Canadian Harvest Illustrates Business Storytelling
Post by Robert Campbell on Oct 04, 2011
It’s October already. September was a blur, but there was one day I did manage to get out to my parent’s farm in time to help harvest honey. We brought in one hundred and forty honey supers in one day.
Here I am helping my brothers harvest their honey crop. 
The harvest is late this year, and beeing out in a ‘yard-of-bees’ on a chilly September morning isn’t much fun – the bees were miserable!
But the mist covered scenery is breathtaking.
I love this particular beeyard because its centered in an old apple orchard. Its a trip back in time to when local farmers planted fruit trees and made their own home cooked pies and preserves. Now here in a very old field, far from any major highway there are a half dozen hundred year old trees and their children, and their forgotten fruit lies all around the perimeter of the apiary enclosure.
This place would be excellent cow pasture, or a natural habitat for wild deer if it wasn’t for the beehives and an eight volt solar powered fencer that keeps the critters away. It keeps the animals away from bushels of healthy apples too, and that’s a shame.
The second best thing to happen in the month of September was meeting Nora Camps of Duo.ca
Nora Camps of Duo Strategy and Design is a business storyteller with a great track record, and a website full of referrals from well known clients.
Nora taught me lots of little things in our very first meeting. She introduced me to High Fidelity Storytelling and enlightened me on how charitable Foundations and Trusts do business, and how she tries to do good work for the most deserving clients;
she seeks out projects with green mandates, and especially those organizations that work to create real change. She is overwhelmingly positive.
Nora has a wonderful storytelling process and it starts with listening…
Building your Brand Story
I am honoured to be working with Nora and Duo Strategy and Design
We’re running a Lenzr photo contest for Duo called Canadian Harvest, wherein we’re asking folks to upload pictures of themselves, friends or neighbours outdoors harvesting Nature’s bounty.
TEXT UNDER IMAGES!
Here is a look at the future of Lenzr storytelling – to me this is a very exciting. Text under the pictures adds volumes to the story.
Websites that collect high quality user submitted content can be used to help businesses investigate and even illustrate their consumer’s perception of a subject; they collect ideas and images for the sponsor’s own brand stories. By selecting a theme that’s somehow related to their business, the sponsor makes mosaics with other people’s pictures and anecdotes; Lenzr lets companies make powerful myths to serve their own brand establishment.
A web 2.0 storytelling tool, you can see all the pictures in Canadian Harvest, Photo Storytelling on Duo.ca as Nora is testing the innovation on her own site – the RSS feed for this contest will someday be a fully developed API that allows real participation on the client’s website.
The photo above is all that i have left of an interesting experiment that I captured – for two days the feed to Nora’s site from Lenzr had the 140 character descriptive text displaying under each uploaded images, and it revolutionized the entire storytelling experience. This is how to tell stories! Images and text melt together into a beautiful rich media collage – this is how I want the Lenzr Archives to display all previous contests.