It’s been at least two months since I’ve looked at storytelling items that are getting significant buzz on Twitter — usually in the form of multiple retweets. The primary application I use to alert me to storytelling items on Twitter has been out of commission, and my alternate methods aren’t quite as user-friendly. So, the following isn’t a comprehensive compilation — nor is it totally up to date — but I present some highlights of the storytelling conversation on Twitter:
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- Henry Jenkins, leading expert on transmedia storytelling (and, I believe originator of the term), enjoyed many, many retweets of his Revenge of the Origami Unicorn: Seven Principles of Transmedia Storytelling.
- Rob Mills got tons of comments and retweets of his December blog
entry, Storytelling on the Web, which suggests that storytelling has gotten lost in cyberspace. - Through Twitter I learned of a 50+-page downloadable PDF Literature Review by Patricia McGee, PhD., on using storytelling for teaching and learning.
- My good friend Thomas Clifford had a popular blog entry in his Boosting Employee Engagement With Multimedia Storytelling, and interview with Jim Hauden, author of The Art of Engagement: Bridging the Gap Between People and Possibilities. Here’s what Hauden has to say about storytelling:
A number of companies are starting to see the difference between using multi-media to “tell and sell” and using it to create insight and to model examples of success. One company calls their examples “proof points” of what behavior looks like when it is in concert with a new strategy. Multi-media can be a powerful way to answer one of the most profound questions that people rarely ask regarding strategy: “What does it look like?” As long as people are concerned that what they think it should look like might be different from what leaders are picturing, they’ll sit back and wait for others to go first. But if leaders can vividly create insight through multi-media in terms of what it looks like when strategy is being executed, we can start to close that gap. We begin to reduce the apprehension that people feel when it comes to taking the risk to bring new strategies to life.
- Three Reasons Why Storytelling is the Key to Social Media Marketing Success by “Guarav” was a popular post that included these words:
Given how central storytelling is to the human condition, it’s not a surprise that social media is most powerful when it is used for storytelling. These stories can be about the organization and its brands, but they are more powerful when they are stories about the role these brands play in the lives of their consumers. The most powerful stories are about what these brands stand for, if they stand for a larger social object: a lifestyle, a cause, or a passion.
The resources at the end of the post are especially valuable.
- And two quotes I liked from the last couple of months: @jshelley78 (who subsequently changed his Twitter account to @jamesshelley) said: “What ‘actually happened’ does not define us nearly as much as the story we choose to believe” and (I believe) from my friend @treypennington: “Look for strong linkages [among] #socialmedia, #knowldgemgmt & #storytelling to emerge in 2010.”