The greatest art that any communicator can master is storytelling. It can be difficult, but it's always worth the effort.

Joseph Campbell spent his life studying myths — the greatest of all stories. Drawing on the teachings of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, he showed how storytelling gratifies our deepest psychological needs, including the need for the child to separate from the mother and become a man or woman, and the need for the adult to accept/transcend their own mortality. His work is now considered compulsory reading by scriptwriters, and the public relations industry should follow suit.  

Faced with ideas of the magnitude of Campbell's, the work of public relations sometimes seem small. But don't dispair: Servant of Chaos has rightly explained that the smallest stories are sometimes the best. And our work is rich in opportunities for storytelling.

Think about that staple of B2B marketing: the case study. When writing one, don't just describe the customer and how they used the product. Tell the story of the challenge they faced, and how they surmounted it.

Consider that staple of the corporate website: the About Us page. Don't just drown your visitors in statistics. Tell them how you came to be.

And of course there are blog posts. Simple link posts have their place, but the greatest satisfaction comes from telling a story.

In all these cases, storytelling can be challenging, but it's far from difficult. Start by asking some basic questions:

• Who was changed?
• Who created change?
• What challenges did they face?
• How did they feel?

With the answers, your story is half-way written.