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.
Today, I received an email from a client wanting to know when she would receive the postage estimate for her magazine. Usually, postal estimates are one of the last things clients want to receive. Checks have to be requested, approved, written, signed and Fed Exed to the USPS Postmaster by a certain date. Often, after the magazines are mailed, excess postage accumulates in the account. The post office will not refund this money, but only hold it for future mailings with no interest paid.
But a year or so ago, Hammock helped this client switch to the USPS CAPS (Central Automated Payment Services) system for submitting postage to the postmaster for her association’s magazines. Using CAPS, a client sets up a trust or debit account for payment of postage.
One or two days before the postage is due in the account, the client is given an actual expense for postage, and her money can be deposited in the account the next day. There is no overage for accounting errors added to the amount as there is with an estimate.
For the above client, it has worked really well. She is included in a co-mailing pool with other magazines that utilize CAPS. Not only are her postal costs reduced because of shared freight charges, the magazines get to local post offices quicker and into the hands of her members. Plus the balance in her account at the end of the mailing is $0.
It can be cumbersome and time-consuming to navigate the postal system, but we have helped many clients achieve similar efficiencies. We serve as a bit of a translator for the intricacies of the postal system for our clients.
Over the last year, ShopText has provided Hearst’s CosmoGIRL with code-enabled advertising so that readers can text to buy items or receive promotions from advertisers. The effort has been an overwhelmingly success—one issue last year resulted in 100,000 sent texts. With advertisers struggling these days to find new ways to not only capture their target audience’s attention, but also motivate them to action, the CosmoGIRL/ShopText partnership is a very successful case study in advertiser engagement.
Hoping to build on the success of the project, Hearst plans to experiment with some of its other titles, including Good Housekeeping and Oprah’s magazine O. It’s a smart strategy if you consider the latest predictions from eMarketer, which forecasts spending on mobile advertising text platforms to more than triple over the next five years. While $1.47 billion was spent in 2007, eMarketer estimates that promotions and ad placements will grow to $4.5 billion by 2012.
These are big numbers, but I’m still not sold that the texting platform will translate to the Good Housekeeping and O demographics. Readers of CosmoGIRL are completely immersed in texting as an integral part of their social interaction with peers. The same can’t be said of the predominantly older readers of Good Housekeeping and O.
We love to tell great stories. We love to hear them, too. That’s why our ears are always perked for good ones. And sometimes, good stories come in the form of podcasts.
In a nutshell, a podcast is an audio file, distributed over the Internet, which is ready for playback on your computer or a portable MP3 player.
Although they started out as a way to distribute radio-type shows, podcasts are also being used to market new products, distribute class lessons to students and share news. Podcasting and other forms of social media like blogging and photo-sharing are popular and effective ways of telling a story. And a growing group of associations are embracing the trend as a new and popular way reach out to their members and potential members.
Here are a few good ones we’ve noticed recently.
We send all kinds of files back and forth to clients and vendors every day — Word documents, spreadsheets, images, PDFs — whatever you can imagine! But the need to email photos isn’t exclusive to custom media companies. We frequently send and receive electronic files with people who aren’t members of a creative profession — and of course with our friends and families. We’ve found that outside of the small circle of us who regularly use electronic images in the course of our business, the proliferation of point-and-shoot digital cameras has led to some bad habits as we try to share images.
Make sure you are sending your electronic images in the best way using these tips.
The May/June issue of American Spirit allowed us to get a little crafty … with scrapbooks. Carrie Wakeford designed a beautiful layout to spotlight smart, simple ways to compile an archival-quality scrapbook. Carrie’s creative take on preserving family history meant that, for a few days, Hammock’s library was covered with buttons, bits of wallpaper, colored paper, stickers and other scraps. Savvy readers will be able to pick out her clever use of childhood photos of editor Bill Hudgins.
And what would a family scrapbook be without those faded photos of Aunt Norma and Uncle David posing in their Sunday best? Our cover story, “Treasure Hunt,” outlines new resources to track down family photographs. Thanks to digital collections at libraries and historical societies and Web sites devoted to genealogy, it’s easier than ever to find photographs of long-lost relatives on your family tree–and we show you how.
Just last week, my mind was having a little battle between the words “maximum” and “maximal,” and it was driving me crazy. I had typed each word out a few dozen times as I wrote and rewrote a story. I had stared at them both for so long that they no longer even looked like words to me. So, to end the battle, I turned to the best resource I know for answering tough grammar questions: my colleagues here at Hammock.
To me, there is no better resource than the smart folks around me for hammering out the proper use of a hyphen. We talk about it over lunch, from opposite ends of the hallway. And, as you’ve heard us mention before, we use Instant Messenger to talk about pronouns and dependent clauses as much as we use it to discuss last night’s episode of LOST.
But when some of us are up to our necks in a project or out of the office for lunch (or sleep), where do we go when our deepest thoughts about the subjunctive mood just won’t rest?
Online, you’ll find us logged on to:
Off the shelf, you might find us grabbing:
There are dozens of other great resources out there. What’s your favorite?
Bill’s post earlier this week celebrated all that we love about magazines and their punny, punny headlines. But you’ll notice here (“How to Write Headlines for the Web”) we’re playing it straight. And there’s good reason for that.
When you’re titling articles, posts and features online, your headline has to do a lot more than look pretty and act clever. Since headlines may show up as links, and often help with search engine results, they have to cut to the chase: Just tell us what the page is about.
Our client’s magazines were being delayed once they entered the Bulk Mail Center. The magazines were entering a facility that served a large area of the heavily populated northeastern United States, but the magazines weren’t making it to our client’s members’ homes for three or four weeks. They were being transported from postal facility to postal facility to postal facility until they reached the local post office for delivery.
While participating in a webinar on postal concerns, I learned about a company that co-mails magazines together. We worked out a plan where:
Plus, the client paid less in postage or postal freight.