A convergence of three recent articles tickles my fascination with differences in how we tell our stories in the virtual world vs. “in real life.”

In one of the posts (which is referenced in the second one), R.I.P. Personal Branding, Olivier Blanchard expresses a refreshing, iconoclastic view in a careers sector that has been dominated by the you-must-have-a-personal-brand edict for the past several years:

People are people. They aren’t brands. When people become “brands,” they stop being people and become one of three things: vessels for cultural archetypes, characters in a narrative, or products. … Can you realistically remain “authentic” and real once you have surrendered yourself to a process whose ultimate aim is to drive a business agenda?

I have long shared this cynicism about personal branding. “Is there really any value,” Blanchard continues, “to turning yourself into a character or a product instead of just being… well, who you are?” And finally, scathingly: “You know what we used to call people with ‘personal brands’ before the term was coined? Fakes.”

In Is Your Personal Brand Fake?, inspired in part by Blanchard’s post, my colleague Barbara Safani seems to take the view that personal branding is OK as long as it’s not fake. For example, the identity — or brand — she projects on Facebook, she contends, is authentically her:

People who friend me on Facebook see the gray. Sure, they get job search advice, links to great articles and resources, and motivating success stories about my clients and all of this helps build their confidence in me as a professional. But they also see what types of things I am interested in and they get a feel for who I am as a New Yorker, a mother, a daughter, a friend. And if they dig deeper they will figure out that I love dark chocolate, running in Central Park, and high-heeled shoes. They get the panoramic view of me rather than just the professional headline. People want to hire people that they relate to and connect with.

Barb contrasts the projection of one’s personal brand on Facebook with that on LinkedIn, which she implies may be “boring, one-dimensional and not believable … [j]ust like many of the LinkedIn profile headlines I read…Visionary CEO…Dynamic Marketing Executive, Results-Oriented Operations Manager…”

She’s saying, I believe, that it’s possible to express an authentic brand but easier (or perhaps, more expected) to do so in some online venues than in others.

According to the third post, we do authentically express our real selves in social media, especially on Facebook. In Study: Your Facebook Personality Is The Real You, Alicia Eler reports on an academic paper revealing results of two research studies that conclude “Facebook users are no different online than they are offline.”

It’s not hard to find flaws in the studies. One suggests that the number of one’s Facebook friends correlates with extroversion. I have a higher than average (130 friends, according to Facebook’s stats) number of friends, but I attribute that at least in part to the fact that I have been on Facebook longer than many people — since 2005, when only people with .edu email addresses could belong.

Still, I agree, like Barb Safani, that what you see of me on Facebook is pretty much authentically me. One exception is politics. I hold strong political feelings, “feelings” being the operative word. I expend a lot of time and energy trying to avoid political punditry because it makes my blood boil. Similarly, I avoid engaging politically in social media because I’m too emotional about it to make rational arguments. This avoidance is admittedly difficult in an election year. But I digress …

To avoid fakery in the way we project ourselves — whether online or in real life — we need to think in terms not of personal branding but of personal storytelling. We have amazing tools to do that these days. Blanchard writes, for example:

If I have learned anything from Facebook’s new Timeline feature, it’s this: It’s fun to be yourself. It’s easy to forget that, especially when the “personal branding” industry would have you shift your focus away from the little flaws that make you… well, you.

Ask yourself if you are authentically telling your story in all your interactions and look at the differences in how you tell it from venue to venue.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Recently, in a LinkedIn group to which I belong, a member cited his “favorite LinkedIn profile of all time.” The profile belongs to Orrin “Checkmate” Hudson, who uses chess to turn around troubled kids, and it does the best job I’ve ever seen of using a LinkedIn profile as a platform to tell a story. And not just a story, but a compelling, inspiring story. Here is most of it:

I grew up in a tough housing project in Birmingham, AL, in the 1980s, never far from gangs, drugs, and criminal activity. Fortunately for me, I met an exceptional teacher who put me on the right path.

After 6 years as an Alabama State Trooper, I thought I’d seen some worst possible examples of human behavior. Then one night in May, 2004, the TV showed how 2 teenagers murdered 5 teenaged employees of a Wendy’s in far-away Queens, NY. Kids killing kids for money — cold blooded, execution style, no value for life — all for a lousy $2400.

Evil prevails when good people do nothing. The TV images were so awful I couldn’t sleep that night. I thought back to my own youth — growing up in a family of 13 kids — and how close I came to landing in jail for stealing inner tubes off truck tires. But an English teacher got me interested in the game of chess. He turned me around.

Watching the aftermath of a mass murder in Queens was my personal wake-up call. I decided to follow the example of my own teacher and use chess to turn around troubled kids. Nine months later I sold my business — auto sales and repairs — and launched BeSomeone.org. As of 2012, we’ve helped build the character of about 25,000 young people — our goal is one million — to inspire them through the game of chess.

The last time I wrote about LinkedIn profiles, I noted that one of the difficulties of deploying stories in profiles is that, like resumes, the profiles are usually constructed in reverse-chronological order. Granted, it appears that Hudson doesn’t seek a job; his objective seems to be to raise awareness for his organization and drive visitors to its Web site. As such, he perhaps has more latitude with the chronology of his profile.

LinkedIn profiles are usually presented in reverse-chronological order because the user wants the audience to see the most recent — and usually most relevant — career activity first. In promoting his organization, Hudson has less of a need to list the most recent first. In fact, his story does not follow a linear course. His profile is far more engaging for drawing the reader in with the challenge of his growing-up years. He then skips way ahead to a more recent career incarnation and how a classic inciting incident became the turning point that led to launching his organization.

In between the incident and describing founding the organization, he flashes back to the teacher that turned him around as a youth by sparking his interest in chess.

Skipped in the tale is how he went from being an Alabama State Trooper to owning an auto sales and repair business — but it hardly matters because the reader is so immersed in his tale.

Would a chronological — but not necessarily linear — story work in a job-seeker’s LinkedIn profile? Maybe. It helps to have a dramatic, turning-point inciting incident around which to spin the story. It also helps to write as well as Hudson does. At the very least, Hudson’s profile has opened my eyes to the story possibilities in LinkedIn profiles.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Mashable wants to see what’s possible in terms of Facebook’s dramatically expanded 63,206-character-limit status updates, so it’s holding a contest. Strictly speaking, the contest isn’t just for stories, but stories are among the possibilities:

We want you to post something in your status update that’s going to blow us away. You could write a short story, or an epic poem. Facebook has given you the space to write the equivalent of 451.5 tweets, and we’re giving you the green light to use it. We just want you to write about whatever you want.

Deadline is Wednesday, Jan. 18 at 5:00 p.m. EST, and you can learn how to enter here.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

This week saw lots of buzz over the new Facebook profile timeline, which will be rolled out to users on the 29th. I couldn’t help loving the emphasis on story, as in the tagline “Tell your life story with a new kind of profile” on Facebook’s page about Timeline.

The story focus does raise questions, though, especially for story purists. Will the content in people’s timeline’s really tell their stories? And my friend Stephanie West Allen raised the question, “Is Facebook writing our memoirs for us?”

Of course I couldn’t really offer an opinion on either question without experiencing Timeline for myself, so I deployed the quasi-hack that Facebook developers can use to get Timeline a little early. Below you can see a screenshot of mine (I have Timeline now, but it’s visible only to me until the rollout on the 29th).

Does Timeline really tell my story? I’ve always contended that we tell fragments of stories in social media, but they are largely incomplete and unconnected. Dr. Ananda Mitra, social media expert and Chair of the Communication Department at Wake Forest University, calls these fragments “narbs,” for “narrative bits.” Timeline, I believe, does move a bit closer to connecting the fragments by organizing content nicely and attractively. The story will always be incomplete because we will always have parts of the story we are unwilling to share.

I also truly love the fact that I can easily go back to the very beginning of my Facebook life. I was an early adopter of Facebook in 2005 because I had an .edu email address, which was required before the venue opened itself up to all users in 2006. My very first activity was in September 2005. With Timeline, I can easily relive memories — at least Facebook memories — from six years ago to today.

Which brings us to Stephanie’s question. For the most part, we choose the content that appears on our own profiles. Facebook is not writing my memoir, but Timeline would be an awesome tool and memory jog if I were writing my memoir.

Regrettably, I don’t keep a journal. When I first started using the Internet in 1993, thought of the emails I sent to my best friend as journaling. Today, we email much less, and I journal to a small extent through Facebook. Those emails — if I still had them all — would provide much more depth of detail and emotion as fodder for my memoir, but I still believe Facebook’s timeline would be a terrific tool for remembering and reconstructing should I ever choose to.

It’s true that I am disinclined to criticize Facebook much. The platform’s frequent changes bother only marginally. I am the first to admit that Facebook is a big part of my online life. While I think the “Tell your life story” claim may be a bit overblown, I am hardly inclined to complain about the recognition of the importance of our stories.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

We live in a world in which Facebook or Twitter are often the venues through which we learn of a shocking and tragic death and those same media become the platforms for a unique, new style virtual memorial service in which stories of the deceased are shared.

Such was the case when Trey Pennington took his life this week. The day of his death, Sunday, saw an outpouring of shock and devastation on Trey’s Facebook wall. Yesterday, a candlelight memorial took place simultaneously in both the real (in his Greenville, SC, hometown) and virtual worlds (see also this post). Here was the place Trey’s friends told their stories of him — in words, pictures, and videos.

Common themes in the initial reactions to Trey’s death included the fact that he had been depressed, that he was enduring a painful divorce, and the irony that a man with more than 100,000 Twitter followers and nearly 5,000 Facebook friends would feel desperate and alone enough to take his life. A few people beat themselves up for not hearing cries for help, or hearing them and not doing enough. Some hints arose that Trey had difficulties with the church on the grounds of which he killed himself. On Tuesday, some loved ones cried out against the language that same church used in its memorial service for Trey.

Some of the more striking and frequently cited pieces of writing after Trey’s death included The Difference Between Me and Trey Pennington by Bridget Pilloud, Today My World Changed by Kris Colvin (which mentioned that Trey had attempted suicide once before), and Trey Pennington, a Good Man from Trey’s best friend and cousin Rhonda Snowden Norsby. Doing a search on Trey’s name, of course, yields many more tributes and reflections.

Missing in all this was any kind of “mainstream media” coverage of Trey’s death — radio, TV, newspapers. I would like to think I sought out such reports not for maudlin or rubber-necking reasons but because I hoped for some balanced and factual coverage as a counterpoint to the emotions exploded on social media. Rumors were starting, and a few things turned out not to be true. Perhaps I’m old-fashioned to think journalists would have the straight story, but that’s what I hoped for. Trey died around 11 a.m. Eastern, and not until 8:44 p.m. did I see a brief, not very detailed report from a local TV station. By the next morning, the report was gone.

Apparently many media outlets have policies against reporting suicides, in part because doing so inspires copycats or “suicide contagion.” WYFF, the TV station with the report, which eventually reappeared in greater detail, noted, “Because of the public nature of Trey Pennington’s career as a leader in the social media community, WYFF4.com is making an exception to its general policy in order to cover Pennington’s untimely death.”

One reason Trey’s death was so shocking was that in constructing his personal story and identity online, little of Trey’s pain and suffering came through. I do remember a Facebook post a few months back to the effect that his wife was turning his six children against him (if I am remembering inaccurately, I hope someone will correct me), and Trey asked for support from his vast network of contacts. Beyond that, Trey seemed to me to be the same kind, enthusiastic, effusive person he had always appeared to me. Would the tragic outcome have been any different if he had expressed more of his pain publicly? We cannot say.

We all construct our stories a little differently (sometimes a lot differently) in the virtual world from the way we construct them in real life, a phenomenon that fascinates me. I pass no judgment on this practice. I am struck that Trey can no longer tell his story in either realm — but so many are now telling Trey’s story and how their own stories intersected with his.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

At least a year and a half ago, I planned a post entitled “Proposition: Storytelling 2.0 is the Holy Grail of Online Content.” The post was inspired by the seminal, attention-getting, oft-cited piece by Bryan Alexander and Alan Levine, “Web 2.0 Storytelling: The Emergence of a New Genre” (which came out in the Nov-Dec 2008 issue of EDUCAUSE Review). That was a damned important piece, and no self-respecting curator of material about applied storytelling should have let it go by without notice or comment. I still have, somewhere in my milk crate of possible blog material, a thick sheaf of material for my planned post, held together with a binder clip.

But I never wrote the post. I kept scheduling it, probably beginning with its late 2008 publication date, and pushing it back. The most recent date for which I had scheduled it was Dec. 31, 2009. The post just kept growing in my brain; I kept collecting more and more relevant material; and I just never felt I could do justice to Alexander’s and Levine’s brilliant piece.

A recent post by writer and instructional designer Dianne Rees reminded my of my long-neglected response. The moment has likely long passed for the post I originally planned, but it’s worth noting that Web 2.0 storytelling, or as I prefer to call it, Storytelling 2.0, is alive and well.

Rees designed a brief, attractive slideshow describing several salient points about Storytelling 2.0:

Rees also lists 14 examples of Storytelling 2.0, of which I’ve blogged about or listed lonelygirl15, twistori, Tell a story in 5 frames, Cathy’s Book, and We feel fine.

Rees’s listings that were new to me:

• Skeleton Creek
• 2009: A true story
• Playing for keeps
• Postmodern Sass
• Alternate Reality Games
• World without oil
• Hamlet on Facebook
• Loser Queen
• Trackers

Another one, recently gaining significant buzz, though not on Rees’s list is Welcome to Pine Point, described by Kottke.org as, “a lovely interactive remembrance of a Canadian mining town that doesn’t exist anymore.” A blog post by “Katherine” on NPR’s ScienceFriday.com calls the project “an interactive documentary. A virtual scrapbook. A ‘liquid book,’ noting that Welcome to Pine Point is “hard to define, because I’ve never seen anything like it before. But it’s most certainly a beautiful project that, to me, signals a new era in storytelling.” She continues:

The format is an interactive webpage, full of photos, interviews, videos, animations, music, and text. The story is a meditation on memory, and the medium itself seems to mimic how we experience memory — through sometimes random, often powerful fragments.

Katherine also cites a piece on Neiman Storyboard that gives the backstory of the Pine Point project.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

A year after presenting a webinar on Telling a Story with Social Media, Ann Treacy writes, she found that story was all she was hearing about. Indeed, 2010 seems to have been the year of social-media storytelling. Treacy said she’d found that businesses “who can tell their story online — and better yet engage their customers/communities to help tell the story — are most successful online.” Today, a few choice tidbits on social-media storytelling:

It’s delightful to see storytelling as the holy-grail fifth stage in the “Five Stages of Humanization for a Social Business” in a guest post by Jay Baer and Amber Naslund excerpted from their book, The NOW Revolution: 7 Shifts to Make Your Business Faster, Smarter & More Social, which will be released next Tuesday (Feb. 1). The previous stages are ignoring, listening, responding, and participating. The storytelling stage, the authors write, “is when you start to become a documentarian, communicating in multiple formats about company history, people, and behind-the-scenes information.” The”paradox and genius of the storytelling stop on the highway,” the authors note, is that “you’re marketing your company, but so indirectly that it becomes ‘UnMarketing.’”

A couple of nice how-tos for social-media storytelling include Dr. Pamela Rutledge’s 5 Keys for Social Media Marketing Using Storytelling, who offers the steps (1) Find your story; (2) Build your story; (3) Plan the story arc; (4)Share your story; and (5) Give value. The other is 3 Storytelling Hacks | Curation Tools by Kevin Dugan, listing tools he uses to help tell stories online — ScoopIt, BlipSnips, and crowdsourced stories via. Flickr (the example he gives makes me question the story value).

I’ve written a number of times about various attempt to tell stories with Twitter. Not too long ago, Andrea Pitzer offered an interesting roundup of storied Twitter uses on Neiman Storyboard. Pitzer, who writes about story from a journalistic standpoint, concludes: “If Twitter continues to build its user base, journalists will have an expanding pool of millions of voices and characters on hand with individual stories authors can weave into a larger nonfiction narrative.”

Facebook is also cited for its story capabilities, such as in two recent examples — La Città di Asterix (the City of Asterix), a Facebook group (graphic shown at left); and A Facebook story: A mother’s joy and a family’s sorrow, as told by the Washington Post, which edited and annotated the Facebook page of Shana Greatman Swers to tell her story from date nights during her pregnancy “to a medical odyssey that turned the ecstasy of childbirth into a struggle for life.” Carlotta Mismetti Capua tells the backstory of La Città di Asterix, the Italian-language Facebook group that tells the story of four Afghan boys in Rome. Watching this video is also a good way to understand the backstory, though it doesn’t mention the Facebook group.

An interesting video by Jim Banister, The Nature of Social Narrative, examines whether social networks are storytelling media and looks at various story constructs, as shown in the screenshot below. He kind of loses me when he starts talking about programming and gaming, but the video provides food for thought.

One new twist — one I’m not totally sold on (pun intended) is the idea that, as Jesse Stanchak writes, “Commerce is a narrative art.” Stanchak’s jumping-off point is the trendy location-based social networks that “provide the bare bones of the narrative, but none of the details that make the story worth hearing.” He notes that “when we ask someone where they have been, what we really want to know is, ‘What happened to you once you got there?’” Stanchak then profiles seven “social-commerce” networks that “aren’t about the money you’re spending, they’re about experiences that tell stories.” These services are Social Currency, Blippy, Swipely, SCVNGR, Barcode Hero, Beerby, and Ravelry. Decide for yourself the extent to which they enable storytelling.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

In the next couple of weeks, I’ll be reinventing my personal bio story, based on a series of webinars presented by Michael Margolis. Regular readers know the journey began here.

I’ve been talking about my own journey in blog posts in this space and summarizing the webinars on inside pages. I’m not sure I’ll keep summarizing; the summaries are time-consuming, I’m not sure anyone is reading them, and I’m not sure Michael wants me to give away his information.

The second webinar, “Synthesizing: Finding the Through-Line Arc,” excited me but raised a number of questions. The webinar closed with an assignment to attendees to prepare a draft of our personal bio stories before the final session on Feb. 3.

Michael noted that most bios are at the extremes of obnoxious self-importance or boring earnestness. I think mine probably has elements of both.

To avoid those extremes, the bio should tell a story that people can identify as their own. That concept scares me because I often feel like an oddball with a story no one can identify with. I would imagine I’m not the only one who feels that way.

He also pointed out that most bios lean too heavily on external validators and not enough on natural authority. In Michael’s vision of a five-component bio, one should lead with natural authority. That’s another concept I have a bit of trouble with. I have confidence in my natural authority in the self that is a career/job-search expert, and perhaps the self that is a writer. But the whole idea behind the bio-story webinar series is reinvention. The reinvented self I strive for is the one that makes a living based on my passion for applied storytelling. That’s the self for which I lack confidence in my natural authority.

Michael suggested that bios need to have a point of view (“We want characters. We want personality. We want point of view.”), offering as an example the fact that news consumers have gravitated to news that is blatantly biased to the right (FOX news) or left (MSNBC), and that outlets like CNN that try to remain objective are losing viewers. I was troubled by this analogy, as was another participant, who wrote in the chat box: “The news example is a chilling example of how storytelling point of view is misused in my opinion. Not something to be at all celebrated or emulated in this context.”

I instantly agreed with him, but then I thought about how I really behave. I find most news unwatchable these days. I do watch Jon Stewart, but as I said to the participant I quote above, I consider his show entertainment, not news. But then I realized that, as chagrined as I am to admit it, like many people, I do get some of my news from “The Daily Show.” I tried to watch the relatively objective “PBS News Hour” for a time, but it was deadly dull. Quite a rude awakening to realize I, too, seem to gravitate to news with a point of view. The problem there, is that I think our allegiance to biased news puts us in ideological ghettoes where we become closed off from perspectives not our own. Anyway, this issue may be tangential to creating a personal bio story. I think I would have preferred a different example for: “We want characters. We want personality. We want point of view.”

Another tangent: Michael spent some of the webinar talking about archetypal story structures, including the oft-cited Hero’s Journey. In a Q&A that I’ll be running in February, coach Lisa Rossetti refers to the maleness of the Hero’s Journey archetype. I hadn’t thought about that before and would like to ponder the degree to which the Hero’s Journey is an inclusive archetype.

As I mull over Michael’s ideal five-component bio story, I feel that my LinkedIn profile comes closest to this model. I felt terribly constrained by the character limit LinkedIn requires, but I used my LinkedIn bio as the basis for a profile on my personal site. I think that one is a good starting place for my reinvented bio story, and it also points to my reinvention away from career/job-search expert and toward applied-storytelling guru.

Another component that is challenging for me is No. 2 — Define Your Work. I can easily define my work in the career/job-search realm, but the definition is fuzzy in the applied-storytelling realm. I want to make a living at it. I haven’t yet determined how.

Michael gave us some terrific samples to review over the next couple of weeks as we’re crafting our bio stories:

• Mandy Leith
• Hugh Weber
• Chris Ronan
• Jon Thomas

Michael suggested that lists such as Julie Stuart’s 42 things you might not know about me are an excellent character-revealing add-on to a personal bio story. I have one of those, 45 Random Things About Me, which sprang from a Facebook meme and needs a bit of updating.

I’ll post my personal bio story draft when I complete it and submit it for your scrutiny.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Chances are you’ve seen this video in the last week as it has been making the social-media rounds. But given the unlikelihood that anyone is reading this on Christmas Day, I thought I’d run it. Really does show the capacity of social media to tell a story, even if a very familiar one.

From “ExcentricPT,” the Christmas story told through Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google, Wikipedia, Google Maps, GMail, Foursquare, and Amazon. (I found it incongruous that the secular “Jingle Bells” is the background music).

Since you have likely seen the above, let me leave you with a fresh thought for Christmas, courtesy of Sharon Lippincott, who reminded readers of Lifewriter’s Forum to

savor the Story of the season. I don’t specifically mean the Manger Scene. I mean the Story as you understand and live it. How the Season and its Story affects your life, now and all year.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Performance storyteller Ellouise Schoettler, with her daughter, is offering two workshops for storytellers on getting the most out of Facebook pages. I know of no reason their techniques should not work for those working in the applied-storytelling realm. Ellouise writes:

I’m on Facebook, and it works for me. Often, though, other storytellers tell me they’re on Facebook and it’s wasting their time.

My daughter Robin Fox is a certified Social Media Coach. Working with her has opened my eyes to the value of Facebook to me as both a storyteller and an event producer. Stories are timeless but filling seats? That’s getting harder, isn’t it? I’m convinced Facebook and other Social Media are critical tools for our industry. We just need training.

That’s why Robin and I are beginning to offer Social Media workshops, taught live but online. We’re starting with Facebook Strategies for Storytellers.

Details on the workshops:

Jumpstart Your Facebook Now & Save 20% on the Workshop
Register for Monday, December 20, 2010
7 p.m. to 9 p.m. E.S.T. - Live Workshop Taught Online

OR

Wait and take the January Workshop
Register for Workshop on Sunday, January 9, 2011
7 p.m. to 9 p.m. E.S.T. — Live Workstop Taught Online

All workshops are delivered live through your computer via the Internet at no additional cost to you, and includes audio, slides and downloadable PDF workbook (Internet access required).

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.