Rick van der Wal alerted me to the post What’s The Story? by Jessica Helfand. She discusses the millions of short (140 character) messages we’re seeing today on Twitter, status messages, and the like. Sometimes funny, these messages can also incite a story.
the wedding cake in the middle of the road
You can see a story, however it also void context – that’s all for you to add. Helfand seems to pine for a more traditional form of story.
Nevertheless, the pithy, out-of-context statement is becoming its own narrative form. Yet despite its appeal, it is almost singularly flawed: isn’t it by its very nature meant to perpetually self-destruct? (How else to make way for the next one-liner?) On one hand, it’s blessed with the patina of abstraction, a gestural cast-off intentionally divorced from context lest it appear too serious.
It’s value is fleeting. How many people remember tweets or funny status messages? For all their entertainment they’re fleeting. Which got me thinking. For years people have been advising the use of story to communicate, most importantly in businesses. We think in stories, so marketing and business should also. Seth Godin has been advising businesses to use story to break through today’s tidal wave of marketing messages. One problem is that they’ve been taking the advice but cling to the most basic form of story – the creation myth. Yahoo! being started by two graduate students from Stanford. eBay and the Pez dispenser myth. Companies are learning that they need to move beyond this most basic form of story. But beyond that these companies also default to stories with little context. Context takes time; the whole strategy of adding story is to maximize the little time you have with customers, why waste that precious time on context. Which leads me to ask, without context are they more fleeting?
Google Lively the perfect example of fleeting
Let’s use Google Lively as an example. I harp on it and many consumer virtual worlds for a lack of context. You could modify your avatar to be a big headed kid, a bear, or almost anything. Compare that to World of Warcraft where you can be one of only a small set of characters and all taken from the established WoW universe. In Club Penguin you of course have to be a penguin. With SuperSecret you’re a teenager trying to grow up. These might not be the best examples but they have a whole lot more context than Google Lively had. Without context Google Lively proved very fleeting.
Google Lively like others in the virtual world space thought they were building a utility and expected users to generate the content and in so doing, the context. They were very similar to the the pithy phrase – the wedding cake in the middle of the road. There was something there but it was fleeting without context.
Offering superior utility
That isn’t to say that they had to have context to survive, they could have provided superior utility. However compared to their competitors it was pretty much more of the same. Hence they were in the context game and sadly they weren’t even suited up to play.
In today’s world where everything is competing for attention if you don’t provide superior utility or context, you’re fleeting.
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