Branded by Doing.

I'm working on some stuff, so I thought I might as well work it through around these parts. This particular post was spurred by Paul, and the quote I stole directly from here.

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Tim Smith of Applied Design said that marketers will be not be measured by how well they tell stories to their audience, but rather by how well their audience tells stories about them. 

We are in the business of telling stories, but maybe that business is broadening rather than becoming more narrow. Our ability to build narrative isn’t necessarily reliant on the old storyteller model. In the old days, an orator spoke, while the townsmen leaned in to listen. 

And we progressed to radio, where the family would gather around the large wooden box in the living room to listen to Amos ‘n’ Andy, Bing Crosby and the original Lone Ranger. Of course, television was no different. An appointment experience where we would take in Lucy or Gilligan or Seinfeld, just with video to add color and nuance to the story. 

But those days are mostly just ghosts of an era gone. There are few appointments and rare family gatherings scheduled around program schedules save for the Super Bowl and maybe a game seven here or there. 

While we lose what might be a more intimate gathering around programming, we’re gaining something that could be far more rewarding and meaningful, community based on shared experience, shared meaning and multilateral storytelling. A story crafted through participation, not necessarily just dissemination. 

We see this bubbling up today in remix culture where thievery is a form of flattery. We see it when television media is augmented not just by those in the room, but those connected digitally in the cause of dissecting a buried clue in Lost or Heroes. We see it when people take interest in contributing to the media around them through not just blogs, but bookmarking, citizen journalism and the simple comment. 

To reach this idea of engagement, we must not only say things, we must do things because participation and creation are reactions spurred by actions, not just messaging.