By Sam Mackisack and Alex Wood, DT Strategy Team.
This story will not begin, as most do, with a request for your undivided attention.
It will not ask you to remain in the palm of my hand, a willingly captive audience, until a thrilling climax which leaves you in awe of my storytelling abilities, and ready to do my bidding.
The reason it won’t do any of this is because I am not the storyteller.
You are.
Storyteller implies power; the dominant force driving a narrative. Alas, I am not that dominant force. Once upon a time, I was: if you wanted to hear the end of this story, you had to listen patiently as I told it. Now you, the reader of the story, decides where the narrative goes, and how (or even if) it finishes.
Narrative is now on demand.
As Douglass Rushkoff discusses in his new book ‘Present Shock’, we have experienced narrative collapse. I haven’t read this book. Nor will I. I will instead Google the book and read only the information I find most interesting. I may buy the book, perhaps only to display it on my desk at work as a token of my cerebral nature. Mr. Rushkoff may have written this book, but I am still the storyteller.
Consider Game of Thrones. On the surface, a piece of classic storytelling. But we don’t navigate the Game of Thrones world as if it were a story we were being passively told. We are in full control of how the narrative is exposed to us.
I may watch half an episode, the highlights clip, or a whole season in one sitting. Meanwhile, with a second screen, I’m navigating my own Game of Thrones story. I’m watching the Sean Bean death reel on YouTube. I’m posting it to Facebook.. Now I’m trolling the comments section with questions about how to pronounce his name. I’m reading a chapter from the eBook. Now I’m Googling where to skip to in the episode for the ‘juicy’ bits.
Basically, I’m diverging and chattering away through the whole story… instead of sitting patiently, and quietly listening. And when the story finishes, production ceases, and George R. R. Martin puts down his pen, it’s still not over.
Because I read Game of Thrones fan fiction.
The stories that most engage us now, no longer have a beginning, a middle or an end. And if they do, these are incidental to the true emotional value we get from them.
So as a brand, you shouldn’t be telling a story. Here are five things you should be doing instead:
- Give up trying to control your audience. You are not telling the story.
- Collapse your narrative. Forget about beginning, middle and end. It begins where they choose. The middle is infinite. And the Internet has no dead ends.
- Be a world maker. A world is an environment with structure and rules, but ultimately offers the freedom to act within them. Think World of Warcraft, Facebook, Game of Thrones. You don’t own or control this world. Access is the new ownership; whoever is engaging with your world, owns it.
- Know your context. Your world is not the only one they are engaging with. They are combining yours with everything else they can consume, hence one of the most immediate forms of meme: the pop culture mash up. It might not always be with things you expect – it could be anything you share the zeitgeist with.
- Feed your fragments. Fragments are all the pieces of your world, strewn throughout the cloud. They could be products, paid advocates, users, mentions, both brand and user generated content. Any of these can act as “rabbit holes” (entries into the world), “mushrooms” (invigorating content consumed along the way) or “golden apples” (rewards for participation). Any fragment should be all three of these things. The more fragments storytellers touch, the deeper their story runs.
And if you’re an agency: don’t present to clients in story form. Let your audience control the journey – they’re used to it.
This post by DT strategists Sam Mackisack and Alex Wood first appeared on DT’s excellent blog.