12 corporate storytelling top tips
A gift from our key-note speakers
Because our first corporate storytelling event was a success with a lot of positive feedback from various parts of the industry, we thought you might want to know more about corporate storytelling.
So the key-note speakers of the event were asked to provide us with some tips to build successful stories.
About corporate storytelling
Storytelling as a business?
Yes. Because storytelling evokes emotion and involvement and makes a perfect catalyst for change. Your corporate story is the engine behind your internal and external communications. The lynchpin between your corporate identity and your reputation. Have you also noticed that successful companies are all companies with an inspiring story?
Not just any old story
The aim of corporate storytelling is to create a dynamic. This forms the foundations of a new policy or the mainstay of a strategic reorientation.
Storytelling in corporate communications:
- Gives sense and meaning to your company and its staff
- Links and binds people
- Creates support
- Inspires and gets people moving – in the same direction
- Recounts the values of the company
Are facts and figures superfluous?
Of course not! No stakeholder or ceo worth their salt would let themselves be convinced by a story alone. It is the combination of this with storytelling that ensures that the message sticks.
With a corporate story we look for the values, the mission and the vision of your company and tell it as simply as possible in a unique corporate story.
Because storytelling gives an insight into the heart and soul of a company.
See the Top-3 Tips of:
- Raf Stevens - Corporate Story-adviser & trainer
- Geert Degrande - Journalist copywriter
- Nancy Nackaerts - External & corporate communications
- Rachel De Rudder - Internal communications / human resources
The Bemore storytelling blog
BeMore will launch a corporate communications blog soon!
Industry specialists and experts will supply you with in-depth articles, best practices & special features offering insights on storytelling.
Storytelling top3
Watch out for the bear
The story goes like this: Once upon a time, two managers were walking through the woods. Suddenly, they saw they were being followed by a grizzly bear, so they started running to escape it. Then one of the two managers stopped suddenly, took his Nike running shoes out of his rucksack and put them on. Surprised, the other manager asked him, “What are you doing that for? Do you think you’re going to escape the bear that way?” The first manager replied, “I don’t have to escape the bear. I only have to escape you!”
The story is about competitive advantage. There are many definitions of the term. The question is, if you have to explain some complicated issues to your personnel tomorrow, are you going to tell the story of the bear or are you going to work with definitions?
Don’t do like the Titanic
This is a story about an iceberg. About the visible top part and the invisible part below. The visible top part is the storytelling. But first, you have to think about the bottom part, in other words the story thinking. If you only concentrate on the form, in other words the telling and not the thinking, the content, then you will come a cropper, like the Titanic.
Always work with an egg timer.
This is the story of your complicated company information, which has to find a place in the minds of your audience and your stakeholders. How do you do that?
By focusing your message. By processing your complicated information into an interpretable unity. The passage through the middle, the tiny hole in the egg timer, is the story. Make it concise. Tell it well. That way you will have more impact!
"When communicating the narrative way, it will be easier for our brain to remember the message. If communicating factually the brain will give up after a while."
About Raf Stevens
Corporate Story-Advisor & Trainer:
Storytelling as a strategic instrument for strong corporate communications.
Facts & figures alone do not motivate or inspire. Epically powerful stories do. Raf will help you to discover your own story. He believes that every sector, product or service has a story. Together with you, he will write your story, simplify your communications and make sure your message hits home.
Raf has been working for ten years as a marketing and communications manager with a number of different companies. www.corporatestoryteller.be
Storytelling top3
Be original
I think that for storytelling it’s particularly important to find a creative, original angle. People often start off with the traditional idea of recounting an event, a story event. That’s not actually what it is. You don’t necessarily have to tell things in chronological order, for example; you can tell things using flashbacks, for instance. Or start the story in the future, like in a film, for example.
Make a link
Try to link the story to current events or to something highly topical or something a lot of people are thinking about at the moment. You could take a television programme or a book, like one of Stieg Larsson’s, who is the top fiction novelist at the moment. I think that, with some degree of creativity, it’s possible to make a link there.
Focus
Decide which value you really want to accentuate. When telling a story the danger is wanting to convey too many values at once. I think it’s far better to clearly define the values you want to express and focus on beforehand. That could be friendship, for example, or thoughtfulness, or anything. In other words, you have to have one value on which you focus the story.
"We all have the basic need for stories, but somehow due to the technological evolution we have forgotten that.
That is to return!"
About Geert Degrande
Journalist-copywriter of “Tournée Générale”, “Homeless World Cup” & “Latte Macchiato” among others.
Geert Degrande has been working for over a quarter of a century as a freelance scriptwriter and copywriter. He has built up broad multi-disciplinary journalistic experience at different publications for the trade and the public (including HR square, Vacature, Intermedair and Jobat). He is currently associated as a journalist with CFO Magazine (www.fm.be), the Belgian trade magazine for finance managers. He also has experience in storytelling. One example is “Homeless World Cup”, a story about ten homeless people who travelled to Australia for the World Cup for the homeless; “Tournée Générale”, about the secrets of Belgian beer; “Lobo”, where suspended Gent superintendent Peter De Wolf looks back over a thirty-year battle against crime.
Storytelling top3
Choose one core essential message
When you’re storytelling, it is important to be clear about what your core essential message is, the key message. Then you surround that message with all the rest of the events as examples, as a frame, but continually returning to the key message.
Live your story!
It’s also important to live the story! For everyone to be behind that key message! For everyone to live the story on a day-to-day basis, both internally and externally, in his own building block, in his own story, as part of the big story and as a representative of that key message.
Be consistent
It is important in expressing the story in external communication for all messages to be the same, illustrated on the basis of examples. Those examples serve to generate a sense of reality, to build a kind of plausibility, so your story is not a one-liner, but it really lives within the company, even within the person telling the story.
"You first have to do your homework internally before you go tell the story externally.."
About Nancy Nackaerts
Director External & Corporate Communications UCB S.A.
Nancy Nackaerts started her career as a journalist specialising in political and economic news. With her sharp analyses, she built up a strong reputation among different media including De Standaard & Dow Jones Newswires. After ten years she made a radical decision to move to the world of business as a communications specialist. She is currently responsible for the development of a worldwide corporate communication strategy at the pharmaceutical company UCB. in other words: implementing a corporate communication plan, drawing up a coherent media policy and offering support for local corporate communications. She profiles herself as a dynamic, forward thinking woman who takes a results-oriented approach working with large companies.
Storytelling top3
Listen
Storytelling is about giving meaning. To be able to really make your story mean something, you have to use your identity, your values as your starting point. It is something you do both as an individual and as a company. In more concrete terms, what it means is first seeking your values as a company – What are the individual values? What are the collective values? The mission is formed on this basis.
Consciousness
So what’s important in corporate storytelling: on one hand listening. Listen to yourself, but listen to your colleagues, too. On the other hand, consciousness is also important. Consciously working with what you’ve heard.
Authenticity
Be yourself, both as a company and an individual, a colleague, a customer.
"Writing a story is a perpetual motion.
It starts over and over again."
About Rachel De Rudder
Member of the Board of Directors of Durabrik Bouwbedrijven NV
Rachel De Rudder qualified as a clinical psychologist in 1996. The remarkable aspect of her career is the way she installs human resources in the broadest sense of the word building up experience in corporate culture and identity. She places a great deal of importance on people as human beings and employees’ own stories. Rachel started her career in HR at Volvo Cars and SAS Automotive where she evolved to become HR Manager. In 2005 she was named HR Manager at Visser&Smith Hanab NV, an industrial B2B construction company and in January 2007 she moved over to Durabrik NV.