I think we are all tired of talking about the economy, on some level, but one thing I attribute to our downturn has been the subsequent rise in the value placed on content.
A friend of mine called me this week to talk about some clients of theirs that have vast amounts of content they are seeking to package and monetize. Another group we are talking to has a need to create vast amounts of content to springboard a community and generate highly positive organic search results.
Every day, I am having conversations with organizations about their marketing needs. Whether the organization has content and needs to be more effective in deploying the content, or whether the organization has a deficit of content or a deficit of resources, and needs help, the priority of content has increased dramatically.
I think it’s because content is like access to credit or capital, it’s fueling growth. Particularly in an internet marketing environment.
How did we get to this place where content became so important to so many companies?

My first content marketing job failed, based on the measurements for success I established. I made my first magazine at the age of 10. It was a fanzine related to my enthusiasm for the Washington Diplomats, part of the long defunct North America Soccer League (NASL), and owner of the least poetic of all team nicknames, the Dips.
I hand made the magazines and complied statistics about the teams, players and games of the NASL. My mother, who was a teacher, allowed me to use the mimeograph machine at her office to make a dozen slightly wet and purple copies, which were stapled. I brought the issues to school, and offered them for sale in a unit of my class that was devoted to helping us understand economics. We reserved two hours at the end of the day each Friday to buy and sell to our classmates.
A guy named Sunil Chitra sold erasers with staples pushed in that could be used in our games of racecar before school. Sam Fowler made some sort of kettle popcorn. They met their goals. I know I bought from both of them. My foray into magazine publishing ended with two magazines sold. By the standards of how success could be measured in that situation, it was clearly a failure.
Creating content today can be a pure passion (like fanzines about NASL soccer) for fun, or it can be used to drive business aims, in which case it must be measured for its effectiveness. Content today is just as critical to the growth of a business as capital or access to credit. But content has to move the needle, and we need marks to tell how far the needle has moved.
At Hammock, we create custom content strategy based on our client’s goals and we benchmark and measure those things that we can influence and which drive the business goals. We then create and source the best content for the job. But that’s not enough. We set the marks with our clients, and track the movement of the needle every month, using custom reports to show how it’s working, and when necessary, make a course adjustment.
It’s still great fun to be in a business of creating content. But you can’t buy popcorn or little eraser cars unless you can create content that works.

I was asking a friend who sells advertising about her business.
“It’s hard to swim, or even to see, with this much blood in the water,” she said.
True enough. Magazine advertising was off in 2007 and 2008. Those were historically bad years. Magazine advertising got off to an even slower start in 2009. Quarter one numbers from the Publishers Information Bureau show magazine pages off 26 percent year to year from 08 to 09.

The interminable buildup is over.

The Obamas have a new dog. A Portuguese Water Dog. Named Bo. He’s a cute little rascal.

The Obamas are thrilled, I’m sure.

I’m not.

My wife, two daughters and I also have a Portuguese Water Dog. His name is Winston. My life, as I had known it, is now over.

Since this whole media contest for the dog started, I’ve been rooting for the Obamas to get any dog other than a Porty. Now, when people come up to us and ask us what kind of dog we own, we’ll mutter “A Portuguese Water Dog,” and they’ll invariably say, “Of course, just like the Obamas.” This has already happened. Twice. These dogs, and how great they are as pets, used to be a pretty well kept secret. Now, the secret’s out.

That’s not to speak of all the predictions about puppy mills cranking out PWDs. I hope this doesn’t turn into the President’s stimulus package for the overbreeding of a wonderful dog. Hopefully, the breeders stay just as careful about selecting owners as they were when I bought one. Portuguese Water Dogs, I’ve been told, are not in shelters. You can’t rescue one because there aren’t any to be rescued. Probably not exactly true, but whatever kernel of truth there is in that, I’ve always took it to be an endorsement of the breed and its owners.

My family isn’t as down about this as I am. And I don’t mean to rain on their parade. Now that the deed is done, I should say what’s in store for the Obamas based on our experience. Not the typical stuff about how loyal they are, playful, etc. All that’s true of EVERY DOG. In discussions with other owners of this breed, what I’ll tell you is pretty consistent with the experience of others, too.

It’s a dog that will attach to its primary caregiver. In my house, that’s my wife. Winston needs to know exactly where she is at all times. When Hannah e-mailed me earlier this year to renew that chip he has implanted under his skin, I balked at paying the $10. If Winston, who stays approximately within a 7-foot radius of my wife at all times, is missing, we’ve got bigger problems than a missing dog. It becomes a missing person’s case. So, who’s the attached human going to be? Sasha, Malia, the First Lady or Mr. President?

Good news. The dogs aren’t chewers. Bad news, they are swallowers. Socks, underwear, dead squirrels, boxes of needles (true story, this happened to Winston’s mother). You have to be hyper vigilant, especially when they are younger than three years old. Nothing of great historical value to our country small enough to be swallowed by a dog should be left sitting out. Seriously. And whatever they swallow will end up on your front lawn, or pooled up at the bottom of the stairs with their dinner.

Portuguese Water Dogs deliver presents to anyone who walks in the door. This can make for some slightly embarrassing situations. No visits by heads of state from other countries should be casual enough that the first dog is in the room. Otherwise, the first gift to the dignitary may be an article of clothing not meant for public viewing, or worse, something dead.

They will be mistaken for poodles. A lot. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

So God bless the Obamas and their new dog. I wish them well. But what would have been so difficult about them getting a labradoodle? Maybe Bo has tax problems in his past and they’ll have to withdraw him from consideration. Somebody needs to get on that angle.

Organizations like yours are likely extraordinary at a couple of things: providing a service, manufacturing a product, building advocacy or creating value in any number of ways. Is publishing and managing media one of those things that you do better than anyone else?
It’s not just a matter of identifying your core competency. It’s a matter of cost.
Here are five ways working with a custom media company will save you money:

After years of writing articles and interviewing subjects as a writer and reporter, it’s always unusual to be on the other end of the process. That happened again recently, when I was interviewed by a writer from Entrepreneur magazine for an article published in the December 2008 issue (“Change Can Do You Good”).

The ongoing discussion among marketers about how to measure engagement today is a bit anxious. Most marketers seem overwhelmed with the organizational challenges of measuring and analyzing ROI. The realities of having to interact with their IT departments may be more top of mind than how they can get their hands around new customer behaviors in a world of social media.

A June report from Forrester Research by Brain Haven and Suresh Vittal, “Measuring Engagement,” contributes to the ongoing conversation about how marketers should measure the behaviors of customers and relationships of customers to their brands.

Haven and Vittal lay out the four I’s of engagement: involvement, interaction, intimacy and influence. The easy-to-remember formula defines engagement as the level of the four I’s that a customer has with a brand over time.

But before we can better understand the customer’s engagement, which align with his or her buying process, Haven and Vittal note the realities that stand in the way of making and using a better measurement: lack of agreement on the meaningful metrics, trouble accessing data, inadequate analysis skills and trouble connecting the insights gained into meaningful creative content.

But before we throw up our hands and give up, Haven and Vittal offer a strategy:

• Define what an engaged customer looks like
• Audit engagement measurement capabilities
• Assess value of metrics
• Prioritize metrics

I can’t offer more specifics without violating my user agreement. Forrester offers this insight for a pretty nice fee.

I’ve got three opinions about this:

• An enlightened organization is one that will be able to work through the operational challenges and get to work on the 4 I’s.

• Technology will surely emerge to help this process.

• Staying engaged in this discussion is necessary for all of us in the custom media business.

An article a couple of weeks back in the New York Times
about the upcoming season of Mad Men on AMC (which begins July 27)
got me thinking about what’s changed in the world of advertising.
Mad Men, which won a Golden Globe for its first season, focuses on a Madison Avenue advertising agency in the early 1960s. It chronicles what workplaces were like when smoking, drinking and womanizing were all part of the work culture. Mad Men also gives a pretty good glimpse into the creative process of developing ad campaigns.
At Hammock, we are particularly interested in advertising agencies because in addition to creative development, media buyers reside in those shops. Media buyers and their clients buy the advertising that we run in several Hammock-published magazines. Hammock manages the sale of advertising as part of the services we provide to clients.
My most senior colleague in the world of advertising, Dennis Connaughton, corporate general manager at the James G. Elliott Co., is far too young to have worked in advertising in the early 60s, but he does have more than 30 years of experience in working for agencies, as well as experience on the client side for Chevrolet, and even as a former publisher of Field & Stream.
I work with Dennis on the sale of NFIB‘s MyBusiness magazine to media buyers. Dennis’ perspective is particularly useful to all of our clients who carry advertising in their publications. The current advertising environment has changed dramatically in the past five years, not to mention the past 30 years.
So I decided to ask Dennis whether he’d be willing to give us a perspective on the changing dynamics of advertising over the course of his career. I doubted he would share many tales of drinking or smoking or womanizing. (If that’s what you’re looking for, you may want to stop reading now, and buy the first season of Mad Men on Amazon instead.)
Otherwise, tune into a Q&A podcast with Dennis here (Just over 22 minutes, 10.3 MB, mp3).

My 8-year-old daughter is studying the Oregon territory and she refreshed my memory (thanks, Wikipedia) that the U.S. and Great Britain were involved in a land grab during the 1840s. The U.S. ultimately prevailed and a treaty was signed establishing the 49th parallel, the line that runs between the states of Washington and Minnesota on the U.S. side, and British Columbia north of the boundary.

Determining the 49th parallel in the media world is happening right now. The territory in question is the very fertile territory known as engagement. We are witnessing a land grab to define and determine how we will measure and monetize audience engagement with Web media. And there are all sorts of parties putting forward ideas of how to redraw the lines on Web analytics so this idea of engagement is more relevant to current Web media experience.

Like most people in this business, I have become obsessed with this discussion surrounding the idea of engaged audiences, particularly as this discussion centers on Web analytics. (I’m not sure I speak from personal “blogging” experience about engaged audiences when my last post to this page was in January. Mitt Romney looked like our next president when I last blogged in this space). Regardless, I’ve been paying attention to the people who have been trying to define this idea of engagement.

Forrester, who has been all over engagement for more than a year, is the latest with a set of metrics. Forrester Research’s last month at their annual Research Marketing Forum in L.A., which are based on the concepts developed by analyst Brian Haven in an August 2007 Forrester Research report on the same topic, lay out the ideas of Involvement, Interaction, Intimacy and Influence. Haven’s full report on these metrics, “Measure of Engagement,” which is co-authored by Suresh Vittal, will be published this month.

Will Haven’s metrics stand the test of time. I think Haven’s metrics ( I look forward to the full report) are an advancement in our quest to understand what sometimes seems like the unknowable: what does she think, what is she going to do?

We have ways of of trying to evaluate something like engagement in the print world. As Josh Chasin, chief research officer at comScore, admitted in a column he wrote about engagement, he doesn’t really know what engagement means. I can detect enough sarcasm to hear what he’s really saying: he believes we don’t know what engagement means.

Chasin knows that print and, now, online media, are evaluated based on reach and frequency, which might sound like engagement, but it’s not. He’s right. We ask how many issues out of 4 do you read?, and how much time do you spend with our magazine? Do you take specific actions as a result of reading my magazine? How many people other than you read this issue?

While I always thought those standard measurements were a little too crude to evaluate the experience a reader has with a magazine, and they never claimed to be engagement, they are pretty darn close to Haven’s 4 “Is.”

Much closer, in fact, than the idea of trying to use the same reach and frequency measures online, in a medium where the media itself isn’t a reach and frequency medium anymore.

But Haven’s metrics fall short of being useful for all purposes. While the end goal for most participants in this conversation may be an easier way for advertising agencies to come up with sound ways to direct their client’s spend of dollars, that’s not the defined goal for all observers of this discussion.

At Hammock, we’ve noticed how the metrics used to evaluate advertising-centric measurements aren’t intrinsically useful discussions for some clients. If selling Web advertising online is even one of the top five things under discussion with an association client when we talk about the Web site, it’s rare. The purpose of the site is to create a greater sense of value of membership to the visitor. The purpose of the site may be to spur a call to action. The purpose of the site might be a serve as launchpad for a set of helpful links. It might be a place where members can find helpful tools and advice, it might be a place to renew, or register for a products for which members qualify for a discount. It might even be a place to, yes, engage members, because all associations need ways to ensure that there is some way they can continue to drive home what is valuable in their proposition.

I agree with Chasin about the value of measuring “against a clearly defined set of goals.” Chasin points us to Eric Peterson, author of Web Analytics Demystified. Peterson has a series of quantitative and qualitative ways to analyze engagement. It comes down to an idea that what you measure is tied to an idea of what you want the experience of the visitor to be.

Setting goals that can be measured makes sense to me. If generating advertising is the goal, then I await the best sets of metrics for that purpose. If it’s not the goal, I think it’s on us to develop better ways to measure what we know is engagement.

Team Hammock enjoyed its first try at the Country Music Marathon and 1/2 Marathon Saturday morning. The rain cleared in time for the start, and it stayed cool.

We had a blast. We raised a little money, lowered our resting heart rates over the time of training, enjoyed a course-side tent experience (Thanks, Carrie!) and had some fun. We really appreciated our friends who joined us by donating money, running with us or cheering us on.

First of all, thanks to our contributors. You’ve made great teammates. Thanks to your generosity and to our matches, we are donating $1,600 to four worthy organizations. We will contribute $450 each to the Nashville Adult Literacy Council, Nashville Zoo and Big Brothers Big Sisters of Middle Tennessee. We’ve also made a $250 donation to the Legal Aid Society of Middle Tennessee on behalf of the law firm of Salas & Slocum, who graciously allowed us to set up our tent on their parking lot (and only made us sign a one-page waiver).

Hammock had nine walkers and runners make it across the finish line. We may hold the distinction of the longest-travelling half-marathoner of the day. Patrick Ragsdale, who planned to run the full marathon, was nursing a foot injury that was nagging him all week. Patrick made it to 16, then turned back and finished on the half marathon course. If you’re counting, that’s a 23-mile run. And yes, Patrick is on crutches today.

Check out this Flickr set of our photos from Race Day.

Our Team Hammock race tent was a welcome sight near mile 8 on the course. Those were our handsome red balloons flying over Music Row. Next year, look for the Hammock blimp.

Rex took the time to capture the experience of running in this phenomenal event with his hand-held high-def video camera. Check it out here. More than 30,000 people were registered participants, and it seems like half of Nashville turned out to cheer on the runners. The energy of the whole day makes me proud to have this great an event in my adopted hometown. I’ve been a participant in other major races around the country. I’m not sure there is a better one than ours.

Stay tuned to other Team Hammock events. I’ll blog more about what we’re doing next. We’re committed to more than just running. We’re trying to integrate our work and our passions with our work in utilizing all the tools of social media to reach goals. Let us know how Team Hammock can work for you.

Later: Thanks to Lynne Boyer for shooting some video of the Team Hammock Spirit Squad.