She's one of dozens of Oxygen Media users who have shared their highly personal stories about everything from bad blind dates to Valentine's Day heartbreak. By listening and sharing with your customers, you're essentially having them co-write your brand. And they're doing it for nothing, or next to nothing,'' says Kit Laybourne, chief of Oxygen's digital storytelling project and husband of Oxygen founder Gerry Laybourne. Not all companies harvest digital stories the same way. For example, Oxygen producer Kimberly Mercado mails out digital cameras and recorders to people whose stories she wants to produce and distribute to customers online.
People read their stories into a recorder and then photograph or videotape aspects of the tales.
Back at Oxygen, Mercado puts it all together, sometimes adding music and animation, and then posts it online. To be sure, advertisers have always used stories to help sell goods. But this is different. Unlike TV, where company-contrived stories are used to pitch products to customers, digital storytelling aims to build customer communities. By letting customers share their brand experiences with each other, stories become more authentic and interactive than just another ad.