Roeth: Why trucking companies should share their stories in different formats

Storytelling has been around forever. The paintings on cave walls thousands of years ago were a form of storytelling. Oral storytelling allowed people to share myths, legends, and their own histories.

The printing press changed the way stories were shared, allowing people to see printed versions of stories they had previously only heard.

Today, we have a whole host of ways to share stories, and those of us who are storytellers need to be aware that different people like to “hear” stories in different ways. When NACFE first began publishing Confidence Reports, we simply relied on long-form writing with some rudimentary illustrations/graphics to break things up. We did very little of our storytelling with video, nor did we consider social media as an outlet for our stories.

Fast forward to today, where every report we publish is fully illustrated with photographs, graphs, charts, and tables—many created by Kim Ehrenhaft, our design director. And every report has a video that summarizes key elements of the report.

We also use videos as a standalone way to tell stories, as evidenced by our Stories from the Run, which have been part of all five Run on Less events we’ve conducted.

Beyond our long-form storytelling through both our Confidence Reports and Guidance Reports, we now also tell our stories through more short-form writings, such as blogs like this. Blogging allows us to get our message out in more digestible bits, and I believe it allows us to reach more people. While I am proud of the reports we publish, they can run to 100 pages or more, and that can be intimidating to some people. I’d like to think the Executive Summaries that accompany every report give people a high-level overview of key elements of the reports. But in today’s fast-paced world, not everyone has time to read longer pieces.

NACFE now also has a presence on social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and X. These outlets allow us to tell our story in yet another manner, with us sharing even shorter bits of information.

It takes time and effort to tell stories across all of these communication channels, but I want to encourage all of you to do so. People want to receive information in various ways, so presenting your message across multiple platforms ensures it reaches a broader audience.  

It’s also important to remember that a person does not necessarily always prefer one method of hearing your stories over another. For example, someone may want to read the entirety of a report on trailer aerodynamics but might only want to read a short blog on battery-electric vehicles or even just a tweet on hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. All of these ways of telling your story have value.

The point is to ensure you are telling your stories in as many ways as possible. In this competitive trucking environment, if you don’t tell your story, you can be sure your competitor will tell it for you.

And as NACFE’s director of communication, Denise Rondini, reminded me when she was a guest on my podcast, “Until the lion tells the story, tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”