- The Storyteller
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- Storytelling is about the listener
Each week, we share a practical technique to become a more effective storyteller and analyze a video that demonstrates its use in the real-world.
Quote
“What one does is what counts, not what one had the intention of doing” Pablo Picasso
photo: luis quintero via pexels
Storytelling is about the listener
One of the stories I find myself telling often is of the time I threw my laptop in a customer meeting.
I’m sure that you’ve told stories (less violent ones) that have been a huge hit with your listeners. Yet the same story bombs when you tell it to a different audience or occasion.
Why is that?
Storytelling is all about your audience.
A story is the telling of an event, either true or fictional, in such a way that the listener experiences or learns something just by the fact that he heard the story.
Good communicators identify their audiences explicitly.
Unless you are in a one-on-one situation rarely will you have a single audience. It is important to know who your PRIMARY audience is.
And what is it you seek to have them learn or experience?
Once you can answer this question, you can then tell your story in an appropriate manner.
Yes, you can tell the SAME story to different audiences, for different reasons. But rarely would you deliver it in the SAME manner, if you want to have the desired effect.
I do tell the story of “Throwing my laptop at a client meeting” to multiple audiences but tweak my vocabulary, delivery and takeaways for each one.
Entrepreneurs: Narrate it colorfully in a NSFW manner to make the point “being aligned internally before making customer commitments is critical.”
Students: in suitably PG terminology but with a great deal of visual imagery to convey “mistakes I’ve made and lessons learnt.”
Marketers: Occasion, whether at a conference talk or drinks after work, will determine the language but the message is “Just because we speak in English doesn’t mean we are hearing the same thing.”
Whilst this may seem simple or even self-evident, it is easy to lose sight of this, as you can see in today’s video example.
Video
On Jan. 21, 2022, Intel announced plans to invest more than $20 billion in the construction of two new leading-edge chip factories in Licking County, Ohio -- near the City of Columbus. As part of the announcement their corporate public relations folks released this nearly 3-min video.
Who do you think is the target audience for this video? If there is more than one, which do you think is the primary one?
What secondary audiences does it address?
What is its message to each of them?
The folks at Intel are extremely talented and have no shortage of resources or skills—be it communications, creative or public relations. Yet the video fails to jump out at any one specific audience—Wall Street investors? Ohio legislators? Citizens of Licking Country? Prospective employees? Current shareholders or employees?
Why do you think this happened? What would you have done differently?