story telling and social media, Summaries of Visual Arts

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Social Media Storytelling: The Way to Your Audiences’ Hearts is Through a Good Story ¢ Have you ever had those moments where you read a novel once and remember what that one minor character said that one time but stutter and stumble while trying to remember an answer you swore you spent days studying and revising? * Don’t worry: you’re not the only one. ¢ The reason you can vividly recall a story is because it keeps you interested with its use of language, its plot twists make you say ‘I did not see that coming’, you feel like you can relate to the perfectly flawed characters, and the cliffhangers, oh the cliffhangers sometimes make you want to chuck the book across the room and rage about it on social media. ¢ The Ingredients of Good Storytelling * The Protagonist / here it can be the brand * The Goal/ here it can be increasing brand awareness and its create an experience for the same In social media how do we do it ¢ 1. Protagonist * Every good book needs a protagonist; The Hunger Games has Katniss Everdeen, The Lord of the Rings has Frodo Baggins. In case of social media storytelling, your brand is the protagonist and just like any protagonist, your brand needs to have a personality, strengths, and flaws. Taking a note of the ideals your brand values and analyzing the history of your company is a good way to learn about these ‘personality traits’. * Obviously, these traits will keep changing as the company grows; in fact you should make sure they are changing (for the better) because a protagonist who doesn’t change as the story is called a ‘flat character’ and no one like reading a story that stars a flat character. * 2. Goal ¢ Another important characteristic of a good book is that it has a goal that the protagonist wants to or needs to fulfill. You can find your goal somewhere in your business plan. There are two types of goals that writers chalk down for their Main Character: internal goal and external goal. ¢ Analyze your business plan. What is the core objective of your business? Do you want to get more leads? Or increase sales? Or are you looking at expanding in the future? Whatever it may be, make a note of it because that is your internal goal. Now, your audience is really not interested in your internal goal. They don’t care about your profit margin or sales numbers; they care about their experience. So your external goal needs to be something that pertains to your audience. It could be something as philanthropic as ‘bringing education to the rural areas’ (like P&G's Shiksha) or something as simple as ‘making your life easy’ (Amazon’s Echo). Having a clear view of your internal and external goals is essential because you will have to build your brand story in a way that fulfills both of them. ¢ As an example, Airbnb is an app that relies on goodcustomer experience and aesthetic photographs. To tell their brand story, they combine these two and post photos submitted to them by their hosts and guests and add a story to it. ¢ They then post these stories on Facebook as posts or via albums dedicated to particular hosts. This helps them grow out of simply being an app their guests use and become partners in the stories of their hosts, changing the narrative from “hey, look at this beautiful place” to “take a look at the wonderful people who live in the place”. Origins: The Classic Storytelling Trope New businesses that have the advantage of adding digital marketing in the very core of their business plan can use the classic “start from the start” way of telling their brand story. This means including your audience into your story from the beginning. If you can’t do it from the very start, you can apply this archetype to one of your future marketing campaigns. You should interact with your audience and find out what they want before you create your content and a build a living campaign around feedback. Yes, this requires you to be quick in your work and have a large amount content production capacity, but in return this method generates authentic conversations and actionable audience engagement. The hotel chain Marriott used this method by stalking the social media of their guests (and the guests didn’t even mind!) Even if you don’t choose to follow this method, there is a valuable lesson you learn from it: Listen to your audience. What is a no...no is social media storytelling Spoilers: The Unconventional Way of Storytelling This is perhaps an archetype that used the least but has a lot of potential. In this archetype, you kickoff your brand narrative by revealing the end (every bookworm is probably screaming “SPOILERS!!!” at their screen right now — | did the same when | read it the first time). No, | didn’t mistype an entire sentence; this archetype really does start by revealing the end (“gasp! They said it again!!”), but it’s not as horrific as you think. It’s a little like those movies where they start off with an intense fight or a comedic situation the MC is in with them saying “You're probably wondering how | got myself into this situation” and then the screen fades to the actual beginning and the story progresses so we get to see exactly how the protagonist got themselves into that situation. Basically, all you do is reveal the goal at the very beginning of your campaign and then including your audience in the journey to show them how you're progressing. Elon Musk’s SpaceX pulled this off perfectly by announcing in 2016 their intent of sending their spacecraft to Mars by 2018. They then included people in this journey by strapping streaming devices to most of their craft, regularly tweeting updates, and even shared videos of all of their fails (it’s magnificent, to be honest).