The Community Roundtable

Empowering global community leaders with research-backed resources, training, and tools.

CMGT 101: Why use storytelling in your online community?

By

Note: This content appears in a slightly different form in our ebook: CMGT 101: 17 Community Leaders Share Their Secrets for Success. CMGT 101 is packed with engagement ideas, governance tips, career advice, and more from community leaders working at innovative organizations like CA Technologies, Aetna, Electronic Arts, SAP, Pearson, Akamai, and Atlassian. Download the ebook here for free. 

Chris Catania is the Community Team Lead and Strategist at ESRI. He shared best practices for using storytelling in a powerful way in your online community.

Why is storytelling a powerful tool for community managers?

Stories move us. And community professionals must prioritize and master the art of storytelling in their daily work. Storytelling is vital to communicating the business value of community to stakeholder audiences. An inspiring well told community story can win minds and transform an organization.

Do Demonstrate Value

Focus on WIIFW: What’s In It for We. Appeal to the shared common good not just individual gain and you’ll connect with your audience and make a greater impact.

Do Target Your Message

Focus on having different stories to share with different people. Always be ready to share your stories at a moment’s notice in a meeting or in the elevator.

Do Seek The Right Stories Out

Stories don’t just come to you. You have to know what stories you’re looking for and then go get them. You have to put on your journalist hat, ask the right questions, be constantly curious and discover the gems yourself. And once you find the story you have to mold, shape and refine it so it’s ready to share. But don’t wait for perfection. Sometimes just beginning and sharing it over time is part of refining your story.

Don’t let your story get stale

Evolve your story. Adapt and grow your community story to show how your community is growing and evolving, too.

Why Doodling, Drawing and Visual Storytelling Are Good For Community

By

By Amy Turner, The Community Roundtableblog image_doodling

If we look back in history, we have been using visuals to communicate complex information for years through the use of diagrams, graphs, charts, etc. In today’s complex environment, we need visuals to help us make sense of the world. Raw data is too much of a sensory overload.

TheCR Network had a unique call with Nancy White, Founder of Full Circle Associates, to explore the use of collaborative drawing and visual storytelling across social media and community. Nancy learned that her sense of doodling at meetings was a way to help her pay attention, motivating her to develop a practice of both offline and online graphic facilitation through the use of visuals.

Six Fun Facts About Visuals:

  1. Visuals can help keep some people more focused, particularly those that have a difficult time in audio-only mode.
  2. Shared visuals can allow people to participate in different ways. Drawing is very social and can help move people out of their comfort zone, activating a different part of the brain to help improve engagement.
  3. Visuals can invite storytelling and meaning-making, whereas the printed sentence can stifle communication.
  4. Visuals can help organize our thoughts better than text in order to help people connect concepts.
  5. Adding beauty to text as a form of communication can actually make people stop and take a breath. This is especially important in blogging, allowing the visual to impact what you are trying to express.
  6. Comics as an online communication and engagement medium are becoming more popular. There are tools that allow people to create their own comics as a method of dialoguing with each other.

Visuals And Community:

  • Visuals can draw people together. When people first went online, a common complaint was Screen Shot 2016-07-08 at 8.50.20 AMthat it was difficult to form relationships due to the lack of body language. Emoticons were the early tools for self-expression. Now, we can embed images and draw together online, which can help us communicate better. Furthermore, video has introduced a whole new way to connect people online.
  • Visuals help clarify communication. When someone writes a sentence, they think that their intent is clear and that it is received by the recipient as clear. However, when we start looking at visuals together, they are much more negotiable. People say: “Well, what did you mean by that?” One person could interpret it one way and another individual could interpret it another way. For some reason, individuals are willing to be open to interpretation within a drawing, but are much more black and white when it comes to text. If you are in a community where you are trying to make meaning (particularly in work communities where people are trying to design or problem-solve), a visual opens up a discussion whereas a statement may close it.
  • Social reporting. Nancy explained that social reporting is “The act of people participating in the capturing of what is happening in a face-to-face event to share with the wider world or as a way to capture what happened.” This could be live blogging, live tweeting, graphically recording, photographing and/or videoing. The key is that it is a participatory process rather than something that is done by an outsider professionally. When a community can capture its own artifacts, some very interesting things can happen. When we participate in the creation of content around something we are learning or doing, it deepens our own learning and locks it in our brains. It is the process of participating in the conversation on one hand and making it concrete on the other. This connects people more than somebody doing it for them.

How do you use visuals to better impact your community and social channels?

 

Inside TheCR Network: Storytelling and the Power of Why

By

Recently, Michael Margolis of The Reinvention Summit and Get Storied  joined members of TheCR Network to discuss the art of storytelling. As described on his website, “Storytelling is the most important skill you didn’t learn in school. But it’s the foundation for everything.” For businesses, this is your ability to convey your brand in a compelling way that communicates and engages. It’s about telling a story your community cares about, thereby building meaningful connections that inspire action.

Your brand is only as strong as the stories people are telling about you. You need to help shape them. The challenge for community managers is to enable community members to see themselves in your organization’s shared stories. Assist people in understanding their role in your brand. Describe your world. Make it tangible, real and relevant.

Michael described his five-step storytelling framework, which he calls “MASTR”: Motivation, Audience, Stakes, Trust and Relationship. Storytellers often neglect these elements, but they are key to creating stories that support and engage your community.

For me, one of the many great themes that surfaced in this discussion was the power of storytelling to communicate why. As inspirational speaker Simon Sinek says, “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. In his TED talk “How great leaders inspire action,” Simon describes how successful businesses—like Apple (of course!)—are able to tell a story that defines their culture and inspires people to act. This is a charge for community managers. How do we tell our stories in a way that inspires action?

Michael himself discussed his affinity for the Apple brand. He has continued to use Apple computers, despite hardware problems he’s had in the past, because he’s loyal to them. He believes in the Apple experience. That, Michael described, is the power of the brand.

In addition, Michael says helping people understand your story is critical. It’s not enough for them to hear your story—everyone has a story. Instead, people need to connect with your story in a meaningful way. They need to believe in why you do what you do. That’s the turning point between a community outlier and an active community member.

As Michael described, your story must break the barrier of expectation, be extraordinary, and elicit an emotional response. He shared a personal story about unexpectedly receiving a flower arrangement with a note from a “not-so-secret” admirer. This certainly caught his attention, but when he visited the website listed on the card and discovered it was an email marketing provider, the compelling storyline broke.

It’s not enough to attract attention if what you offer isn’t relevant. To be effective, your story needs to communicate why you are relevant and why your audience should care. Rather than telling people what you do, you need to convey why you do it.

How do you tell your story? How have you used storytelling to convey your brand and build meaningful connections?

—————————————————————————————————–

Rick Allen is a member of TheCR Network and as such gets access to strategic, tactical, and professional development programming and events as well as an online community for discussions and to make lasting connections with fellow community, social media, and social business practitioners. TheCR Network is the place to learn from industry leaders and practitioners.