Toby Bloomberg (aka Diva Marketing) is collecting stories about how blogs have touched people’s lives in her Blogger Stories project. She asked me to contribute my story, which has just been posted, so if you’re interested in a little background on how I got into blogging you can read it there.
Around the same time she asked me for my blogger story, Rohit Bhargava told me about Ogilvy’s global discussion blog about HIV/Aids on the 25th anniversary of the discovery of the disease. They want to gather as many personal stories as they can about the disease, to encourage people to keep the dialogue going and “just talk about it.” Here’s more about it from Rohit’s blog. Read the stories and contribute your own experiences.
And I also recently came across the March of Dimes’ website, Share Your Story, in which parents of premature babies and babies in the NICU can tell their stories and get support from others going through the same thing.
This approach of gathering personal stories about an issue for raising awareness or changing attitudes — whether it’s to show the soul behind the technology or the human faces of a health problem — plays off an essential part of what makes us human. We tell stories to each other to make connections. We learn from hearing about other people’s experiences. We give and get comfort from each other. We find universal truths in the individual details.
The best marketing tells a story and makes a connection with the audience. Without that connection your issue is just another faceless subject among many. What story can you tell, and how can you make your audience care about that story?
Nedra helps nonprofits and public agencies create positive change on health and social issues through social marketing and transmedia storytelling strategies at Weinreich Communications since founding the company in 1995. She helps organizations make a difference for the populations they serve by strategically designing programs that draw on state-of-the-art behavior change techniques, digital media approaches and the power of stories. 
Nedra,
Thanks for your post and for supporting the effort to increase dialogue on all of these sites. The power to solicit and share these stories in an ongoing way is certainly one of the greatest impacts that the Internet has had on social marketing. Judging from the passion and emotion of those who have shared stories on any of these sites, it will continue to be a great way to engage people in a dialogue on important issues.
Nedra – Thanks for the out shout to Blogger Stories. I agree with Rohit stories are not only a great way to engage people in conversations but I think we as ‘humans’ have a need to share some of who makes us .. us.