WHAT STORY SLAMS CAN TEACH YOU ABOUT BUSINESS COPY IV: Keep It Familiar

Awhile ago I heard a report on NPR about how to make your dinner party stories engaging.

The takeaway was surprising and, for a business storyteller, pretty comforting: Don't talk about things your audience hasn't experienced.

"Speakers tend to think that listeners will most enjoy hearing novel stories - that is, stories about experiences the listeners haven't had. And that makes perfectly good sense. “We think of communication as an attempt to tell people things they don't already know," says NPR social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam. "But what our experiments revealed was that listeners actually far preferred to hear stories about experiences they had already had."

This is great news for business communicators. Something I hear from business owners is that they tend to hit a wall when it comes to developing new content. It's hard to come up with engaging new ideas all the time, especially if you're an expert in a niche industry.

The good news is, you don't really have to. Instead, put your work into developing a solid business message based on what your audience has experienced and what they need. Then shape your content around subjects that address those needs. Repeating yourself isn't just acceptable, it's preferred. "Think of stories as if they are wine," Vedantam says. "They get better with age."

And what does this have to do with story slams? Everything. The most successful stories are not the rants or the guess-where-I-went-on-vacation stories, but the ones that tap into a universal. The listener can relate if they feel something familiar when they're listening. Why? Because as a listener, or a prospective client, they're being affirmed.

It's a comfort to know that someone else in the world gets you. Communicate that, and it will make people who are new to your work want to find out more.

Check out the NPR story here.