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Listen in! Pick up some expert advice to a reader's question that we selected from CyberSchmooz.

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The value of a CMS in consistent storytelling

 

Companies that use storytelling gain a serious competitive advantage. Storytelling makes abstract concepts more tangible and relatable, it’s essential in branding, and it’s used across multiple domains – demonstrating a broad area of application. However, this versatility also makes it important to keep brand narratives aligned. With storytelling going on in different departments, you need to make sure that the same essential messaging is being used, and that it is consistent. Without consistency, you quickly undermine any authenticity you might have already accrued.

We live in a digital age. Digital storytelling is the way that storytelling is done successfully in our modern business landscape. Digitally mature companies are using digital storytelling at every opportunity, to enhance the experience of each communication and branding touchpoint. Different audiences can be addressed with specifically tailored content and messaging, to ensure that it resonates with them. While each story should offer something unique, consistency across every brand touchpoint is still needed.

Without consistency, you lose trust. This is important in every area where digital storytelling is normally used in business. As we’ll see, a well-designed content management system (CMS) is a critical factor in achieving consistency. With a shared content library, everyone has access to the right digital assets, and it can be intelligently organized to make it easier to customize messaging.

 

More remote and hybrid working requires top-level hybrid events

To accommodate remote-working colleagues or clients, companies today need to excel at hosting hybrid events. Hybrid events are complicated to manage, but valuable. They turn a boring webinar into a multi-level, interactive experience that keeps the different audiences engaged. When done well, a hybrid event can be so engaging that it can even feel more like entertainment than work, but the reality is that the brain is simply tuned-in and delighted. A hybrid event that is done the right way will keep the audiences fully engaged and emotionally invested, regardless of their location.

Hybrid events also require a degree of agility because you don’t know what the audience participation might bring. Sometimes the audience will ask a question or suggest an idea that gives you an opportunity to deliver a timely message. You don’t want to miss an opportunity to use a pertinent digital story if it comes up – and conversely, you need to be able to ‘read the room’, and be prepared to drop content that might come across as tone-deaf or inappropriate for a certain situation. Whether this is done in real-time or based on a more considered, forward-looking approach, you need the ability to easily recognize the right content and use the most appropriate digital stories for each occasion.

If your content management system doesn’t allow this, then you’re losing out.

 

Creating an amazing immersive experience with digital storytelling

You also need a degree of flexibility and agility for digital storytelling that is used in an immersive experience. Immersive experiences are extremely effective, especially when they include interactive elements - and a good CMS is essential for this. With a flexible and well-structured CMS, you can create an array of interactive experiences for participants, and this will keep them engaged and interested.

By offering more interactivity, the participants in an immersive experience can create their own ‘journey’ by interacting with different elements using a menu or touch-capable wall. This leads to a compelling experience that is very memorable. Each interaction or selection is essentially a trigger for serving a particular content element, so the design of these experiences needs to be supported by a well-structured content library.

Again, the ability to clone and customize these immersive experiences with different digital stories for distinct audiences is key to achieving the best value for all parties. With the Hyro digital storytelling software, this is especially easy to do. You can create similar experiences based on a single template, by substituting unique digital assets, or you can create entirely unique immersive experiences. And with a smart structure, you can ensure the right digital stories are easy to find and updated.

 

Control and consistency

A modern, digitally mature organization needs to have the ability to use digital storytelling whenever and wherever the need arises. It also needs to retain total control and consistency over content, even when it is added or accessed by different departments and regional offices around the globe.

To keep your content appropriate for each situation, you may need distinct content that caters for specific regional or cultural contexts, accounting for religious or historical influences in how your messaging might be perceived. Tailored content for specific regional or cultural considerations, therefore, needs to be easy to create, find, and access.

To achieve this, an organization should keep a central, cloud-based content library, managed with a professional enterprise grade content management system. This allows all content to be maintained and approved by ‘administrators’ whose job it is to ensure on-brand messaging and consistency. Your ‘single source of truth’ can then be relied upon to be up-to-date and on-brand.

To keep everything easy to manage, content should be easy to organize with labels and themes. You should be able to see when each piece of content was created, by whom, and when it was last updated.

There are many content management systems and digital storytelling apps available, but most of them are not suitable for the needs of a mature business. The Hyro platform is one of the few digital storytelling platforms available that offers both the cloud-based content library, alongside the easy to use yet powerful CMS that keeps all the content accessible, and easy to deploy from a well-structured system. It can be accessed from anywhere in the world, and be used to power the full range of digital storytelling experiences - from webinars to fully immersive brand experiences.

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