Conclusion

You can tell better stories that resonate with your audience, and when you resonate with your audience, they are more likely to buy, act, or respond as you intended. More than that, if you tell a really powerful story, they are going to retell it, which makes it viral.

You’ve seen this virality at work in other communication channels. When that funny ad runs during the Super Bowl, there are people discussing it the next day, retelling it and reenacting it for weeks, months, years to come. Heck, you probably still know at least one person who says, “Whazzup!” And that Super Bowl ad ran way back in 1999. Those kinds of viral ads become fodder for other media, including references in sitcoms, social media posts, and funny TikTok videos. They get talked about in the break room at work.They become an inspiration for in-jokes that family and friends tell at get-togethers. They might even inspire other ads from other companies.

Storytelling has always been this way. Stories are passed down from generation to generation. The really good ones inspire other stories. Important details from those stories get woven deeply into cultures and even the ordinary experiences of everyday people. Indeed, people are eager to tell and retell the best stories because they know the audience is going to react.

It’s the reason we discuss popular movies. It’s the reason fans of certain TV shows, movies, and books have elaborate conventions where they can continue to discuss their favorite stories and find creative ways to interact with them for years to come.

That same sort of virality can happen with your presentations. The stories you tell in your presentations can get retold and reshared, inspiring other stories, long after the audience first heard them. From a business standpoint, if you give a presentation to one client, and they can effectively retell your story to their colleagues, it’s going to have a far more profound impact than if you share the story with each of them yourself.

Viral stories make your job a whole lot easier, and storytelling drives virality more than anything else. Indeed, the best stories are designed to be easy to understand and easy to retell. They make an immediate emotional impact and have a clear plot that leads to a poignant, moving, or amusing With Structured Storytelling, you’re organizing all of your content so that it’s formatted to present, published in a slide library, but just as important, you’re weighing the emotional impact of every slide. Every presentation tells a story, and every slide is a scene. Data and dry information are couched in impactful stories designed with intentionality.

Yesterday’s presentations were preordained, linear slideshows that were often hastily constructed from a tangled mess of slides. They weren’t often intended to tell stories or evoke specific emotions, nor could presenters readily respond and react to the audience. Instead, the presenter was usually trying to shove an audience down a predetermined path no matter how they felt, reacted, or responded, with little ability to adjust on the fly.

Now you’re like the old storyteller sitting around the campfire, telling your most profound tales to a captivated audience, but you’re also following their emotional journey, able to react and bolster your story by answering questions and leaning into the emotion.

Scratching The Surface

What does the future look like? Every single person in your organization is able to present as effectively as the CEO. Your entire global organization continually gets better, giving more consistent and impactful presentations every day.

It all begins when you start bringing some order to the tangled mess of slides that are scattered in folders all across your organization and beyond. Create your slide library, organize all of your content, trim the fat, format everything to present, impose some intentionality on every slide, and create your structured slide library.

Of course, you can do all of this yourself. It may seem like a big task, but cleaning a cluttered house is hard work, too. And it’s a big task that can be tackled efficiently with the processes we’ve given you. All of that work is worth it in the end. The benefits of creating your own structured slide library will be worth whatever it takes to get there.

However, the whole process becomes a lot easier when you invest in good Presentation Management software. The choice is yours, but we strongly recommend you get started right away. If you’re still using the old cobbled-together mess of linear presentations, you’re in Presentation Hell.

You’re missing out on the real power of Structured Storytelling and Presentation Management.

Imagine: a whole channel of communication available to your organization, and you’ve only scratched the surface of its potential!