USE THE WEB TO TELL YOUR STORY

by Antoin O Lachtnain, March 2, 2001
Email: antoin@nua.com
Web: http://www.nua.com/making_it_work/

We live in the information age. The most ancient way of transmitting information is through the story. Human beings love stories. People have sat around hearths listening to storytellers tell stories since long before writing was invented. People who go to Shakespearean plays and read novels are all driven by stories. Similarly, the massive sales of tabloid newspapers are driven by new, exciting, outrageous stories.

In the information age, the effect of storytelling is magnified 100 times. Who hasn't experienced the speed at which a rumor can spread right around the world via email? A good story (usually gossip) propagates just as surely as a well-engineered email virus.

An old-fashioned storyteller would pull together many interrelated facts, and put them together in a sensible, understandable way. By doing this, storytellers used legends and fables to help listeners understand human behavior and natural phenomena.

Information Technology is a sophisticated story-telling device. It lets you take many different interrelated facts and put them together in a sensible, understandable way.

The stories an IT system tells are usually more than fireside gossip. A system for tracking a driver's license tells the policeman a story about the person he's questioning. A livestock tracking system tells a vet the story of an animal, or even of a slab of meat. It can also tell the story of the quality of animals bred by a particular farmer, or about the spread of a disease, by pulling together information about a large number of isolated incidents. Like a storyteller, these systems put together facts that are insignificant in isolation, but when placed together in context gain a new significance.

Any product or service these days has a plethora of complicated information built up around it. Even a simple product has quality and inventory information. Every technology product has extensive technical and user information. The problem for your customer is that they may not be able to make sense of all this information. They don't know what information is important and what to disregard. If they aren't guided through it properly, they will become bored and confused.

Your corporate or intranet website is a new kind of storytelling device. It has to link the facts together and make them relevant for the reader. It has to help a reader understand you and it has to be presented in a way that is relevant and exciting for him or her. Like the storyteller, the novelist, or the newspaper publisher, you have to adopt certain devices and conventions to tell your story:

• you have to be current. What you say has to seem relevant to the current environment. That's why it's important to update regularly.
• you have to highlight the things that will interest your reader or customer and draw him or her in. A good storyteller always starts with a curiosity-arousing line that makes you want to know more. Similarly, you have to have a headline, which will make your user want to click.

The Web has some special characteristics as a story-telling medium, which you must take advantage of. In particular:

• the reader has to be able to go off on the tangents that interest them. In the oral tradition, a storyteller could tailor the story to the needs of his listeners, so if he was talking to farmers he would tell them more about the characters who worked the land, or if he was talking to housewives, he would put the emphasis on the women in his story.

Similarly, a good website allows a reader to find his or her own way through the information, by structuring and categorizing it well. They may have come to the same piece of information by any of a number of different routes.

So next time you're making changes to your website, whether it's for your intranet or your Internet. Think of it as a tool that you will use to tell a story. Don't worry about flash graphics or new logos. Ask yourself:

• Will this website allow us to tell a compelling, continually evolving story?
• Will it make our story relevant to readers and draw them in?
• Will it allow readers to explore and find the information in their own way?
• Most of all, will it organize all our information so as to help the reader make sense of us, by bringing together the facts and putting them together in a way that makes sense?

Antoin Ó Lachtnain
Nua Ltd
US Headquarters
475 Park Avenue South, 6th Floor,
New York City, NY 10016
Tel: +1 646 935 9411 | Fax: +1 646 935 9414

European Headquarters
Merrion House, Merrion Road, Dublin
4, Ireland
Tel: +353 1 218 7600
Fax: +353 1 283 99 88
Email: antoin@nua.ie