Digital Storytelling and Social Media
On Wednesday I attended a seminar, “Plugging the Gap: Young people skill up older workers in social media”, organised by Voluntary Action Sheffield for Learning 2.0gether. Its worth capturing something about the conference, especially as the keynote speech links comfortably with my thread about telling stories on your website started last week.
The idea of learning 2.0gether is to match up young people with skills in social media with older people with experience in business for mutual learning. (Mutuality is important and not reflected in the conference title.) This is the approach this blog advocates and so it is worth visiting their site for more information. Whilst this particular project is local to Sheffield, similar work is happening across Europe and at the conference we had speakers from Germany, Spain and Italy as well as the UK.
The keynote speaker was John Popham, digital storyteller. He covered similar ground to the ideas I began to share last Friday and so I thought it might be worth summarising what he said here. This is my interpretation of his talk and if you are interested it may be worth checking his website.
People don’t read formal reports online. Actually how many people read formal reports at all? No matter how glossy the report may be, the chances we skim it at best. Reports simply tell you what has happened, what is dead and gone. Stories change things. Our lives are full of stories, think about soaps or programmes like X Factor, which are vehicles for stories about the contestants. This summer someone threw a Baked Alaska into a bin and the country was outraged. More people watch the Great British Bake Off than watch Doctor Who; maybe the stories on the former are better. Such stories are inevitable when programmes have such massive followings but how effective are they at generating change. Marketing should be about stories that make a difference.
John Popham suggests digital technology is rehumanising our society. He argues we once lived in villages and then, with the industrial revolution, moved into cities which was dehumanising. Migration to the cities took away natural interactions and these may be restored by the digital village. Social media builds relationships, just as if you live in a village. Business depends on relationships, social media helps build them, potentially across the world.
Whilst I agree the move from rural to city life must have dehumanised the new industrial poor, there is plenty of evidence for that in the eighteenth century, I am not so sure that the same applies in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. The co-operative movement for example demonstrates community building locally and between localities. The reasons for decline in community are complex but post-war perhaps it was the growth of mass media and powerful corporations that dehumanised society.
The trust people have, living in a village, will depend upon how well they know each other. If they know each other they are more likely to trade with each other. Social media can help people become known to one another online. Stories are a good way of building relationships online and essential if you are marketing through trade or causes.
Where trade used to be based upon barter and mutual exchange, many people are experimenting with similar arrangements online.
One example is NeverSeconds, a blog written by a nine-year old schoolgirl. I followed this when it became well-known, although it hasn’t posted since February this year. After it went viral many people visited it and donated to Mary’s Meals, a campaign to build kitchens in schools in Africa, and the amount jumped from a few thousand pounds to hundreds of thousands. Veg, the blog author’s online name, has a fantastic story about how her school banned her from photographing her school dinners after the newspapers claimed she had said the cooks should be fired (she didn’t). Thousands of people subscribed and the school had to back down. It’s a brilliant story, told on the blog.
We have never had so much technology to hand to help us tell stories. Blogs are one example and video is a second. John Popham claimed that videos from a mobile phone can be as good as professional cameras and many of us aren’t even aware we carry such a powerful tool around with us all day. Of course we need to work out how to use it but you learn by doing.
There is little doubt stories are more effective at communicating than any amount of academic text, a lesson this site perhaps needs to learn. Have you any stories about how you’ve told your story online?
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