Spencer, I agree to this extent:  The phrase ‘Social Media’ is so amorphous as to be essentially meaningless.  In fact, all media are social.  It’s like saying Wooden Tree, or Feathered Bird.

The most social medium is sexual intimacy, followed (if we’re talking relevance; preceded if we’re talking chronology) by meaningful face-to-face conversations, scaling out from there, and eventually reaching the nebulous netherworld of thoughtless Likes, meaningless Tweets and snarky YouTube comments.  Noise.  Cosmetic data with no emotional or meta resonance.

What’s usually ignored in conversations about Social Media platforms is the Science of Narrative.  Narrative is the force that makes media meaningful.  Narrative may not make the world go round, but it describes for us why and how it does.  It provides context for information that would otherwise appear as random.  The reason social messaging echos and evaporates is that it’s not connecting with a narrative.  (A hashtag or a mention does not a narrative make!)

The most relevant aspect of Social Media will turn out to be the lens it afford us with which to perceive narratives.  We are, I believe, at a stage in the history of narratology that parallels where physics was at the turn of the last century, when the science moved from the Newtonian to the Quantum.

Marketers who use social media as you have described it, as a fashion statement, are doomed to keep firing blanks at a target they cannot see.  They are using Industrial Aged models to engage in a Networked environment.  It’s like trying to split an atom with a pendulum.

Those who use it as a lens on narrative, will be able to direct ‘particles of meaning’ at the quantum narrative made visible by social technologies and capture the massive energy predictably released by these interactions.

Ping Pong wasn’t perceived as a real sport until it became table tennis.  And now that it has its first sex symbol in Biba Golic, it has, let’s say, aroused a certain demographic that paid scant attention to it before.

The wild dogs of Africa could not be brought back from the brink of extinction until Greg Rasmussen renamed them ‘painted dogs’ (per Nick Kristoff in the NY Times).

And the art of storytelling won’t gain mainstream cred with MBA-educated managers and their brands until professional storytelling gets re-branded and re-positioned.  This came to me while I was reading about how  legendary story consultant Steve Denning changed his working vernacular so he could talk to his clients without them thinking they already knew it all.

Let’s begin by looking at the current status of storytelling in business.  Many managers will tell you that storytelling is too airy to feed the bottom line, or as Denning says, they think they’ve got their story covered.   And they do.  They have it covered.  As in they have a story and they’re sticking to it.  Bringing up the subject of storytelling can be a license to snark.  “Story?  Yeah, we got a story.  We sell our product as often as possible for more than it costs to make and deliver it.   We make our number.  We go get a a drink.  We live happily ever after until the next quarter.  The end.”

As we know, these perceptions cripple a brand.  When a story stops moving forward, it dies.  And when a brand’s story dies, the brand is sure to follow.  Here are three moves professional storytellers can make to break through the crippling perceptions.

1)  Shift the focus from ’story’ to ‘narrative.’ Narrative is our table tennis.  It is our painted dog.  Story is finite.  It has three parts, beginning, middle, end.  Narrative, by comparison, has infinite potential.  It is flow.  It is to organizations and brands what the Ohio River once was to the Shawnee Tribe.  The source of sustenance.  Stories are like the fish that come from the river and feed the family.  Narrative is the river.

2)  Share the narrative. In the networked world, brands can no longer script and control their stories the way they used to when there were only twelve or fifteen media channels for a manager to worry about.  And they can no longer operate on the false assumption that the story that works today is the same one that’s going to work tomorrow.  Today, brands have to find ways to participate in their customers’ stories.  They have to learn to share the brand narrative with customers.  That is a tectonic shift whose implications have just begun to surface in C-suite discussions and executive reading lists.

Sharing the narrative has many benefits.  (We’ve been listing them here for two years, check the archives for backstory.)  One of the big benefits is that narratives that result from collaboration with the customer energize a brand like nothing a brand can do on its own.  And thanks to the proliferation of media platforms, sharing the narrative has the potential to generate ‘positive unforeseen outcomes’ on a massive scale.

3)   Move from scripted to improvised narratives.  Shared narratives cannot be scripted, they have to be improvised into existence. There are too many players in the game to script for all of them, and make no mistake, each and every player plays a role. All it takes is one customer with a bitch and a big network to knock down your market cap like Bluto took out Popeye before he ate his spinach.  Improvisation is to narrative what spinach is to Popeye.  Scripted (and re-scripted and re-re-scripted) scenarios quickly fall out of sync with the customer audience.  Improvisation, by contrast, is about staying in the narrative flow. If you’re not in it, you’re out of it.  Eat your spinach!

Stories are the best way we have of simplifying complexity, of finding common ground.  They provide context that no technology or platform can. In a complex system, context owns.  Because business gets conducted in an environment that’s exponentially more complex today than it was yesterday, story is more important than ever.  But like everyone else does, we have to go about our work differently.  We’re not just storytellers, we are experts in the science of narrative.   We are Shawnee.  We are hot blondes armed with paddles and balls.   We are painters of dogs.

Narratologists, as the name implies, obsess over narrative.  What makes a good story (and a story good)?  What are the emotional stakes?  What’s the relationship between characters?  Between text and subtext?  Who are the players?  What roles to they play, and do these roles reveal or conceal their true natures?  What motivates them?  What needs to they seek to fulfill?   How does narrative create dialogue between players and audience?  These are the questions keeping Narratologists awake at night, and earning their keep during the day.

Platformists obsess over apps. How solid is an app?  How does it scale?  What language is it written in (and how many does it speak)?  Who uses it and why?  What is the feature set?  What is the ROI?   What is the social component?  How compatible is it?   What’s the relationship between reliability and flexibility?  What differentiates it from its competitors?  If you can answer these questions for more than five apps, you’ve got a lot of Platformist in you.

Narratologists and Platformists can collaborate with one another, but one cannot be both.  Not at the same time anyway.  We all have to choose.  To help with your decision-making, here are a few things to consider:

Narratives are designed to make sense of the world by distilling information into meaning.  Most platforms are, by contrast, designed to distribute information. ”Information,” Viola Spolin once said, “is a poor form of communication.” Choose.

Narrative is inherently more unique, and therefore scarcer and ultimately more valuable than any platform.  As information gets commoditized across platforms–33.5 billion tweets about brands in 2009 (Forrester),  120 million videos hosted on YouTube with an average of 200,000 more added every day (Yahoo Answers), and 400+ million profiles on Facebook (Business Week)–using narrative as a way of organizing and extracting meaning from information grows more relevant all the time.  Would you rather wrestle with one meaningful narrative, or 33.5 billion mostly meaningless tweets?   Call it while it’s in the air.

Narratologists deal in the relationships between people. Narrative wants to be human.  Wants to engage. Wants to move its audience. Yes, it can be messy and unpredictable, but that’s life.

Platforms, on the other hand, deal in the relationships between people and technology.  Platforming may be more predictable, but it’s antiseptic.  It wants to be germ-free. That’s not life. ‘Sterile’ is most likely not an association you want for your brand.

Maybe what matters most is that narratives are a lot more fun for participants.  They generate energy and emotion, manifest purpose, offer possibilities.  They elevate their audience from the drone of daily life. 

Platforms, from the days of Gutenberg’s first printing press, have always been and will always be a pain in the ass. They spawn frustration and induce headeaches.  We find ourselves chained to them.  It’s the nature of the beast. 

Would you rather entertain the possibility of having fun, or guarantee yourself a certain amount of frustration?   Are you a ‘glass-is-half-full-drink-up’ kind of person, or a ‘this-glass-will-automatically-notify-me-via-SMS-when-its-fill-factor-is-above-50%’ kind of person?  You can only drink from one glass at a time.

Narratives define what platforms cannot.  Narratives last longer than platforms.  Mean more. Engage more deeply. Evolve more quickly.  Earn more money in the long haul.

Choose.