The Friday Thing #699

The Friday Thing 699 brings us to the fifth and final P from the book, Once Upon A Time – The art and craft of storytelling. This week’s edition is about platform.

I am tempted here to simply point to Marshall McLuhan’s phrase – The Medium Is The Message – where he posits that a communication?medium?itself, not the?messages?it carries, should be the primary focus of study. I don’t agree completely – but I do agree that the medium is vital to consider. This fifth P is really about medium, but we’ve chosen to use “platform” because 4 P’s and an M just doesn’t have the same ring to it ??

Through the previous four P’s I’ve given several examples of different platforms we have used for our storytelling at Microsoft to convey a message. There are some obvious examples such as written stories – of which we have many – including an inspiring story this week about Katherine Ann “Kat” Rowlands who went from an eager summer intern for Bay City News Service 35 years ago to buying the whole operation in March 2018. Kat has proved that despite more than 2,100 newspapers being shut down in the U.S. over the past 15 years it’s possible to run a local news operation successfully in 2021.

?Kat’s story has pictures of course (I especially loved the Bay City News hard drives) and I’ve shared a lot of photography and videos over the first four P’s. The story of the Emma watch, the photographs from the Windows 10 launch in Kenya, the Microsoft loves Linux image. Photography may be my favourite platform for storytelling. Maybe.

Books are a timeless tool for storytelling and we’ve used them with precise intent in our work. The books we created to explain AI and Quantum computing to visitors to the Microsoft café in Davos were very specifically designed to use a medium that would work in that environment – people would pick them up, pocket them and read in a spare moment. The format suited the circumstances of people on the move.

We’ve used books in many other ways too. We produced a limited-edition book to support the story of Abdoulaye and Ibrahima Barry who created a written language called ADLaM in order to preserve and advance?Fulfulde – their native language that was only a spoken language. To celebrate this accomplishment, the book was produced left to right in English and right to left in ADLaM. The medium fitted the message of taking a spoken language in to a written form.?

Perhaps the most ambitious endeavor we’ve had with books is creating a collection of short stories titled Future Visions back in 2015. We had the crazy idea to invite nine award-winning sci-fi authors – Elizabeth Bear, Greg Bear, David Brin, Nancy Kress, Ann Leckie, Jack McDevitt, Seanan McGuire and Robert J. Sawyer – and graphic novelist Blue Delliquanti – to poke around our research labs and then write short stories inspired by the experience. That became an award winning book – which we gave away for free. You can grab the Kindle version – and rumour has it there are still some of the sought-after hard copies still around ??

Another format we have used to meet a need has been 360 video – a few years ago it was all the rage and I saw it being used in ways that felt inauthentic and simply eye candy. However, when you want to take people inside of a sterile lab environment such as a quantum materials lab, 360 video is perfect – it’s better than still photography or regular video as viewers can explore form themselves. Enjoy a 360 Tour of Microsoft’s quantum computing lab. We’ve used the same technique recently with the Virtual Data Center Tour I shared last week.

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Sound or audio is a medium in which I’d like to experiment with more. Podcasts are an obvious platform and we have tried this platform with .future. My favourite podcast from Microsoft right now is from our CTO, Kevin Scott. His last three episodes in particular have been outstanding so be sure to add Behind the Tech to your listening list. We used audio for one of my favourite stories we’ve told in recent years. It’s the story of Matthew Bennett - audio creative director for a large portfolio of Microsoft software and devices. You may never have heard of Matthew – but I guarantee you have heard his music. Check out the story page for Soundman and hit play on “bloom” to find out what I mean. Again, the medium suited the message.?

Of course, social is a huge platform for storytelling and my team does a lot of work here too. If you haven’t checked out the Microsoft Twitter handle lately, you’re missing a treat. I am biased, but others seem to agree… ??

I mean, the team created a fake holiday album containing a Christmas carol with the words ‘Bingle Bells’. It truly brought Joy to the Word.?

We’re also actively visually telling the story of Microsoft on Instagram while our Microsoft Life account takes you behind the scenes to meet our employees – and get some amazing recipes through a series known as Home Cooked. We launched a new series there this week titled The Monthly Rewind. In all of this instances, content is tuned to the audience and the platform.

And then there is LinkedIn where I confess, I spend a lot more of my time of late – it’s a good crowd who share good stuff that helps me get my work done. And thus I started publishing the Friday Thing here a few months ago….I just wish I could easily upload the previous 670+ editions that you missed before I started. I have them all in email though….in case anyone wants a project ??

We’ve used coffee cups to tell stories, we’ve commissioned art from Patrick Thomas, we’ve put stories on sidewalks that only show up when it rains (hello Seattle) and we’ve built lending libraries that we planted around our campus to encourage a learning culture.?

Oh, and we’ve delivered epics demos to tell stories too. I’ll not talk about the Skype Translator demo again but will point you to this demo from our Ignite conference in 2016. This AI Supercomputer Demo shows our technology being used to translate all of English language Wikipedia to Spanish. I love it because it?applies the skill of storytelling to explain something extremely complex in a very simple, relatable way – all in 75 seconds.

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I could go on and on here but hopefully you get my point that I’ll remix a bit with McLuhan – the message should influence the medium.

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We keep exploring new mediums here at Microsoft as the formats, mediums and platforms are endless and growing. The biggest learning for me that I am working hard on right now is starting with your audience – and then choosing the right platform and format to deliver the message to that audience. Too often I have leapt to a tactic, outlet or reporter before really considering this. Another learning is you don’t have to (and almost always should not) rely on a single platform – owned media, earned media and social can be used in harmony to tell the same story – to different audiences. There is a place for each of them under a single sun.

For now, I’ll wrap up the series here and as promised, share the book for anyone to download – but before I do, I want to say a huge thank you to my team at Microsoft. They’re the people who deliver these amazing stories across all of these platforms day in, day out. They’re an incredible group of storytellers, creatives and human beings and I’m proud to have been able to share just a small sliver of their work as we’ve toured through the 5 P’s.

Okay….here’s the book. I hope you enjoy it.

Happy Friday,

-Steve