Marketers and trainers are the storytellers of your org

Posted by Gina Rosenthal in storytelling | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

I’ve been mulling this question over for days, asking people for input, reading on it….

Are marketers and trainers the storytellers of an organization?

This video showed up in my stream today, and it makes me believe that I’m on to something. Jonathan Mann, AKA @songadayman, reminds us that “free” publication properties such as  YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook are really just advertising agencies. They depend on us to create their content. He reminds those of us who do create to remember what we are: writers, artists, songwriters, performers, and I’d add storytellers.

He also makes an interesting point that in the paradigm of advertising, content is quantifiable, and disposable. It’s really worth a watch.

 

I think one reason marketing and education have moved away from being the storytellers is that stakeholders require hard numbers for success, so reporting numbers is the focus. You can measure how many people take a test, click on a link, or how long they watch a video, but how do you measure the impact of reading or listening to a story?

I also saw this post on Facebook this week, a list of qualities that can’t be measured by tests.

https://www.facebook.com/mariamontessori/photos/a.118497936344.102692.116834301344/10151136514881345/?type=1&theater

This makes me think – the measurements we work from now to prove success of training and marketing programs are quantitative. But if we’re the storytellers, we need to also gather qualitative measurements.

What would those measurements be?

 

4 Responses to Marketers and trainers are the storytellers of your org

  1. Pingback: Marketers and trainers are the storytellers of your org - Tech Field Day

  2. Don Bender says:

    As a trainer for a hi-tech company I couldn’t agree more. What do storytellers do? They create images and thoughts in peoples’ heads. That’s what I do. People come into my training, often without a clue what they’ll be taking away, and my job is to create something that will blossom when they get back to their office. That is considerably more than showing people how to do stuff. I see marketing doing the same thing, just at trade shows and conferences. So the only difference between our marketers and us trainers is one is the pre-sales storyteller, the other is post.

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  4. Pingback: G's view of the world | Quit forcing storytelling into an old school marketing model

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