Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Storytelling is a universal human trait. It emerges spontaneously in childhood, and exists in all cultures thus far studied. It’s also ancient: Some specific stories have roots that stretch back for around 6,000 years. As I’ve written before, these tales aren’t quite as old as time, but perhaps as old as wheels and writing. Because of its antiquity and ubiquity, some scholars have portrayed storytelling as an important human adaptation—and that’s certainly how Migliano sees it. Among the Agta, her team found evidence that stories—and the very act of storytelling—arose partly as a way of cementing social bonds, and instilling an ethic of cooperation.

At first, Migliano wasn’t actually interested in storytelling. She wanted to know what qualities the Agta most value in their peers, given that they are nomadic and their camps continuously shift. So, her students asked 300 Agta to name the five people they’d most want to live with. They also asked the volunteers to nominate the strongest people they knew; the best hunters, fishers, and foragers; the ones whose opinions are most respected; and the ones with most medical knowledge. And finally, almost as an afterthought, they asked the volunteers to name the best storytellers. That, they assumed, was something relatively unimportant, and would make for an interesting contrast against the other more esteemed skills.

If a 150-million-year-old Brachiosaurus could talk, what would it say?You can find out at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, where many of the exhibits will soon tell their own stories using local voices, thanks to an initiative from local museum advertising specialist Leo Burnett.

The agency wrote more than 100 short scripts, each a paragraph or two long, designed to capture the “voice” of various plants, animals and minerals in the museum’s permanent collection. The write-ups combine history and humor. For example, the Brachiosaurus bemoans its girth while also discussing the contributions of paleontologist Elmer Riggs.

Everyday Chicagoans are invited to record the first-person monologues in a special pop-up audio booth that is traveling around the city this summer. (It visited Chinatown this weekend.) Ultimately, the best voiceovers will be accessible via smartphone for Field visitors to enjoy on audio tours....

So how exactly do you harness audience's ever-decreasing attention span? By giving them an active role in their content consumption process by publishing stories with interactive elements. Such tools can increase engagement, on-site dwell time, and social share rates.

ProjectHubSpot and Playbuzz joined forces to scour the web for amazing examples of interactive storytelling. Each industry poses its own obstacles and unique characteristics, but share one common denominator: Interactive content works for all topics and audiences.

Let’s take a look at a few examples from the ebook....

This may not seem like anything special, Vonnegut says—his actual words are, “it certainly looks like trash”—until he notices another well known story that shares this shape. “Those steps at the beginning look like the creation myth of virtually every society on earth. And then I saw that the stroke of midnight looked exactly like the unique creation myth in the Old Testament.” Cinderella’s curfew was, if you look at it on Vonnegut’s chart, a mirror-image downfall to Adam and Eve’s ejection from the Garden of Eden. “And then I saw the rise to bliss at the end was identical with the expectation of redemption as expressed in primitive Christianity. The tales were identical.”

Vonnegut, in his ever charming way, was quite pleased with himself for making this connection. And 35 years later, his idea had resonated enough with a group of mathematicians and computer scientists that they decided to build an experiment around it. Vonnegut had mapped stories by hand, but in 2016, with sophisticated computing power, natural language processing, and reams of digitized text, it’s possible to map the narrative patterns in a huge corpus of literature. It’s also possible to ask a computer to identify the shapes of stories for you.

That’s what a group of researchers, from the University of Vermont and the University of Adelaide, set out to do. They collected computer-generated story arcs for nearly 2,000 works of fiction, classifying each into one of six core types of narratives (based on what happens to the protagonist):...

When I pulled up to the food pantry, I was greeted with this chaotic scene. There were dozens of residents out there. They had bags of food and bags of clothing and household items that they were ready to donate. And there, in the center, of it all was LoQuator Dinkins, handing out orders to her volunteers and chatting with her new donors. It was amazing to see — there were people from different races and different ethnicities. There were people with different religious backgrounds, who had all come because they’d read this story and they wanted to help save her food pantry.

When I walked up to LoQuator, she was chatting with a man who had driven several hours from a wealthy posh suburb to make a donation large enough that would cover that $3,500 electric bill. She told that man he had been sent to her by God. He said: “I don’t believe in God. I believe in good people.” The scene that I saw that day was so compelling and so inspiring and moving to me, it reminded me of the power of journalism. I went back to the office and I wrote about it too.

You see, it’s those types of moments that keep me from becoming cynical. It’s those moments that help remind me that as journalists, we have the power to empower....

Given the rising popularity of rare and aged whiskies in Singapore, The Whisky Corporation has brought their Glenfarclas Pagoda Reserve Series (the Trilogy and Ruby Reserve) of bespoke single malt whiskies from Speyside to Singapore.

Glenfarclas Pagoda Reserve Series
Since 1865, the Grants of Glenfarclas have carefully adhered to time-honored traditions of whiskey making. They explored their finest reserves and found valuable casks predating 1972 – the year their famous Pagoda kiln was decommissioned....

Second Life is a online game that immerses players in a virtual world. For the past thirteen years, more than 90,000 players have entered the online community. Now, Linden Labs, the company behind the unique game is looking to enter the realm of virtual reality.

With the popularity of virtual reality headsets, there is an important need for companies to create software to go along with the new technology. That’s where Linden Labs comes in.

Creating software for VR is a hefty task and is pretty much impossible for small companies or organizations. Linden Labs is hoping to help those little guys out by creating what they call a ‘WordPress for Social VR’.

No matter what you do, no matter your profession is; entrepreneur, marketer, designer, small business owner; our job is always to tell our story.

The way your business grows, the way you sell products, the way you make money and a real impact is through authentic and powerful stories.

We’re all storytellers, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we can all tell great stories. Yet.

So to give you an insight into the art of storytelling – the art of telling your brand’s story – I’ve put together the 27 most inspiring quotes that will teach you how to become a better storyteller....

In this excerpt from Out of the Wreckage, George Monbiot talks about the power of stories. Stories are the tool we use to make sense of the world: We will only be able to supplant the story of neoliberalism, which has shaped the outlook of so many minds, with a compelling new story. 

You cannot take away someone's story without giving them a new one. It is not enough to challenge an old narrative, however outdated and discredited it may be. Change happens only when you replace it with another. When we develop the right story, and learn how to tell it, it will infect the minds of people across the political spectrum. Those who tell the stories run the world.

Japan prides itself on ludicrous advertising. But every year, a few commercials go beyond—transcending the market’s typical weirdness and reaching a state of truly inspired lunacy.

“Gravity Cat,” which won a silver Lion in Cannes, came close, but its oddness was relatively mild—and also wrapped in jaw-dropping craft. But thankfully, another silver Lion winner from Japan has stepped in to take the prize.

Check out the spot below, from agency Asatsu-DK and production company Spoon. It would be a spoiler to reveal the advertiser, so just sit back and soak up all the screaming and yelling from actors whose true character reveals itself only at the very end....

The four-minute videos produced by seven separate teams explored themes around human brains fusing with technology, including humans becoming so robotic as to be unable to experience romance, neural lacing allowing a “smart house” to reflexively relax residents with a sound bath or other emotional needs on a typical weekday rushed morning, and brain imaging as an extension of aura photography that could let people actually see how someone’s head works during conversation.

An audience of mostly participants voted after viewing all submissions. The prize for Most Hopeful Vision of the Future went to ReFLEKtion’s smart house. In such a house, one’s weekday morning rush would be eased by a mirror that reflexively responds to cues created by neural lacing. One response to anxiety might be a soothing sound bath. “You could have a hospital at home where AI is mapped on your ow personality. It kind of exists as this fairy godmother in your life… in a way that’s palatable to you,” said co-creator Emily Gureyeva, of Stern + Kind. The piece was conceived and produced with Evan Hembacher, Studio Director at Virsix.

Hembacher noted that the technology could be used not just as a constant diagnostic tool for serious physical ailments, but a daily productivity tool. The mirror could read when you’re getting distracted or avoidant, “so you don’t slide into procrastination. It course corrects you,” Hembacher said....

When an author set out to tell a story in years past, he or she typically did so on paper, a typewriter or by typing at a computer.But today, storytellers find imaginative ways to share their ideas with interactive and visual elements. On modern mediums like Twitter, Vine, YouTube and other mobile applications, storytellers are crafting tales in ways that would have been unfathomable a decade ago.

Offline, too, authors have begun rethinking the traditional concept of the book in ways both innovative and unorthodox. Might a story be better understood as a set of machine parts? How might destroying a book actually bring its messages to life?Here are nine ways authors are revolutionizing the way stories are told....

Lindsay Smith shares her incredible insights into how National Geographic Travel is able to utilize the power of storytelling to propel the brand into new heights – continuously going where others aren’t able to go on social media. You’ll also learn some cool things like:

• How Nat Geo Travel curates all of their amazing photography on Instagram
• The success metrics that Nat Geo pays close attention to on social media
• Why Nat Geo Travel’s stories are able to reach the massive audience that they are
• The key components to every great story on social media...

August, Interpol arrested a 40-year-old Nigerian con artist, known only as “Mike,” who was the alleged mastermind of an email scam cartel that swindled over $60 million from victims around the world. Mike operated various email schemes including the infamous “Nigerian Prince” ruse, which elaborately establishes a heartbreaking and potentially profitable tale before asking for money.

The prince scams are a case study in the power of storytelling. Before asking for money, the con artists weave intricate tales that appeal to people’s emotions. While these scammers tend to prey on the gullible, like this 63-year-old Nebraskan woman who lost over $40,000, the more elaborate variations call on astronauts or London gallerists to target people who may be more sophisticated.

In fact, as Maria Konnikova told Contently in an interview about the dark side of storytelling, intelligent people are the most vulnerable to investment fraud. According to another new book, Denying to the Grave: Why We Ignore the Facts That Will Save Us, they’re also more likely to join cults.

Our predisposition to believing good stories comes down to human physiology and psychology. We’re wired for well-told narratives.

They can be so alluring, enticing, and transformative that they can cause even the smartest readers to change their minds, relinquish money, and see the world through someone else’s eyes.

Even though credibility counts for a lot, you ultimately must make an audience feel things to compel action. It’s a frustrating reality for scientists and statisticians, who often try to persuade people with authority and numbers. Statistics may seem irrefutable, but they can hurt a cause, priming people to think analytically, which increases skepticism and decreases the likelihood for action....

Facebook is training journalists through online courses. What does this mean for publishers and content creators?

Facebook is joining the likes of Khan Academy and Coursera with “e-learning courses for journalists”. Four courses are offered so that reporters can learn how to use Facebook’s products and services to enhance their content. 

We decided to try out them out. Beyond the material itself, the lessons reveal insights about how Facebook sees the future of publishing and content. The current selection of courses goes over how journalists can:

• best utilize Facebook and Instagram,
• engage their audience with Facebook Live,
• create immersive storytelling through virtual reality (360) content,
• and produce Instant Articles...