Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

It's advice we've all heard before: Want to be compelling? Tell a story. Tap into the eons-old human compulsion to craft a narrative, say what happened, spin a yarn.

That’s sound advice. But on a practical level, anyway, it's like telling someone, "Hey, be funny." And while just about anyone can go through the motions and tell you a joke, chances are you only know a handful of people who can really make you laugh.

It's much the same with telling stories in business environments. We tell stories all the time in social settings, just for the fun of it. But those run-of-the-mill narrative chops don't always serve us well when we step into meetings and give pitches and deliver presentations. And for leaders who've risen through the ranks for their analytical skills or happen to be second-rate storytellers even at cocktail parties, the challenge is all the greater.

These three techniques are for them....

Every story had to have some moment that was there to amuse me — a funny moment, an emotional moment, some original observation I’d made on the scene that no other reporter had. It could just be a nice moment in the script. Every story had to have someone who was more than a talking head, spouting out their point of view on the issue of the day.

To make them more human, it sometimes only took a line of description, an original thought about who they were and why they believed what they believed, a surprising moment, a funny moment on tape.If you cannot find a deep interest in the story to begin with, that's a warning since. As Pixar Filmmaker Andrew Stanton advises in his TED Talk on The Clues to a Great Story:

And that's the first story lesson I ever learned. Use what you know. Draw from it. It doesn't always mean plot or fact. It means capturing a truth from your experiencing it, expressing values you personally feel deep down in your core....

The chemical and psychological makeup of our minds affects how we consume content: Our brains are wired to connect with compelling stories.

Brand storytelling tactics focus on different functions of the brain related to understanding and perception. The brain processes images 60 times faster than text, and 92 percent of consumers want brands to create stories around ads. Because of this, marketers should be delivering linear content with clear narratives and using images to tell their stories.

OneSpot has put together the following infographic to demonstrate how storytelling affects the brain and how brands can cut through the noise to offer stories that resonate with readers....