Visual Storytelling -- Inspirations and Everyday Examples

I attend a lot of events put on by and for the PR and marketing community in Boston, and it's not always that case that I come away feeling I've learned something new. That was certainly true a few weeks ago, with a session on "Employing Visual Content for Compelling Storytelling" presented by PR Newswire and the Business Development Institute (interestingly, this was held at one of the most magnificent repositories of written storytelling -- the Boston Public Library).  Like most communications and marketing folks, I've long ago embraced the belief that videos, images, infographics and other visual assets are increasingly important when we are working to generate interest in their message.  But what struck me -- as I watched the examples offered up in this program and as looked for other signs of visual content in PR and marketing efforts in the weeks that followed -- was how acheiveable this is. As we see from our own personal experiences with Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other forms of social media, we can easily build videos and images into our storytelling -- and thanks to smartphones, it takes just seconds to capture this.  For inspiration, I'll share one video that stood out that day -- Caine's Arcade -- which was spotlighted by Andrew Davis, author of the book Brandscaping, who presented several very cool examples at the BPL that day (and that's my snapshot of the library -- some very basic smartphone-enabled visual storytelling of my own).