[Cross-posted on rexblog.com]

Wired editor and author of the book, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson, posted an item on his blog today that contains an observation I believe is so obvious, it is completely missed by many self-appointed experts. (Okay, I'll admit I live in that glass house.):

"Not only do small (Long Tail) publishers montetize their content at 3-5 times the rate of the larger publishers in PubMatic's survey, but they're improving in the current environment while the big publisher decline.

This is a fact of life in business-to-business-media, where the business model has long been focused on "free" distribution of content to decision-makers in specialized fields. The "cost per thousand" (CPM) model of advertising sales does not exist as a metric in this long-tail of the media world. Of course, if an advertiser selling a $100,000 piece of equipment can reach 90% of the decision makers in a market of 5,000 specifying engineers, then, hell-yeah, the publisher of that content should be able to monetize it at hundreds of times the rate of, say, a newsweekly.

The lesson here: Online, if you want to monetize content, the number of eyeballs seeing your content is less important than who those eyeballs belong to. And the more helpful that content is in assisting real people make important and valuable decisions, the more "monetizable" it will be.

Four years ago, just as the economy was digging itself out of the recessions caused by the dot-com bust and 9/11, our friend and contributor, the columnist Harvey King at MyBusiness Magazine, wrote a column in the form of "a letter to himself in the future." He wrote it, he said at the time, to remind his future-self what to do during the inevitable economic slowdowns he would go through in the future. As we seem to be heading into that territory, I thought it would be a good time to reflect on Harvey's letter to the future, which, with his permission, follows.:

Dear Harvey:

It's me, Harvey. I'm writing to you from way back in 2004. I'm hoping you are older and wiser, but I'm afraid you may be getting a little fuzzy with your memory. So I wanted to send you a letter from the past to remind you of some lessons you said you really wanted to remember the next time the economy started slowing down. Good times, the kind I hope you've been enjoying lately, tend to dull one's senses a bit, don't they? Well, I hope this expensive, painful advice from your past will jog your memory a little and serve as a checklist for the economic slowdown on your horizon.

1. Do it now. Whatever it is that needs doing, do it right now. I hope you don't have to downsize, but if that's what it is, do it. If it means dealing with that confrontation you've been putting off, do it. It's a lot fairer to all parties involved if you'll just get it done.

2. Take care of your customers even more than you already are. I know you said you would never take any of them for granted, and I hope you haven't. But nothing else will get you through what's about to happen except the mutual respect, trust and loyalty you have with the customers you are serving (and profiting from) now in the good times.

3. Love your bankers. I don't care if you really don't want to, get on the phone with those bank folks and tell them how wonderful they are. I know Mom taught us not to lie, but do it anyway. If you timed this right and you're still a few months from the downturn, use flattery and your current fiscal soundness to lock down the best and longest terms they will commit to. I know you think it's crazy to get a bigger line of credit when you're not even using the one you have, but is your memory that short?

4. Brace yourself. I know you don't want to remember the pain, but get ready to relive some failures. You're about to rediscover what your face feels like when the door hits your nose.

5. Be patient. You'll hate this one, but get ready again for the world to move in slow motion. Remember, during a recession it takes a company six months to approve purchasing a package of pencils.

6. Do not panic. Hunker down, maybe, but don't panic.

7. Read and study and learn. While you're waiting for that pencil order, take up a new hobby.

8. Get ready for some great opportunities. When things start looking really bad, take those resources I know you've stashed away during the good years and start marketing when your competitors go silent. Get on the road when the airlines report that business travel has plummeted. During this recession, turn on some lights when things get their darkest.

9. Forgive yourself. Remember, you are not personally responsible for the entire economy, just the stewardship of your microscopic slice of it.

10. Write yourself a letter to the future reminding me (and you) how to make hay while the sun shines.

Historically yours,

Harvey

P.S. How are those shares of Google doing?

(Note: That P.S. is a joke - Harvey was not that smart in 2004.)

This is not yet another Earth Day post telling you how environmentally conscious our company is.

I assume you'd not be surprised to learn that we, like you, have grown more-and-more committed to thinking green. I assume you'd not be surprised to learn that we are working with our clients to increase their use of recycled paper products. I assume you would not be surprised that we are committed to working with printers who practice green manufacturing approaches like our largest vendor for the past 16 years, Quad/Graphics, that is seeking certification from the U.S. Green Building Council for all of its major manufacturing sites. I assume you'd not be surprised that we are enthusiastic supporters of all the efforts in the printing and graphics industry to encourage environmentally-friendly industry practices.

What I don't applaud are the efforts by some to turn any discussion of the environment, printing and paper into an opportunity for shouted accusations and knee-jerk rebuttals.

For example, a few months ago, Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson made a good-faith effort to measure the impact on "climate" of the content delivered in the paper version of the magazine vs. the content delivered via the Wired brand's digital properties. "Are dead-tree magazines good or bad for the climate?" he asked. As expected from Anderson, the author of the best-selling business book, The Long Tail, his blog post was a detailed comparison of the carbon footprint of a magazine like Wired (the impact related to paper, printing and distribution) with the carbon footprint related to the energy necessary to power each of the computers used to read the same content online. What he discovered was a surprise to some: the carbon footprint of the paper version of the magazine is not that different from the footprint of the same content delivered digitally.

As you can imagine, the debate over Anderson's post (see the post's comments) raged on for months -- and is still raging, with back and forth arguments about Anderson's motivation and methodology. Last week, on the Huffington Post, activist Todd Paglia even used a post criticizing Vanity Fair's annual green issue to divert into yet another blast at Anderson: "Chris Anderson's (post) about the magazine industry's carbon impact came off less like the work of a cutting edge tech mag and more like a rehashing of the moribund timber industry's lamest propaganda."

Rather than point out the obvious fact that Paglia's post came off less like a work of cutting edge environmental advocacy and more like a rehashing of lame anti-paper and anti-printing propaganda, I'd like to call on those who want to out-green one-another to recycle some of this energy into something productive.

As both a magazine-industry observer and participant, it's rather obvious to me: Throughout the magazine industry, there is a recognition that adopting practices with less environmental impact is not only good for the environment, it's good for business. And while we may want to believe that "going online" is a more environmentally friendly form of publishing, we often don't take into consideration the unintended consequences on the environment of digital media. As we become media companies that are "multi-platform," and not merely "print," we must realize that "thinking green" is not limited to properties we create using paper and ink.

Rather than debate about who or what is more green today, I think a better approach is to stop arguing and start acting for tomorrow.

Here are a couple of suggestions about where to start:

Read Cherly Dangel Cullen's, "18 Tips for Environmentally Conscious Publishing." At Hammock, we've taken several of these steps and are working on more.

Check out the KinderHarvest program from our friends at MagazineLiteracy.org. The program rescues and recycles children's and other consumer magazines that would otherwise be discarded and destroyed, and distributes them to children's literacy programs.

Let's celebrate Earth Day. Not argue over it.

Lost photos: I shot this photo from
my office window last April.
Unfortunately, I can't locate the photos shot
from the same location on April 16, 1998.

(This "recollection" is also cross-posted on rexblog.com.)

My first ever accidental online "citizen journalism" (before the term existed) experience occurred ten years ago, today. Unfortunately, because of the ephemeral nature of the web and certain "wish we knew then what we know now" practices, there is no place for me to point to what I did on that day.

[After the jump, read about the Hammock 'tornado' photos.]

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

After much travel (some work-related, some college-visiting with son-related), I'm back in the office for most of this week. Did I mention that I had a cold during nearly all of that travel? Did I mention I'm a real wimp about being sick with a cold? Glad that's over. Gee, it's nice to be back at work and well.

I am "on the road" this week, starting Tuesday, March 18. As always, however, I'm available via e-mail and will be checking voice mail messages. But I'll admit, e-mail works better as it checks me. Also, you can text me at this number: 615.310.0919.

We've had lots of wonderful new photos added to the T-shirt Map during the past few days -- maybe it's the weather or something. We now have photos from four continents. I was just looking at it and clicked on an "H" icon in the Mobile, Ala., area and what should appear but a busy-mom wearing a T-shirt and a happy young man having his first baby food. The mom is Elizabeth, my niece (is there such a thing as a niece-in-law?) and that handsome young guy is my great-nephew. The happy eating runs in the family.

On days like today, I'm reminded of how aggressively we've always adopted technology that allows our staff to remain connected -- wherever they may be. We have several people in Chicago today at a sales meeting. Another person has been diverted to the Buffalo airport on her way to that meeting in Chicago. Someone else is at a photo shoot out of the office. Another is at a training seminar. Yet all are connected and answering questions from one another via text, IM and email. And all are working together to ensure the continuous editorial and design flow that marks each day here. Some people view technology as "cool stuff." To us, the only technology that matters is that which can be an effective tool to get a job done in the quickest, most efficient way -- and to stay in constant contact with one-another -- no matter where we are.

Thanks to the many business news-related projects we work on at Hammock Inc., we have some fairly big Internet pipes delivering to us a constant river of flowing business information. In our case, this flow tends to be more "macro" news -- we're not tracking markets or individual companies -- but I'm still amazed with the ying and yang of business and economic news: and how reporters and analysts even feel the need to pair positive with negative. Perhaps this isn't surprising: business is a marketplace of buyers and sellers. Perhaps there is no such thing as good or bad when every transaction needs a buyer and seller. And while I don't always view business as a zero-sum-game, perhaps there is something necessary about always seeing the world as collisions of bears and bulls, optimism and pessimism, greed and fear.

As I write this post, for example, I can see news flowing by that consumer confidence fell sharply in January, but the next item reports that just-released numbers related to factory orders in December indicate they soared.

Data points. A river of data points. You can short it, long it. Believe it, deny it. Bottomline: Everyday brings opportunities. Everyday brings set-backs. It's up to you to choose how to use that information.

How do I choose to handle the data? I do all I can to stay informed. I lean into news both good and bad. I look for opportunities. I prepare for the worse. In the long run, I believe in -- or, at least hope for -- the best. In the longer run, my goal is to leave more than I've used.