Jonah Sachs on the Story of Business and Social Media

The following is an excerpt of an interview with Jonah Sachs, author of Winning The Story Wars and Unsafe Thinking.

Jonah Sachs: When I left college, the Internet was starting to become an everyday thing and people were starting to create their own messages to share it with their friends and their networks. You know, before that, messages that would get broadcast were only by people who had the money and the power to craft messages and we would all consume them. I was really interested in what might happen when people started having the power to create and broadcast themselves and then how might we help them do that in the best way possible.

So, I started an advertising company to kind of explore that, and what we found pretty early on was we were making the short movies about blood diamonds or about factory farming, and people went really crazy about watching short films, passing them on, making them their own. They would cost us just a few thousand dollars to produce, and we would get 25 million people seeing them.

They were all about social change, which was my kind of passion, progressive social change. As we tried to repeat those successes, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing, I found that the factor that made something really work was not whether it was beautiful, or whether it was funny, or whether the sound effects were great ,but whether you were telling an amazing story or not, whether story that really helped people say, “Hey that’s my story too. I need to share this.”

It almost didn’t matter what it looked like. We made this thing called Story of Stuff which was stick figure animation 20 minutes long, and more than 30 million people saw it in the first couple of years. So, it was so simple, but it told a really compelling story that people built their identities around in a sense, saying that, “This is my story too. I will share it.”

I think in this post-broadcast era it’s really the stories that work, that get passed around to get people’s attention. That’s how I first became passionate about storytelling as a tool for social change.

Jonathan Cook: Since the publication of the book, the way that people tell stories and the way that we deal with information and communication has changed quite a bit. One of the things that’s come up has been the rise of social media and automation, in particular in the way that it’s working with identity, our very idea about who we are. I’m wondering what happens to story when automation takes over these traditionally human activities.

Jonah Sachs: In some ways, the analogy between sitting around a campfire 1,000 years ago or 10,000 years ago, and telling your story and what was happening maybe in the year 2000, where people were consuming a four-minute story and then sending it to their friends, that analogy was probably closer than what we might see between then and now. Stories have really changed format, into shorter and shorter forms for the more automated and targeted algorithmic kind of communications, and in some ways I think it’s extremely challenging and I sometimes feel totally lost. How do we still continue to connect to them in a human way when machines are trying to tell us the exact right things to say?

A/B testing targets perfectly what might move someone. So, in some ways it’s dislocating and confusing, and it’s harder than ever to help people make sense of the world. But, I guess I would say that there’s still an overriding factor that’s very important, which I wrote about in Winning The Story Wars, which is how a brand or organization is a story and every communication put out there is another chapter of that story. A good story has a moral, the moral of the story, the core truth you believe in. So, as we start communicating in the shorter and shorter bite-size nuggets, and as they get filtered more and more through technology, it’s more important than ever that we as communicators understand what our overarching story really is, and what core truth the moral that we stand for is, because we still have that control, even if the form may change the master narrative.

We’re trying to shift the world, so who goes where it’s going next? I do believe that eventually, computers will know exactly how to tell the most compelling story to people and give them exactly what they want at every moment. We will lose more and more control in some ways, but in terms of the overall meaning making, if we’re trying to move people, we need to understand how to connect to them, human-to-human, at least in the overarching sense of what do we stand for, who are we in the world, and then we can let machines assist us in getting that message out there.