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The results make for interesting reading. Reagan and co say that their techniques all point to the existence of six basic emotional arcs that form the building blocks of more complex stories. They are also able to identify the stories that are the best examples of each arc. The six basic emotional arcs are these:A steady, ongoing rise in emotional valence, as in a rags-to-riches story such as Alice’s Adventures Underground by Lewis Carroll. A steady ongoing fall in emotional valence, as in a tragedy such as Romeo and Juliet. A fall then a rise, such as the man-in-a-hole story, discussed by Vonnegut. A rise then a fall, such as the Greek myth of Icarus. Rise-fall-rise, such as Cinderella. Fall-rise-fall, such as Oedipus. Finally, the team looks at the correlation between the emotional arc and the number of story downloads to see which types of arc are most popular. It turns out the most popular are stories that follow the Icarus and Oedipus arcs and stories that follow more complex arcs that use the basic building blocks in sequence. In particular, the team says the most popular are stories involving two sequential man-in-hole arcs and a Cinderella arc followed by a tragedy....
Visual storytelling is simply the way most brands will decide to go in 2016 & beyond, as they try to tell their story to their customers. Why? Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, Vine… All these trendy social media sites are based on visuals.
“Facts bore, stories sell” is a common saying. But I will go even further (and probably annoy some master storytellers), by saying: “Stories in text bore, stories told visually engage — and sell”.
To drive home this point, and before I delve into the how-to, the numbers in this infographic should be more than enough...
Below, take a look at some of the examples of these Storytelling Websites that we have gathered for you and your convenience.
As you scroll down, take some inspiration and share at the comment box the websites and elements that compel you. Come, take a peek, and enjoy!
Story time isn’t just for kids. In my analysis, top sales reps use stories at almost every stage of a deal -- clarifying the product, overcoming objections, answering questions. No matter what step they’re at or what the issue might be, they have a story on hand.
But the powerful art of sales storytelling is only mastered by a few. One reason is that salespeople aren’t taught how to talk about case studies and other marketing content as stories. It’s great to create written case studies, film an accompanying video or two, and put those resources on the website for potential customers. But the next step should be to provide training that walks salespeople through the talking points in the context of a story.
Also, too many sales reps use case studies as a way to puff out their chests. But they’re much more effectively put to use as a way to talk through challenges from the buyer’s perspective. Less “look how great my company is” and more “here’s how our client’s life got better thanks to our help.”
Here are the elements that should be in every sales story, to help both sales and marketing determine how to structure these valuable tales....
About six months ago, Pocket Gems, a mobile game developer, launched a new platform called Episode. It allows writers to script a story and then turn it into an animated interactive mobile story. It combines parts of TV shows, comics, and novels, and provides the unique ability for readers to have some control of how the story goes.
I started writing on the platform almost as soon as it launched and have written three stories to date. My most successful story, Finding Mr. Wright, has built a significant audience in a short time. So far it has an audience of 163,000 readers, who have collectively read over 1,222,000 chapters of my story....
Once upon the time--1969, to be exact--The Valley of Gwangi (see poster, left) was made. Based on a story concept by stop-motion pioneer Willis O'Brien (King Kong), and employing the stop-motion effects of Ray Harryhausen (former apprentice to O'Brien), it was and is the greatest cowboy-dinosaur movie ever made.
In the summer of 1970, a pencil-necked geek named Matt (see photo, right) discovered Gwangi quite by accident when it was the opening "B-movie" at his local theater with When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. Matt was all of seven, and he hooted and hollered and cheered throughout the film.
He was all alone that evening ... well, sort of all alone....
According to Curt Cloninger, "Usability experts are from Mars, graphic designers are from Venus". Not so fast. Your visuals can really enhance your storytelling....
Visual communication can be thought of in terms of two intertwined parts: ‘personality’ and visual organisation. The personality of a website or other customer touchpoint is driven by its look and feel: colours, shapes, images, patterns, interactive behaviours – that drive the emotional response to what the audience experiences.
But an equally important part of the user experience is less immediately obvious. The usability of a page, whether printed or displayed on-screen, relies on an intuitive visual organisation, a coherent visual narrative that leads the user through a logical progression of elements on the page.Using tried and trusted rules of visual design we can tell a story that will guide the user to our desired end point, whatever that may be: a ‘buy now’ button, further instruction, request for donation or any other call-to-action...
Takeaway. It’s not about marketing your small business. It’s about marketing your story.
You have a business you love and you want to tell the world about it so they love it too. Seems simple enough, right? Well, small business marketing isn’t as simple as it seems because it is more than just telling the world about your business, it’s about telling your story along with your business story. It’s about developing relationships not just making connections. It’s about creating valuable content not just spreading a message.
Marketing is something everyone thinks they can do and it can be overwhelming, especially if marketing isn’t your area of expertise. I get the need to tighten the purse strings. I get that you have no budget and you are a one-man or -woman show. It is doable and you can do it! You just need to be armed with the right kind of information and expectations....
"Hi is a website that lets you attach a snippet of text and a photograph to a location. We call that a moment. Moments are grouped by location. You can then choose to return to that moment later and extend it — write 100 or 10,000 words about it. That collection — moments tied to location, some short, some extended — is a narrative mapping."
Via Marie-Sophie
We talk a lot about the importance of storytelling when it comes to your small business or nonprofit blog or website, and even how you use social media. We’ve moved away from merely spitting out messages, particularly hard sales or marketing messages, and are now emphasizing the need to tell your story.
Your story as a brand, your story as an owner or manager, and the stories of your employees, customers, and clients. Telling your story isn’t just a matter of having something to talk about. There are actually a number of reasons why it makes good sense, and why you should take the time to rethink your online strategy, and begin telling your story...
Adding an audio message to your classroom blog or website can be a good way to help deliver important messages to your students and their parents. Posting an audio message, even if it covers the same content as a written message, can increase the chances that a visitor to your blog will take notice of something important.
Adding an audio message to your blog or website is not difficult to do. Here are five free services that you can use to add an audio message to your blog or website....
When a veteran stand-up comic is also funny on Twitter, it doesn’t exactly come as a shock. When an unknown phenom makes you physically choke on guffaws, though, it’s a revelation and also something of an extended audition. ...After catching the attention of the comedy cognoscenti in 2010, the then recent Harvard graduate soon got jobs writing on the Oscars and Disney’sA.N.T. Farm., before moving to a staff writer position at NBC’s ensemble sitcom Parks and Recreation. (The show was just renewed for a sixth season.) The in-demand writer is also an accomplished poet who’s writing asatirical guide to science for ladies. Megan Amram’s frothy blend of dark humor and smart, surreal silliness has found more than 356,000 followers on Twitter so far. Although not everybody trying to generate laughs online is doing so for the same reasons, or with the same twisted flair, Amram’s consistent comedic quality is enviable for anyone trying to make their mark with brief bursts of humor. The multidiscipline writer recently spoke with Co.Create about puns, poetry, and how to be funny on Twitter altogether....
Storytelling is absolutely essential whether it be traditional paid media, owned media like social networks and blogs, or earned media where someone else is telling your story. It’s critical to connect your story of how you solve the customer’s problems at each step of their journey. The key in storytelling though is to recognize that people are going to enter your story at different chapters and pages along their journey. It’s Their Story, Not Yours So as you think of telling your story you must visualize it through their eyes. You should ask, where is the customer in the buying cycle, where are they in the learning cycle, and how does it relate to their job’s role as it relates to that stage of the process? That way the story is relevant to their needs, their issues, their requirements....
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We all know storytelling is one of the key aspects of successful blogging. If you can weave a story around your words, no matter what your niche or topic, it is more likely to entertain your readers and resonate with them.
Even if you think you aren’t much of a writer or storyteller, you can still find one of these story types discussed today that will be useful and relevant for your blog – following on from Episode 80 of the ProBlogger podcast where I discuss what to say when you’ve got nothing left to say, hopefully these should give you some ideas on how to craft your words so you can stand out as a unique and interesting blogger.
In this episode I discuss these story types and how to get the best out of them (with examples!)....
It has been a while since my last blogpost. Last month, I had the great honor of writing four guest posts on the topic of mLearning for ASTD. Furthermore, I have been studying hard to complete my postgraduate studies, which made me step aside from some other projects for a while.
Having said that, last week I came across a very interesting discussion on the eLearning Heroes site and I thought it would be a great opportunity for me to share with you my favorite tools for storyboarding....
How can public radio make audio that breaks big on social media? A NPR experiment identified what makes a piece of audio go viral.
Editor’s note: Public radio produces a lot of audio — but it doesn’t always get the attention on sharing platforms that it might deserve. Our friends at NPR Digital Services want to fix that, which has led to a series of experiments. Here, NPR’s Eric Athas shares some of what they’ve found.
Chances are you’ll listen to this audio — or at least 56 percent of you will.
That’s what our experiments in making audio more sharable have shown so far. You’re more likely to listen and share interesting sound if it’s packaged with a good headline and an image — and recently we’ve discovered the type of audio matters, too....
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This is a tale of memory, truth, technology, and, well, the future of humanity—but it starts in high school.
If you went to high school in America, there is a pretty good chance you learned to write essays using the dreaded five paragraph method. For those who don’t remember, the structure is this: Introductory paragraph (wherein you lay out your thesis), followed by three supporting graphs (each one making a different yet complimentary supporting argument), finished with a conclusion (essentially your introduction restated and a final conclusion drawn).
What I want to point out here is the amount of data being offered up. While it’s called a five paragraph essay, the argument itself hinges on three main data points. Three core ideas. Because of this, the five paragraph essay is also known as the “hamburger essay” or “one, three, one,” or, occasionally, a “three-tier essay.”...
When we think of stories, we typically think of books – “Once upon a time…” and “They all lived happily ever after.” The truth is, though, that stories are more than just words on a page. Here, then, are ten masterful methods of storytelling that will help you answer the two questions I get asked most often are: 1) How do you tell a story? and 2) Where do you start?...
In the startup world, we hear a lot of talk about the Web and digital media “disrupting” traditional business models in a positive sense. But one rather important old-school industry, journalism, has found its lot in the digital frontier to be a pretty unhappy one. Newspaper subscription rates have plummeted, and only a select few publications have managed to successfully monetize their online content.
Many people have proclaimed multimedia to be the solution to this issue. The logic is that, if you could seamlessly integrate beautiful photographs, graphics, audio and even video into your articles, then you’d have yourself a truly viable product for digital natives.So it became a design problem. And, in late December of 2012, The New York Times may have solved it...
...But what happens once everyone has caught on and businesses are blogging simply to stay healthy, kinda like eating green beans?
We’re here to be inspired, right? I mean, I’m not talking the last twenty minutes of Rudy inspired, but rather inspired to read more, and maybe buy something. We have a challenge. A question. A need or even a want. And we're looking for that moment of inspiration to help make our purchase decision easier.
Somewhere along the way of this mass information age, many forgot this. They forgot that storytelling is the main ingredient for inspiration.It’s why we cry at the end of Forrest Gump. It’s why we cheer at the end of Rocky (all six of them). It’s also why some of us buy Dunkin’ Donuts over Starbucks (or vice versa)....
Takeaway.
Done right, your blog introduces you to your audience so they will WANT to do business with you.
Your small business blog and website are tools. Done right, your blog introduces you to your audience so they will want to do business with you.
Set the foundation and make it easy for your audience to make the buying decision. You can do that by giving them the information they need in well-crafted pages that tell a story and set you apart....
Since launching in private beta last year, Medium has been building up its platform, which aims to offer a simple but 'beautiful' reading and writing experienceIt was one year ago this week when the online publishing world was abuzz with the news that two of Twitter's founders had launched a new platform called Medium, in private beta.In the early days only a select group of people were allowed behind the scenes to contribute content to Medium.
Some details on the platform were made public via an announcement post from Ev Williams, in which he described Medium as "a new place on the Internet where people share ideas and stories that are longer than 140 characters and not just for friends".In the past year the group of people invited to write has grown, and we are told it "should be a short wait from now" when the platform will be available for all to use.
The main aim of Medium is to be "the best place to read and write about things that matter", and this emphasis on both the writing and reading experience has been reflected in its approach over the past 12 months....
Somewhere between a PowerPoint presentation and a full-fledged video is the audio slideshow. Creating audio slideshows can be a good way to add meaning to slides that otherwise might not mean much without a presenter. Here are some ways that students can create audio slideshows....
Digital storytelling, the practice of combining narrative with digital content, is gaining more ground in the educational field.
...There are actually several tools to create a digital story online but for educational purposes I have meticulously selected some of the best ones available online and for free. But before you start exploring the list make sure to check out these three tools to develop creativity in your Students Writing.
Here is the list of some of the best free digital storytelling tools for teachers...
Drinking From the Content Marketing Fire Hose As we launched the site, the iQ team started to work with a team of journalists and editorial partners, conducted editorial meetings and worked closely with the Intel social media team to amplify and extend iQ content. Before we knew it, we were beginning to operate a newsroom, managing a robust content machine and starting to see our goals for iQ come to fruition. By end of 2012, iQ was emerging as an essential asset to Intel’s marketing and social media strategy. Although satisfied with the early success of iQ, we knew there were many improvements to be made. In January 2013, iQ version 1 (the current site) was released. Several new changes and strategies were implemented from our learnings since the BETA launch. So what have I learned about content marketing in the last 11 months? I’ve distilled the 12 core lessons for brand publishers organized by the tenets of the iQ content marketing approach; production, process and promotion....
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Scientists at the Computational Story Laboratory have analyzed novels to identify the building blocks of all stories.