The true pain of our nation’s wars never really hit me until I escorted my kid sister to the airport, bound for Iraq. Seeing parents say goodbye to their kids, and saying goodbye to her, was almost more than I could handle.
When I die, I hope people will remember me as someone who mattered.
I hope my kids someday like me as much as they like my wife.
I am way more happy and inspired than I often look.
Every spring, I ACHE to play baseball again.
My emotional spectrum of joy and pain expanded 10-fold with the birth of my kids.
I try to enjoy whiskey, herbal tea, and comic books every night before bed.
Besides the suffering or death of my children, nothing scares me more than Costco on a Saturday.
Eating food from our garden has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.
I still think Wilco is the greatest band since the Beatles.
If I was a professional athlete, I’d be retiring soon.
Deep down, I believe my kids are more talented, smarter and better looking than your kids. And I know you feel the same.
I believe in the curse of A-Rod. It’s a real thing.
Will Clark, the ex-major league baseball player, changed my life by signing an autograph.
Here’s a little exercise that I’d highly encourage you to try some time (especially if you’re a marketer). I’ve seen it work in settings large and small, and it strongly demonstrates the power of story each and every time. It goes like this:
Grab someone you know (or a total stranger for that matter). In the next minute, share with them a story that is told in your family about another member of your family. Next, ask that person to summarize what that member of your family cares about. I’ll bet you they nail it. Based on one 15-60 second story, they’ll be able to summarize one or more of your family member’s personal values.
Lisa Watson, co-founder of Cupcake Jones, shares a funny story about testicular cancer!?
Wouldn’t you love it if you could tell such an effective story about your company!? YOU CAN! We, as marketers, spend hours every day crafting language, when we could be capturing and sharing the stories that exemplify our company’s values and benefits. Like never before, it’s time to become storytellers rather than wordsmiths.
For a little fun, and an example of this exercise in action, watch this clip from the session I did with Gary Hirsch at GoGreen ’09. Watch the whole thing or jump to the 26 minute mark for this specific exercise.
Back when we lived in small villages with rich oral traditions and long cultural memories it was relatively easy for the story—and meaning—of a house, horse or hero to persist and develop generationally. It should come as no surprise, then, that our jetsetting, transmedia’d, mobile, modern lives have kind of interrupted those patterns (and…yeah, we don’t ride horses so often anymore). It’s hard to pass down a long local legend about a subdivision neighborhood that’s only ten years old, or for a product that will be thrown out by month’s end. This doesn’t mean that we don’t have stories and resources for conveying these stories, it means that there has been a shift regarding what the objects are and the ways in which the stories could be told. Perhaps we’re too busy playing around on our smartphones to stop and listen to as many long, rambling stories as we used …or maybe we just need to find a way to add smartphones (and the internet) into the equation?
coming to a tweet near you?
Indeed, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that we are coming up with new methods of storytelling and collective histories that are …well…. transmedia’d, mobile and modern. We are, after all, fundamentally social beings with an inquisitive streak that predates opposable thumbs. What are we doing now that we possess not only opposable thumbs but touchscreen mobile devices? The same thing we’ve been doing all along: interacting with our world through our social structures and the technological means by which such undertakings can be facilitated. Or, to make it sound less intimidating: we do stuff in our world; utilizing people and things as needed.
What’s interesting to me is to see the latest iterations of the “utilizing people and things as needed” part. This is because the social web is allowing an unprecedented confluence of people, things and worlds—stories, about real things, unfolding in real time, across a digital ecosystem that permits the democratic, horizontal and interactive production of content and correspondence. Instead of relying upon DJs and evening news producers for determining what we hear and how, we have things like Last.fm that bring us closer to a network-based musical listening experience and Youtube playlists, enabling users to tell a certain story by preparing a particular sequence of videos for others to view (and comment upon/respond to, accordingly).
This development—the streamlined horizontal addition of one’s own narrative or storytelling touches to things and ideas—is now being carried over to the analog world and it has important implications for the relationship between someone and the brands and people with whom they interact. While there are many facets of this (which I will surely continue to explore in subsequent posts), I wanted to take a moment to make an initial look at one in particular: the “Internet of Things”.
You can think of the Internet of Things as the inclusion of real-world objects to the internet, by virtue of physical sensors, QR codes and RFID tags. I’ll not talk too long on the basics of it and will instead steer you to ReadWriteWeb’s excellent (and persistent) coverage of the emergence of the Internet of Things. Allow me to summarize, as simply as possible, why this is an awesome development for brand strategy: imagine.the.storytelling.potential.
As brand strategists and marketers we always talk about fostering a close relationship between people and the brands they love—this adds a whole new dimension (namely, the 3rd dimension) to such efforts and smart brands will start playing in this space to find out just how it might be utilized by their users. While I envision there being a certain time and place for proprietary Internet of Things uses (see my previous gushing about Icebreaker’s “baacode” as a quasi-Internet-of-Things program), my sense is that much of this will (hopefully) follow the adage that “information wants to be free” and barriers will come down in favor of a ubiquitous and usable interface that crosses brand lines and product categories. A cool new contender: Itizen.
Describing itself as “a place to tell, share & follow the life stories of interesting things,” I think it has a lot of potential. It’s simple: you put one of Itizen’s TRACKit tags (available in stick-on or sew-on, depending upon the nature of the object) on whatever you want, then you register the code on the website and share its story. What it is, why it’s meaningful, where it’s been, and so on. Cool. Fascinating. Powerful.
I first heard about this kind of idea from the founder of Re-Shirt and love how it does more than just share things or even stories—it shares meaning. An opportunity for self-expression, cultivating connections between people on a very deep level: the little bits of life that are interesting and beautiful—(some of) the things that make life worth living. It’s an amazing step back to where we began: passing down stories of the valuable things in our lives, just with a new twist: a digital invitation to put your voice into the story as well.
What are your thoughts? Are people going to get burned out on all of this “sociality”? Do I have the wrong read on the “information wants to be free” thing? What are some of the neatest applications of the Internet of Things that you’ve come across or seen on the horizon? Let me know!
- Caleb
PS – for a great thought experiment regarding products and “sociality” as a factor of the Internet of Things, look here.
