If you work in place marketing, or any kind of marketing, really, you’ve no doubt been told that storytelling is one of your most powerful tools. Every culture has revered storytellers. My people came from Ireland and in old Celtic society there was a person known as a seanachie, highly respected and some say second in stature only to the kings.
The role of this person in a time of little or no written language was to preserve and teach the history of the people, through oral storytelling.
Some seanachie were part of a clan, and some were itinerant, traveling from one community to another telling the stories of the places they came from and adding the stories of the places they were to their repertoire.
I think that this is you, filling that role for your communities today. Storytelling starts as an oral tradition, and though these days you have to figure out how to get that voice heard across a number of different platforms, at its essence it is about the tale you are telling.