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.

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?

Over on Mashable, Josh Catone correctly notes that:

“Text is a very important part of user experience on the web, so it needs and deserves the same sort of design consideration. You must make your text usable in the same manner that you do the rest of your website or social media campaign materials.”

I do think the post doesn’t go far enough, though. I agree that “large blocks of text are your enemy,” but I think paragraphs of eight or nine lines in length are good candidates for being broken into two paragraphs … especially when the character count for the width of those paragraphs is in excess of 90. Many usability experts say 70-80 should be the maximum.

I’d add a sixth point to Josh’s excellent five: Utilize Punctuation. Long dashes, ellipses, parentheses and more — even boldface and italics (though font, of course, not punctuation) — these can all contribute to breaking up that gray box of text, making it that much easier for the reader to absorb.

Takeaway for marketers: Creating good copy is both a science and an art. It’s knowing the rules of the medium in which you’re working as much as it is understanding the business for which you’re writing.

Over onZDNet, Larry Dignan reports on research by Forrester and Akamai finding that “e-commerce sites have two seconds to load a Web page or consumers will click away. And after three seconds nearly all customers will split.”

Takeaway for marketers: Bells and whistles are nice, but focus on the basics. Keep it simple. Make it fast.

E-Commerce Times reports on uSocial, a company that “will populate a business’ or individual’s Facebook account with hundreds or thousands of new friends — all real people, apparently — for a few hundred bucks.”

Which is great if all you care about is quantity, not quality. If you’re trying to reach an arbitrary number of followers or friends for no other reason than to reach that number. If you treat customers and potential customers not like real people but like another digit on a spreadsheet (yeah, people love that).

I suppose it was inevitable, though: uSocial is arguably the ultimate social media pimp.

Has your company sunk so low that you really feel the need to pay for it?

Takeaway for marketers: Would you rather be connected to 100,000 people who don’t care at all about your product or service or 100 who do?