Curating an Experience Your Audience Will Remember
This article, re-published with kind permission of Danny Brown, takes a different type of look at the importance of storytelling in engaging an audience, and is itself written in a manner that engages from first word to last. Enjoy!
Creating and Curating an Experience Your Audience Will Remember
We like to be entertained. We enjoy storytellers that can transplant us into fantastical realms and take our imaginations on rides that we’d never usually imagine.
We like touchpoints. We feel more in tune with those that directly reach out to us and hold our hands; guide us; share their experience and involvement with something, and make us feel that we’re the only people that they’re talking to at that given time.
Simply put, we enjoy being part of the experience.
The best storytellers are that because their audience is enveloped by the words from the pen or the lips of the person telling the story. The best touchpoints are the ones that leave us with a lasting impression long after the initial touch has happened.
You need to be the storyteller. The touchpoint. The connection between what is and what can be. This can be for your business, your blog, your online or offline persona – in other words, you. So how do you become the experience everyone wants to be part of?
Create and Curate
Our time is busy – you need to offer us a reason to take part in whatever your experience is offering. We need to feel that there’s benefit or relevance – otherwise, is there any point in checking out your experience to start with?
Some areas to consider:
- Does it save me time?
- Will it offer me something I can’t get elsewhere (or at least be significantly different)?
- How much of a role can I play in it?
- What’s the long-term approach – is there one or is it just a one-off?
Once you’ve created the experience, your job is only just beginning. But then that’s all part of good storytelling – raise the interest then keep it going.
- Offer me tidbits and teasers as the experience draws near.
- Build excitement by offering plot points – these could be a big sale coming up, a new product’s blurred image, a special guest blogger’s shadowed profile only in a teaser post.
- Keep the touchpoints alive by using your storytelling experience to hint at future experiences – make the experience the first part of an ongoing deal (business events, sales promotions, a blog post series, etc), and ensure your audience knows this is the case.
Create the experience. Tell a story around it. Draw in the crowd with a warm welcome. Look after the before, during and after. Ask readers of your story and visitors to your touchpoints what they enjoyed, and how they’d like to see the tale(s) progress.
Feedback can turn into payback – don’t lose that impetus.
We want to be entertained, but we want to be entertained honestly and feel that you mean it.
You can do that, can’t you?
Originally published as “Creating and Curating an Experience Your Audience Will Remember” on Dannybrown.me
Danny Brown is a published author (co-author of Influence Marketing and The Parables Of Business), and an excellent and provocative writer not only for his own blog, dannybrown.me/blog, but also for IBM Open Forum.
Image attributions: Featured Image: http://lasdilearn.blogspot.com/2013/10/storytelling-through-design-thinking.html
http://www.scotsmanguide.com/Residential/Article.aspx?id=4294968733, Illustration by Dennis Wunsch
Jan Gordon
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