The Importance of Storytelling
Our world revolves around stories.
When Jesus Christ was depicted in The Bible walking on water, the author of that passage didn’t just write a sentence that explained Jesus did the impossible, then move on to the next story.
He gave the event some life by providing the motivations and back story that led up to this rather significant event in Christianity.
Without stories to support these biblical events, I’m not sure the religion would have nearly the following it enjoys today.
As humans, we crave knowledge. But we find it more palatable if there is an element of human interest attached. Stories drive us. They keep us engaged. They give us something to latch on to.
Think about your social activity, for instance.
Every tweet. Every blog post. Every Facebook status update.
Every time you do this, you’re telling your story. If you were able to combine all of your activity into one cohesive timeline, you would be able to read it as a, sort of, history of your social life. More than likely, it would be mostly positive since we are the ultimate editors of our lives, but you would see a narrative emerge.
This idea of storytelling is how PR professionals should think.
We are tasked with making news on a regular basis, but how often do we stop to investigate the deeper story, rather than just pushing out a press release or email pitch? The story that will give our new product or initiative some much-needed color?
My client recently announced a new air bag designed to deploy in the event of a side impact collision. Before this air bag was a real piece of safety technology, fatalities occurred when a driver and passenger banged heads. The air bag was installed to inflate between the driver and passenger, thus, cutting down on the number of fatalities.
When I was interviewing the safety engineers for their bios, I learned that two of the engineers had been in serious accidents previous to their work on this project. One of them even told me that, when they’re designing new safety technology, they understand how their work affects lives.
Call it ironic, call it poetic. But it’s part of the larger story.
You can show videos of crash test dummies during testing all you want, but knowing the story behind the technology humanizes it.
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Like I said above: stories drive us. They motivate us. They give us hope.
In a world where we are becoming increasingly reliant on technology and non-personable automation to to give us what we want, sometimes it’s nice to know there’s a human behind it.
Stories do that.
