The 5 Ws and H of Storytelling: Where to tell your stories?

Not to sound like an old head talking about 'back in the day' but ...well... this all used to be a lot simpler back in the day.

Twenty years ago, the media landscape was much, much simpler. 

There was no social media of note - though shout out to the forerunners like mIRC, MSN and Yahoo Messenger and forums like Black Planet, which were early in tapping into our voracious appetite for digital socialising. I basically met my husband on MSN Messenger which is a lot less embarassing to say now in the 2020s than in the aughts, when meeting someone online seemed ...odd.

The self-publishing and self-broadcasting that is now an everyday feature of our lives was very nascent. There were some websites of note but you really had to have pretty in-depth knowledge of HTML code to be able to maintain a website. Blogging platforms opened up a whole new world and then YouTube opened up even more and then when Facebook and Instagram allowed us go to live? Chile...

I don't know if we fully grasp what a sea change we have experienced that allows an individual with just a phone in their hand to broadcast live to hundreds, thousands or millions - something which would have required a whole complicated set up for a television channel just a few years ago.

We're already seeing - for example in Nigeria's #endSARS protests last year, how powerful this ability can be by getting the more holistic story out, especially in situations where powers that be would prefer to shape the narrative themselves.

The ability to self publish and self broadcast, including live broadcasting, has meant that an individual can become a media brand on their own, without needing a 'big break', money and heavy corporate support.

This has resulted in the media landscape being a whole lot more disaggregated now. The audience which the traditional media has is much smaller on their legacy platforms at least – their TV stations, newspapers, magazines and radio stations are smaller and competing with a lot more out there. Influencers and even micro-influencers have to be part of any aspiring storyteller's considerations now when they plan out where's best to get their stories out there.

Which is exhilarating on the one hand because here you have these social media personalities who have incredible, authentic connections with loyal, engaged audiences and who tend to be more affordable and accessible than a huge legacy media company.

On the other hand, it can be exhausting. It requires constantly being up on who is hot, who is influential, who has the ability to get a story out and make it highly visible. And even the ones that you think are hot and current can have their Achilles heel.

One example - the Shaderoom is the Instagram-fuelled gossip and entertainment news juggernaut which has become hugely influential in the social media sphere in recent years (to the point that former U.S. President Barack Obama stepped into the Shaderoom while campaigning for current POTUS Joe Biden) and are known for being quick on the draw with celebrity news. However, even they are still often derided by their messy roommates for being late on stories, especially non-celebrity viral moments which surface on Twitter and sometimes even Facebook days before making it over to the Shaderoom.

So where do we go in this brave new world? Where do we share our stories and how do we figure out the best places and spaces for them?

First and foremost, constant  monitoring is key. This is related to a point I raised in a previous post where I highlighted the importance of research to know who to reach out to. 

Monitoring where they are most active and influential is the other element in this. Social media dashboards such as Hootsuite are incredibly helpful for this, allowing you to keep track of conversations on the topics you're telling stories about and to be able to see where the social media tide is turning, where amplification is happening and where stories are being told in ways that resonate.

It's also important to have multiple strategies because what works on one platform won’t necessarily work on another. And even on the existing platforms, there are a range of storytelling tools, new tools being regularly rolled out (e.g. Instagram Reels anyone?) and new ways to use existing tools. 

So while you may be telling the same story, you have to tell it in different ways on different platforms - a story could be a straight ahead press release or article pitch in a magazine but be told with a Live on Facebook or Instagram and still again as a podcast episode.

Another point to note - though I've spent a lot of time in this post writing about the multiplicity of new digital and social media channels, it’s still critical to tend to your traditional or mass media relationships - this is not a binary situation. They still have incredible pull, large audiences and the ability for you to reach a lot of people at the same time.

However, depending on the nature of your story and your audience, it may be more beneficial for you to have it told on the social media platforms of traditional media brands, than in the actual product itself. This is an approach I've used several times before - working with a media house when I was at the U.S. State Department to host a live Facebook chat (long before there was Facebook Live) to discuss reconstruction efforts in Haiti six months after the devastating 2010 earthquake and years later to host a discussion on human trafficking, (an issue which my service club works on), on World Day Against Human Trafficking.

However (and this may seem counterintuitive with all I've said here) - one of the most important things to remember in deciding where to be when telling your story, is to do you. You do NOT have to be on every platform, whether legacy or digital, to be effective. The spread is not nearly as important as targeting where your audience really is. Even if someone follows a particular brand on Instagram, they may not engage much with the same brand on Facebook. It could be for a variety of reasons - the brand may have a different voice and focus on different platforms (as they should) and your target audience prefers one over the other. For instance, many millenial and Gen Z focused brands have found it more difficult to take their audience over with them from their Instagram pages - the same Shaderoom for instance, is ranked well below older, similar blogs like The YBF, which got their start in the first golden age of blogging, when it comes to website traffic. So remember that power and reach in one space is not necessarily the same as power in another space.