It’s been a while since I’ve made an “audio post” to a blog (I’m more “video” these days). However, some recent blog posts and Twitter comments by Patrick Ruffini inspired me to dust-off the Skype account and Audio Hijack software and give him a call. In 2004 Ruffini had the very Web 1.0 title “webmaster” for the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. Despite the title, he ushered in some very Web 2.0 features and approaches to the site — and the campaign. Over 30,000 off-line “meetup-like” volunteer gatherings were organized on the site and over 5,000 websites and weblogs hosted the badges and widgets (remember, this was in 2004) that Ruffini’s team developed using RSS and XML. After the election, he ran the Inauguration website and later had a two-year stint as eCampaign Director for the GOP.

After the jump, read more and listen to the interview.

Try to check out “Sons of Lwala” when it premieres at the 2008 Nashville Film Festival April 17-24. Last night I attended the benefit preview of the film about Milton and Fred Ochieng, two brothers who come to Nashville to study medicine while simultaneously opening the first health clinic in their home village in western Kenya. The brothers were driven to finish the clinic that had been their father’s dream before he and their mother died of AIDS. Milton, in particular, felt compelled to give back ever since villagers sold chickens and cows to raise the $900 needed for his first plane ticket to the United States. “Just don’t forget us,” they told him as they sent him off to pursue his education.

Despite the pressures of medical school, it proved impossible for either brother to forget a home where sick villagers have to walk miles for treatment, children suffer from preventable waterborne illnesses and 20-year-olds are dying of AIDS.

Produced and directed by Barry Simmons, a former TV reporter, the documentary follows two years in the life of the brothers as they struggle to raise money for the clinic on their own. Their goal seems close to impossible until they meet others who are inspired by their quest, including Sen. Bill Frist, the band Jars of Clay and hundreds of their fellow students. Thanks to an outpouring of support, the clinic opened in 2007, and to date, it has served 15,000 patients and spearheaded community health initiatives.

Check out the documentary Web site for a trailer and this link for more information about the brothers’ continuing efforts to support their village.

“Only” is one of those words that never quite feels at home anywhere in a sentence. It is frequently misplaced, although our brains are wired in such a way that most of the time we unconsciously relocate it and interpret the sentence correctly.
“Only” can be an adjective or an adverb. As such, it should be placed immediately in front of the word it restricts. Otherwise, the sentence changes meaning.
Let’s take, for example, the title line from Gene Pitney’s 1962 hit, “Only Love Can Break a Heart.”
As it is written, the sentence says that nothing else except love can cause heartbreak. Fair enough, although maybe not exactly true.

Hammock partner Jim Elliott of the national advertising sales firm the James G. Elliott Company shares some tips on how to train your magazine sales force to sell digital platforms in the latest issue of their company newsletter Ads&Ideas:

Training is, of course, necessary here to sell a brand which resides in different media platforms. But that training has to be in just the fundamentals or basics of each medium—not in the technical or mechanical aspects.

For instance, a seller should understand the fundamentals of podcasting; how it is delivered, its advantages and drawbacks and what kind of advertising works with the medium, but the seller doesn’t have to be an expert in the technology. Hopefully, the brand has a podcast traffic manager to handle the technical questions.

One of our Hammock partners is the national advertising sales firm the James G. Elliott Company. In the latest issue of their company newsletter Ads&Ideas, President Jim Elliott shares his perspective on recent news coming out of the advertising industry:

Oh, what a difference a few months can make! The first quarter of 2008 has been one of the roughest in magazine ad sales history. A quick glance at the revenue numbers for monthly magazines is sobering. The decline has been caused in part by many agencies holding back on placing 2008 schedules due to their clients not releasing budgets. But it has also been due to advertising money being diffused into various new delivery platforms.

Of course, the magazine industry has been trying to hold on to some of these dollars by creating their own multiple delivery platforms for their content. However, there is no dominant selling strategy in the way they actually sell advertising around these new platforms.

For instance, some magazine companies have created a separate digital advertising department. Some have hired outside representatives to handle on-line advertising, with a different outside group to handle mobile and so on. Others have taken their current sales force and trained them to be knowledgeable in several different media platforms.

We are keen on the last strategy being the most sensible approach because, regardless of the platform, it is the brand and its community that set magazines apart from other media. It is the strength of our business. For those of us who have also been on the buying side of the business, there is, and has always been, one thing that stood out about magazine representatives. Both trade and consumer magazine reps have always sold the brand — which is a conceptual sale.

Historically, magazine sellers were allowed to call on clients, account people at the agency and the media department because they were selling the audience, and what made that audience distinctively different, both psychographically and demographically from the competition. Magazine sellers have always been distinctively different stylistically in their approach from that of broadcast sellers in that the sale was more complicated, involving more channels of decision makers built around selling conceptually. Branding is a concept.

A good friend, Dave Smith of Mediasmith —a large digital San Francisco advertising agency—told me recently that their agency had identified many new digital platforms by which to offer up content. For example, they have identified things like:

• Rich Media Display Advertising

• Video Display Advertising (Web)

• Video SEM/SEO & Video Distribution

• Video on Demand & Interactive Television

• Over-the-Top (OTT)

• Widgets

• Mobile

• Digital & Interactive Out-of-Home

• Digital & Interactive Cinema

• Consumer-Generated Media and Advertising

• Mashups

• Blogging

• Social Networks

• Peer-to-Peer

• RSS

• Advergaming and In-Game Advertising

• Virtual Worlds

By the way, to learn more about each one of these subjects, you may visit Mediasmith’s website to see a section dedicated to emerging technologies:

From an advertising sales perspective, how many different groups–either internally or externally—will a magazine brand require to handle their ad sales needs in this world of diverse platforms? And what will happen to a consistent brand story with so many different groups involved?

I would strongly argue that magazine representatives are uniquely positioned to handle ad sales in this emerging world of different delivery platforms.

In our travels among publishers, we often hear that magazine reps don’t understand the Internet. But when you investigate these statements more carefully, often what they are really saying is that magazine reps don’t understand the technological aspects of the online medium. However, that doesn’t mean that they don’t understand the audience or the community represented and can’t, with a little training, translate the particular online site into a part of a brand for an advertising buyer.

Frankly, how many magazine representatives actually understand the many facets of the print production part of the magazine industry? I have noticed that magazine management frequently confuses the activity of order taking with the art of selling. Those folks that often take orders also perform tasks on the web that are similar to those performed by a print production manager in magazines or a traffic manager in the broadcast world.

Check back this Friday for Part II of Jim’s article.

My friend Josh Hinds interviewed me on the topic of business networking. Here’s the link to the interview. Thanks, Josh.

Have you ever thought about how often magazine offices appear as settings in movies? From writer Andie Anderson (Kate Hudson) in “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days” to Andrea Sachs’ (Anne Hathaway) stint as an editorial assistant at Runway magazine in “The Devil Wears Prada,” movies are filled with characters who dream of making it big in journalism.
If you don’t believe me, take a look at this list compiled by Rex a few years ago and you’ll see how often it really is.
And it’s not just on the big screen. One of my favorite shows (“Ugly Betty”) is all about the making of a Vogue-esque magazine and the crazy people who help put it together.

Business networking guru Josh Hinds interviews Hammock Inc. CEO Rex Hammock on — what else? — networking. Rex and Josh discuss both in-person and online networking.
Key point from Rex — you get what you give:

As with any relationship, building a business network starts with “getting involved” and “giving back.”
When I look back over three decades of business, I can tell you that my most valuable connections came from serving on trade association or civic-related committees or boards.

Read the full interview.

What do we do? Over the years at Hammock Inc., the way we’ve answered that question has changed. Back in 1994, we often described ourselves as relationship marketing experts. “Custom publishing” became a popular buzzword in the mid- and late-1990s. And sometimes, we’ve resorted to the shorthand: “We publish magazines and build websites for corporations and associations.” Simple, but for those in the know, it didn’t say nearly enough.
Today, we are a custom media company in the business of creating and managing magazines, videos and online media to help organizations build stronger relationships with customers, members and employees.

Recently, Folio: — the magazine and website for the publishing industry — interviewed Hammock Inc. President John Lavey in an article about the evolution of custom publishing. John shared his thoughts about how the evolving media landscape provides new opportunities for publishers, advertisers and readers — the kinds of things we’re working on every day.
Just a sample:

Customers are aware of the various [digital media] features and functionality that are out there, but are still relatively unsure how they can specifically apply them to campaigns, which puts the publisher in the fortunate position of educator. “We’re seeing a lot of questions about what they can use and what makes sense to use,” says John Lavey, president of custom publishing firm Hammock Inc. “At the same time, the pressures of the postal increases, increases in the cost of paper, and the difficulty of selling advertising without a robust package of assets to advertisers, are favoring bigger ideas and packages.”

Read the article on Folio:’s website.

Thanks to you, friends around the globe, we reached our goal! More than 100 Hammock T-shirt photos have been uploaded to the Hammock T-shirt map. (Including the one above from some of our friends at the DAR in Washington, DC.) You know what that means—you’ve helped us meet our goal of donating 20 laptops to the One Laptop Per Child Foundation.

For 16 years we’ve designed an annual Hammock T-shirt to give to our friends. In 2008, we decided to experiment with a crazy new idea—figuring out how we could make T-shirts, a little interactive collaborative media and a social cause work together. Happily, we discovered that it wasn’t that hard to do—and more rewarding than we could have imagined.

We simply used the Google Maps API to create our mashup map, asked our friends to upload a picture wearing their Hammock T and then donated one laptop for every five photos uploaded. Then voila—our wonderful friends took it from there, sending in amazing photos of themselves at work, at play and in sometimes freezing or rain-forest temps, all in a quest to give laptops to kids who really need them. What’s better than that?

Thanks again for taking time out to participate—we hope you had fun! Check back later in the year for our plans for next year’s T-shirt.

Haven’t posted your photo yet? Upload your photo here. We’ve met out goal but we still want to keep adding our friends to our map. We’ve got a few extra T-shirts left, so if you have an exotic or special place you’d like to add to this map, email us (including your size) and we’ll try our best to get one to you. Check back often and watch the map grow.