Tell me your story!

Greetings from a wet and humid Shanghai!

I don't know if I am noticing more companies asking for people to tell their stories, due to heightened awareness of story telling and anecdotes, or if there is actually an increase happening.

I was in the Intercontinental Hotel in Tokyo checking out yesterday, when a little postcard caught my eye. The deal was that if you tell your story about your experiences staying at the hotel, you will go in the draw to get a free night. I started to think about this and it raised a number of questions:

- In soliciting stories of people's experience at the hotel - what are they going to do with them?

- Is this for customer feedback, input into marketing, to use in promotional material, to isolate issues that are arising in specific hotels - all of the above?

What does concern me is the fact that there is no indexing of these stories by the person contributing them. If someone else is going to do this then any kind of induction from the stories is immediately biased. How can you compare these stories? If a third person reads them and categorises them as "a good experience" what is that based on apart from their interpretation of what the story teller has said. If these stories were from two different hotels in different countries, then immediately a cultural bias exists for a start.

Perhaps they should be following the naturalised sensemaking approach aka pioneers such as Dave Snowden - this in my opinion would allow for  more accurate and richer perspectives to be gained from such activities.