Maybe it’s something to do with being born with a mother from Dublin who can talk the hind legs of a donkey, and a jazz musician father from London who played his way around the world and came back with the photographs to prove it, but I’ve always been a storyteller. Some combination of writing, photography and technology has paid the bills since I left college (emerging from my Masters in Anglo-Irish Literature from Trinity, Dublin into the teeth of a recession – plus ça change).
What’s my story?
For years, I’ve worked as a web developer, writer and photographer – building sites for clients such as the New Mexico Community Foundation and the Santa Fe International Folk Art Market, photographing jobs for New Mexico Magazine and Los Alamos National Laboratory, and contributing articles to publications such as The Irish Times and Salon.
I used to keep these elements of my professional life separate – not telling the web clients that I could also write, for example. But as I watched many of the sites I’d built go stale and die for lack of good regular content, I realized that building the sites wasn’t enough. What people responded to online were good stories, well told.
It’s not a technology problem, it’s a creativity problem
A strong design and solid technical base to your website is important, but it’s not going to move people, or let them know what you’re really about. Visitors are increasingly looking for more and better content from your organization, in a range of media, including writing, photography and multimedia pieces.
Your website should be the hub of your online activity, but you should also be telling these stories across a range of social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. As with your site, reaching and moving people is not so much a technology problem as it is a creativity problem – it’s relatively easy to get some kind of site together and set up a Facebook page, but do you have the skills to tell your stories in a way that grabs people, and makes them share your material with others?
How I can help
I still build a few websites, and maintain others for long-term clients, but right now I focus on telling stories for organizations and publications that get to the heart of what they do and communicate in a way that people can relate to. These stories are told in a number of ways:
- photography – documentary-style projects
- multimedia – combining photography and video to create pieces that are ripe for sharing
- writing – interviews and stories that communicate your passion for what you do, and show the effect your work has on real people. (Don’t have much passion? Getting people to love what you do could be beyond even me if you don’t love it yourself.)