Telling the best stories: content curation opportunities

My little boy has learned that if bedtime is a rush and there’s not much time for a story, he can tell this one:

‘Once upon a time, they all lived happily ever after. The end.’

His big sister thinks this is cheating, but I tell him that the story is good, it has a beginning and an end – he just needs to work on the middle part a little.

At my little girl’s school, they put a lot of emphasis on storytelling as a vital part of literacy teaching, and this doesn’t really change as we get older, whether we are retelling a news story to someone else or recounting a version of everyday events in response to those inevitable ‘why’ questions that little ones come up with.

As the amount of information people share online increases exponentially, it will become even more important to be able to filter the content out there in order to make sense of the online world around us and to build the best story that has the most resonance and relevance to us.

If you are at all active online, for personal as well as for business reasons, you are telling a story in every piece of content that you either create or point out to others for sharing.

If you can see the longer term benefits of telling a story, building up small consistent pieces or chapters of content, then you can put forward a version of events stamped with your own personality and offering your own unique point of view.

For your customers and potential customers, this can be a very powerful means to help them make sense of a marketplace overloaded with information.

Creating high-quality relevant information pieces such as articles, blogs, case studies or how to guides, combined with a careful curation or ‘re-presentation’ of the best and most relevant information by other authors on your particular subject, will put you in a position of expert storyteller, and if the story is compelling enough, more and more people will listen.

Careful storytelling or content curation offers a super opportunity to show your readership what makes you unique, what sets you apart, and by using content that truly reflects you and your brand you can demonstrate what you can offer over and above your competitors.