There’s a reason that the official Google Blog is so well read and shows up on the Techmeme leaderboard.

Beyond dominating search, the Google posts are crafted with a conversational tone and often contrast the old way with a new way.

Take last week’s post “Go thataway: Google Maps India learns to navigate like a local.”

In short, it explains how improved directions in India came from including landmarks (visual cues) that both describe a turn as well as confirm that the person is on the right track.

For the men in India who are not big on asking for directions (and you know who you are), this latest incarnation from Google must be a godsend.

The storytelling kicks in with a screenshot of Google Maps directions in India from 2008:

Not good.

It’s almost like you’re expected to tape measure each leg.

Now look at how map directions in India appear today:

Even if you don’t speak the local language, these directions give you a fighting chance to move from point A to point B.

The contrast is obvious.

Often, companies are reticent to explain the “old way” because they mistakenly feel it comes across as a “negative.”

Yet, this information is vital to putting the “new way” in context.

Technology Review claims to be the oldest technology magazine in the world, going back to 1899.

Coming out of MIT, there’s a certain cachet to the publication as it strives to educate us mortals on emerging technologies.

Not exactly considered the magazine for hammock reading during a lemonade summer day.

And certainly not a magazine known for its entertainment value.

Not so fast.

There’s bona fide storytelling in the publication’s July/August issue as it strives to reveal the real Wolfram Alpha in the article “Search Me.” (BTW, great double entendre for the over-50 crowd who, when asked a question in their youth they didn’t know, would respond “search me.”)

Check out the lead sentence in the story:

On the evening of April 27 a ferocious rain raked the windows beside Jamie Williams’s cubicle as the physicist sat, exhausted, immersed in the minutia of food science.

Nice twist on the “dark and stormy night” opener; the stage setting continues with:

Williams wasn’t toiling in a redoubt of Silicon Valley Web entrepreneurs but in a Midwestern citadel of science geeks: Wolfram Research, in Champaign, IL, housed in an office block overlooking a Walgreens and a McDonald’s. This was the corporate lair of Stephen Wolfram …

Great word “lair,” last prominently used in Batman.

I also liked the explanation of the technology through a jargon-free example:

Say you wanted to know how much cholesterol and saturated fat lurked in a slab of your grandmother’s cornbread. You’d transcribe its ingredients from her yellowed index card to an online query bar, and Alpha would run computations and produce a USDA-style nutrition label.

Now this isn’t to say the piece doesn’t periodically delve into the esoteric — etymology tables, crystallographic patterns, animal morphologies, and the like — but again, a genuine story threads the content with a couple decent subplots.

It turns out “grasshopper,” none other than Google Founder Sergey Brin, interned for Mr. Wolfram in 1993 before surpassing the master. And while Technology Review doesn’t play the conspiracy card, it chronicles a series of Google actions that allow the reader to draw his/her own conclusions.

Also, we learn there are people who dislike Wolfram and view him as a “techwomizer,” a bit of a showoff when it comes to technology. So when Wolfram postulates on his search engine’s place in history in the same breath as the invention of mathematics and this thing called the Internet, it rubs some in the scientific community the wrong way.

While the ending is somewhat predictable, we see a softer and dare I say humble side of Wolfram in the closing line:

“It’s here as a useful service, and the test is, do people find it useful or not?”

From a communications perspective, there’s no question that Stephen Wolfram is good copy. He seems like a cross between Stephen Hawking and P.T. Barnum.

Still, the person or people behind building the public profile for Wolfram Alpha deserve credit for delivering access to Technology Review which, in turn, allowed for the storytelling. Striving to control this type of article suffocates the narrative.

As a side note, Wolfram Alpha has possibilities for PR professionals. Just one quick example: Dropping “BusinessWeek versus Technology Review” into the search engine results in the following:

The San Jose Mercury News ran the feel-good story “From Strawberries to Startup” on the front page above the fold.

No doubt, the Merc’s editorial decision-makers - and for that matter publication bosses from around the country - figure the onslaught of negative news starts to numb the readership.

Check out the Merc’s front-page headlines leading into the piece:

Our Shrinking ECONOMY (their choice to go uppercase), The “Worsts” Keep on Coming, Jan. 31, 2009

Closing in … housing crisis reaches wealthier valley communities, Feb. 1, 2009

Super Steelers (relief from the Dorito bowl), Feb. 2, 2009

Home Prices: bad to worse, Feb. 3, 2009

Needless to say, you don’t need the M.B.A. brigade for deep analysis to discern the trend.

To break the pattern, the Merc highlighted a story that never goes out of style: An immigrant capitalizes on America’s opportunities through old-fashion hard work. If this post was multimedia, you’d hear “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” playing in the background now.

What took the startup called Ooyala from the Business section to the front of the paper is the contrarian angle.

We’re not talking immigrants from India, China, Taiwan, Israel or Eastern Europe who regularly impact the tech scene.

The chaps who lifted Ooyala to stardom come from Mexican heritage and their parents were migrant farm workers.

From these humble beginnings, Bismarck and Bel Lepe gained entry to Stanford which led to a gig at Google and set the stage for their own undertaking.

Merc reporter Scott Duke Harris develops the compelling tale with ample use of anecdotes. I particularly liked:

“The Lepe brothers say their parents’ hard work provided them with privileges not common to working class kids, including piano and karate lessons.”

I think it’s fair to say that the children of migrant workers aren’t typically learning Tchaikovsky.  

The quotes - unlike the typical generic filler - also enhance the story:

“To stay at Google would be like living in your parents’ mansion: It might be nice but it’s still their mansion.”

Lest you think serendipity landed the profile, the company has secured visibility in targets ranging from Global Burger to a Fortune profile penned by heavyweight Adam Lashinsky.

Obviously, the Lepe brothers learned a thing or two about building a company image from their time at Google.

If you ask people what’s the one digital device they absolutely can’t live without, the mobile phone comes out as the clear leader.

That’s why you have industry heavyweights like Google’s Eric Schmidt calling mobile advertising the  single most exciting opportunity for the do-no-evil guys as far back as 2006 (The Wall Street Journal).

It also explains the strategic importance of the Android platform for Google. Mobile search and the ads that come along for the ride will be a massive market.

While predicting the size of such an embryonic market is a little like Mrs. Magellan asking how many lunches to pack, this hasn’t stopped the prognosticators from taking a shot. Industry analyst firm Informa, for example, forecasts annual expenditure on mobile advertising reaching the $11.4 billion mark by 2011.

Whether you buy this number or not, the point is that people are increasingly turning to the phone for content … which brings us storytelling on the “small screen.”

Rudy De Waele’s blog called Mobile Media Lifestyle looks at this very topic. In fact, De Waele delivered a presentation called Mobile Digital Storytelling in Seoul last week (appreciate Kathrin Eiben in Spain flagging it) that even touches on the tools emerging for packaging a story for display on mobile phones.

Obviously, a tiny screen puts a premium on the visual element.

You can check out the early days of visual storytelling on Flickr via its “tell a story in five frames” initiative, which offers the following guidance:

Guidelines are not rules, but a formula that can be used to suit your creative imagination. Several avenues exist for story telling, such as journalistic reporting, sequential photos that reveal a moment, photographic poetry, and narrative. The following guidelines are for narrative.

A good story has characters in action with a beginning, middle, and an ending. Fortunately a lot of information can be given in a single photograph, enhancing the limitations of five photographs for your story. Location, time, and atmosphere aid viewer imagination. Keep standards of pictorial beauty, but pack as many storytelling elements in one photograph as possible to develop an action.

1st photo: establish characters and location.

2nd photo: create a situation with possibilities of what might happen.

3rd photo: involve the characters in the situation.

4th photo: build to probable outcomes

5th photo: have a logical, but surprising, end.

Like any form of storytelling, drama keeps an audience engaged. 

OK, it’s not exactly Shakespeare.

But it does raise a question for communication professionals. Namely, should cleverness or search engine optimization be the guiding principle in writing a news release headline?

I pondered this question after reading the interview conducted by Brian Pittman from the Bulldog Reporter with Meredith Artley, executive editor of LATimes.com.

Specifically, Artley shared:

“We have a graining program to help copy editors write headlines optimized for search. That means headlines that might have used metaphors or clever word usage in the past won’t work anymore — at least not for the website, because people don’t search for turns of phrases. They search for nouns and descriptors. Sure, this may take some of the ‘art’ out of the writing, but an artful headline that nobody sees is useless if you can’t find it on Google.”

Now there’s a sobering comment.

No matter how much drama, humanity and humor you bring to a headline, it’s all for naught if the words don’t resonate with the Google algorithm.

It turns out that this topic has been bandied about for some time, with one of the better posts coming from CNET with the header, “Newspapers search for Web headline magic.”

CNET makes the point that a Wall Street Journal article with the witty headline “Green Beans Comes Marching Home” - about Green Beans Coffee opening its cafe in the U.S. after serving overseas military bases - doesn’t cut it with the SEO generation.

In other words, if you’re looking for information about the intersection of coffee with military bases or soldiers, the takeoff on “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” means zilch to search engines.

As the news release has evolved from a tool for journalists to a form of communication to the average Joe/Joanne, it’s clear that SEO should rule the day at least for the headline.

This is one of those instances when the power of entertaining must give way to vanilla information.