How to Build Better Stories With Collaboration and Improv

Want fresh ideas for your marketing content?

Curious how improv techniques can help?

To explore how collaborative storytelling can help you create engaging or interactive content, I interview Kathy Klotz-Guest.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is designed to help busy marketers, business owners, and creators discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview Kathy Klotz-Guest. She's a storytelling expert and the author of Stop Boring Me. She also hosts a Facebook Live show called Yes, And Brand Show.

Kathy explains why collaborative storytelling encourages your audience to engage with and share your content.

You'll also discover how to turn ideas from a collaborative story session into awesome social media posts and videos.

Share your feedback, read the show notes, and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Collaborative Storytelling
Kathy's Story

Kathy became a storytelling expert after working in technology and communications for 15 years. Although she worked in the tech and marketing world during the day, she was also telling stories on stand-up and improv comedy stages 5 or 6 nights per week. When she left her day job, her goal was to share how concepts from improv can help businesses.

Improv is short for improvisational, and improv comedy is all about a team getting suggestions from the audience and building a scene based on those suggestions in real time without a script. It's collaborative, and Kathy thinks business storytelling can work this way, too.

Specifically, because improv encourages the audience to participate and collaborate in the experience, the audience is incredibly engaged. As the improv team tells stories, people are at the edge of their seats. Also, with the audience's input, the stories go in amazing directions.

The improv model is a huge contrast to the boring old models of storytelling in business. These models aren't collaborative. They're focused on the business instead of the audience. By bringing to companies the improv concepts of creating together and collaborating with audiences, Kathy thought businesses could create stories with their customers and partners, and have more fun.

At first, Kathy tried these tactics in her day job running marketing and communications for a technology company. Then the birth of her son was a catalyst to move forward with her idea. That was 8 years ago. Today, she works with companies on their storytelling and communications.

Specifically, Kathy helps companies identify where their communications aren't effective or collaborative. Many companies can improve communications among both internal teams and with their audience. To do that, she helps them rethink the entire storytelling experience so they listen to and include their audience. She calls this mix of improv-meets-narrative strategy collaborative storytelling.

Listen to the show to hear Kathy discuss how the show Whose Line Is It Anyway? is a good example of improv.

The Benefits of Collaborative Storytelling

When you create stories with your customers and have more interactive experiences, you have higher engagement, better ideas, and a better sense of what your customers like and don't like.

This collaborative effort begins internally. Teams often have untapped capital. However, because the team isn't communicating or maybe just doing the same things over and over, the team isn't developing fresh ideas.

Another part of this collaborative style is reaching out to customers by asking them to finish a story, share what they like about it, or explain how they'd make it better. When you co-create a story with your audience, they're going to share it because people share things they help create. When you create with your audience, you increase their emotional investment in that outcome.

Also,