It’s easy to overlook the daily stories we tell and how they interconnect us with one another.
As a student of Gonzaga University’s online communication and leadership program, I recently spent a weekend in Spokane, Wash., discussing the principles of good storytelling. Unlike many of my classmates, I get to talk about storytelling and writing principles all the time. I wasn’t expecting to hear anything too revolutionary. But, silly me, I forgot about the power of community.
Our intimate group of 20 was made up of vastly different backgrounds and stories. We formed a community around our mutual interest in learning, and shared pieces of ourselves that we rarely share with others. For instance, our instructor asked us each to find a quote that spoke to our hearts, and read it aloud to the group. Each beautiful line gave us a peek inside one another’s personality: One man recited his wedding vows; another read hip-hop lyrics from The Roots. Some students chose quotes from their favorite books; others read poems from their childhood.
These snippets painted images of one another that conveyed our personal histories — one of many storytelling lessons I learned from my educational community and Prof. Kristina Morehouse that weekend:
- “Stop in time, and pay attention to the power of words.” What we say builds community — and sadly, sometimes breaks it down. We need to be mindful of the words we use because someone is always listening.
- “Concise messages are most important.” If you find the right word, you don’t need as many.
- “Show, don’t tell.” When telling a story, don’t leave out the details. Oftentimes, we’re writing for an online audience that reads fast and suffers from information overload, so we skimp on the background information — the interesting characteristics — and focus solely on the lead, aiming to quickly grab attention. But when the next newsworthy headline hits, your lead is long gone.
- “Everyone needs one really good editor.” Find someone you trust to read your work. Ask for constructive criticism, and grow from your mistakes.
- “You can’t write if you don’t read.” Even the best writers find inspiration in other people’s words, and they appreciate how others phrase their musings. We should all read to better learn about the basic rules of grammar, and to uncover the magic behind parallel structure and cadence.
I found myself nodding along to each suggestion, excited to share them with my broader community of writers, editors and storytellers. Even if we’ve heard them before, it’s always nice to reiterate their importance in our industry.
And as for my inspirational quote? Always the grammarian, I read a quote that demonstrates parallelism at its finest:
“To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else’s heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.”
– Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “Love in the Time of Cholera”
Image by wallyg.
Subtitle: What I learned at BlogWorld L.A.
Write it. Just hit publish.
Those were my closing thoughts during a workshop I gave on how to utilize the real-time Web for better storytelling. We get so distracted by processes, editing, review cycles and proper tone that we miss the boat. We miss an opportunity to tell a story when telling that story is most vital.
Being able to tell a story is more than the words you use. Sometimes, just writing from the heart is the best way to ensure that people listen to your story. There’s no strategy that enables you to tell a story. While at BlogWorld & New Media Expo, I had a fair number of informative and enlightening experiences.
I got to meet Cloris Leachman. Thanks to Amber Osborne, aka @MissDestructo, for taking this great picture.
I got to attend my first-ever Kings game. Here’s the view from my seats at the game. Thanks to Brian at shareasale.com for these tickets!
And I even got to learn something along the way. The main thing I learned is that at the end of the day, the stories we get to tell are just content. Creating content is fun. Being able to start a new email or a new blog post or a new tweet is fun. Getting to tell stories for a living is amazing. If you happen to be able to make money from the stories you tell, that’s even better.
My workshop focused on how to create a strategy and utilize the technology available to tell better stories faster. While I was telling my aunt (who happens to be a newspaper publisher) about this, she asked me “How is this different from journalism?” Without hesitation I smiled to myself and said “it’s not.” My background is in reporting, so telling a story, quickly, is a skill I’ve been able to make work for me.
It’s just content
At our hearts, we are all storytellers. We want to connect our clients and business groups with customers, reporters and shoppers (they’re all “influencers”), and we want to do it with soul and passion and adept skill. As communications professionals, there is nothing more fun than telling a great story.
I was surrounded by food bloggers, mommy bloggers, tech bloggers and even bloggers who blog about blogging. All of them, though, are storytellers creating content. As communications professionals, we tell stories. We work with clients to create messaging and compel people to act. There are countless pieces of research on how to appeal to emotions and how to optimize for search. You can A/B test your headlines. You can put a picture above the fold or you can add a video.
But at the end of the day, your story is just content.
At BlogWorld, CC Chapman shared the story of a site created by the U.S. Army to tell the stories of soldiers on the front lines and returning from home. Go spend a few minutes reading their stories.
These are human stories told without editors and without a content calendar or SEO in mind. Whole platoons can write from the front line in Afghanistan. No filters or editors at all. And the Army is adamant about the blog having a human voice. If the U.S. Army can speak human, you can too.
Measure twice, cut once
The old carpenter’s adage seemed to ring true here as well. Being able to prove your mettle was an underlying trend at BlogWorld. From back-channel debates on what constitutes science to super smart people like Tom Webster presenting enough stats to melt your mind, the emphasis on measurement and analytics was clear. Here at Waggener Edstrom Worldwide, we place an emphasis on measuring actionable metrics and using them to influence the decisions you make.
Having the tracking systems in place that show both where traffic goes and whether the goals you have in place are accomplished is vital to the continued success of your content strategy. Content and storytelling doesn’t have to be all for profit. Telling stories and communicating with an audience is great in and of itself. Being able to track performance and metrics, you can create actionable plans for future content strategies.
Products such as Ripple Effect and Narrative Network® make deciphering the streams of information easier. It’s up to you how you want to act on it.
There’s perpetual discussion about the ROI of social media. The person that tries to claim that social media doesn’t have an ROI is seriously flawed. If you can’t track, test or convert on the content you’re creating, you need to rethink your strategy. Everything has a metric. ROI means being able to track the outs of what you’re putting in. It may not have a dollar sign in front of it, but it does have action.
So, just publish. Just tell a story. Just remember to tell the story you want to tell and tell it the best you can.
New York Public Library (NYPL)
Last weekend I was locked inside the New York Public Library (NYPL) for the entire night. I was not alone in that massive, elaborately decorated building. There were 499 other people from around the nation participating in a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: We were invited to “Find the Future” to help kick off the NYPL centennial celebrations. All 500 participants were asked to participate in a complex Alternate Reality Game (ARG).
So we were all locked inside the library from 7 p.m. to 6 a.m. on a nightlong scavenger hunt and novel writing experiment. The experience, the creativity, the game, the idea and the final product were incredible, truly unique feats (not to mention memories that I will carry with me for the rest of my life)!
Editors and book binder servicing the pool of 500.
The night began with gaming mastermind and futurist Jane McGonigal explaining the game to the players as we gathered in the beautiful wooden NYPL reading room. Our mission was to explore the massive, historical library on a never-before-done scavenger hunt, where we would break into teams, seek out artifacts and write a 600-page book by the end of the night, describing the stories of each artifact. We had a website and a smartphone app to help us out as we scoured the building, looking for 100 famous artifacts and the stories they told. Along with each artifact was a writing prompt inspiring the players to reflect on ideas of their own that fit into the significance of the history they were observing.
The game consisted of two elements: 1) We ran around the library in small teams consisting of professionals, academics, gamers, creatives, writers, journalists, readers and library lovers seeking out artifacts and their coinciding QR codes that unlocked each story and writing or creative prompt; and 2) together or individually, we generated unique content, stories, images and designs. It was our aim as a collective group to cover all 100 topics and create enough content by the time the sun came up.
Using the smartphone app as our main tool, my team roamed around all corners of the library and scanned QR codes that were associated with displays that matched artifact clues. After scanning each QR code, the app would “power up.” In essence, the more QR codes a team had, the more power a team had. The power was largely irrelevant, although it signified the unlocking of creative prompts.
Each artifact was “infused” with special powers that you, in turn, absorbed when you scanned its QR code. Each power represented different elements of knowledge. Next, back at the reading room, we looked at the artifacts we had just scanned on the game’s website and began writing as a team on the prompts that each one provided. An added incentive was the fact that certain stories had to be done before certain deadlines. From there, it was simply a game of “find the prompt that you feel like writing about.” Some prompts involved writing, while others involved photography, drawing or visual representations. The book had to be finished by 6 a.m.
As an additional bonus to the eve, we all were given the rare privilege of being taken on guided tours of the NYPL stacks (where the opening scene from Ghostbusters was staged). And in case you were wondering, the place is definitely haunted. There are seven stories of books below New York and Bryant Park. The NYPL stacks contain 80 miles worth of books. If your mind just exploded, I don’t blame you — mine did too. In the stacks, each of us would find a hidden postcard (well, 500 of them), which had a personalized “message from the future” handwritten by Jane and her team. The message was about how the scenarios each of us had written about in our application would (hopefully) play out. It was a thoughtful addition to the overall game. To make this task a difficult and enjoyable one, each of us had to take our postcard and then deliver it to the person it was addressed to. With everyone scattered throughout the library all night, this was a challenge and, ultimately, a satisfying experience. The idea behind this task was that each of us would make connections with others who weren’t already working directly on our teams and for us to make connections to people that, as fate would have it, we were connected to. I enjoyed this task and thought it very exciting when I found Charlie B., the man whose card I had and when I was found by Lanie, the woman who had my card.
Team Awesome Wombat (My team at Find the Future)
On Saturday morning, I finally got home at 7:15 and set my alarm for noon. I didn’t wake up from my slumber until 3 p.m., and I’m still overwhelmed by my experience at the NYPL. What I’m left with is this: “Finding the Future” at NYPL with 499 amazing people — representing different minds, different skill sets, different world views, different professional disciplines and different histories, but with a common interest in promoting the public library system and a commitment to contributing to our world — was truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and one that I feel honored to have participated in. While I felt the game was an interesting ARG application and representative of different approaches to business and learning that we will likely find in the future — and I thought the artifacts were awesome and interesting — it’s not every day that you see the stuffed animals that inspired Winnie the Pooh, the Gutenberg Bible or a handwritten score by John Coltrane. However, the thing that I thought was most amazing about the entire experience was having the opportunity to be in a room full of 500 inspired people who for an entire evening were collaborating, brainstorming and producing completely unique and original ideas. I have absolutely never experienced an environment of such condensed creativity. There was a constant buzz in the air that was composed of 500 different thoughts and opinions. It was absolutely impossible to not feel the creative electricity of the room and feel inspired to contribute to the novel. The final outcome was that more than 18,000 stories were written that evening, and we will have a 600-page, hand-bound book published that will forever be held in the NYPL collection. If you ever visit NYPL on Fifth Avenue, ask for the book and see what happened on May 20-21, 2011, the night before the end of the world. The evening was a first-class success and an irreplaceable experience. We collectively “Found the Future.” It turns out that the future could be a pretty awesome place.
This week NPR broke the shocking news that more than one person contributes to the creation of timeless tales. Apparently prose-perfect Jane Austen had an editor. Well! I haven’t been this unsurprised since I learned “Beowulf” might have resulted from oral tradition instead of “coming finished from the [newly invented] pen” of a somehow-literate Old English poet.
Sarcasm aside, I was disappointed by the reporter’s missed opportunity to explore the reasons authors seem to be expected to function as one-person perfect creation machines. Since when is creative collaboration a bad thing?
In the story, reporter Mary Louise Kelly interviewed the scholar leading a project to make a glut of Austen’s edited pages available online. She asked, “I’m wondering if you’ve heard from any of her diehard fans who are surprised, maybe disappointed, that the work that they always thought of as hers was actually a little bit different as it left her pen?” Professor Kathryn Sutherland responded: “I have had some very extreme and, I have to say, unpleasant responses to my work. … There are very few authors that we put in this extraordinary position where we feel that we should never say anything critical about them. … The idea that we can never question what she wrote I think is absolute nonsense.” Kelly ended the interview there.
Preparing for another day of work helping communication professionals tell compelling stories, I exclaimed to myself, “Why is it ‘critical’ to suggest writers have editors? Of course they do!” One of my most thrilling educational moments was seeing a page of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” before and after his editor, the great Maxwell Perkins, took a pass at it. Is the genius and clarion voice of Fitzgerald (or of Ernest Hemingway or Thomas Wolfe, who had the same great editor) diluted by the fact that someone helped hone it? Is a polished diamond less or more brilliant?
Of course there is a delicate balance – and implicit trust – at the heart of the creative partnership between storyteller and editor.
A fascinating 2007 New Yorker article about the fraught bond between Raymond Carver and his editor, Gordon Lish, points out that, “In the normal course of things, editorial work is relatively subtle, but there are famous instances of heroic assistance: Ezra Pound cutting T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ in half when the poem was still called ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices’; Maxwell Perkins finding a structure in Thomas Wolfe’s ‘Look Homeward, Angel’ and cutting it by sixty-five thousand words.” As Carver felt Lish did, an editor can go to far, fundamentally changing a writer’s voice and vision.
Did Austen feel that way about her editor? We’ll likely never know. But, with the conviction of an indelible Austen character, I declare that without creative inspiration and collaboration, no great stories can be told. What do you think?
image credit: studentofrhythm on Flickr
Our daily lives are consumed with content in the digital realm — news, tweets, blogs and e-mails that we are continuously drowning within in a mere attempt to keep up to speed in the world. We are all guilty of reading the first few lines of any piece of content to grasp the basic concept being conveyed and then moving on to the next.
An effective writing technique that I find valuable is to “trim the fat.” Working in the communications industry, it’s a skill that I am actively working on to ensure my readers are grasping my main point without having to skim for it. Remove the wasted words loitering in your writing, and you can soon become your own editor. With any skill, it takes time to adjust your practices, but eliminating the unimportant will allow your readers to recognize the significance of your message more clearly.
Below are some words and phrases that frequent our writing but, needless to say, (perfect example in its own) can be removed from our everyday use. More guidelines specific to trimming the fat are available for business writing and for freelance writing.
Common Unnecessary Words and Phrases:
- Very
- Just
- In addition to
- The fact that
- Until such time as
- At the present time
- In the past
- By means of
- For the purpose of
WGN CEO Randy Michaels provoked radio and blog commentary earlier this week when he issued a list of 119 words that WGN-AM radio announcers were no longer allowed to use on the air. The directive “puts WGN news staffers at a loss for words” gripes blogger Robert Feder, who includes the full list in his post. “If CEO Randy Michaels was looking for a way to make his employees loathe him even more, then he’s done a marvelous job,”says Pandora Young of FishbowLA. And Ian Chillag of NPR’s “Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me” lampoons the effort in a blog post that crams in every item on the list.
Michaels’ approach seems heavy-handed, reportedly asking staffers to monitor announcers’ compliance via “bingo cards.” And nobody likes to be told what they can’t say or do. Michaels is being accused of micromanaging, which may be true if you think a radio executive has no business concerning himself with what’s actually said on the air. But if Michaels is really just trying to improve the quality of WGN’s radio broadcasts, the list itself is a good start. I can’t find a good justification for using any of the terms on the list.
Most of them are flabby or pretentious ways to say something that could be expressed more sharply: “laud,” “area residents,” “at this point in time” or “the fact of the matter.” Others are redundancies: “5 a.m. in the morning” or “medical hospital.” There are also attempts at insincere folksiness — “All of you,” “hunnert” as a pronunciation for “hundred” — and banal weather terms including “white stuff” and “shower activity.” A commenter on Twitter suggested that failing to use “alleged” could land the speaker in legal trouble; that’s possible, though a good writer should be able to say “accused,” “charged with” or other terms to clearly explain that the person isn’t yet proved to be guilty. “The alleged attacker” is too often a lazy way to call the suspect an attacker without verging into libel.
Check out the list here. What terms would you defend? What would you add to the list?
“His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy…”
These opening lyrics from Eminem’s hit song “Lose Yourself” talk about fear of rapping in front of an audience. He knows his lyrics are good. He knows his style is good. But in front of an audience, well … “He opens his mouth, but the words won’t come out … He’s choking how, everybody’s joking now.”
And that’s how a lot of us feel about blogging. As our own Tac Anderson pointed out at a team off-site yesterday, the word “blogging” generates almost the same reaction in people as “public speaking.” I can relate. As I sit trying to write this the anxiety is there – I know my idea is interesting (or is it?) but do I really need to share it with the world?!
Yes, I do.
For a communications professional it is as important a skill as knowing how to write a press release or messaging document. It is something I counsel clients to do, so I need to know how to do it. I need to know what the experience is like and what types of information and content are needed. This knowledge gain won’t happen magically, so it’s important to stop stressing and start doing.
So where to start? Here are some ideas for dipping your toes into the blogging waters.
- Read other blogs regularly. Just as with anything you want to be good at, you have to study and be receptive to new ideas.
- Find a subject that interests you and write about it on a personal blog. This is a great way to get comfortable with the sound of your digital voice.
- Look for inspiration everywhere. My idea for this post came out of a nine-hour meeting! (Granted, I was surrounded by smart people so I was jotting down ideas all day.)
- Celebrate your own voice. The Internet is a melting pot of ideas and interests. No one is right and no one is wrong – it is just happening and you can should be part of it.
- Accept that you won’t instantly have readers or people commenting on what you write.
- Don’t over-engineer it. Just get your thoughts down, check your spelling and publish.
- Have fun. I’m not kidding. As I near the end of this post I’m smiling. I did it. Phew.
What keeps you up at night about blogging? If you are a reluctant blogger, how did you get over your fear?
Photo from EW.com
If you’re hoping for hints on weatherstripping your windows, skip this and go to DoItYourself.com.
No, I’m talking about content review processes that involve countless rewrites and generate an abundance of drafts.
My personal record was a speech that got up to a 12th draft before it was approved, some written by me, some by the speaker and his entourage. Was the final draft better than my first? No; quite the contrary. Like most documents written collectively by multiple authors, it was disjointed, poorly organized, and devoid of humor and the kind of stylistic elements that hold a listener’s attention.
I once read an article in a humor magazine about what famous speeches would be like if they had been vetted through a team of lawyers and other middle managers. “Ask not what your country can do for you” became “Rather than wondering how your government can help you.” “Tear down that wall” became “Please consider removing the border restrictions.” “Nothing to fear but fear itself” became … well, you get the idea.
I recently tele-attended a PRSA tele-seminar on how PR writers like me can make the process of getting their copy approved by clients go more smoothly. The presenter was Ann Wylie, president of Wylie Communications, who had a surprisingly full bag of tips and tricks to impart.
Of course, document reviews are a two-way street, and I’m sure the reviewers don’t relish the process any more than the writers do. And any improvements in the process will probably require mutual agreements and concessions.
All of which brings me to the point of this rambling missive. How can we make document reviews easier for both parties? Here are three ideas:
Fewer reviewers = fewer drafts. Let’s make sure we aren’t sending the document to anyone who doesn’t absolutely have to review it. Generally, there should only be one person from each organization (legal, marketing, PR, business unit) in the distribution list.
Agree on boundaries. Reviewers aren’t being asked to rewrite the copy, merely to check it for factual inaccuracies, confusing or unclear sentences, improper disclosure of proprietary information, legal sensitivities, or erroneous representation of the company’s PR and marketing messages. Wordsmithing and rewriting is not only unnecessary, it is also counterproductive.
Mutual respect. In a similar vein, your company hired an agency (or in-house PR writers) because it had confidence in its competencies: creativity, writing and editing ability, knowledge of target audiences and how to influence them, etc. As a reviewer, don’t second-guess their judgments around style issues. (See boundaries comments above.) And vice versa. PR writers don’t know as much about a business’s products, markets and strategies as the subject matter experts reviewing the document. If they say the copy isn’t conveying the right message, they’re probably right.
I’d love to hear other suggestions, from both sides of the approval equation.
As a writer I’m frequently asked to work my “magic” — usually under deadlines that would confound even the greatest masters of the black arts. What many people lose sight of is that any well-written piece of content, whether blog post, e-mail or web copy requires a significant amount of advance thinking and subsequent editing. A recent historical discovery in Philadelphia underscores the importance of these steps in creating a well thought out document of any type.
While conducting research, a doctoral candidate stumbled upon an early draft of the U.S. Constitution at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Thirty-year old Lorianne Updike Toler noticed the familiar phrase “We The People. . . .” written upside down on the back of one of two known drafts of the historic document.
One of the framers of the Constitution, James Wilson, penned the words in 1787, but historical experts always considered the writing to be nothing more than a fragment. That all changed when Toler found the remainder of Wilson’s draft in the society vaults.
Wilson was one of five Constitutional Convention members selected to serve on a smaller group known as the Committee of Detail. For roughly two weeks these men sought guidance from the Articles of Confederation, the Virginia Plan and each state’s constitution before fleshing out 28 resolutions established by the convention.
They returned to the larger group with a report of their findings. Lore’s discovery, titled “The Continuation of the Scheme,” may very well be the first draft of that report. Much of the thinking and hard work that went into that report was preserved in the final version of the Constitution.
What was “especially thrilling” to Toler was seeing the framers’ thought processes in these early drafts. They are testament to the fact that creating any masterpiece of original content begins with the hard work of identifying what you want to communicate. The same principle holds true whether designing a web site, developing a story board or writing a feature story.
It’s also worth noting that when the time came to write the first draft of this very important (major understatement) document, the 55 men who were members of the Continental Congress looked to a much smaller group of five. When your goal is clarity your chances of success increase as the number of contributors decrease.
Image by Nic’s events
David Patton, Editor in Chief, WE Studio D
When WSJ.com was experimenting with social media like Twitter, Facebook and Digg my thought was: This is a chance to publish our content on someone else’s site or platform (that had an established audience) for free. Sign us up.
For media companies this is a no brainer because they are all about creating content. They have reporters, writers and editors that are paid to create content or news that is in search of the widest audience possible. It takes minimal additional time to ensure the content is getting to social media outlets.
But what about organizations that aren’t media companies? They typically aren’t set up to be content creators or publishers. There are rarely reporters or writers on staff. Can organizations use social media as effectively if they don’t have those resources focused on content?
Yes, if they begin to think of marketing, communications and advertising teams as content creators and publishers. These resources also need to refocus some of their time on creating the right kind of content and getting that content onto social media platforms.
It’s important for organizations to look at social media not as an add on, but as a replacement for some of the things the organization might have done in the past.
As Tac Anderson wrote this week, it’s possible to measure the ROI of social media in many ways. Whole Foods has been very active in social media and feels it has a high ROI, but admitted in this Mashable post that it’s taken more time than expected.
While using social media is almost free (if done quickly and efficiently), especially when compared with ad placement, creating the content that will be effective in telling a story isn’t. But creating content that is authentic and credible, that lets the expertise and passion of the organization show through, is less expensive than creating slick marketing and ad content.
Is your organization shifting resources to content creation for social media from other tasks? Do you plan to?
Photo by Material Boy
