Is Story Hour on Your Calendar?

The first month of 2015 is just about finished. Let’s face it, time moves fast, and so does the pace of communications and marketing.

No matter what industry you work in, or what kind of company you work for, business moves faster than most of us want to admit. Why do you think we are all chained to our mobile phones, stressing out each time we hear the email notification, and diving for our phones to answer on the first ring?

What if we took a few minutes and stopped what we were doing to take a few minutes to seriously consider about the story we want to tell?

This week I attended the monthly meeting for the Northern California Business Marketing Association (BMA). The title of the event was “How Stories Can Boost Your Content Marketing Success.” Yes, I know, content marketing – is another buzz word necessary?

The unique turn to this meeting is that BMA focuses on the business-to-business (B2B) side of the marketing puzzle. One of the speakers works for an agency that works with the education division of Intel. By telling more compelling stories they were able to increase Intel Education’s Twitter (@IntelEDU) following from 1,600 to more than 210,00.

How you ask? They took the traditional B2B tactic of sharing numbers and statistics to a new level.

1. First, they became more and more visual. Stale numbers were turned into entertaining infographics that had resonance with even a consumer audience.
2. Second, they decided to be more human in their content creation and their interaction.
3. And third, they actually set aside time each week to tell stories.

It’s that third practice that really sets them apart. When was the last time you put Story Hour on your calendar? If you’re like me, you remember going to library as a kid for story hour, or you remember your first grade teacher telling stories using a felt board and our imaginations.

How do you tell stories? Where do you come up with your best stories? Do you have Story Hour on your calendar?