Bringing the Corps’ message to the Windy City, U.S. Marines swept into Chicago in mid-May for the first-ever Marine Week, a citywide series of events designed to better acquaint Chicagoans with the Corps. Our client, the Marine Corps League, partnered with the Corps to plan and carry out the demonstrations, speeches, concerts and receptions, and the story of Marine Week makes the cover of the July-August issue of Semper Fi, the League’s member magazine produced by Hammock Inc.
Everyone has a spine. Sure it’s not a part of the body we tend to think about or receive compliments on (how hard would you laugh if someone said, “My what a lovely spine you have …”), but it holds everything together with subtle precision. The same is true of a magazine spine. It’s probably the last thing you notice when you pick up your favorite publication, but without it you wouldn’t even want to try to sift through the piles of pages.
There are two types of binding for magazines: perfect binding and saddle stitch, otherwise known as wire-sewn. In a perfect bound magazine, printed sections lie on top of each other, with the backs of the sections held together with a thermally activated adhesive. In a saddle-stitched magazine, the sections are stitched inside of each other and held together with wire staples.
So how do you pick the right binding style for your publication?
Hey, I’m looking for someone who eats hot dogs for breakfast and whose last name starts with a C. Anyone out there fit that description? Anyone out there know someone who fits that description?
OK, so that’s a strange example, but I was just trying to demonstrate one of the best uses of social media and Web 2.0—crowdsourcing. In very basic terms, crowdsourcing means leveraging your audience to find solutions to your problems—or, in my case, answers to very random questions.
If you walk around our offices here at Hammock Inc., you’ll find that most of us Hammockites have cherished desk items that have been with us almost as long as we’ve been working here. While some of us like to keep a fun reminder of our favorite childhood toy in our line of sight, others need some sort of stress reliever within arm’s reach at all times. And whether we choose to display our favorite cartoon, an artifact from our backyard or a gift from a parent, one thing is certain: None of our desks are bare. Here’s a fun slideshow of Hammock’s favorite desk toys.
Judging from the hits, our post last year on creating style guides filled a need. If you’re just starting this process, or perhaps dusting off your current guide and thinking of remodeling, we thought we’d offer some tips on things you simply must have in your style guide. Typically, these are items that raise the most questions from readers or, if you are a custom publisher, from your clients:
The Hammock Team shares some of our grammar pet peeves
You’ll often find us walking up and down the halls with a red pen tucked behind an ear, resting in a shirt pocket or in-hand, always ready to lend a scribble or two to the editing process for our magazines and newsletters.
Though all of our publications have their own style guides, which help us answer specific questions as they come up, bad grammar is just bad grammar. Here are a few examples that really put us over the edge:
Once a month, we’d like to bring you your morning coffee and news.
Truth be told, we don’t know a lot about brewing fancy coffee, but we always know the latest and greatest from the world of custom media and custom publishing. With two simple clicks, sign up to receive the Hammock Inc. enewsletter in your inbox once a month. Each edition includes our insight into the latest in custom media, social-media marketing and community-building trends.
We promise not to spam you, and we promise to work on our coffee-brewing skills.
Several members of the Hammock crew spent June 3-4 in Washington, D.C., for the Association Media & Publishing Conference, an annual meeting for association publishing professionals hosted and organized by SNAP. Hammock Inc. served as social media sponsor for the event, and part of our responsibility in that role was creating and maintaining the “real-time” event website live.SNAP09.com. We believe it’s a great example of how to pull together some of the streams of the “live” web (Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, SlideShare, blogging) to capture the activities of an event. It also allowed a increased level of participation for those who attended by including their tweets and photos.
“The launch of a conference live site enabled SNAP to convey content in real-time to both to attendees and those who couldn’t make it,” said Amy Lestition, CAE, SNAP executive director.
In addition to developing and updating the live site, Hammock also developed and helped the folks at SNAP host a six-week pre-conference community at SNAP09.com that helped to start the conversation leading up to the conference. While good content and networking are the keys to a great meeting, it’s interesting to note in this environment of magazine-oriented conferences being canceled and having their attendance fall dramatically, this conference hit its attendance goals and sold out its exhibitor space.
“The online component increased the interaction between the attendees and created a valuable, worthwhile experience,” Amy said. “For SNAP, the live site enabled the association to foster connections not only in person, but virtually as well.”
We’re not suggesting that making social media a central part of the conference promotion is the only reason this conference attendance has held up; however, we do believe it displayed how a focus on online “community” reinforces the intuitive understanding people have of the value of investing time and money in making the effort to spend time offline connecting with people with whom they share a professional passion.
10 words you need to know to get started
We like Twitter. We like the quick pace, the fast information, the smart and talented folks who post there, and the ability to be part of the conversation.
And as is the case with many new things, there is a vocabulary growing specific to Twitter and its use. If you’re just getting started with Twitter, here are 10 terms specific to the use of the service that will help you along your journey:
It’s no surprise that American Spirit, with its focus on the early American period, regularly features the Founding Fathers (and Mothers) on our pages. And it’s not surprise that editing this magazine for the DAR has really fed into my history geekiness. So, when friends invited me on a long weekend tour of three presidents’ homes in the Charlottesville, Va., area, I pretty much jumped at the nerd-cation* chance.
Our first stop was James Madison’s Montpelier, which recently unveiled the stunning results of a four-year restoration. American Spirit featured the ambitious project in a July/August 2005 article. We focused on the meticulous way the Montpelier Foundation chose to restore the home of the Father of the Constitution. Not long after Madison died in 1836, his wife, Dolley, sold the home, and it went through extensive changes by multiple owners before finally passing into the hands of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Instead of freezing the home as it was when first acquired, the National Trust decided to strip away two centuries of renovations and preserve the house as close as possible to the way it was when Madison retired from the White House.
It’s one thing to read about the restoration, but it’s another thing to see the impressive results of this project for myself. Montpelier’s Classical portico and its imposing columns have been restored to Madison’s day. And get this: The ink stains are still visible on the floor in the study where he wrote the Constitution! Guides describe finding a fragment of a letter with Madison’s handwriting in a rat’s nest and uncover other details found in the process of peeling back the home’s many layers.
Beyond the archaeological finds, the home’s setting is idyllic, offering a gorgeous vista of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
We finished off the day in Charlottesville’s historic downtown at night, where we added our screeds to the free speech wall and drove by the Thomas Jefferson-designed rotunda at the University of Virginia, which he founded in 1819.
The next morning we visited Jefferson’s masterpiece of design: Monticello. The almost-too-efficient tour guide whisked us through the house rather quickly, but we still managed to check out some of his one-of-a-kind inventions, from a copying machine to a compass/weather vane contraption to a wine dumbwaiter. Since American Spirit detailed Thomas Jefferson’s penchant for gardening in our “Gardening the Founding Fathers’ Way” story (March/April 2006), I was eager to see his carefully arranged rows of vegetables and learn more about his experimental crops. Jefferson’s 5,000 acres of orchards, vineyards, fields and gardens were worked by hundreds of enslaved and some free workers, and the Plantation Community Tour explained the daily life of some of those slaves.
We squeezed in a quick visit to James Monroe’s Ash Lawn–Highland where the fifth president lived from 1799 to 1823. It’s now operated by the College of William and Mary, Monroe’s alma mater. (Stay tuned for American Spirit’s upcoming story on this historic college.) The home is packed with 18th- and 19th-century furnishings, some from Napoleon’s France, where Monroe served as ambassador. Most know a little about the Monroe Doctrine and that his presidency was called the “era of good feelings,” but I was surprised to discover what a well-regarded politician (oxymoron?) he was during his lifetime.
Back in D.C. on Memorial Day, we waved hello to No. 44 at the White House and swung by a few monuments on the National Mall, including the Vietnam Women’s Memorial, where we were inspired by military nurse’s speech about her service in Vietnam, Iraq and now Germany. The weekend ended with a four-hour tour (yes, and I could have stayed longer) of the interactive Newseum, a must-see museum for current event junkies and newshounds in the shadow of the Capitol.
Next on my to-do list: Learn more about Dolley Madison. What a fab first First Lady!
*nerdcation. Pronunciation: /nərd ˈkā-shən /. Function: noun. Date: 2009: A journey offering great potential for expanding one’s vocabulary, Trivial Pursuit ability and storehouse of random knowledge and/or cocktail conversation.