Story for Business: How to Create Stories That Move People to Act

Do you use stories to engage your audience?

Want to see how powerful stories can be?

To discover how to create stories for business that move people to act, I interview Park Howell.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode I interview Park Howell, a brand story strategist who helps businesses grow through the power of stories. He also hosts the Business of Story podcast and performs workshops on stories for business.

Park will explore the mechanics of storytelling, a craft every marketer should master.

You'll discover why this is important to social marketers.

Share your feedback, read the show notes, and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Story for Business
Park's story

Park, who has been in the advertising and marketing business for 30 years, shares that what always frustrated him was not knowing whether a TV spot or radio commercial was going to work.

Story started to bubble up in the advertising world around the same time Park's middle son, Parker, went to Chapman University film school (from 2006 to 2010). He asked Parker to send him his textbooks when he was finished with them because he wanted to see what they were teaching his son to prepare him for Hollywood, the most competitive storytelling place in the universe.

One of the screenwriting books was Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder. Blake, who Park says sold more family-oriented screenplays in the 1980s than anybody else, had a prescription for the 15 beats to a story.

According to Blake, a screenplay needs to be the same number of pages as the weight of a jockey (110), and Blake could tell you on each page (within a page or two) what needed to happen. Although it sounds formulaic, it worked very well for Blake and many other writers, Park adds, and the approach fascinated him.

When Park was introduced to the work of Joseph Campbell, America's foremost mythologist, he noted how Blake had adapted Campbell's The Hero's Journey, or what Joseph called the monomyth, a 17-step process for story structure.

During the time Park was reading through The Hero's Journey, he was looking at a brand strategy plan and realized he was already following this story structure with his plan. Park wondered what would happen if he was intentional about it.

Park boiled down the steps of the Hero's Journey to 10 steps for business, and used it to guide the creation of content to tell a story that would make a difference. To Park's amazement, it worked, so he fine-tuned it into what he calls the Story Cycle, a process that can be used for everything from high-level brand strategy to the creation of a 30-second TV spot.

In the social media world, you just have a small blip of time to communicate a story. Park explains that you can get that story across if you follow the three fundamental principles of the three-act play: start with a setup, introduce conflict, and resolve it.

He shares that if you can do it in a 6-second Vine video, you will have connected with the deep reaches of your audience's minds.

Listen to the show to learn about Park's background in music, as well as his comparisons between music and story.

Why marketers should care about stories

Park believes that stories are people's superpowers, and says the brain is hardwired to constantly search for them. Humans can go weeks without eating and days without drinking, but only roughly 35 seconds without their brains scanning the environment to create meaning out of what they see.

Park explains how while one son was studying film and Park was studying what Hollywood knows about story structure,