In her Marketing Daily commentary today, Vanessa Horwell has this to say about PR, but it can easily be applied to all marketing communications:

“Good storytelling is a skill that needs to be nurtured by PR professionals, and taught profusely within agencies and by academics. It is not about form, but about substance. Companies want us to tout their wares, so we have to rise about mediocre drivel and produce compelling stories for our media audience.”

Bingo.

I’ll give you one very specific example that demonstrates why Vanessa is exactly right.

Part of my work for a recent client was developing material that was issued to the media through PRWeb. Over the course of three months, we issued six press releases that were more conventional in style and four “story releases” that were written as pure content. In other words, we created and issued a relevant story of high quality.

According to PRWeb metrics, the story releases received 31 percent more page views on average than the conventional releases. Beyond the page views, though, the editors actually used them far more often than the conventional releases.

As Vanessa said: “Good stories don’t need to be packaged in special kits or on glossy paper to be effective. They just need to tell and, ultimately, sell our clients’ stories very well.”

Bingo.

Takeaway for marketers: Tell a story and tell it well.

If so, then Blogging Tips has a list of 101 great blogs you should be reading.

Not only is Google roughly 11 years old, so is the Hampster Dance. Get all the details about Canadian art student Deidre LaCart’s homage to Hampton Hamster, plus all your other favorite Internet silliness (and some seriousness) over at Dipity’s Internet Memes page.

The Google folks are celebrating their 11th birthday, which is why their logo looks like that today. Wikipedia’s page for 1998 says they were founded on September 7, while their Google page says they were first incorporated on September 4. Google’s own history page doesn’t call out September 27 as anything special. Whatever.

Takeaway for marketers: Google has a market cap of $155.91 billion. Where will you be 11 years from now?

Adverblog alerts us to a very cool presentation from Google about Creative Lab and various uses of their platform. It’s bound to give you some creative ideas. You might even find a useful or entertaining new service or three.