Great Storytelling
The Energy of Many
By Jeff Busch
I heard “Tell me a story, daddy” many times while my three children were growing up. It’s something inherent in the human spirit that from even a young age we want to connect our imagination with a great story. Unfortunately, for many of us, as we grow older…wait, let’s make that—more seasoned—we seem to migrate away from the comforting art of storytelling and into more brief and often abrupt conversations.
When I think about it, what illustrates this better than my children, now teenagers, who like many around the world, are text messaging their way through the day? It is seemingly faster, more efficient and gets us more quickly onto the next thing in our busy lives we think we need to do.
But in business, and in an environment where our industry is challenged daily with proving our worth, we have to find a way to blend the current trend for brevity in communications with our critical need to reconnect with decision makers and tell a story. In a world twittering away at 140 characters per message, how do we do that?
That’s exactly what we’ve challenged our team here at MPI to do—find a way to re-connect through the forgotten art of storytelling. And we’ve challenged them to do that through the modern mediums that are growing in popularity.
Through critical analysis of our communication channels and watching trends of where our members and other industry professionals are connecting digitally, we’ve developed an integrated communications plan that marries our traditional efforts with social media channels that are becoming wildly popular communications tools.
You’ll find MPI active not only on LinkedIn, but also on Facebook, Twitter and launching an enhanced and more reader-friendly blog, Engage (to go along, of course, with our award-winning PlusPoint blog). Looking further ahead, we’re planning downloadable podcast interviews and on-demand content. Beyond reaching out to people online, we’re finding innovative ways to integrate social media into our live events. At MeetDifferent, we’re trying out preferred seating for twitterati, digital scavenger hunts to prove the power of face-to-face connections through Posterous, user-generated content on our blog, tweet-chats with speakers and providing blog hubs.
We’re taking a step out there and risking the unknown. We’re letting go of some of the message control and encouraging our members and professionals in our industry to engage with us in these digital conversations to help us tell the story. It’s a story about how when people get together, connected for a purpose, great things can happen. One+
JEFF BUSCH is MPI’s vice president of strategic communications. He can be reached at jbusch@mpiweb.org.