I’m loving Lisa Cron’s Wired for Story, because it’s full of practical tips about what makes stories work. It may be written for fiction writers, but every great tech case study is a story too.
Here’s Lisa on what makes stories powerful: “Feel first. Think second. That’s the magic of story. Story takes a general situation, idea or premise and personifies it via the very specific. Story takes the horror of a huge, monstrous event – the Holocaust – and illustrates its effect through a single personal dilemma – Sophie’s Choice.”
Your stories aren’t about how “industries need to embrace digital transformation.” They’re about how Steve, who leads the data team at Shell’s Houston division, is trying to find a solution for getting petabytes of visual data into the cloud so that the global team can search it all with a browser.
When you’re telling a story from the stage, tell us about a specific person. Tell us about that person’s dilemma. Tell us about how that person solved their problem (with your help of course) and then tell us the happy ending.
The happy ending isn’t “Steve saved money on server maintenance costs” or “Searches were resolved in milliseconds rather than minutes.” Those are technology outcomes. Steve’s happy ending is a business outcome. “Because the global team could now do searches in milliseconds, they saw that the Houston data mirrors the data in Central Asia, which gave them the idea to try a whole new approach. Now they are delivering new products and services in a new part of the world.” (I am totally making all of this up – it should be obvious that I’m not an oil and gas expert.)
Your audience learns by metaphorically climbing into Steve’s mind, by vicariously going through Steve’s experiences. By envisioning the world through Steve’s eyes (which is what story allows them to do), they can see a way to solve their own problems.
Specific stories do more to convert customers than anything else. Use them!
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