Last week, our topic was listening. This week, we are sort of going to the other side of the coin. We focused on storytelling this week, but maybe not quite in the way you're thinking. We did not write, "Seventeen things you can learn from XYZ story," although that's not a bad idea, actually. We also did not write the typical content marketing guru kind of blog titled something like, "If you write well, good things will happen." We took a slightly different approach.

On Monday, we talked about Marsha Collier's new book, the ninth edition of eBay for Dummies. You might ask, "What does that have to do with storytelling?" Well, Marsha uses great stories to help highlight what she is trying to teach at any given point in the book. This makes an instructional book more interesting and also helps keep the associated tips in your head.

On Tuesday, we talked about a pretty interesting new advertising campaign from Sprint. That's the problem with being a marketer. You sit down to watch a Cavs game in the NBA finals and end up getting inspired to write a blog post about an ad. Anyway, this ad campaign made me realize that a company telling the story is just half the battle. The story needs to be good enough that your audience wants to help you tell it.

Finally, yesterday we talked about technology meeting storytelling in a really intriguing way. The publication The Drum used IBM Watson to allow marketers to interview "David Ogilvy." The answers this artificial intelligence mechanism was able to generate are truly spectacular.

Speaking of stories, we'd be remiss if we didn't include this. Talk about a story! Have a great end of the week and weekend!