Reinvention Summit 2 is history, but I’m continuing to recap, synthesize, and expand on its 20 excellent sessions.

From a session with Marie Forleo (“My goal is to add more value to your world than you ever dreamed possible by giving you tools that you can immediately use to improve your business and life.”) and Corbett Barr (“I help people build cool stuff online”), I’m synthesizing bite-sized bits of advice about how to make the most of the social-driven social content you generate, both from a change-the-world perspective and a revenue-generation perspective.

1. Speak and write in your own voice. Both Marie and Corbett described starting out after college in “soul-sucking” and “mind-numbing” jobs that they wanted to get out of as quickly as possible. Because Marie was so young — just 23 — when she struck out on her own, she felt she had to project her online presence in a highly professional manner. But it wasn’t her, and when she decided she had to write in own voice, she got much better results. Corbett found that the more open and honest he was, the more he connected with his audience, and the more the audience grew.

2. Think about how you can be of service to your audience. That’s an especially useful trick Marie says, if you’re worried about what people think of you.
3. Use mind tricks to overcome any fear of exposing your vulnerabilities. Marie advises remembering that it’s easy to have personal conversations and share you opinions at a party or other social situation; thus “it’s not that different online.” Corbett suggests that on your way to finding your voice and telling your story in a way that can relate to multiple people, make your audience feel you’re talking one-on-one to them.
4. Conceptualize the “avatar” of your audience. Knowing the characteristics of your ideal customer or reader will help you appropriately target your audience. What is it about that person who identifies with your business’s mission and values? Consider also, Marie says, a individual avatar for individual services or products, as well as overall avatar. And be open to a greater audience beyond the avatar you conceptualize. Corbett suggests thinking through who the ideal people are you’re trying to help. Think about their representative issues. He notes that audience feedback and comments could not be more important.
5. Learn what resonates with the consumers of your content and what they remember you for. For Marie, it has been her painful struggle to be “multi-passionate” and juggle her many interests. They remember tidbits like the fact that she’s from New Jersey and loves hip-hop. For Corbett, a post, 33 Things I’ve Never Told You (or, How to Re-Introduce Yourself and Kick Your Watered-Down Self in the Ass), became a “rallying cry for finding your voice.” He recommends that the stories you tell to your audience need to help people and relate to the actions you want them to take to help themselves.
6. When it comes to social media, determine where you you want to focus your energy and attention. Once you choose your vehicle — Facebook LinkedIn, Twitter, or something else, Marie says, “dominate it.” She also gives particular attention to comments on her blog.
7. Be transparent and be nice when communicating with your audience. Transparency especially comes into play if you have team members involved in your interactions with your audience. Be sure audience members know when it’s really you communicating and when it’s a team member. Corbett notes that if you’re nice to people, good things will happen — “just being there, being a real person, and caring about the people that contact you.”

8. Be strategic. You have to really know your business model, Marie cautions. Not every piece of the business is about making money, but it’s still part of the strategy. For example, she doesn’t monetize her MarieTV initiative. Instead, she says, its “core driver is to make a difference.” Marie also advises giving up a bit of impulsiveness. For every project you’re considering jumping on, you have to ask yourself, for example, “What is the purpose of [this ebook]? Where does it fit into the strategy? Why am I gonna do this?” Each project needs to fit into big picture, the revenue model. Corbett suggests whittling 10 possible projects to one or or two. Part of strategy for Corbett is providing something of value. “Content is the way to demonstrate you have something of value,” he says. Indeed, for Marie, too, strategy is tied to value, and in turn to content: “You have to be clear on where you want business to go,” she says. “You have to know where you’re going so you can reverse-engineer where the content goes.”
9. Find your mechanism for self-actualization. For some, it might be expression through social media, but for for Marie, starting a business — taking ownership, taking risks — has been the tool for self-actualization. “Starting a business is the best personal development you can find,” she observes.
10. Get on the “No Train.” “Give an immediate ‘no’ to every new idea,” Marie exhorts (especially to women). She has published several blog posts and videos about the “no train,” the most explanatory of which is probably this one, where she writes: “When you’re on the No Train, you allow ‘no’ to be your initial response to new projects, new requests, new demands on your time.” Later, if projects fit into the strategy, they can come off the “no train.
11. Train yourself to be a better copywriter. Content has its limits, Marie say, if you can’t write a great headline, email subject line, or tweet. Your copy should inspire your audience to take action, so use storytelling to enhance your calls to action. Marie’s favorite copywriting resources include Copyblogger and Social Triggers.
12. Ask yourself: What, how, and why. Corbett recommends asking these three questions about your venture: What value will I help people with? How will I do that? Why should anyone care? Further, why should anyone pay attention to my blog, business vs. others. How can I be different from any others?

See also Corbett’s Start a Blog That matters and Think Traffic.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Reinvention Summit 2 is history, but my Scoop.it curation, Reinvention 2 on Scoop.it, serves as an ongoing magazine about the continuing storytelling energy the event has generated.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

See a photo of Mary, her bio, and Part 1 of this Q&A.

Q&A with Mary Daniels Brown, Question 2:

Q: To what extent do you believe people construct their narrative identities differently in the digital world — for example on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and blogs — from the way they do “in real life”?

A: I used to think that perspective was the most important aspect of a person’s self-defining life story. But I’ve realized that context is just as important.

The contrast between the identity we create in the digital world and the identity we project in real life is a good example of the importance of context. In fact, the dichotomy of digital identity vs. real-life identity is a gross oversimplification. We all contain many, many selves, and which one we present at a given moment depends on the social situation. Although most of us have a basic core identity that remains the same, we project variations on that core identity in response to the social situation we find ourselves in.

In terms of online identity, for example, I have three accounts: LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. LinkedIn is a site for professional networking, so on that site I focus on my education, my skills, and my professional experience and accomplishments. I don’t express my political leanings or my views on current issues such as abortion or gay marriage. However, I use my Facebook account to keep in touch with a limited group of family and close friends. My Facebook updates express my social values and political beliefs. My Facebook identity is much more informal than my LinkedIn identity. And I use Twitter mainly to showcase my professional interests, although I also try to include enough personal details to make me look like a real person. Last fall, for example, when my hometown team, the St. Louis Cardinals, improbably won the World Series, I tweeted my moments of agony and ecstasy during the games. So my Twitter identity is somewhere between my LinkedIn and Facebook identities. Some people even have separate professional and personal Twitter accounts. But I don’t have “an online identity.” I have several slightly different online identities that I use for different purposes.

Most people also have several variations of their “real-life identity.” For example, we act differently in a meeting at work than we do when watching the Super Bowl on television with a bunch of friends. When we create a particular identity for a specific social situation, we are not being hypocritical but are making a prudent assessment of what aspects of ourselves we find appropriate to reveal under the circumstances. We match the narratives we tell about ourselves to our perception of the social context.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I want to give you an idea about just how incredibly content-rich we can expect next month’s Reinvention Summit to be.

During the 2010 Summit, I covered on this blog just 6 of many sessions offered. But as you can see from the links below, I learned so much, was inundated with so many ideas, and got so energized that I cannot even begin to describe the value the event imparted.

The April 16-20 event is described as An Online Conference for Storytelling in the Digital Age, but it’s about so much more than storytelling. Interested in self-actualization? Your authentic identity? Branding yourself and your business? Being on the cutting edge of social messaging? If you want all that and so much more, this conference is for you.

This virtual conference features some heavy-hitters — Robert McKee, Rohit Barghava, Jeff Gomez, Jim Signorelli, and more. I’m already planning which sessions I want to be sure to “attend” and cover.

One of the very best parts unfolds spontaneously during the event — conversation among the attendees, who form an amazing bond, and whose wisdom, generosity, and sharing extends the value of every session.

I encourage you to check out my posts from the 2010 Summit just to bask in the richness of the event and get an idea of what you can expect:

• Social Movements as Participatory Storytelling with Andy Goodman and Lily McCombs
• 5 points from the inimitable Annette Simmons
• Jason Seiden and Julie Ann Turner on living your story and following your story arc instead of a career path.
• Nancy Duarte’s brilliant and mind-blowing story structure for presentations.
• Angela Maiers tells how to fix education through story.
• Summit founder Michael Margolis charges the tribe members with setting their reinvention intention in the closing session.

If you decide you’d like a piece of this action, register now, because early-bird pricing ($197 vs. $297) goes away after Saturday, the 31st.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Someday I’d like to attend the South By Southwest (SXSW) Interactive conference in Austin. In the meantime, it’s nice that the conference gets comprehensively covered in clever ways with strong story elements. Here are two that caught my eye this year:

Storify: Storify, the tool that helps users tell stories by curating social media, was the storytelling medium behind more than 1,000 stories about the interactive conference. See some of them here. Storify was also the winner of the Social Media category of the 2012 SXSW Interactive Awards. The Social Media category is for “users and campaigns that are creatively connecting and sharing their experience.”

Ogilvy Notes is a series of visual summaries of the biggest and best keynotes and panels at SXSW. This method of visual note-taking is growing in popularity and contains some storied elements.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

As I noted in mid-January, Mashable recently held a story contest to mark the huge expansion of the character limit of Facebook status updates to 63,206 characters. The site announced the winner this week:

We received a range of responses, including prose, poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and even someone who used Facebook to quit his job. But one suspenseful story stood out, and we’re happy to announce Dan Holden as the winner for his 15,084-character tale, “Taking Forever.”

Holden’s story is striking, suspenseful, and contains a twist. It’s unclear to me whether it’s fiction or a true story. I thought it was true for most of the story but then was unsure at the end. You can find it, along with a brief interview with the author here.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I had two occasions in the last couple of months to see the “About” pages of many Web sites and blogs. In the first, I had a few dozen story practitioners that I wanted to invite to participate in my Q&A series. In the second, I visited many sites and blogs to glean a short description of each so I could list them on my inside pages.

Both activities had maddening elements.

Probably about a third of the “practitioners” provided absolutely no way to contact them. These were mostly bloggers. I do understand that blogging has its roots in anonymity. While most bloggers identify themselves today (Is that a true statement? Any stats on blogger anonymity?), some still have legitimate reasons to hide their identities. They may not want their employers to know about their blogs, for example.

But note that I perceived these bloggers as practitioners in the story world. That means they appeared to be interested in selling their services — so how do they expect to do so if they provide no contact information? Some provided only a first name; a few provided no name at all.

I don’t get it.

The other maddening phenomenon involved sites and blogs (and here I also refer to the businesses or organizations behind the sites) that provided little or no idea of what they are about — their purpose, mission, premise, etc. In at least two cases, I had to turn to third-party sites to get a description of the thrust of the sites I wanted to list. That’s just pathetic, in my opinion. Common situations:

• Absolutely no About page at all and no description on the home page as to what the site is about.
• Descriptions on the About page of people behind the site, but still no hint of what the site is about.
• Long — often nicely written and even storied — descriptions of an overall philosophy, but still no concise statement of what the site is about.
• Worse, a long, boring chronological bio with all of the founder’s credentials, but again no concise statement of what the site is about.
• Site where one could probably figure out what the site is about by using it, but the user must register to do so.
• The user has to watch a video to find out what the site is about. Sorry, I don’t have the patience for that.

Here are the two crazy-making examples from my recent endeavors for which I had to consult third-party sites to get a description:

The much buzzed-about Dear Photograph: Now, it’s not hard to figure out what this site is about by looking at it: Submitters take a snapshot — usually one featuring one or more people and dating from the film-photography era — and hold it up against the original setting so that past and present blend into a new work of art. They also write a brief piece about the work. But would it kill founder Taylor Jones to have an About page? I’d love to see how he sees the site, what his vision for it is, a description of it in his own words.

Small Demons: No About page. You’ll find a fair amount of text on the home page for this tool. But none of it explains how to use the tool, what the purpose is, and why you would want to use it. In fairness, a 1:49 video gets the user a little closer to understanding — but still doesn’t tell us how or why this tool is useful. We could also perhaps figure it out if we registered on the site. Personally, I’d like to know what I’m registering for before I register. Could we not get a simple explanation of a couple of sentences that tells us what Small Demons is good for? Something like these sentences I resorted to from Cool Hunting: “Collects and catalogs the millions of references to real-world and fictional music, movies, people, and objects that are found in literature and provides a place — a Storyverse — where users can draw meaningful connections between stories and everyday life.” I can only wonder at how many more users Small Demons would get if people could figure out what it’s about.

Not long ago, the About page of blogger Len Evans’s blog, “Looking Out from My Little Place was cited as a nice, storied example of an About page (I’m sorry that I forget who pointed it out.)

The story is indeed charming, authentic, and personal, especially when juxtaposed with the link Evans provides at the end of the story: “The Blah, Blah, Blah Bio” (also charmingly, there’s not all that much blah, blah, blah).

Evans’s story isn’t perfect. It’s a tad long. He says what he’s about but isn’t explicit about what the blog’s about. A quick look, however, reveals that his “about” and his blog’s are one and the same: “pastoring youth pastors and youth workers, helping build healthy local youth ministry networks, providing youth ministry training and walking alongside churches with a process so they can discern and discover what a healthy youth ministry means in their context.”

Still, it’s a refreshing About page compared to many.

Karen Dietz included in her Just Story It Scoop.it curation today Sonia Simone’s article on this “About” subject, Are You Making These 7 Mistakes with Your About Page?, which covers many of the same complaints I’ve just ranted about — plus more:

1. You don’t have an About page.
2. I can’t find your name.
3. I don’t know what you look like. (Not a huge complaint for me, but a photo is nice.)
4. The writing is boring.
5. Using video alone.
6. You go on (and on and on).
7. I bet you think your About Page is about you.

The article also generated 113 comments (at this writing), so it’s a great discussion of the issues of About pages.

Why do you think so many Web folks and bloggers fall down in the area of About pages, and what are your pet peeves?

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I committed myself this month to updating some aspects of this blog, notably the “inside pages” on which I list links related to applied storytelling (Links to Interdisciplinary Storytelling Resources, Links to Organizational Storytelling Resources, Links to Storytelling Platforms, Tools, and Prompts, Links to Blogs that Relate to Storytelling, Links that Relate to Storytelling and Career, and Links about Memoir-Writing, Journaling, and Personal Storytelling).

I was also planning to update “Kat’s Definitive Twitter Story Follow List.” I’m not usually the type to make bold pronouncements, such as “my list of story people to follow on Twitter is definitive,” but I did so a few years ago in a fanciful mood.

I was horrified to discover during my updating process that I had not updated my Twitter-Follow list in almost three years!

I’m guessing that I initiated the list before Twitter enabled users to create lists there. As I considered updating my Twitter-Follow list, I wondered whether it made any sense to simply copy the information that appears on this page of my Twitter profile to a page within this blog. No, of course it doesn’t when I can simply provide a link to the list.

I follow, at this writing, 412 Twitter entities on a list I call Storytelling Practitioners. Despite its name, it’s a pretty all-encompassing list that includes brands and story tools as well as people. Most are in applied storytelling, but a few are traditional oral-performance storytellers.

To be honest, I use Twitter much less than I once did, and I was never a devoted Twitter user. I just never got into it the way some folks do; all the FF-ing, RT-ing, and thanking seemed exhausting and time-consuming.

Twitter is a great way to find out about new content in the applied-storytelling realm, but one must wade through an awful lot of repetition and noise to get to the gems. At one time I had a wonderful desktop app called Twicker. Icons of folks who used the #storytelling hashtag would move across my screen in ticker fashion. It was a great way to keep up, especially when I could see icons of my favorite story peeps. I can’t make Twicker work anymore, and it doesn’t seem to be supported. If I still had Twicker or something like it, I’d be much more into Twitter than I am.

I have other ways of uncovering finds now, and one can be enmeshed in just so many social-media venues. As I’ve said before in this space, I’m a long-time Facebook gal. I’m sure I miss some story goodies by putting so many of my eggs in the Facebook basket, but my experience on Facebook is much more enjoyable than it is on Twitter.

Each to his or her own when it comes to social media. I hope my friends for whom Twitter is a big deal don’t feel neglected and unappreciated when I don’t notice a shoutout from them. I am grateful for the attention, even if I fail to say so.

If you’re new to the story world or just curious about whom I follow in that realm, please do check out my public Twitter Story Practitioners list.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

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.