a springboard). Here are my thoughts:

  • The story aspect of the release is definitely intriguing. The release uses the word “story” numerous times. Most press releases announcing a new business give a dry, resume-like recitation of the entrepreneur’s background and qualifications.
  • The release is long — 4 pages (!) when printed as a PDF. Many editors would be daunted by its length and wouldn’t have time to read the whole thing. But they might be intrigued enough by the story aspect to at least put it aside for future consideration.
  • The subject, whose name is Sonia Gallagher, makes some revelations that are unusually personal for a press release — that she grew up in a abusive household, that she experienced “demons” and depression, her engagement and wedding, and being sued by one of her law clients. Would an editor be turned off by these intimate details — or intrigued enough to want to learn more? Depends on the editor.

At the very least, this press release is attention-getting, which cannot be a bad thing when you seek publicity. Storied press releases may have great potential.

Getting Closer to Discovering What Makes a Good Story

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When reader Raf Stevens challenged me last fall to clarify what makes a good story and to present examples of good storytelling, I began a mental journey to explore these questions and find answers.

The challenge began with a discussion of winners of a slide-presentation contest — which were not particularly storied. I think Stevens especially wanted to see examples of slide presentations that do typify great storytelling. I see discovering those examples as kind of the last stop on this journey.

In the meantime, I’ve looked at well-done examples of:

I also wanted to locate stories — preferably nonfiction — that are told purely with words in print (as opposed to spoken words); in other words, a story that must be read. Of course, there’s no shortage of stories like this, as exemplified by the winners of Narrative magazine’s Narrative 30 Below Story Contest, a competition for writers under age 30 in which entrants could submit fiction or nonfiction. (Free registration on the site is required to read the full stories.) I wish Narrative labeled the stories as fiction or nonfiction. If I had to guess, I’d say all three of the top-prize winners are nonfiction, but I can’t be sure. Makes me wonder if stories in writing competitions are judged differently based on whether the intent is fiction or nonfiction. Looking at the guidelines for the magazine’s Winter Story Contest, I see that entrants are required to indicate which genre their work fits into, thus identifying fiction vs. nonfiction. (on a related note, check out Cynthia Kurtz’s provocative blog post about naturally occurring stories vs. packaged stories.)

Another good written story came to my attention through my Facebook friend Liz Massey, who called Jonathan Odell’s Coming Home: A Gay Christian Speaks to Fundamentalists amazingly well written.

Stories of Haiti Keep World’s Eye’s Focused on Troubled Nation

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The world’s eyes have been opened over the last two weeks, not only to a tragedy of unspeakable proportions, but to a nation that has been suffering long before this natural disaster befell it. Tonight, eyes will continue to focus on helping the Haitian people as major television networks broadcast a “Hope for Haiti” telethon.

During this period of opening the world’s eyes to Haiti’s past and present plight, the site Spoken Stories

Debris lays in the street after an earthquake along the Delmas road in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Wednesday, Jan. 13, 2010. A 7.0-magnitude earthquake, the largest ever recorded in the area, rocked Haiti on Tuesday. (AP Photo/Jorge Cruz) ** NO PUBLICAR EN REPUBLICA DOMINICANA **

offered a video of Haitian author Edwidge Danticat, speaking after another natural disaster and reading from her work.

(Following a long introduction, Danticat starts speaking about 9 minutes into the video; the entire presentation is about an hour.)

This is also a good opportunity to call attention to the site that presented the Danticat video. SpokenStories.Org says it has “one short-term goal, one mid-term plan and one lifelong mission: to help Maximize Human Capabilities through Stories, Poems and other human-uplifting arts.” Here’s more from and about the site:

Why We are Different

We believe that the best way to bring the best out of people is to empower and inspire them with awakening stories. This is the basic premise and the foundation of the work we do. We tell and write stories that will nourish your life; stories that will strengthen your spirit and soul; stories that will help you sustain your senses; stories that will help you embark journeys that you never thought about before; stories that will help you preserve your inalienable human dignity; stories that will enlighten your ‘bad’ days, and lift you up!

Many of these stories are real-life experiences. Thus, the intention is to teach you a lesson that you would otherwise had no chance.

One-Stop Link for Storytelling Weekend

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I’ve published several entries recently about April’s Storytelling Weekend in Washington, DC (April 15-17). Steve Denning has now provided a one-stop link to learn about all three days of the weekend and links to register. More details and a registration link are still to come for the Saturday event, Golden Fleece Day.

Artistic Intent and the Story Behind (and Beyond) Still Photos

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I’ve always been fascinated with the concept of artistic intent. What story is an artist trying to tell, or what statement is the artist trying to make in a given work of art?

Having worked for a while in an art gallery, I came to realize that most artists don’t really like to reveal their intent. Thus, the intent or meaning of a work of art is usually left to the beholder to interpret. A major component of art-history scholarship seems to focus on making scholarly arguments for what an artist’s intent was for a work or body or work.

My fascination with artistic intent was piqued by a new contest Canon is holding, called “The Story Beyond The Still,”

©Vincent Laforet – LAFORET | VISUALS – ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

which the company describes as “the first user-generated HD Video Contest where photographers become filmmakers, and we all see beyond the still.” The contest is largely to promote Canon’s EOS 7D camera, but also to “demonstrat[e] the social appeal of collaborative storytelling.”

The contest, as it turns out, is not really about artistic intent. If it were, the contest’s name might be “The Story Behind the Still.” Instead, it’s more like “what happens next” in the story of the still photo. The idea is to move the story forward rather than to look back at what inspired the photo.

Canon asked photographer, Vincent Laforet (who is also a judge for the contest), to “interpret” what story lives beyond the first still and to tell that story with the new camera. Laforet collaborated with Grey New York to bring his interpretation of a still image to life in a short film entitled “The Cabbie,” which begins on a still image depicting a teddy bear left on the sidewalk outside of an airport. “The Cabbie” serves as the first installment of a seven-chapter collaborative work in which each participant is asked to interpret the previous winning photographer/filmmaker’s final still image to start their vision for the subsequent chapter. The still photo at right above, a large trunk sitting in what appears to be a warehouse, is the still for Chapter 2. Submissions for the next chapter are due February 11.

Even though I’m a little disappointed that the contest doesn’t focus on the storied intent of these visuals, I admit that Laforet has created an intriguing first chapter (below), and I’m looking forward to subsequent installments.

You can read Canon’s press release here.

 

Escape From Tomorrow (A Day In the Life With Nigel Sylvester) from 13thWitness™ on Vimeo.