Author: Emily Ludolph / Source: 99U by Behance
From a hobby blogger to the head of storytelling at Microsoft, Steve Clayton charts his unlikely career rise and shares how stories about people can bring real value to a company.
One day eight years ago, Microsoft Chief Storyteller Steve Clayton figured he was going to get fired.
In his time at Microsoft he had moved up from a systems engineer to the Director, Cloud Strategy based in London. There was a Microsoft blog back then that covered what Microsoft brought to the world, but Clayton saw the chance to tell stories about what was unfolding inside the company. So he started doing just that as a hobby. He was a pretty honest judge and that fair and balanced approach attracted an audience, including some Microsoft Communications team members who would say, “What are you doing? You’re not the official spokesperson for the company.”But nobody told Clayton to stop so he kept right on writing because he had a passion for it. Fast forward four years and Microsoft’s head of communications finally said “We need to talk about your blog.” “And that was the day I thought I was getting fired,” recalls Clayton. Instead, the head of communications complimented Clayton on all of his work and asked if he’d like to move from London to Seattle and tell stories about Microsoft in an official capacity.
“When I arrived in Seattle I didn’t have much of a clue about what I was supposed to do,” says Clayton. But it became clear that the job was to tell stories about the company that start to drive changing perception around this company.
” To start, the public relations team asked Clayton what his title should be. “I said a blogger. I blog at Microsoft. And they said, well we can’t call you a blogger because everyone is a blogger,” remembers Clayton, “They said they’d call me chief storyteller…the title came by accident.”Today, Clayton manages a 30-person team that is responsible for telling Microsoft’s culture story, which includes everything from highlighting internal culture innovations on the Microsoft Story Lab blog, to developing the company’s AI communications strategy, to building tech demos for CEO Satya Nadella. He recently spoke with 99U about how good stories can result in good business.
At corporations, storytelling has typically rolled up into marketing. What’s the difference between what you do as a chief storyteller and a marketer or someone in publications relations?
I’m not precious about the job title “chief storyteller,” but I’m precious about storytelling. I think it’s become a term that people want to hear and sometimes I see a great advertisement or media campaign and people say ‘oh that’s storytelling.’ I admire those creative executions, but I know that wasn’t storytelling. This is probably too binary of a definition, but I tend to think storytelling has people involved. When I think about the storytelling that I’m most proud of that we’ve done over the last few years, it’s been about how our technology impacted someone in the world and made a difference in their lives and is much more around people, than it is around products.
Give us an example of what that looks like.
Sure. Yeah, we started this platform about five years ago called Microsoft Stories and the first story we did was called “88 Acres”—the codename for Microsoft’s original campus in Redmond, Washington. We shamelessly copied The New York Times “Snowfall” story that had published a few months earlier and showed us all what longform storytelling on the web could be. “88 Acres” was a story about a guy who worked in a real estate and facilities department – not an obvious place for a compelling story
But someone in our real estate department told me he had a great story about the person who oversees the 125 buildings on the Microsoft campus. And I thought that doesn’t really have the hallmark of a great story. Buildings. But nonetheless I…
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