Tag Archives: Chicago

Snow! We finally got some decent snow here in Chicago. My California friends are all shaking their heads right now. Yes, many of us like the snow.

Anyway, I heard during a WGN-TV news story that the City of Chicago has a new website (Chicago Shovels) that lets people track the location of city snow plows and learn about other snow-related resources. I got curious so I checked it out and was excited to see video embedded on the home page.

Guess what? It’s not bad. It looks professionally done, tells a pretty good story, and I actually learned a lot. It even made me interested enough to want to get involved in the Snow Corps program… volunteers who shovel sidewalks for the elderly and disabled.

Go figure… quality storytelling informed me and drove me to action. Sounds like a concept business leaders might want to consider.

–Tony Gnau

You don’t always need words to tell a story, but if you have them… make sure to use them well. Content creators and business leaders can certainly learn that lesson from watching a Chicago tourism video that starts with a great concept but falls a little short.

The video uses the written words of Daniel Burnham. For those of you non-Chicagoans who might not be familiar, Burnham was the architect and urban planner who created the city’s blueprint following the Great Chicago Fire.

His words… perfect for this video. The problem… the video is too long, edited to include long musical breaks between Burnham’s well-written lines.

The breaks are so long you completely lose the flow of what Burnham wrote. Tighten up the edit and all of a sudden the story starts to make sense.

This is a mild critique. The video is shot well, and has one of the world’s great city’s as a backdrop. It’s hard to go wrong with that imagery. Adding Burnham’s words in a more efficient way would have put this video over the top.

Your content may have words, but does it tell a story?

–Tony Gnau

VIDEO: Chicago Tourism