Never before has social media allowed us to realize peoples’ altruistic nature. Why? Because people want to be a part of something bigger than themselves. Social media has empowered people to give because there are no social barriers separating commitment levels. It is a sort of emotional Laffer curve. If you reduce the interest rate, or emotional indifference in this case, the more unity you induce and the more people will respond. By doing so you are increasing the authenticity of the story. More unity makes each person’s contribution more valuable intrinsically.

Storytelling is good and will attract an audience as far as they can make a connection with their real life or situations. But increased content or activities in this space may bring malicious or false images to the public for increased competition, which may jeopardize the whole social media for its credibility.

I believe there are no rules, this changes every day, and the only thing you can do is to try to manage this social media wave in order to keep yourself above it the most of the time, but for sure you will fall!

I agree that passionate authenticity when coupled with a good story can get any company where it intends to be. As a social entrepreneur, I find that “give and you’ll receive Luke 6:38”, works in the nonprofit world very well. Give, tell people “why and how” and you’ll see results. I particularly find that the “why” outweighs the “how” in many cases.

It’s a great insight and a terrific example for non-profits. But the only commercial businesses that can do this are the ones with a focus on a single, charismatic leader (such as Branson/Virgin and Jobs/Apple) and it could be argued they are already doing it.

If the story resonates with the audience, then the engagement becomes an exchange with social media. I personally experienced it with an inspirational book, I Will Survive. Naturally, the mainstream media was cynical, but readers kept posting their personal, visceral reactions. Often I find that NGOs miss the woods for the trees. Story is the most compelling element of how truth is told.

The majority of social entrepreneurship stories that the media covers typically begin with the well-to-do person who decides to “give it up” to do good, which by the way helps him/her feel less empty. But the real stories, the stories that are less likely to be covered by the media, come from very different origins.

Consider the example in this article. A well-to-do person wakes up one day and decides he feels “empty”—life without purpose. Then one day he decides to do something interesting: on his birthday he taps his wealth network to contribute to his new found cause. Read the expert below. What do you think, does it sound canned?

“Scott Harrison was at the top of his world. The 28-year-old New York–based nightclub and fashion promoter excelled at bringing models and hedge-fund kings together and selling them $500 bottles of vodka. He had money and power. Yet his lifestyle brought something else: emptiness. Harrison felt spiritually bankrupt.”

This is not how it really happens.

It is misleading to train readers to expect the “better” causes to have this type of plot.

The origins of effective long-term changemakers is a personal experience with the issue (cause), in many cases poverty. An experience that has had a direct impact to his/her daily life, which has shaped how she or he interprets the world i.e., cause and effect, possibilities, approach. This person realizes there is a need do something and to make a positive impact long before the well-to-do person took a vacation in a developing nation or read about a need in low-income community.

The untold changemaker story is based on direct poverty experience, a personal challenge to break through barriers, and achieving a point in life where giving back is just the start and changing lives is the objective.

It appears that readers and, ultimately, donors and investors have been trained to expect and prefer the plot script that you’ve proposed in this article.

This is unfortunate.

Where can the changemakers from developing nations and low-income communities turn to to tell their story? Will they have to follow your approach?

Clear, spare and cogent. I’m lovin’ the Dragonfly.

How do you know when you are hitting on all four wings? For me, especially while speaking, it’s a very visceral connection.

What’s so new about the idea of storytelling as a way of engaging people? The whole point about Social Media is to engage people but the trick is to convert that “engagement” to action.

Authenticity, empathy, and passion are the key words; story-telling is the medium. Thank you for this inspirational story.

Lovely article about the fundamental importance of storytelling. My only comment would be that I am not sure about the ‘transgression’ element of storytelling. This seems a negative place to start from—maybe the third story type could be ‘the brand or customer story’, i.e., stories that illustrate a company’s authentic point of difference/value.

It is no surprise that storytelling is such an attention grabber—we have all been listening to stories since childhood. Not-for-profit stories are usually more engaged with our core humanistic side. Hearing about the issues and challenges being faced by a children’s charity reasonates deeper and on a more personal level than hearing about how a new department manager overcame work place difficulties. Both important issues for the storyteller but you can’t help but be drawn into the one about things many of us have taken for granted!

Everyone has “something” inside that “moves” them—your story has to connect to that chord. It seems like Scott Harrison’s story did just that. The 95% who are inundated and just delete requests for support to social causes in my mind never get “moved” by the approach used by the campaign. I’ve seen loads of paper wasted on such campaigns with requests for charity, but in this case it seems social media has a solution.

I think storytelling is more or less easy depending on the sector, industry, and cause. Public (and donor agencies) are generally inclined to give more money for causes that target the lower levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy of need (food, shelter, health, security), creating engaging stories that trigger guilt or empathy is much easier than, say, a project for higher education or management education of, say, a health programme worker.

In my organisation, we realised that even though there is a lot of money for TB, malaria, and HIV, what is missing is management skills of running these programmes and we started management development programmes. In spite of subsidising these courses for participants from the developing world, we still don’t get paying participants. A real example I can quote is that donors feel giving medicines saves lives, but these same medicines may expire before they’re used because of poor management, or there may be stockouts because of poor information management. But for us it’s still a struggle to get door money for management training.

The reason I started working in nonprofits was because my life changed due to education—my parents were uneducated from a small city in India and because someone believed in me and created a learning opportuity and I was succsesful. I am sitting now in Paris and writing to you hoping that I can create opportunities for others as someone created for me.

We have many wonderful stories and if you want can send to anyone interested - but that is not helping us to get the necessary funds or paying participants for our courses in adequate numbers.

Anyone interested in taking my organisation as a case study is welcome.

@J Jeyaseelan. Aren’t sincerity and honesty necessary elements of authenticity, and isn’t the beauty of authentic and gripping storytelling, that it inspires and changes the reader’s heart towards nearly any given company? Of course you would have to be consistent. You can’t share your passion for clean drinking water in third world countries at the same time as lobbying for corporate monopoly on the sale of clean water tablets. Once it reaches the public, you’ll be marked as a hypocrite or probably even greater magnitude as the company goodwill reaches, created by your initial story. Nevertheless, there are backlashes to storytelling (they are probably also mentioned in the book – aren’t they, Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith?). I think you’re completely right in suggesting that companies have to evaluate very closely what kind of stories they want defining their core and essence.

What makes a good story is the personal integrity that shines out of the story. With personal integrity comes the desire of not even bothering about quarterly profits. It would be nice if the general corporate culture would embrace this concept.

An insightful article that reflects the desire in human beings to be engaged and connected with their community. In 2011 and beyond, social media will open up the opportunity for many people who have been marginalised by disability to become connected and to engage in ways that were previously not available.

A good story, but once again the article/interview drifts toward this nebulous discussion about organizational “misbehaviors” instead of more specifics about optimizing approaches. I have worked for a leading national non-profit for many years, and now consulting to several, believe me, the non-profit sector does not have a leg up on the private sector in this area. The example you used, charity:water, is very much the non-profit exception rather than the rule. Sure, a true compelling cause generates the emotional contagion necessary for the noun “network” to become the desired verb “network” but I was hoping for more substantive insights into the still murky waters of social media.

What a load of tosh. The reason that some social enterprises and non-profits appeal to people emotionally is because what they do is meaningful. It has very little to do with the story-telling and everything to do with the story. Some corporates can aspire to achieve the same levels of engagement because what they do is meaningful; for example Google with information or Tesla with the electric roadster. Most, however, don’t and they cannot. Unless of course, what’s actually going on here is just the repackaging of an old idea—a time-honoured tradition in business writing—whereby “story-telling” is the new buzzword for good old-fashioned advertising.

After all, the job of advertising is to tell (or sell) a story that usually goes something like this: “Acquire product X and you will be healthier, stronger, smarter, wealthier, and more attractive to the opposite (or same) sex.” It’s a story we’ve been told and bought into many many times before and it belongs to the genre of science fiction; the science part being the market research we do to guide us to how best to tell the story.

Case study explains four effective dimensions of deploying social media, aiding to fulfill an organization’s goal.

Though a private sector organization might have to face more constraints (thus challenges) in deploying a successful social media strategy, such as, customer engagement, customer behavior, time devotion versus results (in terns of new clients, revenue, growth, market reach), and more.

Story telling is classical salesmanship when working with intangibles. In reality, story telling is what people recall, why they buy, why they speak to pals—tangibles or intangibles. This tactic/strategy is older than the printed word. It tends to be used by non-profits because of small budgets and the realization that it is the story that drives the money. This is a great topic and worth re-telling often.

The authors have done a great job of summarizing The Dragonfly Effect, and, I would say that audiences in the nonprofit, corporate, and public sectors could benefit from these tips. I have led traditional strategic communications activities in both the corporate and nonprofit worlds for many years, and I learned something new today. Also, I was reminded of how my communications skills and mindset can be modified and leveraged to fit this new medium. The excerpt from this book (which I can’t wait to read) is a good lesson in the use of social media. It is concise, easy to read, and makes a lot of sense. This guidance has helped me think more creatively about how I can effectively use my rich base of experience and skills as a strategic communications professional and leader in the social media.

There is no doubt that storytelling is an important power of the social media, but also important is that social media should be a part of the company strategy and even part of the company culture. You have to have a very strong content strategy to have effective social media—to tell the stories which get the customer to “love” it and pass it on to friends and other consumers.

To tell the best, most authentic, and trustworthy stories, you need to have a framework that can help you choose the best media for you as a company to pass on the stories. The next step is to train your employees to use the tools and tell the stories on behalf of the company. To do so, the company needs to provide guidelines for the type of content to share and how to interact with the consumers and thereby pass the story to consumers. If you as a company want the story to last longer, you need to differentiate the content among the communities with which you want to communicate and even offer exclusivity to one community group of consumers for a limited time.

The best and most trustworthy stories are created by other consumers. We know from surveys that customers trust peer reviews and the stories created by them. An example from Denmark about very trustworthy story telling is the example of a US women’ Facebook group who used a new insulin product from the Danish medical company Novo Nordisk and has experienced a weight loss in a short period of time with nearly no negative side effects. This Facebook group has created an obese product by telling their story of how they lost weight. The company had to tell the group of woman that it was not recomendable to use the product for anything else diabetic use as FDA has not blue printed the obese use.

As someone who has been in the nonprofit sector for eons, I have seen the power of passionate people engaging others in their creation of a new entity. For many it was one-on-one story telling. I remember especially one man trying to start an athletic and tutoring program and he would come around with his scrap book and tell the individual stories of how running and competing was the carrot to attract the at-risk youth, but that scholastic achievement was the ultimate goal. Social media makes it easier to reach larger audiences but you still have to have the right story to tell.

In a world of marketing hype and buzz words, this offers a breath of fresh air with focus on “being authentic”! In a wonderful world of technology innovation, social media represents a brilliant way to break down the walls of cultural, geographic, social-economic boundaries where you converge on a message delivered with an authentic voice, lead by an authentic vision.

I’m looking forward to reading the book.

Unexceptionable observations. Effective story telling is certainly the way to find a place in people’s lives. As a startup, I see a lot of merit in what Jennifer considers to be the difference between reporting facts and telling stories that engage the attention of people.

I might just like to add that it is also important to be sincere and honest about the stories being told. These should emerge from the hearts of companies and not from the account books or balance sheets. If any company spins stories out of nothing just to grab the attention, its success would certainly be short-lived.

In the long, long run, the company’s overall credibility and its commitment towards corporate social responsibility would also count. Any company which scores badly on these counts might simply lose its audience even if one of its stories is truly gripping by itself.

This is a an excellent read on how to excel in marketing within a socially-mobile context. I am particularly impressed with the need to engage or “story-tell” the fan base before moving to the action phase. Most leaders do not listen to the feedback or delve into the engagement phase. Yet this is truly where the ‘buy-in’ is made.