Guest Post by: Charlie Osmond
Social Media is all about conversations. It’s people connecting, interacting and sharing content. And whether it’s online or in the real world, the most engaging conversations involve other people’s stories.
Image via Shutterstock
Storytelling is the most powerful driver of engagement in social media. Just as good stories provide the momentum for great books and great speeches, they’re also the impetus for the best in social media.
Storytelling as a tool has been well understood and consciously used by salespeople for decades. What I find surprising is that whilst it’s also been used by marketeers for a long time, it really only hit mainstream marketing theory in the last naughties. I assume the sudden rise comes from it’s ties to social media and conversational marketing made famous by The Cluetrain Manifesto. – I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.
Anyway, the real reason why I wrote this post was to share the following with you. This morning I recieved an unsolicited email pitch from an Indian IT Outsourcing firm, ValueLabs. I get a lot of these and I rarely open their attachments. However on this occasion I clicked on the attached PowerPoint. After skimming the first nine pages of text, charts and diagrams, I reached page ten and couldn’t help but take notice.
This was the only page with a photo rather than a chart and it had far less text on it – perhaps it was a combination of these two things that drew me in. But what really turned me on was the story behind the image. Thanks to the story, this slide is more powerful than any other I’ve been sent by outsourcers. It has a clear message and on top of that provides a clear reason to believe.
Here’s the slide…
Storytelling by ValueLabs
Original Post: http://blog.freshnetworks.com/2009/08/storytelling-and-social-media/
