Marketing, technology, and storytelling

With social media marketing, everyone is a writer. Whether you’re writing tweets, blog posts, or landing pages, you’re telling a story.

So good storytelling skills are well worth cultivating.

Even for those of us in marketing technology, who work behind the scenes, we need to understand that the solutions we build are often vehicles for good storytelling — ideally masterful storytelling. And, more often than not, you need to tell a great story to sell your vision in the first place.

With that in mind, I wanted to share something a little tangential to my usual posts here…

I stumbled across The Writing Life II blog today, written by Charles Deemer, a screenwriting teacher at Portland State University, and found this excellent diagram of the storytelling paradigm:

To be sure, not all stories follow this format, but it’s surprising how many do — easily the far majority of movies, books, and plays in Western culture. There’s a certain rhythm to this formula that resonates deeply with most of us.

Something to keep in mind when crafting your own stories — or enabling others to tell theirs.