I spent the last five years eating Nature’s Path cereal for breakfast, with added walnuts, sunflower seeds, and raisins. It served me well until I decided I didn’t want the extra sugar, and went about seeking a healthy replacement, which I provisionally settled on in November: Grape Nuts.

Grape Nuts is properly filling, appropriately healthy, and quite tasty when you add raisins. The problem was this vague worry that Post might be using GMO ingredients, and, for various reasons, I oppose GMOs.

So I wrote an email to Post, asking a simple question: Do you use GMO ingredients in Grape Nuts?

Post could have responded in simple, easy-to-understand language; it’s a yes/no question. Here’s Post’s email back to me:

Trying to make sense of Post’s email response got me thinking about how a content strategy needs to govern all communications, not simply digital content, and that Post’s response is a massive fail. A few lessons:

As the technologies and channels with which we communicate change, the stories we tell with them change too.

Transmedia involves the telling of stories across multiple platforms—offering a narrative that integrates, say, live events, a Facebook page, a character’s blog, video games, and video to tell a multifaceted story, often one that invites the viewer’s active participation.

Already, brands are using transmedia with impressive success.

Example: Inside, billed “a social film experience created” sponsored by Intel and Toshiba, drove 10 million views, 130,000 tweets, and 200 press stories reaching 25 million people through eight short episodes, posted over 11 days, in which the audience, interacting with the film’s character through Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, could affect the film’s plot.

Content Strategy & Transmedia

While a content strategist may not be involved in the content creation of the stories that we tell in a transmedia experience, we are intimately engaged in the planning of the experience—which is one of the reasons I went to the Storyworld Conference + Expo last week.

Even when they’re not producing a transmedia story, brands are typically engaged in multiplatform experiences. As a brand, you have a YouTube channel, a Facebook page, a Twitter feed, a website—all helping to communicate your brand story. Integration across those channels can only enhance the relevance and impact of what you’re trying to tell people. Taking a cue from transmedia could offer new, fresh ways to engage and delight your audiences—creating more immersive, relevant experiences around your brand.

Bigger than Content Strategy

Content strategy wasn’t the only reason I went to Storyworld. I’m also interested in the nature of story—its power both to set limitations for our vision for ourselves, and liberate us from those limitations.

At a fundamental level, our identities are created and reinforced through story —maybe one of the reasons stories have been a fundamental part of human society for thousands of years. In many key respects, the operating system for our lives is story; story is what governs our vision of what’s possible for ourselves and our world.

Many of our stories are good, pleasant, hopeful. Others reinforce our limitations. We can spend hours, weeks, months, years with therapists or in repetitious relational drama grappling with these stories, reliving them—because so often, our noses are pressed so tightly to the glass of the story, we can’t distinguish them as story.

We often turn to books, or movies, or theater, or other story experiences to get some critical distance from our experience—looking for a way to introject ourselves into another’s experience and, in the process, potentially begin to heal the wounds of our experience.

The Potential of Transmedia

Transmedia represents an entirely new way of adding dimension to our stories, of getting critical distance, of playing out our stories and resolving them by moving us from passive observer to active participant. Transmedia may even help us recognize that our lives are made up from the stories, and give us tools to architect ever more imaginative stories.

This is one of the reasons why they represent so much potential for brands: You can now literally architect stories around your brand, and instead of offering a passive experience, you can give people an active, real-time role. (See more examples of brands using transmedia.)

Transmedia offers an equally exciting opportunity for storytellers to architect new worlds. They can extend the story experience into new media, creating richer stories; integrate real-time, real-world experience with media experiences; and even draw on our social graphs—or personal metrics from a Jawbone Up band, for example—to personalize the story or give it new relevance to our lives.

In the process there is real, significant power to change the our lives and world for the better.

The Storyworld Conference included some awesome examples of transmedia in action—immersive, multiplatform story experiences that make viewers into participants. Here are some examples:

Intel and Toshiba teamed up for The Inside Experience for the release of the Toshiba Satellite P775 laptop, in which a 20-something woman finds herself locked in a room and doesn’t know how she got there. Her only tool for getting out is a laptop with a link to the outside world—so she posts to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to solicit help. The story garnered some 7 million interactions and a top-trending story on Twitter—showing the ability of a well-crafted transmedia story to engage people.

Pandemic 1.0, Lance Weiler’s transmedia experience that united film, mobile, props, social gaming, and data visualization at this year’s Sundance film festival, included a Mission Control center where those engaged in the came could find out whether or not they were infected.

Conspiracy for Good, described by creator Tim Kring as “a move where you can be the hero and impact the outcome of the story for the better,” played on websites, mobile devices, live meet-ups in London, and a village in Eastern Zambia. The transmedia experience involved joining a secret society dedicated to good causes.

MTV’s Valemont, sponsored by Verizon, a university for vampires, was a series of two-and-half minute videos that played during the commercial time preceding MTV’s popular The Hills and The City. The story tracked a woman trying to find her lost brother, using only his cell phone, and included exclusive content for Verizon subscribers and blogs by the characters. People could replicate the video experience online by applying to the college, getting their own virtual Verizon phone, and receiving info from other characters that filled in the backstory.

Today I hung out at the Storyworld Conference + Expo. The great thing about this conference: It’s a conference about telling stories. Nothing is as fundamental to the human experience. It’s the thing we do that other animals don’t do. At least we don’t think they do it. But we do it constantly, and we’ve always done it, and we’re going to keep doing it.

Storyworld is about transmedia storytelling, specifically—telling stories that collect narrative components and share them across multiple types of media and communications platforms, offering a rich, deep experience of the story that goes beyond the boundaries of conventional storytelling formats like a movie or book. Transmedia stories are physically distributed, immersive, and multiplatform: They can live as a game and a movie and an object and a book and a comic; they can draw in information about the audience via geo-location and social graphs; they can follow you through phone calls or involve the solving of a mystery with clues delivered through an app on your cell phone.

An Opportunity for Brands

We are all storytellers. It’s a part of the human experience. We listen to our friends tell them. We tell them to our friends, not always realizing that’s what we’re doing. We watch them at the movies, on our TV sets, on our computers. We track them in the news. Just the last few days, there’s Herman Cain’s story about Herman Cain. There’s the story of Occupy Oakland. There’s the story of the person who won $375,000 after betting on the St. Louis Cardinals to win the World Series. Stories are everywhere.

Stories present huge opportunities for brands because a brand, after all, is a story—or a bunch of stories. And when a brand creates a story that resonates with an audience, and opens that story up to the audience to participate, to partake, magical things can happen. That’s why I came to this conference: To see how others are thinking through the opportunities for telling immersive stories across platforms.

San Francisco Bay Area content strategists converged at the headquarters of Suite Seven in downtown Oakland to talk about their portfolios last night at one of our periodic Meetups.

Learnings? Well, most of us don’t have an online portfolio. A few of us don’t even have a website.

A quick review of content strategists who do have websites shows that those without a an online portfolio are hardly in the minority. What online content strategist sites do offer on their sites are examples of their thinking, usually through a blog, case studies and SlideShare presentations.

Conclusions? Content strategists work in the realm of ideas. It’s not that we don’t need a portfolio—project examples are critical to communicating what it is we do—but our profiles tend to be made and tended through the quality of our thinking. Which seems only right, given that’s the output that informs our deliverables.

Last night’s San Francisco Bay Area Meetup Group featured Karen McGrane, from Bond Art + Science, in an excellent Q&A at the Barbarian Group SF office.

Here are six insights I took away from the conversation:

“Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003.”
– Eric Schmidt

Ann Handley’s keynote addressed how to market your content more effectively. This starts, of course, by answering the question why: Why are you on Facebook? Why are you on Twitter? Why are you on LinkedIn? Think through why you are there and what you want to accomplish.

Key takeaway for brands: Embrace that you are a publisher. Yes, it’s imperative you produce content online as a way to connect with your audiences, because that’s where your clients are looking for you.

(Based on a session at Confab 2011: The Content Strategy Conference, held in Minneapolis, MN May 9 – 11.)

Groupon (dubbed the “fastest growing company . . . ever by Forbes) offers 500 deals a day in North America in 175 markets. Its editorial voice is well defined, marked by humor. How do they do it? Brandon Copple, Groupon’s managing editor, explains it: Clear goals.