When I was a kid, and into my early adulthood, there were still many great storytellers on radio in the US. Jean Shepherd, most famous for his “A Christmas Story”, was on the air every night with his stories when I was a teenager. Paul Harvey would tell us “The Rest of The Story” which I would listen to midday, usually  in my car while on the road as a sales representative for that computer company named after a fruit. I thought these guys were amazing craftsmen, keeping me riveted and my mind whirling as they’d get to that final finish. What satisfaction, to be immersed in this story for 10 or 15 minutes, forgetting about my homework or, as an adult, sitting in horrible traffic jams.

As much credit I give these storytellers for using their creative imagination and their voices to spin great tales, I realize that the stories were created in partnership: as a listener, it was up to me to create the visuals in my mind, to fill in the gaps where the storyteller would jump over details, or to decide who was a hero and who was a villain. Listening to those storytellers over the radio was an active process, and now I’m engaged in even more active storytelling by following a stream of tweets about a handful of characters wrapped up in a story about getting married, breaking up, having a baby, falling in love.

Toronto-based screen-writer/author Jill Golick decided to use the tools of the Social Web to tell the story “Crushing It! A Social Media Love Story”. It’s a comic soap opera, that takes place over the course of five days, specifically during Social Media Week,  with a cast of characters that would most believably use Twitter, Facebook, blogging and YouTube in their everyday life. She hasn’t made the story strictly about social media either: the focus is on a couple about to get married, and there are no Social Media Gurus directly involved (although the title is a tribute to Gary Vaynerchuk, an early adopter of marketing his wine store through the Internet via his Wine Library webcast, and has since become an author of the book Crush It!, to inspire others). There is the best friend of the groom, co-workers, an extremely-pregnant best friend of the bride, a mom trying to figure Twitter out to keep up with her son…and intrigue! A “secret” twitter account, a spilt cup of coffee that leads to romance…and you, the audience, following on Twitter using the hashtag #cistory, gets to decide the ending.

The core story line is a work in progress, influenced by audience participation. It’s told in short bursts over the course of the day on Twitter, with additional entries to blogs and YouTube that fill out the background, enriching the experience. This is truly what transmedia is about, where many forms of media are used to tell this story, and real people interact directly with the story, affecting characters and outcome. Even Gary Vaynerchuk has started to follow some of the characters—who knows if he’ll offer some advice or get into the action?

What I find most interesting about the process is how the audience will mold and move the story. Much as Scott McCloud would say concerning cartoon/comic or sequential art stories, it’s about what happens between the panels that moves the story along.

I invite you to watch via twitter: http://www.twitter.com/crushingitstory/lists/crushing-it-story or following the hashtag #cistory. You can go on the website http://www.crushingitstory.com for more background on the story, the characters and credits as well.

Here’s the first video from the character Barbara Marks’ YouTube account, talking about how she’s about to get married (or so she thinks):

The story will take place from Monday, February 1, 2010 through Friday, February 5, 2010. Keep me posted on what you think by adding your comments here or on the website.

In the spirit of giving full disclosure about my involvement (and enthusiasm) with this story, I created the web site and am functioning as the administrator of the site. Although I’m not writing a character directly, I do play a part in providing the framework for the action to play out, and I’d like to hear what you think about the whole experience.

Recently, I sat mesmerized while listening to an executive’s explanation of how he prepares to give a quarterly report to his board of directors. After listing the facts and figures that the board “most definitely wants to hear”, he finished by glancing around the room nervously and becoming silent. Eight other smart executives were there as well, looking at him, or through him: it was hard for me to tell. I don’t however, think they were as fascinated. Now, I have to tell you, I was not interested in the actual list of numbers he droned through. I was taken by how this intelligent, interesting guy, who had a lot to say about sports, family, and the current economy’s effect on business while chatting informally with his colleagues just 1o minutes before, had turned into a soft-spoken and perhaps inconsequential bore. No passion, no information analysis, and no indication of just how smart he is and why he’s good at his job. And I wondered; why I would ever want to friend him on Facebook, or connect with him on LinkedIn, or, worst of all, follow his tweets on Twitter? Who would this fellow be if he is representing his company in the social media environment?

As smart and engaging as he is personally, once he stood up to talk as a corporate executive (and, I would assume, if he had to speak to others as a “businessperson”), he lapsed into a dialect of thick corporate speak; a concoction of numbers, catch phrases and acronyms. In the 5 minutes he spoke, he never told us what course of action to take based on the numbers he disclosed nor did he reveal the consequences of what might happen if nothing changed. Sadder still, I doubt the board would have gained anything from his report, even though they really want to know what matters and what he would recommend.

So, with everyone rushing to get companies on the bandwagon of Social Media, I am concerned that there can be a wall that keeps content of value safely locked behind boring, undigested informational blather. The idea of  “safety in numbers” has an ironic twist in meaning when executives and professionals do not offer insight or comprehension to the conversation, hiding behind the less-risky method of offering volumes of content with little depth. Data gathering is not enough, it needs to be pressed into service and given meaning.

So, please do not ask a C-level executive or, for that matter, anyone in the company, to jump into social media if that person isn’t willing or able to have a forthright conversation. If the person communicating from the company’s desk cannot speak clearly, with depth and presence, and project some real saavy about what’s going on, that conversation will end more quickly than someone can leave the room if they were there in person. Actually, we’re normally far too polite to just walk out of a room when we’re bored, but the online world is a cruel place, and being “unfollowed” is just a click away.

I’m not asking for flip personal conversation or chatty filler to seem “human” or that even more abused buzzword, “authentic”. Corporate communication cannot afford to be jargon-filled and rote or superficial; it must be active and authorities should speak, authoritatively and with purpose when speaking from a corporate setting.

Otherwise, whether it’s 140 characters or 140 pages, there is no reason for anyone to listen, much less be mesmerized, engaged, or even interested.

If you have the dreaded job of delivering reports on some kind of regular basis, I’d suggest first spending the time to create conclusions that make numbers, facts and calculations have relevance and meaning. Then, whether you share them in face-to-face meetings or use a blog or any other kind of media  to present them, you’ll have engaged listeners.

Whether it’s “We have a problem, Houston” or “We’re good to go”, putting thoughtful perspective on even the most routine information-sharing will be the strongest way to create respect and engagement.

Good storytelling sometimes has nothing to do with the story itself, particularly if it’s a story so familiar we can tell it to ourselves. Here’s an example of great storytelling that isn’t about the story, a familiar chestnut of a fairy tale, but the way it’s told: with humor, simplicity, and a surprising amount of data visualization that might hang around in your mind even after the story is done.

Slagsmålsklubben – Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

“What’s coming next?”

That’s the question you want every listener and every viewer to ask. You want edge-of-the-seat, gripping-the-chair attention. You want silence in the room as every eye is on you. If you’re using a whiteboard to make a presentation, you want everyone to get excited as you go to the board to draw the next chart, write the next big keyword, flip the page to make a point.

Beyond interest lies curiosity. That’s what drove humans to find better ways to hunt, explore new lands,  create art.

Examining your presentation, your graphic design, your next blog post, what evokes curiosity? Here are some tips:

1) Build the story. Give a setup: “here’s the situation, the problem”.

2) Describe the outcome that is hoped for.

3) Describe how you propose to make that happen.

Simple, right? So why do so many presentation go down the rabbit hole of too much detail and no end in sight? Good stories are about action. Create energy with action…what are the actions that will make your outcome happen?

Visual tips: cut down the bullet points and write action words. Use a picture instead of a word if you can find one.

And, perhaps my favorite suggestion, when you’re giving a talk or presenting with slides:

Take a breath and pause after you’ve hit a key point. Give it time to sink in. Create suspense by not rushing from slide to slide, from point to point, spewing out facts or running down a list.

Control the pace of your story, and you’ll create a lot of interest not only in the story you’re telling but in you, the storyteller.

The Macintosh computer turns 25 year old - an early print ad

A blog post on http://mac25.org requested stories from those who were around in 1984 for the release of the Macintosh computer. At that time, I was the Sales and Tech Representative for Apple Computer for the Caribbean Region. Most of my job entailed introducing the new technology to both sales people and perspective customers.

First single-button mouse

Although we are all used to all kinds of input devices now, navigating with a mouse was actually pretty daunting for a lot of people at the time. Basic navigation with a mouse involves a kind of eye-hand coordination which, in 1984, was completely novel even for kids, who were using keyboards with up-down-left-right arrows to play games.

Visualization of mouse/GUI navigation

I spent a lot of time teaching the new Macintosh interface to adults, particularly school teachers and educators. The number one question was always, “What happens when I run out of room on my desk to move the mouse?” My routine answer was “lift the mouse, move your hand, lower the mouse back to the desk and move it again”. If experienced mousers think that sounds clunky, I assure you that it just befuddled grade-school teachers who spent most of the day with chalk or pen in hand.

I thought about how to break down the actions into something familiar: Lift, move, lower, move. Lift, move, lower…brush. I found the answer!

The size and shape of a mouse wasn’t much different from that of  a brush. Most of us learn to use a hair brush as children, when we are first developing gross motor skills. Now I had found my common, real-world example of how to move the mouse to get around the screen based on something most people already know.  I could answer the “running out of room to navigate on the desk” question before it came up.

That Macintosh way of thinking, using visual/experiencial metaphors for everyday applications, has stuck with me since that lightbulb went off in my head 25 years ago. Is all of life just a GUI? Tell me your stories about making the leap of explaining the unfamiliar by using common experience.