Lori L. Silverman

Successful businesses have discovered the power of storytelling and its ability to affect the bottom line. A good way to start building your business stories is to use the time-honored storyboarding technique.There are usually a few ways to tell the same story — the one you choose may depend on the circumstances of the telling, the audience, your intent and goal in telling it, and other factors.

What a challenge you have when crafting a business story, especially if all you have is data. First, you have to aggregate the data together and then you have to assemble it into meaningful information. After that, you have to figure out what knowledge — concepts — it communicates and how to bring about enhanced understanding.

There’s no reason to try to be funny or entertaining in your business story just because you believe that’s what people want to hear. Make sure the humor fits with the setting, is respectful, and actually enhances your story. Sometimes in the darkest of moments, humor can jump in and relieve the intensity of a situation.

Infographics designed as a story or that use many story elements can be quite helpful for your business. So are stories created from a series of photos or images — much like what’s on SlideShare or in a photo collage. These media let your imagination and creativity soar. Technology such as Stipple allows you to take a photo and add text to it to transform it into a story.

Telecommuting and working virtually across the country or even the globe are popular and often necessary today in many workplaces. You can use storytelling to reduce the distance among virtual team members. Story prompts and triggers can be useful in bringing out these stories. Here’s how: Get to know each other.

You and you alone have total control over using storied approaches in your daily interactions with others, whether at work or in other social interactions. Here are ten easy things you can do to incorporate them into your work, no matter what you do. Replace questions with story prompts When you desire more specific information than a yes/no response, transform the questions you were planning to ask into story prompts to gain richer context around an issue, problem, or need and to more deeply and quickly develop rapport.

Why should you care about the title for a story? For oral storytelling, it really doesn’t matter because the title is mainly a memory aid for you only. Probably most story titles are thought up solely for this purpose. On the other hand, if you’re a blogger, journalist, professional writer, small business owner, or a branding or marketing expert who’s responsible for placing stories into a story bank or into various media, what you use as the title for a story is very important.

Highly technical audiences like to know the science behind storytelling before accepting it as a core business practice. Sharing all kinds of data with them may be tempting, but would defeat your purpose of demonstrating how powerful stories can be. It’s not that you don’t want to share data — but you want to do it in a way that reinforces the fact that stories not only create understanding, they also create meaning and knowledge transfer.

If you want to develop and deliver a memorable story to your business audience — whether your listeners be employees, stockholders, or customers — you need to consider how to shape your storytelling. Here are some ways in which you might build your business story for maximum impact. Name Structure Comments “I’m Better Off” Main character gets in trouble, then gets out of trouble, and ends up better off for the experience.