Thanks to media coverage worthy of a royal wedding, everyone now knows that Apple’s balance sheet looks better than the U.S. government.

Not exactly an earth-shattering revelation - and Steve Jobs didn’t get married - so why all the fuss.

Reverse engineering the hoopla illustrates the storytelling that can come out of a single dot-connecting moment.

First, look at Apple’s Q2 quarterly earnings which always trigger a spike of media coverage.

A Google search on Apple + Q2 + earnings covering April 19/20 results in 415 hits.

A Google search on Apple + Q3 + earnings covering July 20/21 results in 357 hits.

Even though the Q3 numbers revealed all-time record revenue and earnings, the media coverage was actually less than Q2.

The Apple 10-Q included the cash hoard but few picked up on this even though it jumped a whopping $10 billion from the previous quarter.

The market intelligence site Asymco was one of the few, publishing the following chart on July 20 when Apple announced Q3 earnings (Apple watchers should bookmark this site).

I think the time has come for Apple to offer unlimited organic trail mix to all employees.

O.K., that’s the Apple piece.

Turning attention to U.S. Treasury Department-

The organization issues an operational statement on a daily basis which rarely generates attention. Looking at the closing balances on these Treasury statements last week, nothing jumps off the page.

Yet, when Matt Hartley at the Financial Post pens the piece “U.S. balance now less than Apple cash,” virtually every media property in the free world - and some not in the free world; Tehran Times picked up the story -jumps on the bandwagon.

Hartley leads with the punch line:

Steve Jobs is now more liquid than Uncle Sam.

then nicely milks the juxtaposition:

While it’s highly unlikely that President Barack Obama is looking to ask the founder and chief executive of Apple Inc. for a loan, it became a fact as of Thursday afternoon — the world’s largest technology company now has more cash on hand than the most powerful democracy on Earth has spending room.

Think of it as “mashup storytelling.”

By connecting two disparate piece of information, the amusement quotient dramatically increases.

Which causes the story to be repeated again and again under varied maskheads … often with zero credit or backlink to the Financial Post story (hello CNN).

Even Fortune, which inaccurately credits The Atlantic, can’t resist with the only original thinking coming in the form of the graphic.

Colleague Merredith Branscome from LeapPR notes ”Apple’s out$ized profit + DC’s miniscule margin for error made for a perfect storm.”

I agree but also believe companies don’t need a perfect storm to apply the same “mashup storytelling” to their own communications.

Thinking like a journalist, the trick lies in contrasting and connecting your own information to something from the outside world with the end result being fresh context. As we saw in the Financial Post story, this type of insight tends to get “borrowed” by others.

BTW, the “Apple has more dough than the U.S. government” story could have just as easily been written on July 14 since Apple’s Q2 cash exceeded the government’s operating cash balance on this day too. 

How can you not like a guy who puts in his official bio:

As an entrepreneur, he has founded dozens of companies, most of which failed.

Seth Godin brings many dimensions to the marketing discipline not the least being levity.

A believer in the art of storytelling, he penned the book “All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World.”

The difference between PR and publicity

By Seth Godin

Most PR firms do publicity, not PR.

Publicity is the act of getting ink. Publicity is getting unpaid media to pay attention, write you up, point to you, run a picture, make a commotion. Sometimes publicity is helpful, and good publicity is always good for your ego.

But it’s not PR.

PR is the strategic crafting of your story. It’s the focused examination of your interactions and tactics and products and pricing that, when combined, determine what and how people talk about you.

Regis McKenna was great at PR. Yes, he got Steve Jobs and the Mac on the cover of more than 30 magazines in the year it launched. That was just publicity. The real insight was crafting the story of the Mac (and yes, the story of Steve Jobs).

If you send out a boring press release, your publicity effort will probably fail, but your PR already has.

A publicity firm will tell you stories of how they got a client ink. A PR firm will talk about storytelling and being remarkable and spreading the word. They might even suggest you don’t bother getting ink or issuing press releases.

Well put.

Here’s one more point.

Sure, you can apply storytelling techniques to a news release.

But I would argue that great storytelling doesn’t easily scale.

How many times can Steve Job’s attention to minutia and black mock turtleneck carry the narrative?

Instead, finding and developing stories should be a never-ending process.

I enjoy a story that depends on a contrarian bent.

If someone revealed that Steve Jobs prefers Bad Religion on vinyl or that Michael Arrington leads a Bible study group, I would read those stories.

So naturally, I gravitated to the piece “A hammer — yes, that low-tech tool — helps mold noses of Japan’s bullet trains” in The Washington Post.

Is there any image that screams high-tech more than the Japanese bullet train?

As The Post points out, “Decades of computer-aided engineering have gone into those curvaceous snouts.”

Which leads to the entertaining payoff:

It is a shock, then, to learn that they are banged out — one piece at a time — with a hammer you can buy at the Home Depot.

The banging happens here in Kudamatsu, a small factory town at the southern end of Japan’s main island. Eight craftsmen use hammers to bend and twist thin sheets of aluminum, which are then welded together to create the graceful swoops of metal that cover the front of a bullet train.

The next time I’m at Home Depot, I’m asking for one of those.

The narrative then takes us to Kiyoto Yamashita who, 56 years ago at the age of 17, started the only company in the world that hammers out bullet train noses.

Here, we encounter the first of several anecdotes.

How do you think Mr. Yamashita earned a living before train schnozes came calling?

Listen up, Hollywood. He worked for an auto body shop applying his magic on Hondas, Toyotas and the occassional Beemer to rid them of unsightly dents.

There’s also a prodigal-son-returns dimension to the story.

After being told he couldn’t cut it in the family business, Master Yamashita left Kudamatsu for Tokyo to attend business school and then took jobs in Australia and Europe.

But three years ago, the parents had a change of heart, asking him back to run the operation.

Since taking over, his greatest challenge has been dealing with an aging workforce, a genuine quandary given that it takes a good 10 years for a newcomer to be anointed “bullet train nose jedi.”

As Master Yamashita puts it:

“It is not easy to find people to do this work because most Japanese have never even heard of this skill.”

I suspect most Americans, Italians and Slavakians, etc. haven’t heard of this skill either.

Global issues aside, I don’t think this YouTube video is the answer to attracting the youth of Japan:

Another recruitment idea implemented under Master Yamashita involves creating cellos and violins out of hammered aluminum to create awareness for the company and its unique craft.

I don’t know.

Do 17-year-old kids who favor string instruments have the right demeanor for this gig? Before jumping on me for stereotyping, take a look at how these disparate areas are linked at Kids Web Japan.

I rest my case.

But here’s an idea -

Create a new line of aluminum baseball bats.

Now there’s a connection to Japanese youngsters that would trigger buzz.

I can see The Washington Post revisiting this story in 10-15 years with the feel-good angle, baseball players who can’t achieve Pro Yakyu find satisfying career in the bullet train biz.

When we last addressed Mr. Jobs he was taking a pass on Macworld.

More recently, unless you’ve spent the last week in the proverbial cave, you’ve seen the cavalcade of stories on Steve Jobs taking a leave of absence from Apple.

The common denominator in the stories revolves around understanding his replacement, Tim Cook.

It’s revealing to contrast a blog posting from The Wall Street Journal by Nick Wingfield with a story in the San Jose Mercury News penned by Brandon Bailey ”Iron Reporter”-style (further proof that I’m spending way too much time on the Food Network).

Let’s start with the headlines.

“When Steve Jobs Met Tim Cook” (Journal) versus “Tim Cook – Jobs’ temporary replacement at Apple – seen as strong manger” (Merc).

No contest.

The Journal story promises to put me in the room for the first Jobs-Cook interaction, with instant drama coming from the question “what happened?”  

Was it “like” at first sight?  

Did Cook wear a “Vote for Ike” button as an icebreaker?  

On the other hand, the Merc header indicates that we’re likely going to read a rehash of what’s already known by even pedestrian Apple watchers. 

And that’s about how it plays out. 

Wingfield deserves credit for tracking down the recruiter at Heidrick & Struggles who served as the matchmaker back in 1998. (The fact that the recruiter no longer works for Heidrick tells me that Heidrick PR did not pitch the story angle.) While the walk down memory lane won’t evoke foreshadowing like F. Scott Fitzgerald, at least it’s different from the thousands of Cook-knows-how-to-make-the-trains-run-on-time stories. The anecdote that Steve isn’t big on collecting barber chairs adds some levity. 

The Merc story kicks off with the premise that Cook is the right man for the short-term gig, supported by “scintillating” quotes from two sources: 

“He’s the guy that makes sure everything gets executed properly. He’s excellent at getting things done.” (Tim Bajarin from Creative Strategies) 

The 48-year-old Cook is “not a product innovator. But he runs a very tight ship.” (Brian Marshall from Broadpoint AmTech) 

Needless to say, we won’t be adding these quotes to our art of storytelling curriculum … which isn’t to diss the two sources. We know Bajarin, who is absolutely clued into Apple and often communicates with a compelling bent. But what shows up in this particular article from the sources interviewed doesn’t make for an enlightening read. 

It turns out that the best color in the Merc piece gets borrowed from Fortune’s profile on Cook last year: 

A recent article in Fortune magazine described a management meeting in which Cook was discussing a problem with Apple’s Asian operations. “This is really a problem,” Cook reportedly said. “Someone should be in China driving this.” Thirty minutes later, Cook turned to a subordinate and calmly inquired: “Why are you still here?” The man immediately left the meeting, the magazine said; he drove straight to the airport and flew to China without a change of clothes.

Even with the limitations of a 24-hour news cycle, you would think the paper in Apple’s backyard could do a little better on the original reporting front (although finding a tidbit in the Cook family’s hometown paper, the Robertsdale Independent was a nice touch).

I do recognize that both the Journal and the Merc have published multiple stories on this topic. It’s plausible that with a little more initiative on my part, I could have found a dull Journal piece and a Merc story with panache. 

It’s also not lost on me that the blog as a medium for reporting offers the latitude to capture vignettes that otherwise wouldn’t be substantial enough to make the printed page. 

Still, I think this exercise sheds light on how to create – or suffocate – drama in business communications.

“Apple is reaching more people in more ways than ever before, so like many companies, trade shows have become a very minor part of how Apple reaches its customers. The increasing popularity of Apple’s Retail Stores, which more than 3.5 million people visit every week …”