This morning I presented to Microsoft’s Yammer Customer Community on How to Use Storylines (and Stories) for Business.

Viva Engage is the new employee engagement platform (well, it’s the newly branded Yammer which is sitting in Microsoft Teams as the Viva Engage app). Currently Storylines (aka ‘blog’) is live in Yammer and the Stories feature (aka portrait video) will also be made live soon enough.

Organisations are asking “how do we use these?” so some time ago, I wrote a long post with specific use cases on how to use them based on my own experiences of using these for many years.

Here’s the post:

I think it went off without a hitch.

Initially I was hyperventilating a bit (which is the usual case before every presentation) but thanks to ‘box breathing, I was able to calm down.

It also helped not being able to see all the chat and the people on the webinar so I relied on the host, James Tyer to be able to moderate the session.

I shared some examples of how to use Storylines and Stories and I do hope that it was valuable to people who attended. People asked questions and we heard from one person who was already trying them out and had given specific examples of how he was using them in his work plus how it had reconnected him with a colleague he had worked long ago.

I have this fear that people and organisations don’t value these functions OR start to use them like a ‘content marketer’ would.

I made it a point that I said throughout the session, that it wasn’t about being an ‘influencer’ or a corporate marketer but using these functions for personal and professional growth through your work and finding the interest in the middle, messy bits of work – the times when you are struggling, experimenting, asking questions, trying new things.

I missed out talking about the great framework by Wenger Traynor Value Creation Framework because there’s a certain way of being able to write and share posts that delve deeper through each of the value chains. In my own experience, organisations write/share posts that are in the first value column missing out on the depth of WHY, HOW, WHAT of that post.

For example, they may post a photo of a project that they’re working on and provide little to no context.

• What did they do?
• What problem were they solving?
• What did they work on?
• Who did they go to for help?
• What did they create?
• What worked and didn’t work?
• How will this help them, their team, their organisation?
• How does this change the organisation in some way?
  
  All that stuff is usually missing. I wanted to get across that we need to be sharing deeper, meaningful and more value-add posts that bring out and make visible our thinking.

Rather than focussing on writing posts like a content marketer, we want people to write posts as THEY want to without the pressure of following a template. It has to be in their voice, in their style, imperfect and valuable.

I’d be devastated if organisations and their employees started thinking that they had to follow examples of extrovert social media influencers on social networks on the internal social networks. We need organisations to NOT follow social networks – we want trusted, safe online spaces where every employee can share their work and thinking in their own authentic way and to express it without fear or without thinking they need to build a following – for the sake of building a following.