30 THE POWER OF VISUAL STORYTELLING Companies looking to harness the power of cartoons should keep the best practices of the medium in mind. Bring in cartoons to spotlight what’s humorous about your brand, whether it’s laugh-out-loud funny or witty. It’s okay to poke a little fun at yourself or to mention events in pop culture that affect your industry and still remain on brand. If anything, doing this will humanize your company to your fans. Uncovering inspi- ration for what’s funny about your company or your industry shouldn’t be too hard. Simply visit your social media channels, speak with your cus- tomer service team, or host an internal brainstorm. Seed a few thought starters into the meeting, and watch the ideas fly! When developing cartoons, keep in mind that they are an art form. So finding someone with a good drawing ability to bring your ideas to life is critical. The artwork doesn’t need to be perfect, but the viewers need to be able to clearly identify what they’re looking at. The CEO of Get Satisfaction, Wendy Lea, partnered with Tom Fishburne, the marketoonist, to create a series of cartoons to market her company. Get Satisfaction is a community application that allows companies of all sizes to connect with their customers online, and that connection is facilitated by the company’s software and managed and curated by clients’ community managers. When Ekaterina asked Lea why she chose cartoons to market her brand, Lea said: There are two reasons. We wanted to be creative, and we wanted that creativity to be memorable to a certain type of individual. In our case it was the community manager. Through cartoons we were trying to bring to the top of mind the challenges and the craziness community managers face in their daily jobs, as well as showcase both the demanding and the fun sides of their roles. Get Satisfaction had created a lot of visual content, such as infograph- ics, quite successfully in previous years, and the company wanted to stay