StoryQuest Blog

Most of us view Facebook as a tool that teenagers and college students use to meet people, read the current trends in short posts, keep up with friends or expand their social horizons by attending a posted party, concert or gallery event. What most of us adults don’t know is that these same tools that connect them to people, places and recent trends are just as useful for a business executive as they are for a 20-year-old student looking for the next great kegger.

In a blog by Beth Warren she describes how businesses can develop work groups for collaboration, plan meetings, network to important contacts and events and post problems or successes the have had during their day.

You can read more about Beth’s experience here.

Telling stories. It seems to be something that we instantly relate to the spinning of long, drawn out tales of our exciting, or not so exciting, daily adventures. Sometimes we forget that telling our stories can have a life sustaining precedence, such as in an emergency room, to a police officer or in front of a jury of our peers.

In these instances the way we tell the story is just as important as the facts presented in the account. In a blog by PR and Marketing professional John Durante relays the importance of these facts in his blog, but also the way they are delivered.

During a visit he made to an emergency room he noticed that the medical professionals were “drowning in data.” In a broader context the importance of the story is just as important as the data presented to the listener. The span of events and how they took place is just as important as the events themselves.

The same is true for business. Executives do want to be presented with the facts. The number or errors in their shipment process, the number of new accounts acquired in a year, the number of redundancies in their company etc… Facts are undeniable and sometimes jobs depend on them. What we often forget is that the medium is just as important as the message.

The story of an executive’s failure and then his journey in solving the problem to ultimately triumph in the situation is just as effective, arguably sometimes more effective, than a statistic, PowerPoint presentation or pie chart.

For as Durante points out, “Without data, there are no knowledge. Without knowledge, there can be no context. But without the story pulling together the data, knowledge and the context, how successful can we be, in public relations, or in medicine?”

Here at StoryQuest we try to maintain a blog for many reasons. Of course there is the obvious branding, search engine optimization and good PR that usually comes along with a blog, but what most people neglect to remember is that blogging is also a great internal communication tool.

While I was tooling around on the web trying to gather some ideas and get some blogging inspiration, I stumbled upon this report entitled, “The Blogging Revolution: Government in the age of Web 2.0 by Dr. David C. Wyld.” This report was published by The IBM Center for Business of Government. According to them,

“Dr. Wyld examines the phenomenon of blogging in the context of the larger revolutionary forces at play in the development of the second-generation Internet, where interactivity among users is key. This is also referred to as “Web 2.0.” Wyld observes that blogging is growing as a tool for promoting not only online engagement of citizens and public servants, but also offline engagement. He describes blogging activities by members of Congress, governors, city mayors, and police and fire departments in which they engage directly with the public. He also describes how blogging is used within agencies to improve internal communications and speed the flow of information.”

It is definitely a very informative and interesting document that may open up people more to the idea that blogging isn’t just for teenagers on MySpace.