COLLECT : HOW TO FIND STORIES
When people ask me how I find stories to share, I often use the analogy that I'm like those people who walk along the beach with a metal detector. But instead of looking for and finding metal, I look for and find stories.
STORIES ARE ALWAYS THERE, BUT THEY'RE HIDDEN UNDER THE SURFACE AND YOU NEED TO KNOW WHEN AND WHERE TO DIG A BIT DEEPER.
Teaching your leaders and other key people in your organisation about your brand, its messages, and storytelling on the whole, will also start the collecting process, but there is a process you can follow to uncover more.
It very rarely is as easy as asking someone to ‘tell me a story’. That's a common mistake. Most people think that what they did or what they achieved is not big enough to be considered a story that others would want to hear. You need to draw it out of them and draw out the relevant details.
If your organisation has been around for a while, let's say more than 50 years, and you want to uncover the stories from your past (which you should!), then you may have to allocate someone to go through historic records to uncover specific events and backstories. These are the heritage stories discussed in part I. Two companies we look at in the case stories, The Fullerton Hotels and Resorts and Columbia Restaurant, do just that, with Columbia Restaurants actually hiring a journalist to research for them.
If you are a smaller company or a younger start-up, it's unlikely you'd need to employ someone, but ...
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