MOMENTRO - THE HOVERBOARD
Stories Maketh A Man: Transmedia Storytelling
December 18th, 2019 by chamod tharuka
We are part of a society that keeps evolving and with Moore’s law speeding up faster than ever before, we can expect major changes in the way we learn and consume. This has a massive impact on the way we market our products as well as services. The modern consumer does not want to be ‘sold to’. Instead they would like it to be a consultative learning process.
Gathering what everyone has to say is an effective way to reach out to a target audience by delivering them what they want. Hence, the way forward for businesses will be to adopt a collaborative and participative approach to story making and storytelling which makes everyone a storyteller across multiple platforms. This process is called transmedia storytelling.
Year 2010: Connected Chaos
We are part of a society that keeps evolving and with Moore’s law speeding up faster than ever before, we can expect major changes in the way we learn and consume. This has a massive impact on the way we market our products as well as services. The modern consumer does not want to be ‘sold to’. Instead they would like it to be a consultative learning process.
Gathering what everyone has to say is an effective way to reach out to a target audience by delivering them what they want. Hence, the way forward for businesses will be to adopt a collaborative and participative approach to story making and storytelling which makes everyone a storyteller across multiple platforms. This process is called transmedia storytelling.
Responsive vs adaptive design vs Transmedia StoryTelling
The world of advertising was dominated by responsive designs which basically meant that content moved dynamically in a single layout that resized based on the screen size. However, adaptive design on the other hand uses a set of fixed designs that changes from the server side itself.
Transmedia storytelling is not too difficult to understand. In simple terms, it is a technique where a central narrative is told across multiple platforms. Each part of the story is complete, thus, satisfies the end user. At the end of the day, transmedia storytelling delivers rich content after a cumulative process. George Lucas from the likes of Star Wars is a major proponent of this technique. The success of this franchises was based on transmedia storytelling.
How does it help?
Transmedia storytelling is not a standalone campaign. It is fully participatory and has the ability to create a social trigger. The target audience to which the story is told will be actively involved as they become storytellers themselves. Everyone has a story and it is a story worth telling. This eventually makes us a facilitator for storytelling than being a storyteller.
Why does it work?
People enjoyed telling stories and listening to stories since the dawn of time. If such a habit has not died over time, it is obvious that people share a common undying interest in stories. However, in order to ensure that transmedia storytelling works, you need to make sure that the storytelling process is collaborative and that your audience has a chance to contribute, participate and immerse themselves.
A practical use case from Sri Lanka
Our story is about small and medium scale businesses and how it was delivered across multiple channels and how the influencer became the storyteller. We were able to create a platform called #SMBFriday, for Citizens Development Business (CDB), that allowed various small business owners to tell their stories to a wider audience. The idea was to create content about these SMB’s and in order to amplify the content, CDB threw in a free digital promo budget too, for the chosen SMB’s every friday. These business owners were able to create a social trigger where other small and medium scale businesses wanted to tell their story as well. Ultimately, this approach is helping CDB to gain the trust of this audience and to position themselves as ‘a true friend’ of the business community.
The approach taken was ‘non salesy’ and the idea was to help the ecosystem grow by getting them to become storytellers through the SMBFriday platform.
To further amplify this, CDB created a microsite that enabled to collate all the video content and encouraged anyone to recommend an SMB that they thought would deserve to be part of this programme.
A mix of digital channels including Facebook, Google and YouTube were chosen to take this message even further. The conversations, shares and mentions have started to roll in with ease and user engagement is at an all time high and CDB is clearly changing the way digital storytelling is done!
