We periodically delve into the murky world of investigative reporting.

If you recall — and I suspect you don’t — it was this property that broke the story that The Wall Street Journal failed to dig into the background of Tim Bray who had a history of dissing Apple before joining Google.

It is in this spirit that we scrutinize the storytelling from a beverage company called Sweet Leaf Tea.

No question, this company gets it.

There’s a richness and texture to its storytelling techniques, which you can see in the “Taking It To The Streets” vignette.

Does the storytelling stay consistent?

Does the storytelling stay truthful?

In a word, yes.

I purchased a bottle of black tea from Sweet Leaf last week.

Naturally, I gravitated to the “Our Story” on the back of the bottle.

It’s tough to read, but there’s a line that says:

We’ve grown since then but we’re still inspired by Clayton’s granny, “Mimi,” who taught us never to use ingredients we can’t pronounce.

OK, let’s put this to the test.

I cropped this photo too tightly, so missed the ingredients. Here they are:

• filtered water
• organic cane sugar
• organic black tea
• citric acid

I think I’m on safe ground in saying these words are easy to pronounce and aren’t going to stump anyone at a spelling bee.

Well done, Sweet Leaf Tea.

My last “grab bag” showcased donut drama.

No such alliteration (or glaze) in today’s segment.

Behind the Op-Ed Curtain at The New York Times

I’ve touched on this area before.

Landing an op-ed in a heavyweight target like The New York Times requires crisp and clever storytelling.

I just stumbled across a column in The NYT titled, “And Now A Word From Op-Ed.”

Even though the piece was published back in 2004, it still rings true with insights:

Our decisions about which essays to publish aren’t governed by a need for editorial variety alone. Among other things, we look for timeliness, ingenuity, strength of argument, freshness of opinion, clear writing and newsworthiness. Personal experiences and first-person narrative can be great, particularly when they’re in service to a larger idea. So is humor, when it’s funny. Does it help to be famous? Not really. In fact, the bar of acceptance gets nudged a little higher for people who have the means to get their message out in other ways - elected officials, heads of state, corporate titans. It’s incumbent on them to say something forthright and unexpected. Op-Ed real estate is too valuable to be taken up with press releases.

Love the line that encourages humor … “when it’s funny.”

Comical Cloud Computing

Not exactly.

But a graphic in the LSI paper “Cloud Computing, Hype or Reality and How to Tell” caught my attention.

You’ve got to like a B2B company brave enough to bring a pinch of levity to the wacky topic of cloud-based storage.

Wonder if any customers inquired about the interface requirements for a kitchen sink.

Storytelling in Sports

Some of the best storytelling in journalism takes place in sports.

Tim Keown from ESPN The Magazine profiled Tim Lincecum and Clayton Kershaw with this vignette on Timmy:

Lincecum’s long-hair cool does a thorough job of hiding the fierceness within. The look, exuding casual disinterest, is part diversion, part lie. Deep down inside, Lincecum is an old-school baseball guy, Bob Gibson in skater-dude motif.

Superfluous Language

Glad Federal Express anoints its trucks with the word “ground.”

Wouldn’t want someone to think the truck might sprout wings and fly to Memphis.

That’s a wrap.

There’s often a gap, no make that a huge gap, between what the media values and what the PR function “sells.”

It’s no wonder the relationship between journalists and communicators can border on contentious at times.

In the graphic below, you can see two variables that go a long way toward aligning with the media’s needs:

With the exception of companies like Apple announcing a new iPad, journalists relegate product announcements to the bottom of the food chain.

Yet, most companies devote the vast majority of content development to news releases and company-centric information.

Communicators can lose sight of the simple fact that media properties charter their reporters/bloggers to cover industries and issues, not companies (again, with the exception of goliaths like Apple).

The vertical axis addresses if a particular data point, perspective or story resides in the “public domain.”

Obviously, reporters value information not in the public domain, allowing the opportunity to write with a fresh angle.

I put public domain in quotes because the information can technically be in the public domain, but if no one knows about it or correlates the information, then it still offers a potential fresh angle.

Here’s a perfect example of what I’m talking about.

BusinessWeek recently ran a feature titled, “Fastenal’s Runaway Stock Success.”

The story fits in the upper-left quadrant of our chart, even though the raw content (stock price data) has always been there for all to see.

The journalist, Roben Farzad, asked the question: What is the top performing stock since the crash of 1987?

His dot-connecting produced a contrarian result.

The lead sentence sets the stage with a pinch of showmanship:

There’s no shame in not knowing the top-performing stock since the crash of ‘87. It’s neither Apple (AAPL) nor Microsoft (MSFT), and deprived of the obvious candidates, most people draw a blank.

The natural inclination is to think of known brands particularly strong in innovation.

The punch line -

A company called Fastenal racked up the greatest stock price gains since 1987.

Fastenal happens to play in the scintillating fastener category (bolts, screws, nuts, etc.), not exactly an area one perceives as high growth.

Again, the raw content sat in the public domain.

This same type of thinking can be applied to corporate storytelling with the objective of pushing more content into the upper half of the chart.

Ask 10 people to define buzz and you’ll get seven different answers.

Three people will say, “I know it when I see it.”

It’s easy to quantify a YouTube video by the number of views.

It’s straightforward to quantify a blog through the underlying analytics.

But how do you quantify buzz for a company, especially one in the B2B space?

Here’s a thought that gets horseshoe-close.

It’s called Google.

Using the timeframe function in the search engine (below graphic), you can measure the number of hits by quarter, which starts to give you a feel for the buzz factor.

True, this doesn’t touch on the qualitative side, but given how much due diligence takes place online, it’s not a bad starting point.

Applying the theory to our client, SuVolta, you can see how the numbers played out in 2011.

SuVolta officially came out of stealth mode in June 2011, so you would expect a modest profile in Q1 2011. From the June launch forward, you’d like to see a decent spike, which occurs between Q2 and Q4 (Q3 was a catch-your-breath quarter).

Given SuVolta sits in a somewhat esoteric space - technology for constructing the transistors that make up chips - I’d say these numbers show a certain level of buzz.

I recognize the approach falls short of rigorous research. Obviously, the universe of hits will contain a lot of junk and, short of going through each and every one, it’s tough to calculate the percent of good stuff.

Still, I think the technique has possibilities.

And on the qualitative side, you can apply the eye test; i.e., does it look like a company on the move?

Here’s the page one of the Google search results for Q1 2011

Again, the company was still in stealth, so a fairly humdrum stream.

Here’s the page one of the Google search results for Q4 of the same year:

With publications ranging from Reuters to VentureBeat to EE Times, it passes the eye test.

I’d welcome hearing your thoughts.

In the meantime, I’ll keep experimenting.

The underpinnings of any social network revolve around the interactions.

By personalizing those interactions, we share a little about ourselves and make connections.

For all the things that are great about LinkedIn - there are plenty, not the least being pulling other social feeds into one’s profile - it defies logic that LinkedIn encourages impersonal interactions by defaulting to a boilerplate when someone sends a let’s-connect message on the platform.

Here’s an example of the boilerplate that arrives in my inbox 90+ percent of the time.

Not exactly brimming with a personal touch.

If I was Reid Hoffman (not related, but open to offers on www.hoffman.com), I would simply leave the box blank, prompting the sender to write a personalized note.

What a concept.

In such a scenario, Mr. Gladwell might have written the following:

How hard is it to start with the person’s name?

Even if you don’t write for a living, crafting such a note takes less than 120 seconds.

120 seconds for a personalized let’s-connect note on LinkedIn.

Seems like a reasonable ROI.