The importance of storytelling in corporate communications

As you draft your latest communication plan, do you ever wonder why would people care about what you do? What is the interest for your customers, media or industry analyst to want to follow what you are working on? We often hope that our latest communication or announce will just be groundbreaking enough that will catapult our business forward. It’s amazing what optimism can do …

Understanding your vision and mission

How many journalists or analysts truly understand your mission and where you stand in achieving it? Please do not assume that because you and a few others in the Company get it that everybody does. Spend the time to explain what you do and why you do it. If your mission has no value or interest to the market, you will get virtually no traction – and it can’t just be because everybody else is not as smart as you are.

Tell a story

Corporate communications is very much about telling a story. Each message, press release, addition to your web site all need to fuel a common tread that links everything back to your mission and strategy. If you want to become a leader in something, you need to make sure that you do the right moves but more importantly make it known to the world. For example, if you want to build an industry standard, you need to explain to the media what you’ll be doing and the key milestones in achieving this. As you successfully pass thru the different milestones, you need to remind the media about the steps you have taken; showing that you are on target to your plan. If you do it right, you will be heralded as a standard even before you’re done – that’s the strength of telling a story and having people believing in it.

A story is longer than one press release

Don’t expect that people will praise what you do after just one press release. Building and telling a story takes time; usually begins with an introduction, has several chapters and bridges and since this is a story about your Company. Think of telling a story such as Star Trek where the storylines never seem to end – you need to keep adding to your story and make sure the target audience keeps following you. Look for example at Apple where you have many parallel web sites such as MacRumors that people follow in order to track what’s going on with upcoming product releases and are trying to find out before any formal announcement what Apple will do next.

So as you are finishing that communication plan, reread it one more time and see if you can actually find the storyline that will keep your audience captivated with what you want to tell them – one press release at a time …