Tis the New Year and time to be sharing stories, most likely with family and friends. Most of us share stories directly, through verbal communication. An increasing number of companies are focused on sharing their corproate stories and professional intelligence/IP through social media, eBooks, Slide Share, You Tube…you name it.

Most larger companies have several departments that could take on the corporate storytelling role and are often asked to do so. This might be the investor relations area, corporate communications or marketing. Some of the professionals in these areas have come out of journalism or advertising and are excellent at crafting media releases, investor updates, corporate profiles and the like. This does not mean, however, that they have the time, skill or training to research, synthsise and write the company story.

Creating the company story requires someone with mulitple skill sets, writing be a critical one obviously, but by no means the only one. The writer must be able to relate to the people in the company as they'll no doubt be interviewing some of them. They need to have a broad understanding of the business environment in which the company operates and the external factors that impact on it. They need to understand the financial imperatives of the business and be able to capture all of this in an engaging, concise and highly readable story.

In addition, depending on what the corproate story is going to be used for, the style, tone and length of the company story will be different. It may be that the company story needs to be captured in the first instance and then re-purposed for the different channels it will be used across.

A knowledge of the publishing options now availbale is also a must. Gone are the days when a writer was commisoned to write a manuscript of X words and that's where their role ended. A good corporate storyteller will understand and engage the process of re-purposing the content they have written for print, electronic and social media, as a matter of course.

If you’ve got a corproate story you want to tell, some IP you want to capture and share with the world (and sell to the world), get a professional to research and write it for you.

Yes, it will cost you more than the 'in-house' option but, as Red Adair said: “If you think its expensive to hire a professional, wait till you hire an amateur.”