What does a shovel have to do with storytelling?
Everything.
Many of our clients come from the B2B tech world where hearts race from inventing a way to increase the spin-torque efficiency of a memory device. While these types of stories hold great importance to the people who use a given technology, they typically aren’t going to resonate with journalists from business publications and other mainstream media.
That’s where the shovel comes in.
We believe the story is always there. Yet, these stories rarely arrive on a silver platter for all to see. Instead, the process for finding these narratives can be akin to an excavation, requiring digging and digging and sometimes more digging. The communications profession tends to undervalue the expertise that goes into this form of discovery, the interviewing techniques, research, dot-connecting logic and that scientific quality called persistence.
This leads to our mantra for 2019: “The story is always there.” I’m not calling this a theme or a branding campaign because such labels short change the value of knowing how to go from point A to point B to point C, which ultimately gets you to Point D where the good stuff resides.
We plan to share more about this topic over the course of the year starting with a SlideShare deck that will soon go live.
When we say the story is always there, we don’t really mean it by the conventional definition of a start, an end and something going horribly awry in between, which leads to the drama and payoff. Instead, we’re saying that interesting stuff is always there.
Every communications consultancy on the planet touts it storytelling expertise. We’ve got a different take and one that can be applied to B2B companies without signing up for the “F” word, failure. That’s the genesis of our Periodic Table for Business Storytelling and applying this methodology to our client campaigns.
Of course, this wonderful contrast and incongruence trailed by a bunch of anecdotes don’t arrive prepackaged and ready for communications to the outside world.
Right. They need to be dug out.