At the Face 2 Face conference put on by Progress Media in 2013, we were challenged to consider our stories, refine them and learn to share them as part of our business growth strategy.
Story is a huge component of what my team and I do every day, however the importance of my own story and how that shapes my company's growth has never resonated with me quite so clearly.
My story begins in Texas, where I was raised. In the 5 years after I graduated with a BS in Education, I worked as a teacher and on the side honed my song writing skills, performing and recording two CD's as the lead singer in a local band. I also managed to write a non-fiction book called Lord, Help Me...I'm Single, which was published in 2006, about life as a single girl after university.
Stories. They were intertwined in everything I did...in my teaching, my writing, my songs. And I wanted more.
So I left Texas on an adventure. I moved to St. John's, Newfoundland to study folklore, which essentially is the study of how cultures communicate their belief systems and tell their stories through varied mediums. For my thesis I traveled to Louisiana and studied the local lore surrounding a humanoid primate (aka "bigfoot" type creature) known as the Honey Island Swamp Monster.
I collected stories the natives told, and I witnessed how they wove those stories in a variety of ways to sell them, to sell the belief to the public, and to make money. To this day I have the t-shirt, books, DVD's and plaster cast footprint as keepsakes of my experiences...in addition to my thesis, of course.
At the time I didn't realize that experience would shape my future in the marketing industry, however it has done just that.
After moving with my husband (a Canadian who I met when we played in a band together in St. John's) to Winnipeg and then to Oxford, Mississippi, we made our way back up to Atlantic Canada and settled in Halifax.
With a young daughter and no work visa, I started learning ways to use the Internet to bring in an income from home. And so I entered the field of Internet marketing, and it fit like a glove. I didn't realize why until much later, but I now know that it's my passion for telling stories that made it click.
When I opened Wired Flare in 2011, I had 4 years of experience in marketing but a lifetime of experience in telling stories. And at Wired Flare, that's exactly what we do.
We have the privilege and honour each day of telling our clients' stories. They entrust us with this great task, and to do it well we make our clients' stories our own. Their stories become ours, and we use our voice to tell them out loud, to put them to work for our clients...to communicate their stories and their beliefs in such a way that their audiences become part of the stories we're telling.
What we do is about much more than helping our clients make money...it's about getting to the core of why our clients do what they do and helping them achieve their end goals...which have a far greater impact than money.
Those end goals, the visions, the ultimate impact on the world that our collective stories make...that becomes legend, and legend lives on forever.
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