We all have that one close friend, that confident we share anything and everything with. Sometimes, that person is a significant other, boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, or life partner. No matter who that person is, they want you to listen and pay attention.

Technology and social media are killing our ability to relate to others, making it incredibly difficult to share our stories. Watch the social media pages for a few minutes and see how many advertisements are written without caring about people. It’s all about how YOU see the product or service. How YOU will feel if YOU donate to XYZ cause. Companies want YOU to relate to them. They want you to buy what they are selling YOU.   

Do you honestly care about the environment and how some corporation is helping to extend its bio footprint by building innovative technology? But what we want is more than that. How is the corporation bringing the price of your smartphone down to a reasonable price, so I won’t have to blow my kids’ college funds to buy a piece of technology that will be obsolete in six months?

How do you propose building a relationship with a person who doesn’t care about what your business is all about?

Let’s say you are the president of an energy corporation that has seen record profits for the last nine quarters. Thanks to thousands of workers providing the power lines and electrical engineers, you are making more money than ever! But your workers are overworked and underpaid. They are unhappy with their work/life balance because of mandatory overtime. The union is on the verge of a strike due to unsafe working conditions, and you are looking to lay off 4,000 workers because they are inefficient and a robot could do it better.

You are the leader. You are the one making the decisions, calling the shots. No one else sees what it’s like to live in your office. How will you convince the world that laying off 4,000 workers is for the best? Does an increasing profit line mean more efficient power, more reliable service, and more workers staffed for emergency situations? Yes. And you have more than one person willing to share their story, telling how your company saved their farm and thousands of chickens from dying because a few workers refused to go home before they had power restored to their farm.

Facetious, yes, but the point is the story. The story builds a relationship with YOU and the power company. It focuses on what the company is doing for YOU.

But if none of those things happened, if you made up the stories and shared them as if they were real, and a reporter discovered the truth, what then? Then, like a tangible relationship, you would never be trusted again. Your profits would suffer, and potentially, YOU, as CEO, would be asked to step down.

So, tell the truth. Tell the story that will build trust with your customers. And most importantly, make sure the story you tell is the one that will resonate with the most people. If you do it right? They will tell and retell a good story. But if it’s not honest? It takes years to rebuild trust.

How will your truth tell your story?