Any company would prize 20 column inches plus a photo on the front of The Journal’s Marketplace section.

That’s exactly what UPS enjoyed in the article titled “UPS Thinks Outside the Box on Driver Training.”

The piece makes for a good mini case study on the type of storytelling that plays in the business media.

Note the absence of a news release.

This is a one-off feature.

While the writer packages a phantom news hook in the lead graph around what appears to be a recent problem - a large percent of driver candidates wash out of the traditional training - we learn later that the solution to the problem commenced in 2007.

This is not new, and that’s OK.

But the lead graph does illustrate the power of a “negative” in storytelling:

Vexed that some 30% of driver candidates flunk its traditional training, United Parcel Service Inc. is moving beyond the classroom to ready its rookies for the road.

Most companies wouldn’t release a statistic that reflects poorly on its performance, even if it’s in the rear-view mirror.

Yet, UPS recognizes the negative stat creates the door-opener to the story.

As discussed in previous posts, without being open to sharing what’s been done in the past, the reporter has no context to understand the significance of what’s been achieved in the present. The larger the distance between “what was” and “what is,” the greater the drama.

In the case of UPS, the new training has reduced the washout number to 10 percent.

Further showing an understanding of storytelling, UPS delivers (couldn’t resist) access to The Journal reporter so she can see with her own eyes what goes down in a training session.

Again, most companies would take a pass on this technique; i.e., what happens if the reporter, God forbid, sees a mistake?

Well, the reporter did see a mistake:

Mr. Byrnes hopped back in and started up. “Stop! Stop! Ugh!” yelled Mr. Keys. He picked up the cone. “This is a kid who was playing football around your vehicle and went to get his ball.” Mr. Byrnes looked shaken and slapped his forehead. The lesson stuck: At the next stop, he checked for cones.

And you know what? It’s OK.

If anything, it brings a realness to the story.

Of course, The Journal needs to remind folks that it devotes features to topics, not companies; hence, the obligatory paragraph on other companies testing novel training, including UPS archrival FedEx, which offers this amusing comment:

FedEx Corp. says it, too, has moved toward more hands-on learning in the past five years, although it adds the change wasn’t prompted by a high failure rate among trainees.

Ouch.

It’s always a compelling read when a relative unexpectedly throws a dart.

Still, the article quickly reverts back to the topic at hand and leaves the reader with a positive feeling about UPS.

I didn’t conduct exhaustive research, but best as I can tell the last time UPS played the training card was back in 2007 in Fortune when it first introduced Integrad:

On Sept. 17, UPS opened its first-ever full-service pilot training center, a $34 million, 11,500-square-foot, movie-set-style facility in Landover, Md., aimed directly at young would-be drivers and known as Integrad. The facility and curriculum have been shaped over three years by more than 170 people, including UPS executives, professors and design students at Virginia Tech, a team at MIT, forecasters at the Institute for the Future, and animators at an Indian company called Brainvisa.

So while the innovative UPS training does sit in the public domain, the new hard data - 1,629 trainees have completed the program with a 90 percent success rate - allows The Journal to revisit the topic.

Literally thousands of PR blogs dot - some might say clog - the social media landscape.

When I started Ishmael’s Corner in 2008, I concluded the last thing the world needed was another digital pulpit spewing about embargoes, e-mail blasts to reporters, and the like.

Instead, this blog has strived to address storytelling in business communications, a concept that can be counterintuitive to many executives, particularly those coming from engineering orientations.

With that said, I’ve decided that every 88 posts or so, it’s OK to make an exception to the rule (and perhaps trigger some positive karma according to Chinese numerology).

With the caveat dispensed -

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the often contentious relationship that exists between influencers - defining this category broadly to include reporters, editors, bloggers, etc. - and the PR community.

You can count on a Michael Arrington diatribe about the PR profession every quarter, leaving the reader to conclude that without those pesky PR people, TechCrunch would be more efficient and world hunger would be solved.

Given PR’s focus on specific clients and a media property’s agenda to cover broad industries and issues, there’s bound to be some choppy interactions.

That’s OK.

It goes with the territory.

If the influencer doesn’t perceive a given client as relevant or a client delivers special treatment to certain influencers, it’s bound to cause bad feelings.

Is there a word that describes a relationship as being both symbiotic and adversarial (and don’t say “frenemy”)?

This dynamic existed when I entered the profession and I suspect it will still be there long after I exit stage left.

But here’s the part that bothers me and cuts to the core of relationship-building 101.

Too often, PR professionals only reach out to influencers when they need something in the form of:

* Cover my client

* Meet my client.

* Talk to my client.

Even without the aid of data visualization, one starts to see a trend emerge.

Consider for a moment what happens in everyday life if the only time a person contacts you is when they want something from you; i.e., an introduction, an e-mail address, money (sons and daughters don’t count).

When PR professionals fall into this trap, it limits how the relationship evolves.

But if you make a point of contacting influencers specifically when you DON’T need something, now you’ve got the basis of genuine relationship-building.

Of course, the information you’re sharing needs to be relevant - better yet, relevant and not in the public domain - to what the influencer tracks.

If the PR profession jumped on this bandwagon, we would go a long way toward resolving what the warden in Cool Hand Luke called, “a failure to communicate.”

P.S. Tom Foremski wrote in SiliconValleyWatcher about the importance of hyperlinks in e-mail interactions with media properties, which is worth a read and ties to the big picture of helping the influencer do his or her job.

Robert Scoble, the poster child for escaping corporate cubedom for the virtual pulpit, penned a post titled “What do the freaking tech bloggers want?”

It’s a convincing view.

A bit longwinded perhaps, but if “Scobleizer” is etched in your masthead, you get a pass to periodically pontificate.

An earlier Scoble quasi-rant emphasized that through customers, not the PR function, is the best way to share the latest cool thing with the rest of the world. This predictably led to praise and lambasts across the blogosphere, which caused Scoble to revisit the topic. The following line captures the gist of his latest take:

“Bloggers are being commoditized.”

He goes on to say:

“If we just go to press conferences, or only deal with embargoed news, and report on the same news everyone else is reporting on, well, then, just what reason is there for our business to exist? How will we build an audience that’s any different, than, say, TechCrunch or Fortune’s or ZDNet’s efforts? How will we justify to our sponsors that they should sponsor us as we are doing the same thing as everyone else? Especially if we have a smaller audience? Yeah, advertisers really love getting THOSE kinds of sales pitches. Imagine walking into a big company and putting up a Powerpoint that says ‘we’re the same as Techcrunch, but smaller.’ What’s the chances you’ll walk out with a sponsorship?”

Hard to disagree.

In short, great blogging depends on information not in the public domain.

This is a tough one for smokestack PR which revolves around public-domain content, a one-to-many model also known by that scientific term “mass blast.” The news release is the best example of information earmarked for the public domain.

I’m not saying the news release doesn’t have a place in outbound communications. For a range of reasons, not the least being public disclosure, the news release can be the right tool for the job.

But public-domain information doesn’t work for bloggers.

Back to Scoble’s point about being commoditized, bloggers need fresh stories, unique access and turf to navigate on their own; otherwise, how do they differentiate their offerings?

Which poses a problem for smokestack PR.

Storytelling takes time. 

And it’s not a one-to-many approach in the blogosphere. Instead, it’s about pulling together the right content and sources for a single blogger.

The ROI can’t be predicated on quantity (multiple bloggers).

The ROI comes from forming a genuine relationship with the blogger and one-off stories with the potential of being flung to the far reaches of the Net via the viral effect.

Scoble wrapped up his dissertation on what bloggers want from PR with an anecdote about powwows put on by Microsoft and EA:

“… That was really great because there wasn’t any pressure to report on anything, just a chance to get to know you, your team, and see some of the things you are working on. Same thing at EA last week. By providing experiences where we can get our hands on your products, meet your team, etc, we’ll discover new story ideas together. I found a few at EA that I would never have known about if they didn’t have an event where we could hang out for a day.”

We’ll discover new story ideas together. What a concept. 

One last point -

Tom Foremski from Silicon Valley Watcher spoke to our company about his transition from Financial Times journalist to independent blogger during one of our lunch-bucket sessions. When he opened the floor to questions, I asked about the volume of traffic on his blog.

Wrong question.

He didn’t exactly call me stupid, but with overstated calm explained that a blog’s audience should be measured by the quality of its readers. If 15,000 people with juice read his blog, that reflects a certain value in the content and justifies companies such as Intel ponying up sponsorship fees.

The blogosphere is a different world from traditional media.

As long as smokestack PR exists, we’re going to see the periodic dustups from Scoble and his brethren. 

Businesspeople tend to associate storytelling with fiction.

Yet, the same elements that make a book such as “Moby Dick” a compelling read - good versus evil, care for the characters, humor, etc. - have a place in the business world. Whether it’s a potential customer evaluating your product or a journalist probing your latest news, communicating information in a more entertaining fashion increases your likeability quotient.

And customers, journalists, job candidates and even gadflies gravitate toward companies they like.

Unfortunately, this concept around storytelling is counterintuitive to many business executives, particularly those coming from engineering orientations where science rules the day. I’m not suggesting you need to lose an appendage to a large mammal before anyone will notice you but the ability to build some drama in business communications is a means to capture attention.

That’s the idea behind this blog: To look at the art of storytelling through a business prism.

No doubt, most blog postings will draw from the media world - defining media as any from journalists to an individual with a virtual soapbox since the words are right there in the public domain to scrutinize. But this blog will strive to tackle the bigger challenge of communicating to the outside world in a more entertaining fashion.