Digital Storytelling - An interesting tool to leverage social media platforms

An interesting and interactive technique to engage visitors on popular social media platforms is Digital Storytelling. According to Wikipedia "Digital Storytelling" is an emerging term, one that arises from a grassroots movement that uses new digital tools to help ordinary people tell their own 'true stories' in a compelling and emotionally engaging form. These stories usually take the form of a relatively short story (less than 8 minutes) and can involve interactivity. The term can also be a broader journalistic reference to the variety of emergent new forms of digital narratives (web-based stories, interactive stories, hypertexts, and narrative computer games). As an emerging area of creative work, the definition of digital storytelling is still the subject of much debate.”

Digital storytelling is the best weapon for media creatives. There are three ways in which digital storytelling was different from analogue storytelling. It creates a brand story, and doesn't just provide product information. Also, it allows marketers to pull in people, rather than pushing merely consumers. Thirdly, it creates significant word of mouth.
- Thomas Kin, Creative Director, Global Creative Team, Cheil Worldwide

Digital storytelling aims to make its audience spread the stories spontaneously by word of mouth and create a buzz over the internet. Lately various forms of commercial messages, including advertising on portal sites, microsites and games sites, have become more prevalent.

Some of the interesting campaigns in the recent times that leveraged digital storytelling are Samsung's 'Haptic Mission', Nike’s 'Be the Legend', “Hang in There Jack”, Zack 16 etc.

An interesting proposition would be using digital storytelling of a product in a campaign using social media platform to engage customers.

More interesting case studies on campaigns involving digital storytelling to follow soon….