Why Your Team Members Should be able to Tell a Story

Our friend Claire Diaz-Ortiz recently live-tweeted the birth of she and her husband’s first child.

And the world paid attention.

Claire is an executive at Twitter, one of the better story-telling companies in operation today. Twitter is all about communication, after all, so the fact she live-tweeted the drive to the hospital, the car breaking down, the screaming ladies in the ER and on and on makes complete sense.

Twitter is how we share our lives.

What’s amazing, though, is her story got picked up in international news and got Twitter an enormous amount of winsome, fun press.

Claire was strategic in what she shared.

Humorous, charming and delightful, she kept her audience of hundreds-of-thousands enthralled as the day went on.

What’s important to remember, though, is Claire knew how to tastefully tell a story. And in 140 characters or less, we might ad.

Tweets like:

…kept us all enthralled, but only because a clear story structure was in place.

  1. We knew what was going to happen (A baby was going to be born)
  2. We knew there was a challenge (It’s called having a baby)

When a character wants something and has to face a challenge to make it happen, you’ve got the stuff of stories.

Many people simply tweet the routine happenings of their day, but how many of your employees know enough about story structure to frame their tweets in such a way they are interesting? Tell a good story, after all, and you’ll capture the attention of the world.

How did Claire’s Twitter story end? Quite beautifully.

Welcome to the world, Lucia. If you’re anything like your wonderful mom, you’ll be telling quite a story with your life.

Follow Claire on twitter at @Claire. And baby Lucia at @Lucia.