INTRODUCTION 5 the number two search engine after Google. SlideShare has made the PowerPoint presentation cool again. Numbers geeks are now celebrated for their brilliant data communicated through clever infographics. And don’t even get us started on how much creativity there is to be had across relative “newcomers” Pinterest, Instagram, and Vine. Pause for a moment and truly take in just how much social media have evolved over the past few years. The proliferation of social media plat- forms is fun, exciting, and also a bit daunting. Companies can easily drive themselves crazy trying to be all things to all people across so many plat- forms and hours of the day. The purpose of this book isn’t to make you feel like your company needs to be doing everything under the sun. Instead, we’re here to share why visual storytelling is valuable and easy to adopt, even if you don’t have a massive staff or budget. Our goal in writing this book is to share a mix of our personal experiences and insider tips gleaned from working for celebrated, industry-leading companies that embraced the art of visual storytelling early on. We’ve been in the trenches producing content from scratch, and we have learned firsthand how to craft visuals into a compel- ling story. We’ve seen successes, dealt with misses, and even managed a few crises in the process. As a result, it was important to focus on news and takeaways you can actually use. Some of these are big-picture strategies, and some are “in-the-weeds” tactics that will help inform and enhance your day-to- day content calendar planning. We’ve included the types of visual media at your disposal and platform-specific best practices, as well as powerful case studies on how other companies use visual storytelling to stand out on their social media channels. Throughout the book, we’ve sprinkled in a range of case studies across B2B and B2C industries. We believe that some of the best ideas can be inspired by others and reworked into a unique concept that’s relevant to your company. Working as social media strategists and evangelists for brands such as Dunkin’ Donuts and Intel, we wanted to share our knowledge, experi- ences, and overall journey of social business innovation. But in the end, we