Transmedia Turns Your Audience Into Co-Creators

I’m sure all of us were told bedtime stories by our parents when we were young. Each night they would flip through the pages and then stop at the next chapter to keep us all in suspense until the next night. In today’s digital climate, stories can now be accessed through a smartphone or tablet and chapters continue from a blog to a YouTube channel.

This is transmedia storytelling..

How does transmedia redefine storytelling? Instead of the traditional process of reading a story from one page to the next, the story is scattered across the various media platforms that are available to us. We have the ability to go from one emergent technology to the next and engage in multiple ways. Transmedia goes beyond storytelling and allows us to participate in, as well as create the storyline as we evolve from reader to co-creator.

Transmedia storytelling allows the audience to engage the storyline from an immersive and social level. One example is the Star Wars universe, which introduced us to a series of movies depicting new worlds, space battles, heroes and villains, science and magic—but the Star Wars universe didn’t end with the movies. Video games, social media, online videos, blogs and websites continue the story of Star Wars, even allowing us to become characters from the movies. J.K. Rowling came out with her own transmedia concept for the Harry Potter series beginning with the Pottermore website. The Twilight series’ transmedia comes in the form of Twilight Time Capsule, where fans of the movies can upload pictures and share their experiences with other fans.

This concept can be applied to quality branding campaigns. The age of push marketing has been replaced by brand experience. We want to trust and understand the brand that they consume, and companies should offer the opportunity to do just that. Instead of pushing their products, brands should develop digital narratives and allow us to participate in various campaigns, such as games, links, video submissions, Facebook discussions or Tweetchats. Surprisingly, the audience is developing new and relevant brand content through our interactions, which help spread the brand message as they are shared through our social communities.

In an article for Sparksheet, entrepreneur and transmedia enthusiast Ja-Naé Duane briefly illustrated the transmedia process for branding:

By encouraging your audience to be involved in the storytelling, you allow for crowd sourced open innovation, a process that could drive your company and/or its suite of offerings in new, unique and hopefully more profitable directions. As content creation becomes a shared responsibility between brand and audience, the person formerly known as the customer becomes a full-on co-creator and brand evangelist.

We have been telling stories for thousand of years, from cave drawings and stories around the fire to minstrel songs and books. Stories are a way to communicate information and to maintain our diverse culture. Transmedia is no different, but this time, instead of us listening to the stories, we have the ability to help contribute to the narrative or become a part of it. The key thing to remember, however, is that no matter how advanced our media technology has become (or will become), we have to continue humanizing our communication towards our intended audience.