Employees often relay stories in the lunchroom. Photo credit: Seattle Municipal Archives via Flickr

Compelling brand storytelling requires a sympathetic protagonist as a central element. A customer, fictional or real, often fills that role. Employees too offer a goldmine of storytelling that can humanize the brand.

Employees have plenty of stories. They are probably telling them at work. The question is how to find those tales and link them to your organization and its core values. The lunch table is often the place where employees share company, product and customer service stories. Introducing yourself to different groups during lunch and explaining your quest can uncover marvelous product stories. A simple question often elicits employee responses: Have you heard any good stories lately about [name of company] products or customer service? Or what stories about [product] have you heard lately?

You may not get an immediate response, but just asking stimulates recall. Leave the group your business card and ask them to call if they think of anything. A good story often boils up from the memory within a couple of days. Some businesses have successfully used the company employee newsletter to solicit brand and customer service stories from employees.

Ryan Michael McDonald, director of digital marketing at Iterate Marketing, explains how to elicit and use employee stories in a MarketingProfs article.

Think like a Journalist

Think like a journalist. Keep your eyes and ears open for story ideas. Seek data or statistics that support the story’s message.

Interviewing employees is the best method for uncovering work stories. Company veterans usually have some to share. Asking new employees to relay what they hear can also be a fruitful strategy. Almost paradoxically, employees are more likely to share stories in a group of fellow employees than in a one-on-one meeting with a PR representative. Better, then, to solicit stories in a group where the group reinforces, enhances and extends the story. It then can evolve into a bull session with multiple stories.

Questions to ask include:

• When was the last time you solved that problem?
• Do you have a particularly memorable incidence of [conflict] where you [resolution]?
• What kinds of problems do you solve for customers?
• How do you resolve those problems?

Out-of-the-box story openings and questions can include:

• Tell me the funniest customer service issue you’ve dealt with?
• What’s the hardest product problem you’ve had to solve?
• What customer issues keep you awake at night?

“If you can get just a few people to buy in, others will see that it’s safe and rewarding to share their stories, and they’ll have the templates and models for how to tell theirs,” McDonald recommends.

Classic Story Plots

Seek the classic elements of a story plot. Interesting narratives contain conflict and resolution: a customer faces a problem that employees solve. Brand stories follow a similar pattern, explains Forbes contributor Susan Gunelius. A strong beginning sets the scene and presents the character. The middle covers the character’s problem, and the end presents the resolution.

When creating employee stories, be sure to portray characters that the audience can connect to on an emotional level, Gunelius says.

A major component of employee storytelling is happy employees who support the organization and its goals. Research shows that successful companies tend to have satisfied, engaged employees who support the company’s purpose, says Kathy Klotz-Guest, in a post for Convince & Convert. Reaching that goal requires marketing to employees just as you market to customers.

It’s not just the positive stories you want to hear from employees. While marketers present messages to consumers, employees may be sending a very different message. Stories that employees relay when management is not around can predict problems for the company, Klotz-Guest writes. A rising number of negative stories can foreshadow a decline on trust, organizational trust and even complete company failure.

Bottom Line: Employee storytelling can be a fruitful content marketing strategy. An organization’s employees are fertile grounds for brand storytelling ideas. In addition, employee storytelling can humanize the brand in a way that standard marketing copy cannot. The challenge is to solicit the stories that employees may not know they have.

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William Comcowich

William J. Comcowich founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, media measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media.