Last Friday I had the pleasure of participating in a brilliant workshop about storytelling, held by Petra Sammer, Chief Creative Officer at Ketchum - the PR agency the company I work for is proudly part of. As you have probably noticed, I have lately become quite fascinated with storytelling. It is currently my most favourite writing, research and learning topic, so coincidence or not, the half-day training took place very much at the right time, fitting perfectly to finishing my storytelling post series (at least for now).

I absolutely loved the workshop! Petra is such a nice person; she's extremely knowledgeable on the topic and she definitely has a way with words - she kept us interested during the whole time, not just with the stories she had chosen to show us, but the way she presented them.

Thinking about how best to present my impressions and considering one major takeaway from the session - the growing power of visual storytelling - I got a little creative myself. Making use of some of the slides from the workshop and the notes I made, I put together an infographic that summarises the key learnings from the training. You can see it at the end of this piece.

As I couldn't put absolutely everything in the infographic, here are a few more attention getters:

Now that you have learned why you need to harness to power of storytelling, how to create the perfect social media posts and how long each piece of content should be, it's time to get to the creative bit. Just knowing what you have to do is not enough. Execution is required too. You need to sit down and actually create those powerful stories, and it's not just about the type of content or the platform choice - it's about word play, video play and visual play, i.e. giving life to your stories. This requires innovation and creativity, but there's one thing that often hinders that process - lack of inspiration.

That's what we are going to tackle today and so hopefully, the next time you need that creativity spark, you'll remember the tips and advice from this post.

Let's start with the art of innovation.

Recently Guy Kawasaki, well-known author and entrepreneur, held a Ted Talk exactly on this topic. I know I've been integrating quite a few talks and videos in my blog posts lately, but they are just too good not to share with you.

In his speech, Kawasaki identifies 11 cornerstones of innovation. Even though these principles outline how to be innovative from a business perspective, they can be used on an individual basis too.

His tips talk about innovative product and business ideas, so I've adapted them to serve our storytelling purposes:

I think this is becoming like some sort of series - two weeks ago I talked about the power of storytelling and how brands can to harness it; a week after that I shared a piece focusing more on the art of storytelling, i.e. creating content and what the perfect social posts look like. Today we are going to tackle another important content creation element that you are required to consider too - length.

Great storytelling is not just about picking the right words, it's also about making the right choice regarding the number of words you use. When writing, be it for personal or professional reasons, there are people who tend to get carried away (I myself do so sometimes). Being able to send a message in a short, quick and up-to-the-point way is an art that can be learned by practice and with the help of some scientifically backed-up data such as this from Kevan Lee at Buffer.

Lee has gathered some serious research findings and developed a guide to the perfect length of every online content. Of course, that's not a one-size-fits-all solution, but those are some great points to consider whenever you're writing your next tweet, email, post or headline.

You can head over and read Kevan's extensive article, it's a great piece. I've gathered for you here the most important facts and what you need to know to create highly optimised content that allows your storytelling to stand out.

As explained in my last piece, capturing and sustaining people's attention in our fast-paced, brave new world of massive social media adoption and information overload has never been more important and more difficult for brands.

Having an active presence on social platforms doesn't necessarily mean that your followers are engaging with your messages, many are probably even ignoring them. This is why creating perfect social posts and tailoring them for each of your networks is crucial if you want to win the battle for attention and maximise the effectiveness of your social media activities.

However, it's not just about the content though; the network of choice matters too. You may want to communicate the same message on all of your channels, but you need to adapt it to the requirements of those networks. You cannot simply post the exact same thing on Facebook and then on Tumblr for example, slight adaptation (sometimes more than slight) is absolutely necessary because of the way your audiences on those channels actually use them. Simply put, that way is different and unique for each platform: your audiences expect one thing from you when they are congregating on Instagram and a completely different on Twitter.

Knowing how to approach each channel and how to craft the perfect content is a mix of science and art - science, because you need to understand your audiences so that you know what content they would like, need and engage with across social; art, because you have to be creative so that your content can stand out and be seen.

Thanks to the new media landscape forged by the Internet and social media a new era of two-way street conversations began. Everyone can now publish content and stories and reach a global audience in real time. This empowerment of individuals to have their demands heard has led to a fundamental shift in how brands are expected to behave and communicate.

More so than ever, businesses need to be innovative and clever with their communications approaches in order to really reach and deeply engage their audiences, because as Gary Vaynerchuk explains in his 99u keynote talk below, it's a noisy, fast-paced world out there.

Even a robot print newspaper that is generated almost entirely by algorithms based on social-sharing activity and other user behaviour by the paper’s readers is coming to market.

So, if this is the future of the media and considering that PR has always been about influencing organisational audiences and particularly the media, how can then PR influence robots?

Well, it can't.

But it can influence that social-sharing activity and behaviour of readers.

How?

By harnessing the power of storytelling.

Vaynerchuk says that the one thing that binds us together, regardless of our professions and backgrounds, are the stories we tell. That is never going to change because great storytelling is the way we make real money, real impact and real change. And there's a very simple reasoning behind this: we are all human beings.

What I found pretty funny is that according to Vaynerchuk the majority of organisations and professionals "are storytelling like it's 2007 in a 2014 world".