Steve Spalding, who calls himself “chief storyteller” at his firm, initially caught my eye because he’s based in one of my all-time favorite cities, Gainesville, FL, where I met my husband, married him, and had my first child. Then I became intrigued with the work he’s doing in digital storytelling, Web design, branding/imaging, social-media strategy, advertising management, SEO, and education/coaching, as well as his interesting blog, How to Split an Atom. Finally, I marvel at his unlikely background as an electrical engineer — and how it led him to storytelling. I’m very happy to present his Q&A over the next five days.
Bio: Steve Spalding is the founder of How to Split an Atom, a blog about the intersections of web technologies, small business and culture. In his ample free time he also acts as managing partner at Crossing Gaps, a marketing and design firm that specializes in helping brands and creative professionals find innovative ways to match their business strategy to their web strategies to increase revenue, brand awareness, and overall communication quality.
He has experience building start-ups, working at them, tweaking, fixing and developing campaigns for them as well as speaking to dozens of their Founders and CEOs. He has acted as an adviser for startup entrepreneurs and a host of creative professionals. His work has been cited by the LA Times, Forbes, Mashable, RWW, as well as Geoff Livingston’s marketing and new-media book, Now Is Gone.
Q&A with Steve Spalding, Question 1:
Q: How did you initially become involved with story/storytelling/narrative? What attracted you to this field? What do you love about it?
A: I took a roundabout path to the “story” industry. I started off as an electrical engineer, primarily because I loved the idea of putting things together from scratch. There is something about being able to look at a problem and solve it from first principles that has always excited me, and being able to do that with robots seemed like a pretty solid bet.
As I was finishing up my graduate work, what I realized was that the things I really enjoyed doing would not be the things that I ended up spending most of my time working on in industry. There is a frightening amount of cubicle work in engineering, and my temperament doesn’t do well with whiteboards and testing documentation.
Long story short, I came to a few conclusions to go along with this revelation.
They were as follows: I loved to write. I loved entrepreneurship and business. I knew how to create systems. I liked working with people. After a few detours working with startups and puttering my way through projects, I finally landed on Crossing Gaps, the company I started and have been working on for the last two years.
What has been absolutely fantastic about this latest venture is that it has given me the opportunity to take all of the digital communications tools that are being turned out, the technology that I utterly adore and use it to help companies tell meaningful stories about their products and have real interactions with the people who they are trying to sell their wares to.
As for how this all relates to what I love about storytelling, I’ll save that for the next question.