In fiction writing students are exhorted to "Show, don't tell", to allow readers to "experience the story through a character's action, words, thoughts, senses, and feelings rather than through the narrator's exposition, summarization, and description." (see wikipedia http://bit.ly/2P2lBb)

The idea is that the writer should employ a balance of Show and Tell. Show allows readers more space to use their own imagination, to put themselves into the shoes of the protagonists.

For example compare:

"The white male suspect was 6ft 2 inches with black hair and blue eyes. He was wearing blue denim jeans with white trainers and a dark blue jacket."

With:

"I looked back at Brody. He was pinching his cigarette between his fingers, with a sort of twitch. His hand seemed to be shaking a little. His brown poker face was still smooth."

In the first we are telling the reader. We have a mental picture of the physical characteristics of a man but we have no indication of his thoughts or his feelings. In the second (from The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler) we can empathise with the character, we can feel his nervousness and his attempts to conceal it. Chandler is showing.

So how does "Show, don't tell" play out online? Let's imagine we have launched a service.

A "Tell" content strategy will tell us a lot of textual information about the service, how it fits into the organisation's 10 year plan and who are the people driving the policy. It will tweet to us about how the senior management have launched the service strategy at a landmark event. Essentially a "Tell" strategy is analogous to holding up a mirror and writing about ourselves.

A "Show" strategy is going to tell the stories of customers using the service. These stories are going to appear all over the Internet in places that the customers go to. Coming to this content I am going to be able to put myself in the shoes of a customer.

NHS Choices online gives us both. The A-Z section is our tell, we have a detailed list of all the services Choices can supply us. Looking at the homepage though all we see is a collection of different stories: http://bit.ly/bHd28J . Searching on YouTube I find a whole NHS Choices channel showing peoples' stories of health issues.

These stories allow you and I to understand our relationship with the organisation, to project ourselves as beneficiaries of a service. When a service is communicated in purely a telling style we are going to find it very hard to see ourselves as beneficiaries of that service. If all we had was the A-Z we'd have a hard job understanding what was for us and what wasn't.

So take a look at the content your organisation is publishing online. Is it engaging your customers and showing them how they relate or is it just telling them about itself?

Damian Watson