Jon Greer’s reflections (in his blog, Catching Flack) on a recent media-relations summit emphasize the pervasiveness of the summit’s message that public-relations practitioners need to be doing more storytelling:

Time and again during the conference, the need for becoming better and more agile storytellers came up as the essential tool for PR professionals.

Greer offers these tips for creating better stories:

• The element of time: stories need a beginning, middle and end, and that usually involves the element of time.
• Challenges overcome: we all want to know how each other is faring in the world, so good stories include trials and tribulations. Victory laps aren’t nearly as interesting.
• Detail, detail, detail: this can be a double-edged sword, because often we issue news chock-full of detail, but it’s the wrong kind. Product specs, for instance, aren’t interesting details that tell a story. Details that support storytelling elements such as risks taken (how much money is at stake) and people involved (team members, not spokespeople or top execs) are examples of interesting details
• Novelty: good stories tell us something we didn’t already know or thought we knew. So again, your new product may be a big deal to you, but new products are released everyday. Dig a little deeper to find something truly novel about your product (how or why it was developed, risks taken, challenges overcome) and I guarantee you’ll get more coverage and interest.

The cool thing about focusing on storytelling is that it is platform-neutral, meaning you can tell stories in any setting, whether it’s print media, podcasts, speeches or anything in between

Greer also noted that conference attendees weren’t very interested in sessions presented by the mainstream media but were quite attracted to sessions about new media and social media.