Americans love a good story. We’re the home of Hollywood. We invented the television. We just elected Barack Obama—a man with a most improbable, and breathtakingly American, backstory—president of the United States.

Click on the “about us” link on virtually any website and you are likely to be greeted by a couple of dull biographies that were written from people’s resumes and, if you really aren’t lucky, a calendar filled with grim milestones like “1977-Gray Jeans Company moves headquarters from Spokane to Topeka.”

Avoid this at all costs. No one cares.

Have some fun. Tell a story. And it does not have to be the CEO’s story. It can be some guy in customer service or that woman in sales, but somewhere, at your company, there are people with great life stories to tell. Let them.

Maybe you have an expert spelunker, a bat biologist, a tropical explorer who’s battled sharks and crocodiles to reach an isolated spring before he died of thirst, a mountain climber who prefers to go without a rope and wearing Birkenstocks, a world champion scarf knitter, a skier who never met an avalanche-prone slope she would not plunge down, a competitive Yahtzee player,  a pilot who flies relief supplies in after natural disasters, someone who can complete the New York Times crossword in less than 30 minutes or maybe you have a person who’s done something else remarkable and compelling.

Let them tell their story and let who they are be more a part of who you are.

—Jonathan

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 at 4:58 pm and is filed under Content, Editorial, content marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.