Quit your pitching. Let’s tell great stories for online visitors with social media. If we just build simple posts for our websites and blogs based on check-list, how-to and glossary templates, we’re halfway there. You can also add simple stories based on case studies. Use these formats to generate great social media content every day.

But add great stories and you won’t go wrong. Resist the urge to broadcast, interrupt or bore your online audience. Stories are irresistible. You usually lean in, quiet down and can’t help but tune your ears to the sound of someone saying, “Let me tell you what happened to me the other day …”

People learn from stories and compare themselves via anecdotal information. You can’t build a great online community without passionate storytellers. Stories rally tribes, inspire people to act and produce value for your organization.

A crystal clear picture of your goal is not complete without a sizzling sharp vision. Is the following a plant opening or a story?

The workers watched the grainy footage of empty and stilted structures, litter-swept streets and a broken and defeated populace sorting through recycle bins.

But on this day, they stood atop the clean, unbroken line of new equipment, haloed by bright lights and the steady hum of power that equaled opportunity.

They were alive and plugged in to a new result. Each second that the hum continued was an eternity that soothed the struggle of the preceding years. Each bright light gave a salute to their new lives.”

Storytelling (and social media) is about humans. It’s about emotional response. The good news about social media and storytelling is that it has made it possible for anyone to have a unique voice when telling their own story on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or blogs. Three paragraphs accomplished this in the above story.

In addition to great stories, people find checklist-type posts, learning or how-to posts and glossary posts to be very useful (and sharable).

Tell me five things to check before calling customer service, or three examples of our product in use in a checklist post. Create a how-to storytelling video that answers a simple question. Explain basics for laymen, foreign nationals or admin personnel tasked with discovering initial information. What terms are consistent in conversation with customers? They don’t know your business and products like you do. Help educate them with a glossary post.

Choose an entirely different way to communicate ideas for your organization or business. Stop your pitching and tell me a good story or give me something useful by creating great online content and sharing it with social media.

Kevin Cesarz is director of social media and Web project manager at Thread Marketing Group in Maumee (threadgroup.com). Find more at klcesarz.wordpress.com.

Tags: I Scream Social, Kevin Cesarz

This entry was posted on Friday, December 2nd, 2011 at 2:26 pm and is filed under I Scream Social, Toledo Business Link.
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