Do you know how to tell a great campfire story?
11 Ways to Tell a Great Campfire Story
Based on various sources, here are eleven ways to tell a great campfire story:
- Sincerely enjoy and revel in creating and sharing your story
- Make the story easy for the audience to understand
- Choose a story based on the audiences experience, interests, and closeness to the storyteller
- Introduce local flavor and personal touches into the story
- Avoid bogging down in unnecessary information or pointless tangents, but do emphasize thought- and emotion-triggering details
- Bring originality to your story if it's a familiar one
- Heighten the sense of anticipation by departing from the typical, i.e. start the story in the middle
- Cater to the audience's emotions and senses to create engagement
- Have a strong sense of where you are headed with the story
- Don't tell the story too fast or too slow
- Create a connection with the audience, including by asking open-ended questions to engage the audience and create involvement
By now, you may be wondering why we're thinking about ways to tell a great campfire story.
Blogging for Business and a Great Campfire Story
The connection between business blogging and campfire stories is this: When I conduct blogging for business workshops, I counsel business executives and marketing communications professionals to view a brand's blog as its "campfire."
Don't buy it?
Revisit the eleven ways to tell a great campfire story and substitute "blog" for "story." Suddenly, these tips lead you to crate stories when you are blogging for business that are better than most of you see, especially among business-to-business brand blogs.
One other point to drive home why you’d be better served to think about telling “campfire” stories instead of the standard corporate fare around your business blog?
Nobody tells boring corporate press releases as campfire stories. In fact, as SmallBusinessTalent.com host Stephen Lahey put it, "People crumple up corporate press releases and use them TO START campfires!"
And that, my friends, says it all! - Mike Brown
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