Social Media Storytelling: Seeing and Thinking Differently

By John Esterle

Continuing the thread about the power of stories, check out Kari Dunn Saratovsky's brief interview with Mark Horvath on the Social Citizens blog at The Case Foundation. It offers a brief, compelling, primer of how social media can be a powerful storytelling tool to make the invisible visible (in this case homelessness).

Mark's line about the importance of organizations losing their "lone ranger" mentality is instructive. What especially pops out for me are his comments about the value of helping people that think differently in terms of expanding your own thinking and increasing your impact in relation to the causes you're standing up for. With that, he's certainly preaching to the choir here at TWI. As always, though, we recognize doing so is far easier said than done.

Speaking of media and thinking and choirs, of course, puts me in mind of TWI grantee, Active Voice, and how they use film, television, and multimedia to spark cross-perspective dialogue and inform policy making. Telling compelling, character-driven stories is central to Active Voice's approach and I can think of no better place to go for smart thinking about how to use media to help us to see and think differently about a range of important issues.

So, here's a question (or three): Has reaching beyond the choir changed your thinking? If so, how? And how did this change in thinking manifest in your work?