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Why Real People’s Stories Make Other People Care (And How You Can Take Advantage Of It)
The outcome of a balanced and well-crafted content strategy should be to gently push customers and employees in a desired direction.
What’s the best way to do this?
Let’s freshen up our memories from the post The Clue to a Great Story: Make Me Care, and point out that if people care they are more likely to act.
Real people’s stories weaves your compelling story
Since making people act is the goal, the trick is to create a really good story who make people care. (Dig deeper into the mechanics of a compelling story in the post The Clue to a Great Story: Make Me Care).
One great way to do this is to share best practices and success stories, where real people’s experiences constitute the core essence. Real people’s stories create emotions, and emotions make other people care.
Simple as that, right?!
Storytelling as a way to engage
In her post Telling Tales: Storytelling as a Communication Tool, Rachel Miller, writer of the blog Diary of an internal communicator and winner of various industrial awards, describes storytelling as a way to engage with people on an emotional level.
“You can listen to someone tell you to ‘to change’ but it becomes much more powerful if you listen to a story of someone who has gone through change“, she writes.
3 steps to make people care about your message
1. Make sure everything is about them
And by them, I refer to the people who work at your company, or the people in your special group or community. No superficial language, no buzzwords, no mumbo-jumbo. Just the genuine, authentic, real world experience of your own people.
2. Tell the stories behind everything you do
Interview the people behind decisions, new products or projects. Have them explain with their own words about the background, the process and the next steps.
3. Use photographs of actual employees and your own organization
Never choose clip art or unpersonal org-pics from the web. It’s important to have content from your own organization, featuring your own people. It’s important that everyting your audience see is the real deal.
Dig deeper: I wrote another blog post about how to help employees understand why their job matters, and why they are crucial to the company’s success. You can read it here.
About the author
Anna Rydne is a communications specialist, a mother and a small business owner. Based in Stockholm, Sweden, she's determined to uncover the secrets of how successful people and companies communicate. Anna has a special interest in social media marketing and personal branding and she believes the road to success is trying. She tweets about all things comms, social media and marketing @CoSkills and writes for SteamFeed.com twice a month. She holds a bachelor's degree in psychology. Contact her at anna@communicateskills.com.
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