Content integration and storytelling

By Limor Shiponi

Training techies from B2B in social media can get really funny sometimes. Once in a while they get to “isn’t there a tool for that?”. Very often there is a matching tool but there are several issues that cannot be solved along this line of thought. One of them is writing for the social web, the other is content integration. I’m not talking about the impressive systems that already exist. I’m talking about social subtlety, attentive refinement, the ability to engage in truthful conversation with people all over the world. Which brought me to think about content integration systems and storytelling.

If you know the technological systems – they are complex and “clever” in many ways. They require a lot of maintenance in the form of “translation” – teaching the robots to integrate upon various possible requests. They require mapping information and existing content, integration with other content keeping systems, interpreting clients requests, format recognition – the list is long.

What they can’t do is change the content in real-time to meet a subtle request, to create the proper translation, answer back for the sake of tweaking the content client’s understanding, read other communication signs which do not appear in the form of captured content. Something storytellers do very fast and naturally, not without thought.

Observing the web, two new professions seem to emerge – writing for social context which is somewhere in the middle between copywriting and authoring and content integration – the human element in the system, the person to tweak the conversation backed by technological systems. Both can learn a great deal from storytelling because although the outcome of their work is in the written or captured form, the forces driving it arrive from the spoken culture.