How can you get more people to use social media? The barrier is cultural not technical.

Tell good stories about people using it.

Harold Jarche pointed me to this excellent article by Peter Bregman writing for the HBR -  Snip:

1. Do dramatic story-worthy things that represent the culture we want to create. Then let other people tell stories about it.
2. Find other people who do story-worthy things that represent the culture we want to create. Then tell stories about them.

How do you tell a good story? Here is the master Scott Simon with a lesson – telling a story about story telling

I think that one of the barriers of conventional Story telling TV is the imposing amount of gear that has to be used to “Get the Quality”.

If you are confronted by a interviewer, a sound man and a camera man with a huge camera on his shoulder – it’s hard to open up.

If the topic of what is on the table is a hard one – then maybe you will not open up. We are for instance finding it hard to get people to talk in St Louis about losing their homes – whereas it was easy to get people to talk about their experience in the war. We are starting to debate how we can reduce the barriers to story and hence to engagement.

This traditional approach – where interviewer is outside the story themselves – is not engaging enough.

Here then is my ideal. Molly Dineen making her brilliant film – The Lie of the Land – Available in full on Google Video.

This film is about the  death throws of farming in England and about the barrier between city folk who think that food comes from the supermarket and the country folk who struggle to produce food for a living when the supermarkets and the government do all they can to break them.

What is so special about the film is Molly’s POV. By working alone with just a small camera – she is part of the story. Her warmth allows the natural dignity of the inarticulate to shine through and to give power to the thoughts of people who could never speak other wise.

There is no barrier between her and the people or the actions in the film.

The film has caused a storm. It seems to be the Silent Spring of our time. The wake-up call.

It is the technology of the mini cam that has allowed her to change the relationship between the film maker and the subject. This brings out the emotional power of the story. It is the technology of the web that is allowing you to see this film whenever you want. The new social web brings us depth and distribution. A great story will travel.

A warning – Molly shows the reality of life and death on the farm. NO shrink wrapped beef here.In so doing she reminds us of the real cost of our food – a cost that goes beyond money.

On April 1st, we had the honor of recording a podcast of the esteemed Dr David Vaine, Senior Partner of Apparently KM PLC, who has finally revealed how to make 2.0 work in the most traditional organization.

The link to the “Phoric” is here. I must warn you that some of the material may not be workplace safe.

The ‘Phoric” is a site where well known people in the 2.0 world choose 3 clips from YouTube and discuss why these are important to them. You may find some of the other guests moving and funny. Guest include Matt Moore, Euan Semple, Alex Kjerulf (Chief Happiness Officer)

All fun aside, and there is lots of fun here, the “Phoric shows the “heart” of the 2.0 relationship explicitly and it shows how simple tools can have a huge impact.

Enjoy

The other day I was driving with my 16-year-old at a certain speed down the highway. We needed to get her to her new job at the pizza parlor on time, and were making the usual desultory conversation along the way. She had opened her Macbook and started editing photos taken earlier that day. She was also surfing six or seven radio stations looking for songs she liked, and texting three or four friends.

Suddenly her dispersed attention sort of gathered itself into a rising column of interest. Her neck craned, her body turned, her eyes peered intently as we passed what seemed to me to be a perfectly nondescript van.

“Did you see that?” she said excitedly, adding that the vanity plate said something about Elvis — I’d not noticed. She was peering intently into the van. I tried for a quick look, but entirely missed seeing the driver — a woman, according to my daughter, encumbered by one of those giant hairdos of yore, brilliantly blond, genus fanatica, species elvisia, ca. 1958.

All I saw was the van. All my kid saw was the Elvis attributes — Elvis happens to be one of her longest running crushes — on the license plate and inside. The thing is, given the way her attention had been deployed moments before, I have no idea how it pulled that particular bit of data from the parallel lines of traffic we were passing at 84 mph.

This jogged my memory of a theme surfacing at FASTForward08: How JP Rangaswami, Don Tapscott and others had talked about how multi-tasked kids are, how their synapses seem to have been rewired to do things we can’t do.

We — ok, I – am of the generation of the single node receptor, the seemingly receptive eye/I, waiting idly to be served up something whole to look at, to take in. I turned off my TV off in 2000 and have not looked at it for more than 210 minutes in toto since; nevertheless, I remain a sort of virtual reclined potato, lying in wait for something to actively consume my vacancy.

My daughter and her peers are not like this. They seem constantly pre-occupied, moving between ongoing processes — mySpace, texting, photoshopping, searching — and yet, somehow, they catch more. Not “more” as in all that is going on, and perhaps more worryingly, not more as in the big picture. More within that ambiance that is vital and relevant to their current and ongoing passions and curiosity.

One other thing that seems worth noting: we Boomers are voice-oriented — we listen to voices, discourses, “messages,” till we grow utterly sick of them. Kids excel in tuning voices — and not just those of their parents — out, and in. They instead have selected conversations, not via the paths of the larynx, tongue and ear — exchanges proceeding against a silent, or music-filled, background. The “openness” of the couch potato is not their openness, but they aren’t closed, either. Just differently available.

To address this sort of optative “user,” a mode of address that attempts to fill up all the space with its active, grandstanding, vocal presence is probably not going to get far.

Something moving sidelong and not so showy — less big, less direct, less controlling — might be more suitable. Something decentered, linked to or associated indirectly to what is already moving them.

The battle-cry of this mode of address could be, “It’s the metonymy, stupid!”

Where are these links to be found? In the messiness of what David Weinberger calls the “unowned order” — the unpredictable realm of data and metadata, or, in his metaphor, amid the wild hedgerows before the topiarists arrive — the realm of advanced search.

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I should mention that my five-year-old, who has not yet begun to surf, twit, or google, demonstrates thinking and attentional processes that are linear, Aristotelian, and complete. We have great old-fashioned conversations, as humans once did, in the wayback days. It’s pretty cool.

In the new web TV world time is compressed. I believe that the new standard is what I call the 6 minute epic. This is what I mean. An entire Hollywood film edited down to its essence and linked to a wonderful piece of music – it’s all here!

In my work in Public TV and Radio, when I hear the word “Quality” I usually know that I have met a person who is having trouble with the idea that a person who is not a communications expert is on the air. “Quality” represents often an idea about form – lighting, sound, image etc.

Intuitively we know that while these are important, that there can be a “Quality” of story and of emotional truth that transcends all of these conventions .

I would like to offer up to you an example of what I mean. This 2 minute clip is taken from Ohio Stories – a joint effort by the Ohio Public TV stations to offer their members the opportunity to tell their war stories prior to the opening of Ken Burns epic new documentary on The War that begins on September 23rd.

To this end, WOSU, Columbus, had a kind of Antiques Roadshow, where people could come in and show and tell about themselves or about family members and their experience in the war.

In this clip, we see a woman of about my age, who is a pastor talking about a chalice made from the scrap metal from both a German and an American plane that was used to
celebrate communion. In itself a neat story.

But is it in the last few seconds of the short clip that we go to her heart and to the heart of all of us and what could have been sentiment becomes truly profound. Behind the words we hear her own pain and her own confession – this is not a pastor preaching but a woman opening her heart to all who wish to hear.

But the clip has none of the “Qualities” of a conventional clip. The sound is terrible, the lighting poor and the frame awkward. None of this matters – the “Quality” is in her truth and in her daring to be human.

This is the power of story when story is elevated beyond “performance” and becomes universal.