Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of my time listening – to what others are saying online; on Facebook, on Twitter, in blogs, and in person. I’ve also been reading a lot about the nature of Storytelling, both for entertainment purposes, and for organizations and businesses.
I recently spent a weekend in Montreal at their Storytelling Festival, and came away Story Happy.
According to the National Storytelling Network, the listener has a key role to play in Story:
In storytelling, the listener imagines the story. In most traditional theatre or in a typical dramatic film, on the other hand, the listener enjoys the illusion that the listener is actually witnessing the character or events described in the story.
The storytelling listener’s role is to actively create the vivid, multi-sensory images, actions, characters, and events—the reality—of the story in his or her mind, based on the performance by the teller and on the listener’s own past experiences, beliefs, and understandings. The completed story happens in the mind of the listener, a unique and personalized individual. The listener becomes, therefore, a co-creator of the story as experienced.
So in Story telling, the actual act of telling the story, the fourth wall of the stage disappears, and all the magic happens in the listener’s mind. This is what makes the art of storytelling so very different than other forms of art.
This act of listening is also very important in our new media driven society, as is evident in the plethora of tools that are popping up as a way to keep track of the ‘noise’ online. We sign up for google alerts, anxiously gobbling up and recycling nuggets of information ourselves, until the novelty wears off and our inboxes are filled with heaps of daily offerings of the keywords of our choosing. We use www.search.twitter.com to listen to comments about our businesses and products, in order to better converse with our customers, and to quell any potential PR disasters that might be brewing online. And we keep track in Twitter-related programs of a number of keywords so that we may again recycle, reuse, rehash, and sometimes, re-inspire ourselves with the words of others.
My Top 5 Listening Tools for Social Media are as follows:
- Seesmic/Tweetdeck categories. I love both of these programs, I use Seesmic on my laptop, and Tweetdeck on my iPod. With them, I seem to be able to search an unlimited amount of words or phrases across the Twitterverse.
- Google alerts: Despite my griping above, they are an industry standard when it comes to listening to the online world.
- Search.Twitter.com: a great way to search what others are saying on Twitter
- Social Oomph: The best part of this program (although I haven’t used it) is being able to schedule tweets. However, I am starting to see a trend as we become more ADD online, where I don’t update my search queries anymore (come on! That requires opening another tab on my already overworked Firefox!). Good for the beginner, but I prefer to do my searches within Seesmic or Tweetdeck now.
- Socialmention.com: A new tool I heard about last week so I haven’t had that much time to play with it yet. Basically, it searches across the web; in Twitter, facebook, and on blogs.
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(Author’s note: This is my second attempt at writing this blog post – the first disappeared into the Wordpress ether without saving, so I did what any writer would do, took a break and cried over a sink of dishes. Not content to accept defeat, I am trying again with as much as I can remember, and am determined to get this post in by the deadline of midnight GMT. If this fails, I will accept the fact that I am not destined to win 2 free tickets to CWSS’09!) I heard recently that Michael Stelzner was hosting another of his great Success Summits, this one entirely devoted to Copywriting and marketing yourself as a copywriter. I also heard that 2 free tickets were up for grabs, including a consultation with Peter Bowerman, author of The Well-Fed Writer, a blog-critique by Chris Garrett, a copy of the Problogger book by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett, and a copy of the book Writing White Papers by Michael Stelzner. Well, I thought, let’s give this a shot – as a new blogger I am always up for a challenge, and I know a newbie copywriter close to me who would really benefit from this opportunity too.
I am your atypical work at home mom. My husband and I have 3 young children, we live in a rural area of Southwestern Ontario, and he gladly works overtime so that I can follow my passion. I also hate winter driving so the thought of earning an income from home is a huge deal for me This past year I have attended White Paper Success Summit, and Social Media Success Summit, and have benefitted greatly from the information I learned at both. It’s been a pleasure to learn from the best in this business, and I can’t wait to dive in to the upcoming Summit. A few years ago I had some great news coverage in a local paper for “Work at Home in your Bathrobe Day”, though I didn’t get any new clients out of the article, I did meet a woman from my area who said her Eureka lightbulb went on when she read my article. She always knew she wanted to write, but didn’t know there were options out there aside from newspapers or magazines. I was her Peter Bowerman My two oldest children started back to school yesterday, and my son will enter SK next Tuesday. This will give me 2-3 days a week of utter peace and quiet to work on building Contented Copy. I fear I might have adult onset ADD, as I have not been able to get much work done with all 3 kids home for the last 8 weeks. It’s been a kind of lazy, hazy summer here, and I am amazed at the change in me once September 1st rolled around! Ok, time to knuckle down and focus. I received some good news last week, I have been appointed Artistic Director of St. Marys Storytelling Inc (www.stmarysstorytelling.org), a Not for Profit Arts organization that I have worked closely with for about 5 years. The main event is the yearly “Once Upon a Thames” Storytelling Festival that runs the first weekend in June, and for the past 3 years, they have also offered a monthly Winter Performance Series from November to April. I have a lot of work ahead of me in this regard, and also some new and innovative ideas I am hoping to try out. I have realized that I LOVE working in the Arts sector. And I thoroughly love the genre of oral storytelling. As a child/youth/young adult I never knew this category of arts existed. I knew, emphatically, that Story drives everything, but I never realized that there was an avenue for people to just get up there and share their stories. My Liberal Arts training made me want to capture everything on paper, to preserve and protect for future generations. But, as we all know,listening to a story, and more importantly, passing on a story, is a very powerful medium. That is where the true magic lies, as I experienced many times during Journalling and Life Story Workshops. It is Here and Now, immediate, as opposed to my goal of writing, storing, and collecting dust. So that is how the next year of my life is going to pan out, dividing my work time between Contented Copy and St. Marys Storytelling. On an aside, while watching a comedian on CBC the other night, my almost 5 year old son (who has grown up listening to storytellers) says to us “Is that guy a Storyteller?” I caught the “Look at what you’ve done to my son” joking look from my husband. “Yes,” I replied to him, “He is most definately a storyteller”. Having been an avid Facebooker for the last two years, I was recently getting very disgruntled with the amount of ‘noise’ I would see filtering down through my stream. “I thought Facebook was for connecting with meaningful human beings”, I would lament, as I saw increasing numbers of my friends becoming fans of inane things such as “Sleep”, “Rainbows”, “The Beach”, and various objects, both concrete and abstract. What would further frustrate me would be the amount of Fans said Sleep page had. In the millions sometimes. Seriously? People would rather fan a page devoted to catching a few extra z’s then my well thought out business devoted to social and content marketing and the words that make it all happen? Apparently so. As of Sunday morning, my Contented Copy page had 5 fans. I was one, my brother and a friend, and then two other women I think were members of the most recent and wonderful Social Media Success Summit. When I heard the news that Facebook was opening up their Vanity URLs to pages who had 25 or more fans, I was quite happy. I figured I could just ask (read: beg) 20 more of my 150 odd friends on FB to become a fan, clearly state the reason why, and voila, Contented Copy would have it’s own URL. But alas, as most of you now know, Facebook changed the rules quite suddenly just a few hours before the URL land grab began. Well, I wonder if they were ready for what happened next. I heard from Mari Smith, the Facebook Guru extraordinaire, that a special social media chat had been set up to help people get their 100 fans, with the expectation that you would reciprocate by fanning others pages in return. I didn’t wait up on Sunday night, thinking it was a lost cause, so it wasn’t until Monday morning when I opened my Facebook account that I noticed this link to http://www.savorchat.com/chat/facebook-fan-pages-socialbees from Mari. I headed right over, and over the course of the next 2 days, I finally reached my 100 fan limit, and acquired http://www.facebook.com/contentedcopy It was hard work, let me tell you. I also passed the 1,000 follower mark on Twitter during that time frame (which I’d planned to have a wee party in my office for) but that passed by with nary a ‘whoot’ to be heard as I intently focused on getting that *darn* URL. I also personally invited about 40 of my friends and family on Facebook again, with strategically worded begging. I think I may have inadvertently agreed to name my next child after someone in return, (HAH! Joke’s on them!) but I was very pleased and honoured that almost all of them fanned my page. So, the irony in this whole Vanity URL race thing is this: Facebook stated that the reason it changed its policy on fan limits at the last moment was this: As of yesterday, those pages with 25 or more fans could register but today Facebook increased that limit to 100 fans. This has removed over 401,000 Pages that were previously going to be eligible for receiving a username this evening. This restriction is understandable as Facebook wants to prevent any squatters from creating numerous pages and quickly inviting enough users that they can grab usernames. (allfacebook.com) Not to mention the Pages that had under 25 fans (like mine). I thought at first that I would have more ‘noise’ on my Facebook stream from all the pages I had fanned, but then it hit me: I was fanning pages of ‘real’ people, with real businesses and goals and aspirations. We were in a sense, networking. I know I met a few people that might turn into colleagues/clients down the road. I wonder what the final number of fan page URL’s will be. Definitely a lot more than they expected. What power exists in Social Media! Having a vanity URL makes it easier for my business to be found online, and also claims me a little more of the Social Media ‘pie’. Facebook currently has over 240 million users, so you can start to see why having a customized username and vanity URL is so important. How about this one from InsideFacebook.com: “If Facebook were a country, it would now have the 4th largest population in the world.” Some have said that having a Facebook username or fanpage url is the culmination of our online identity. I know I am not the only one who wonders if Facebook strategically changed the rules at the last minute for a reason. If so, I’d like that thank them, as I wouldn’t have met all these interesting people otherwise. And while I consider myself one of Sleep’s biggest fans, I still haven’t fanned that page
To find out more about what Contented Copy is all about, stay tuned! Carol McLeod Freelance Copywriter/Content Marketing Strategist. |
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I first came across the Well-Fed Writer book by Peter Bowerman over 6 years ago. I didn’t know at the time that the field of copywriting existed, all I knew was that I wanted to write for a living, and the title sounded promising considering the other options for writers – newspapers, magazines, or books. I was hooked. Fast forward a few years, and I heard about Michael Stelzner’s book Writing White Papers. I had no clue at that time what a white paper was, but I was glad I’d added this book to my ever-growing copywriting library. Being Canadian, I was curious as to how the market for freelance copywriters was in this country, so a Google search led me to Steve Slaunwhite, his books, and shortly thereafter, I signed up for one of Steve’s teleclasses (the first of many!)
We’ve kept in contact, and she recently told me that with both of her youngest children in school now, she was ready to embark on the freelance journey. I have told her about the various copywriters that I follow, but I would really like to see the look on her face when I tell her that I have a free ticket for her to attend this summit, and that she can have the chance to learn from the very best in the business!