By Paul Furiga
In the last several months, I’ve been traveling and speaking a great deal about the power of storytelling in public relations. In addition to the opportunity to meet so many enthusiastic, storytelling business leaders, these trips have reminded me of what everyone in business needs most today: a simple, smart roadmap to success.
Whether it’s the Quick Start guide to our new piece of technology or the online restaurant review that gives us the straight dope on the best place to eat, we want to cut to the chase. We’re too busy today to spend hours and hours figuring out the most important rules for success. So in that spirit, here are our Five Secrets to Storytelling Success in public relations, drawn from the development and practice of our StoryCrafting process for sharing our clients’ great, untold stories:
1. Tell an authentic story. This means share your story, not someone else’s, or the one your competitor used last year. Why does your organization exist? Why do you come to work every day? This is not your mission statement. It’s what you tell your friends when they ask what you do, the reason that bright-eyed new hire tells you that she picked your company as her first employer.
2. Employ your most fluent storyteller to share your story. Far too often, whoever sits at the top of the corporate totem pole shares the story. Often, that’s not the best person to share the story. In a tech company, it may be the inventor who is passionate about the product and focused on development — but not running the company. In a non-profit, it could be the person on the ground, delivering disaster relief, not the chairman of the board. In a large corporation, it could be the evangelist client or customer who carries greater credibility because they paid you for the privilege of using your product or service and they love it.
3. Continually read the audience to make sure it’s engaged. Phrases such as “tin ear” and “tone deaf” exist in our language because far too often, we mistake blathering on without listening for true communication. If social media has taught us anything, it should be that life (and communication) is all about the conversation. And if your audience isn’t in conversation with you, your success will be limited at best.
4. Find the hero and the villain in your story. Like great literature, great storytelling in business provides someone to root for — and someone to root against. How does your story stack up on this measure? When you or your organization share your great, untold story, are you making it clear how you (the hero) solve the problems (the villains) of your audience(s)? If not, your audience will find its hero somewhere else (and believe me, they’re looking for one).
5. Focus on your happy ending. In business, we don’t often get the chance to script that “and they all lived happily ever after” ending to our stories. That doesn’t mean we can’t focus on an ending for this particular chapter of our story that leaves our audience engaged, enthused and clamoring for more. Does your story do that? If not, it’s no better than a faded, tattered list of features and benefits from some outdated 1970s marketing or sales manual.
Are these the only secrets to storytelling success? Hardly. We do know from our clients’ experience that they work. What secrets propel your storytelling success?
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Paul Furiga is president and CEO of WordWrite Communications.
