Storytelling in Social Media

I have always liked telling stories.

In second grade, I told a story and the teacher made me stay after school for it. After that, I switched to nonfiction. Story telling stayed with me. I majored in it in college and then I became a journalist.

I remember my days as a newspaper reporter and editor with great joy colored by nostalgia. What slowly strangled the love, was that being a reporter required a vow of poverty. I have never found great virtue in poverty and I did not like it.

So I became a PR guy. This provided me with some level of affluence, at times, but it really threatened by dedication to nonfiction story telling. It also put me into a culture that loved bullet points far more than stories.

Then social media came along. More than half a lifetime had passed, but finally I found a venue that is made for story telling. Stories work so much better in most social media venues than do "three key points," or "six steps to a more perfect complexion."

The thing that you need to realize is the power of storytelling is in the simplicity of the tale.

In business, we very often have a tendency to try to sound as smart as we can. We try to show how much complexity goes into whatever it is we are selling. People want to know how easy it is to drive that car far more than they wish to understand the principals of torque.

Complexity is not memorable and it is rarely fun.Audiences often doze more and retain less.
But a story, ah, a story. I bet you can tell me a story you learned from your childhood and I bet you smiled when you recollected it. You can probably tell me who told or read it to you and where you were.

Can you do that with a recent business diagram, or PowerPoint bullets?

I didn't think so.