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.