Do stories punch through the noise? My experiment in “story engagement” on LinkedIn.

Last week, I posted a personal and vulnerable story on LinkedIn.

I did it as an experiment. I wanted to see what would happen, and what kind of engagement a personal story might generate on LinkedIn.

After all, many of my conversations here tend to be rather corporate and sterile. I haven't been successful in generating much engagement. My hope was to create a different kind of connection with my LinkedIn network... and also to generate more views.

So here’s how it went down.

I originally created the story on my Instagram. It was, yes, a true story about my life growing up in New Orleans. Specifically, it was about a Beatles mural that I painted on the wall of my bedroom in 1982, when I was 14 years old. In the story, I describe how its meaning has changed over the years.

(Are you curious now? ?? You can check out the original post?here !)

To be honest, I felt a little weird posting the story on LinkedIn, because the content wasn’t exactly “business”.

But much of my work in leadership development focuses on storytelling as an organizational skill . And we often talk about how attention is an increasingly precious commodity... and how story is particularly good at grabbing it in an infinitely noisy world.

So what happened?

My personal Beatles story is by far the most successful content I’ve ever posted on LinkedIn.

In my screen shot above, you can see that it has had (so far) nearly 17,000 views. That number is still growing.

For me, that’s massive! My LinkedIn “informational” posts usually get a meager 200 to 500 views. Or less.

Even better, the people who showed up with comments brought a very different kind of conversation. Many said “I have felt that way too!” They brought their own stories. A few people shared some real vulnerability.

Was this a marketing success? After all, in this story I didn’t really talk about my offerings. I didn’t try to sell anything.

But I got quite a few direct messages from people I’ve encountered in the past: “Hey David, it has been forever. We should set up a time to reconnect.”

Mission accomplished.

What are some conclusions we might draw from my experiment? A few thoughts:

• Yes, stories grab attention in a noisy world. We already knew this, right? But it was powerful validation to see it work again in such an immediate way.
• Bring emotion and vulnerability. I took a risk and revealed more of myself than I normally do here. People engage when they feel something. I've been missing opportunities to bring more emotional content into my messages, and my LinkedIn presence has suffered.
• The story generated a community experience. A lot of colleagues commented on my story with variations of “OMG I feel that way too!” Neuroscience shows that there is a?neural coupling?or?neural entrainment?that connects us when we tell stories. Your data doesn’t do that. Only stories with emotion content create this deeply human connection.
• We have an invitation to show up with more humanity. Again, I felt a little weird showing up with content this personal. I allowed you to see more of me, and that felt risky. It validated a conversation that I’m having with my teams: That the voice of leadership is changing. Stakeholders are calling us to show up with more of our humanity, and to create a more-human connection.
• Story is strategic. This particular story did not connect directly to my offerings. That's okay; it did what I wanted it to do. The next step will be to strategically connect these humanized stories to the work I'm doing now. (That's the topic of my new book, "Story Dash" !)

Conclusion?

You should be telling stories. It is the fastest path to generating community-building, sense-making, humanized connection.

What if I've been doing LinkedIn wrong all these years? Yes, my job is to sell and create change. But to do that, I first need to connect.

So how might you bring more of your humanity to your leadership and engage people in your most urgent work?

What’s your story?