virtualDavis

Talk to Me! Storytelling and Social Engagement…

Prepare for a reactive post, no, an interactive conversation, about social engagement.

But first, what about that photo? Bam! A powerful graphic. Except for the middle word…

I’d prefer “Talk with me.” Because social media is all about with. Old school, top-down, one-way, pump-it-out, force fed broadcast media was all about to. Do you follow me?

Engaging Storytelling

Media has evolved. Most of it. Not all. There are still a few knuckle-draggers lurking in the shadows!

Which is why storytelling – in it’s simplest, purest and most engaging form – trumps old school broadcast media. Storytelling in its oldest form. Pre-books. Pre-TV. Pre-movies.

Storytelling is about social engagement, author-audience engagement. Storytelling is about relationships. It’s about with. Not to.

Social Media

Which brings me to Randy Thio (@ideabloke), the founder of ideabloke, “a personal digital media agency committed to 100% organic social media practices.” His post, The Endgame Of Social Engagement provoked my curiosity because I don’t consider social media to have an endgame. Not in the conventional sense. At best there’s no final stage. No end of the process.

Social media is about building relationships, about engaging and maintaining communication, about interacting, about author and audience evolving together.

Social Engagement

But Thio is focusing on the initial social engagement, not social media in general. The objective of engaging an individual through social media, he proposes, is to provoke (and then hopefully extend) a response.

In it’s purest sense, engagement is the ability to cause another person to respond… using any (or a combination of) the following methods:

• Comments – In response to a status update, tweet, or blog post.
• Shares – Includes linking/mentioning on a blog post they wrote.
• Likes – Includes +K’s, Kred, etc.
• Retweets – Whether native or via a tweet button
• Mentions – Includes Follow Fridays, etc.
• Favorites – Anytime your tweet/update/post is faved on any platform
• Pins/Repins – Pinterest specific of course.
• Tags – Whenever a user is tagged on pics on any platform.
• Hashtags – When ppl begin to adopt & share a hashtag you created.
• Pokes – Yes, I did just put that on there.

Whichever method the audience chooses to respond, it’s critical to acknowledge and capitalize on the opportunity to have a conversation… geared to get to know that particular person… which hopefully leads to a relationship. ~ Randy Thio (ideabloke.com)

Social Media as Storytelling

Short of wandering village to village like Mario Vargas Llosa’s storyteller, social media offers raconteurs of all stripes ideal audience interaction. Ideal global audience interaction. With no end game. Except building a rich and enduring relationship. Social engagement is the first step, the wink, the handshake of social media. Social engagement is the open door behind the well worn welcome mat.

Unlike broadcasters, live storytellers understand this intuitively. Initial social engagement is the spark of interest, the pause long enough to listen, a provocation, an invitation. But storytelling itself, live storytelling, is the original social media. Live storytelling is an interactive relationship, and the story evolves accordingly, being shaped collaboratively by author and audience. The storyteller listens and watches and feels, tailoring the narrative to the appetites and needs of the audience. Sometimes abbreviating; other times inventing extemporaneously.

The Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, whose deeply political work vividly examines the perils of power and corruption in Latin America, won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday… Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy praised Mr. Vargas Llosa “for his cartography of the structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat.” (NYTimes.com)

In my senior year at Georgetown University I had the good fortune of sudying with Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa. I was already a fan of his fiction, and the opportunity to meet with this wise, gentile man of letters for several hours each week to ruminate on his favorite jewels in the Latin American literature crown was arguably the highlight of my four undergraduate years. I also had the good fortune of translating a nonfiction essay for Mario Vargas Llosa for publication in The Georgetown Journal. I offer this background to underpin the depth of my pride and excitement when Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

With his typical grace and commitment to literature Vargas Llosa has focused on teaching Borges at Princeton and avoided the pomp inevitably accompanying his laureatship. He acknowledged the sometime comic results of winning the Nobel Prize including a solicitation to invest the approximately $1.5 million into an ice cream venture!

But Vargas Llosa prefers Borges to ice cream. I remember this from my days in the classroom with him, so it’s ironic that he’s currently teaching the work of his Argentine hero who never won a Nobel.

Our great writers have all been prolix… Borges is the opposite—all concision, economy, and precision. He is the only writer in the Spanish language who has almost as many ideas as he has words. He’s one of the great writers of our time. (Paris Review)

This reverence for Borges endures, and it’s not altogether unlike the admiration I have for Vargas Llosa. And not just for his writing, but also for his grace. But this for another day…