Cathie Dodd’s Storytelling Twitterthon begins at 6 am PST Labor Fay, Sept. 7.
Says Cathie:
Start sharing sharing your personal stories. It will be going all day,so whenever you have a moment stop by and be apart of it. Some have already started sharing their stories. Just go to Twitter and when you update your status you write your story and put this in the as the hash tag to type #TOJStory. If you want to see what everyone is writing , search the hash tag.
Continuing to update some entries from the early years of A Storied Career while I finalize my e-book, Storied Careers and prepare for hosting a teleseminar on 09-09-09. New entries will resume Tuesday, Sept. 8.
Over the years of this blog, and in my book Tell Me About Yourself:, I’ve talked extensively about story formulas that can be used in job-seach communication.
Typical formulas (represented by acronyms) include PAR, SAR, and CAR: Problem • Action • Result; Situation • Action • Result; and Challenge • Action • Result.
Steve Denning suggests a different formula: “I noted that persuading people to change required a shift from the conventional approach to communications of problem • analysis • solution, must be set aside in favor of a very different triad: get attention • stimulate desire • reinforce with reasons.
Denning touches on this concept and gives storied examples in the first chapter of chapter of his , The Secret Language of Leadership (starting on page 27).
Looking back three years I first wrote about Denning’s formula, I can clear see how well it works for cover letters.
Job-seekers can use the formula like this in a cover letter:
Get attention by describing a problem the prospective employer has or a need to organization needs to fill. It must be a problem or need the employer has acknowledged — say, in a job posting or in a networking conversation.
Stimulate desire by telling how you can solve the problem or meet the need for the employer.
Reinforce with reasons by telling a story about how you solved a similar problem or met a similar need for a past employer. This technique works because employers know that past behavior is the best predictor of future performance.
Continuing to look back at the early years of A Storied Career while I finalize my e-book, Storied Careers and prepare for hosting a teleseminar on 09-09-09. New entries will resume soon.
Career coach Wendy J. Terwelp touts the value of story, or case studies, in the job search, noting that job-seekers can the same strategy that marketers use in promoting products “to promote what you can do for a company — without sounding like an infomercial.” It really works, Terwelp proclaims, continuing:
This strategy helps demonstrate your expertise during — and after — an interview. Develop at least three case studies that demonstrate your expertise. Keep each study to one page per study, if possible. Name it something exciting, such as: “New Web Strategy Tripled Sales for X Marks the Spot Marketing.” Avoid too much jargon to make it an easy read.
For example, if you are a web designer, provide the Challenge encountered when developing a particular website. Perhaps it was capturing the company’s personality in an exciting way or creating an exciting e-commerce solution that would triple online business in the first six months. Provide the Action steps you took to achieve the Results. This can include the way you developed the web concept and marketing plan, structured the site, researched effective keywords, partnered with outside resources, etc. Then describe the Results. What happened with the project? If you have stats that demonstrate the amount of hits increased combined with a sales increase, these are hard facts that prove you can do the job.
Cathie Dodd, one of the subjects of my Q&A series is trying a storytelling Twitterthon on Monday, September 7, Labor Day in the US, from 6:00 am – 9:00 pm PDT.
You can RSVP and see more info here on Facebook. Looks like you need to friend Cathie on Facebook or follow her on Twitter to participate.
Here’s how she describes it:
This is an experiment I want to do with all my contacts on Facebook and Twitter. I am creating a storytelling Twitterthon. It will be all day Monday. Since most of you are off of work, maybe you can stop by tweet on twitter and tell us a short story about yourself.
This is how it works. Put in the hash tag before your tweet : #TOJStory and then with the rest of the 140 characters share one story, or a number of stories about yourself.
For those who take part in the twitterthon, I will be printing all the replies on my website next week. I will post the link in my group. You can also read the stories submitted by searching the hash tag on Twitter
For those unfamiliar with hash tags just remember that before you write in the twitter box, you write #TOJStory to be considered part of the Twitterthon.
Cathie Dodd AKA twitter name: @Tearsofjoy
Continuing to look back four years ago to the first year of A Storied Career while I finalize my e-book, Storied Careers and prepare for hosting a teleseminar on 09-09-09. It’s interesting to look back at that first year. My entries were a lot shorter (I could learn from my more concise self) and rather self-conscious. I talked a lot about my PhD program and blogging as a subset of storytelling. I’m updating a few of my first-year entries and will resume new entries soon.
Even in this blog’s first year, 2005, an article I cited by, Penelope Trunk was two years old. But its storied advice about networking — telling your story when you meet someone new still hold up six years after Penelope wrote it. In fact, as I wrote about here, Marcos Salazar gave much the same advice just a month or so ago:
“When someone asks ‘What do you do?’ a one-word answer will put your career on ice. You need to have a story. When you want to establish a connection with someone, a story provides social glue.
“When you want to impress someone, a story is more memorable than a list of achievements.”
She goes on to tell a great story of the story she told in a successful job interview.
While I’m working on finalizing my e-book, Storied Careers and preparing for hosting a teleseminar a week from today, I’m republishing an updated “classic” entry from the first year of A Storied Career. These two examples of “story resumes” never fail to make me smile.
Alexandre Gueniot explains that he created his animated, musical resume in 2004, had a huge response from it, and accepted a job at Microsoft as a result of it. I suspect the words fit the music better in Gueniot’s native French (and the French version
also is available), but it’s really well done and shows a great sense of humor. It’s certainly one prototype of a “story” resume. It’s unquestionably a resume that tells a story.
Here’s another one of a different ilk that equally shows a great sense of humor.
Spinning a bit off a comment by Paul Furiga in the recent Q&A with him 
and his partner, John Durante, I’m thinking that as technical capabilities become every more mind-boggling and jaw-dropping, we need to beware of labeling every technologically stunning multimedia presentation as storytelling.
Last week, a Twitterer sang the storytelling praises of this presentation from Waterlife about dwindling water resources and the fact that water is now polluted with pharmaceutical toxins.
I will grant that this is beautifully done presentation. But I don’t see it as much beyond a very technically advanced PowerPoint presentation with facts and figures.
I don’t see it as storytelling. Do you?
The Tweeter referred to the presentation as “Database Storytelling,” which was a new one on me. I Googled the term, looked it up on Wikipedia, and asked the Tweeter for a definition but could not learn what “database storytelling” is. Do you know what database storytelling is? If so, please share.
I was similarly flummoxed by this piece, also touted in the Twitterverse as storytelling. At first I saw it as a poem, but later I realized it’s apparently some sort of game, an “unidentified game object.” I couldn’t get too far into it because the music drove me insane (I suppose I could have turned off the sound). OK, I can sort of see the game aspect, but can someone explain the storytelling to me?
My target date for releasing my free e-book, Storied Careers: 40+ Story Practitioners Talk about Applied Storytelling, was tomorrow, Sept. 2, the anniversary of my first Q&A publication.
I’m not quite going to make that target date. I’m putting finishing touches on
the book, proofing, and editing. I do expect to send out a beta release to contributors this week.
But the actual release looks to be the middle of next week. Thanks for your patience.
Click here to e-mail me to be notified when the book is ready for free download.
I’ve been seeing and thinking recently a lot about the terms:
As I read about these terms, they all seem to be talking about roughly the same thing. I figured if anyone knew about the nuances of difference among the terms, it would be Christy Dena, who has focused her doctoral studies on what she describes as “a new form of storytelling & gaming” (which, I believe, she is currently calling “cross-platform” storytelling).
Indeed, she does offer an answer, and my puny list above, it turns out, is just the tip of the iceberg. Christy provides a lengthy list of terms that she states are either the equivalent or sub-sets of cross-media.
I don’t want to steal her thunder by repeating the whole list — and I also tend to shun those that directly reference games because I’m just not into games — so here’s a very abbreviated version of her list (in addition to those at the top of this entry):
I find these genres fascinating and keep wondering what applications they may have beyond what we’ve already seen. But before I get into that, it’s useful to come up with some sort of definition and basic understanding.
Henry Jenkins, who champions the term “transmedia storytelling,” offers a good explanation in the video I embedded here. Jenkins also offers a good definition, explanation, and copious resources in the Transmedia Storytelling and Entertainment Syllabus for the course he’s teaching this fall at USC, which he posted on his blog:
We now live at a moment where every story, image, brand, relationship plays itself out across the maximum number of media platforms, shaped top down by decisions made in corporate boardrooms and bottom up by decisions made in teenager’s bedrooms. The concentrated ownership of media conglomerates increases the desirability of properties that can exploit “synergies” between different parts of the medium system and “maximize touch-points” with different niches of consumers. The result has been the push towards franchise-building in general and transmedia entertainment in particular.
A transmedia story represents the integration of entertainment experiences across a range of different media platforms. A story like Heroes or Lost might spread from television into comics, the web, computer or alternate reality games, toys and other commodities, and so forth, picking up new consumers as it goes and allowing the most dedicated fans to drill deeper. The fans, in turn, may translate their interests in the franchise into concordances and wikipedia entries, fan fiction, vids, fan films, cosplay, game mods, and a range of other participatory practices that further extend the story world in new directions. Both the commercial and grassroots expansion of narrative universes contribute to a new mode of storytelling, one which is based on an encyclopedic expanse of information which gets put together differently by each individual consumer as well as processed collectively by social networks and online knowledge communities.
The Blair Witch Project and The Matrix are often cited as seminal examples that spawned transmedia storytelling. And just as an aside, a wonderful piece from five years ago — a great story of storytelling — is Exocog: A case study of a new genre in storytelling (back when transmedia/cross-media/immersive storytelling was indeed a new genre) about a transmedia project undertaken independently of a film studio — yet as an extension of the film Minority Report. The project was something like what Jenkins calls a “grassroots extension,” except that the organizers were not “fans” per se. Jim Miller, who wrote the piece, cites the old Apple HyperCard program as one of the earliest roots of using computers and the Internet for storytelling. I never grasped HyperCard yet thought it was cool.
Given that I’m not into games and that storytelling in movies and TV is also not at the top of my list of interests (mostly because other writers/bloggers have those genres well covered), I’m interested in other applications that transmedia/cross-media/immersive storytelling may have. Can they be used for nonfiction stories and for individuals (say, in job-hunting and personal branding)?
John Thompson, senior copywriter at One to One Interactive, answers the nonfiction question when he cites “one of the most successful social media-enabled stories going — the Obama presidency.”
Emerging multimedia journalism also is applying transmedia/cross-media/immersive storytelling to nonfiction. With regard to the way the aftermath of the Iran elections was covered through social media, Brad King writes:
… in this distributed world, the best storytellers should be out there aggregating all the information, creating pages where the information can be pulled, mapped and searched in a variety of manners; where information can be set up top by users; and then knowledgeable folks can provide their own context to what is happening.
(King is concerned both with the way this kind of storytelling should be archived and the perils of “remixing” storytelling that result in incidents such as Maureen Dowd’s failure to attribute a paragraph in her column to its rightful source.
And Kfir Pravda flirts with the individual question by writing:
Immersive storytelling is the use of social web and online video to tell a linear fictional story, through the social activities of the characters. … but what about the stories that happen to people around us? People in real life? Did you ever read someone’s Facebook status messages and learned about his personal stories through it? Did you ever read personal blogs and vlogs and felt that you are witnessing a real life story? This is the basic concept of immersive storytelling — the movie theater is replaced by Facebook and Twitter profiles, blogs, and personal vblogs.
So, we can probably say that some people are heavily involved in transmedia/cross-media/immersive storytelling by having personal Web sites, blogs, videos of themselves of YouTube, photos on Flickr, profiles on Facebook and Twitter, and so on. Various feeds, lifestreams, and storystreams are likely a good way for these various media to tell the individual’s story cohesively. For functions like personal branding and job-seeking, a certain degree of linearity is probably desirable.
And perhaps a degree of interaction is desirable. I’ve written before about Kevin Sablan, whose “storystreaming” vision focuses on how others interact with the story’s protagonist: “every story includes multiple characters, events and plot. A storystream platform needs to document a the events of a story, not a person.”
Although “Johnny Blank” (“a storyteller hell bent on discovering ways to harness emerging technologies to share stories with new audiences”) writes in the context of film and blurring the lines between filmmaker and audience, his words apply to those interested in telling — and participating in — nonfiction and individual stories acorss platforms:
For the first time since ancient cultures, where stories were passed down from generation to generation through verbal communication (around fires etc), the world has now found a new, communal space to share and grow its stories that represent humanity. … In other words, stories are no longer simply stories, they are world views that will evolve with discussion, creation, and review.
See a photo of Paul and John, their bios, Part 1 of this Q&A,Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, and Part 7.
Q&A with Paul Furiga and John Durante, Questions 15, 16, and 17:
Q: Paul, you write in a blog entry that you are an entrepreneur partly because of your family. Some entrepreneurs might find that statement surprising because business owners often find they have less time with their families than before. How are you able to find that balance?
A: Several thoughts are relevant here. Obviously, a big one is that the mobility in information technology that allows us to do many parts of our work in non-conventional environments. Another is that my spouse and I both work at WordWrite and so I guess less collective time is spent on “downloading” the day’s business to one another.
But perhaps an even bigger point is how being a small business owner is changing. Small business ownership has been perceived as very high risk because the entrepreneur forsakes the relative security of an organizational job. I worked in many organizational jobs for a lot of years. In one of them, I actually became in expert in the communications surrounding mass layoffs. I was on-site one year for more than 5,000 layoffs. I learned then what many people are just learning now — that there is actually less “security” in being part of an organization than in writing your own story as an entrepreneur. Thus, the issues of family balance are not substantially different, and in many cases are actually easier. I can afford to be more flexible when it comes to family. Yes, like any small business owner, I burn my share of the midnight oil and occasionally am on the iPhone while attending a family function, but for us the balance issue has come pretty naturally.
Q: John, you wrote a blog entry recently about how Carl Jung recognized the importance of stories. Have you always brought Jungian psychology into your storytelling work or were theories about storytelling a more recent discovery?
A: Since my graduate school days I have always been familiar with Jungian psychology but it wasn’t until Paul invited me in to collaborate on our current project that I began to make the link. Over the years Paul have clearly remained passionate about the importance of storytelling so I started to mesh some of his sustaining ideas with some of older ideas I might have once known. That’s when the Jungian connection about the “collective unconscious” became obvious.
Q: Does the current state of the economy create a greater need for businesses to tell a great story? Does the economy change the way businesses should tell their stories?
A: Yes. And because of the economic collapse, and the lies it exposed, the stories, more than ever before, must be authentic. Consider just one aspect, the collapse of residential real estate. One way of looking at it is that too many people fell in love with inauthentic story approaches to supercharge consumer activity. I mean how else do you explain a household with a $40,000 annual income qualifying for a $400,000 mortgage?
This experience should prove to businesses that we must avoid these types of inauthentic stories. The experience also makes clear that we, as a society, must leverage authenticity to help rebuild communications credibility across vast sectors of global business. The professional storytellers who let their narratives spiral into a swamp of inauthenticity in the first place have much to explain. The retribution, thanks to the independent voice that electronic communication provides, is more swift and powerful today. Without an authentic response to the anger and venom of those complaining on Twitter or blogs or web sites, the price of telling an inauthentic story is even deeper.