An email arrived Monday morning with the subject line 'thoughts?' and a link, and the link was about LinkedIn building a stories format. LinkedIn. The network where people post about their commute as if it were a parable. Vertical, ephemeral, tap-to-advance updates, on the site where your former manager lives.
I laughed. Then I opened a spreadsheet, because clients will ask, and I started listing every place a stories format now exists.
Instagram. Facebook. WhatsApp. Messenger. Snapchat, obviously, which invented the thing. Skype. YouTube. Medium tried a version of it. Google has been pushing an AMP flavor of it into search results since February. And now the resume site.
A format one company shipped in 2013 is now the default shape of the internet's short-form middle.
Stories won not because people love vertical video but because the format quietly solved the biggest unspoken problem in social posting: the fear of permanence.
Feeds are archives. A grid is a claim about who you are, filed permanently, and every new post gets judged against every old one. Stories are not archives. They are a room you stand in for a day. That difference is why people who had gone silent in feeds started posting eleven times a day in stories, and why brands that had gotten stiff and quarterly in their grids suddenly sounded like people again.
For brands the upside is real and mostly good. The bar drops. You no longer need a photographer and a two-week approval chain to show a stockroom, a founder answering a question badly, a flavor being tested. Glossier built most of its intimacy this way. Salt & Straw can put a churn in progress on a phone at four in the afternoon and it lands as generosity rather than production.
The downside is that a format designed to disappear encourages you to say things you have not finished deciding. Ephemeral does not mean unrecorded. Screenshots exist. Reporters exist. A voice built entirely out of things you were only willing to say because they would vanish by morning is not a voice. It is a habit.
Here is the test I have started giving clients. If it would embarrass you as a post, it should embarrass you as a story.
If it would embarrass you as a post, it should embarrass you as a story.
Barnaby has spent the last hour watching rain move down the window, which is a vertical, ephemeral, tap-to-advance experience he has never once asked to archive. Truffles will not look at it at all. Somewhere in there is a tidy lesson about which content deserves to persist, and I am choosing, in the spirit of the format, to let it expire.