So I traveled with my mother to the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee, where every October people from all over flood a no-stoplight town and gather under enormous tents to hear stories from master tellers. The grand prize was the opportunity to tell a story at the very festival where that road-trip cassette tape was recorded. Several years later, I entered and won a national storytelling competition. That was one of a handful of vivid memories from my childhood when I witnessed and experienced the grip a story can have on an individual, the glue it can become for a group. We laughed until we cried for all of Side A and most of Side B until we arrived at the cabin. Though we varied in age, experiences and road-trip agendas, we were all equally captivated. My mom made my brother remove the tape from his Walkman, my dad reluctantly turned off the game, and we played the tape from the beginning for the whole van to hear. His laughter was so genuine that we all wanted a piece of it. As an older sister, it was my job to be disinterested in whatever my little brother was doing, but this simply couldn’t be ignored. On the cassette were 10 or so stories, told live by different storytellers at the National Storytelling Festival. The mystery was quickly solved when I realized he wasn’t listening to the Beach Boys but rather a tape my mother had checked out of the library-a storytelling tape. And then it was confusing what was suddenly so funny about “Help Me Rhonda”? It was annoying at first, as noise emitting from little brothers tends to be. Every drive, for five hours, it was the same each of us keeping quietly to ourselves.īut on this particular trip, our relative silence was broken by spontaneous bursts of laughter from my brother. My younger brother sat in the back, listening to a Beach Boys cassette tape, and my younger sister slept next to him. I, too, read from my seat in the middle row. My father drove and listened to the Twins or Vikings game on the radio, my mother read her book and complained about having to read over the sound of the game. The scene in the van always looked the same. I was 12 years old, traveling north with my family down rural Minnesota roads on the way to our small lake cabin for the weekend. "The skill sets it takes to be a successful entrepreneur, a successful marketer, or a relevant celebrity is a different skill set than you needed ten years ago, even though that was the skill set that mattered for decades."ĭan Schawbel is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Promote Yourself: The New Rules For Career Success (St. "Creating content that allows us to share our experiences, thoughts, and ideas in real time is becoming an intrinsic part of life in the twenty-first century."ġ4. "It took Flickr two years to reach the milestone of 100 million uploaded pictures it took Instagram eight months."ġ3. "Use every customer point of contact to weave stories about who you are and what your brand stands for."ġ2. "If you're in business, first and foremost, you have to be nice. "On Facebook, the definition of great content is not the content that makes the most sales, but the content that people most want to share with others."ġ0. "One out of every five page views in the United States is on Facebook!"ĩ. "Successful storytelling builds brand equity, and businesses with high brand equity don't need to draw as much attention to themselves and their achievements as those that are still establishing their value to the customer."Ĩ.
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