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.