1/  I’m going to do some cast threads on a topic that’s a bit out of character for Farcaster, but I still want to do them here. I hope at least a handful find it interesting.

Two parts, the first setting up the second.

3/  I know that’s not the basic marketing need for many of the nft, protocol, and web 3 projects here. But, the proven marketers, multi-time founders, builders, and creators here are exactly the type of audience I want to lay this out in front of. It had better accord with their experience.

4/  The central idea is that a particular composition of story theme enables the production of media creative that can achieve broad reach. Not just conceptually, but as the basis for a creative development, production, and distribution process that even a small team or solo creator could operate and scale.

5/  Also, I know there are talented writers here. For you, yes - it’s like the hero’s journey form. But the hero’s journey doesn’t give direction on building a creative dev/prod/dist process to publish stories daily in perpetuity without resources being a bottleneck. So, this will be different.

6/  Still, reach might be an actual challenge for some here. If someone’s projects need to achieve reach to a target audience that they are currently unable to reach, this may be useful. I mean it to be.

Even though I will condense it in a few cast threads, the style will be functional and operational.

7/  The second part. In employing this form of story theme, I see a lot of software I would really like to exist. Not just apps, but platforms and ecosystems, and that makes me think of web 3, crypto, and chains. I’m in the lay audience on that. The audience here is not. If there’s overlap, I’ll find out here.

8/  The software I’d love to see more of treats the case where real impact for the user accrues over time from a series of small successive actions, but only if they’re done successfully as a whole.

That covers some of the most valuable change or transformation we achieve. Media to inspire and software to enable.

9/  The same form of theme that enables social storytelling also specs software to make. This connects media and software in the satisfaction of the same theme.

Every company a tech company.

Every company a media company.

10/  From this, I present theme as a first principles concept that can be the basis for: go-to-market, user relationships, fandom, core user data, theme based graphs, media and services to both build out graphs and provide value on top of, ML/AI based services, and irl stores, which are just creative after all.

11/  But I’ll start with social media storytelling, and it all unpacks from the following idea: 

The way people give their attention online translates to a particular form of story theme, and we can employ that 
knowledge to achieve reach.

12/12  I’ll make the case over a cast thread or two from the following topics:

- How do people give attention 
online? 
- A basis for viewer interest
- Attention translates to the grammar of story theme 
- Theme as a basis for creative design
- A practical implementation of theme-based storytelling.

P.S.: I want to link to other, actually familiar and accomplished, people’s public ideas in relation to theme. Here’s an old interview with Eugene Wei touching on graph design.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbnDay35L8I

Because the dominance of the social incumbents’ graphs and TikTok bypassing the building of one entirely, graphs are a dormant topic. And 
yet.

Per the above, I think theme can be used as the basis to identify valuable graphs and design them. I’d like to write about it.

From a non-tech perspective, I mentioned fandom. I think theme can be a basis for it. I’m always interested in reading Default Friend on fandom. While my invocation of it is more prosaic than hers, it’s another example of an interesting idea that comes out of theme to write on.

https://defaultfriend.substack.com/

That’s an example of what I want to do with theme – unpack it as a first principles design element for creative - like this example presenting a functional argument that it relates to two things as different as graphs and fandom.

2/  The first is producing social media storytelling in quantity – daily or more; quality – interesting enough to get broad reach; and for low or no cost of money or time. That’s usually a “pick any two but only two” situation.