There is hardly a typical, replicable day at Hammock (the variety is why we love our jobs here!), but here is a snapshot of a random Tuesday’s tasks for Hammock’s team members.

One sign that social media are maturing is that content tricks such as lists and how-tos do no longer satisfy readers who have had their fill of hors d’oeuvres and hunger for something substantial.
That’s the viewpoint of Drew Hawkins, who recently commented in a blog post titled “The Fall of Content” that “When creating content, whether it’s your blog or Twitter or some other platform, you should ask yourself: are you posting something that you are genuinely passionate about? Or are you just trying to drive traffic at the expense of your reader?”
Customers are ready to move past design gimmicks – fascination by bright shiny objects – in favor of design and capabilities that make information easier to find and use. “Thou shalt not direct a visitor away from thy site” was never more true than today.
Thus content and design must work together – and also with your other marketing and communications strategies.
Hawkins isn’t alone in this viewpoint or the first to express it — it’s something Hammock has believed since its founding in 1991. Your online presence needs to provide potential customers and clients with content that helps them evaluate and use your products and services—what we call contextual content. And the design must be clear, easy to navigate and use.
Whether in print, online or skywritten, content and design must be not only creative, but also meaningful and helpful to our clients’ audiences. Otherwise, it’s like an ad that gets everyone talking – but no one can remember what the product is.
And isn’t the point to have content that works for your product or service?

More than 350 blogs were reviewed by Junta42 and their lead researcher Janet Robbins for their selection of the Junta42 Top Content Marketing blogs. This is the eight installment of this list for Junta42. Congratulations to Jay Baer from Convince and Convert for his spot at the top. Here are the top ten blogs:

A recent study shows that U.S. consumers are “more likely to respond to content marketing than other forms of online marketing,” according to this recent article from Vertical Leap. Specifically, the study indicated that content marketing generates a greater response than banner or pop-up advertisements, email offers or sponsored links.
For those of you already integrating content marketing into your overall marketing strategy, whether with a blog, company e-newsletters or Twitter, your reaction to this study is probably “Well, duh.” And rightly so. Content marketing, when done right, just makes sense.

Despite what some might think, simply setting up a few social media accounts isn’t enough. You have to have a strategy of how to use them.
Once you’ve outlined your objectives, if you’re having trouble deciding which social media platforms to use to best market yourself, check out this handy chart from Revenflo to get an idea of which social media platforms will help you achieve your goals. For example, Facebook and Twitter have ended up in the Most Effective Customer Communication and Most Effective Brand Exposure categories, while Digg and StumbleUpon are considered effective in driving traffic to your website.

Kudos to Junta42’s Joe Pulizzi for appealing to burger freaks and content geeks all at once. He took a very long but interesting (not to mention mouthwatering) article about Five Guys Burger and Fries from this month’s issue of Inc. magazine and turned it into lessons about content marketing. One of my favorites:
Never cut corners on content. Your customers will notice: “Jerry (Murrell) and Five Guys gets potatoes north of the 42nd parallel because they grow slower and are more solid,” Pulizzi says. “They soak all their fries in water so they won’t absorb any oil when they are fried. The beef is never frozen and all burgers ordered are fresh. My favorite: always two slices of tomatoes…no matter what and even in the current tomato crisis. That’s Five Guys secret sauce. Your content marketing must be different in some way. I’m getting tired of all the sites I go to that simply just aggregate content all day or say the same thing as everyone else. How does that help your brand story?”
The others are equally thought-provoking. Thanks, Joe!

[Photo credit: zordroyd/Flickr via Wiki-Commons]

As many people know, Hammock Inc. is the developer of the wiki project, SmallBusiness.com.*
What you may not know is that my title on SmallBusiness.com is “Head Helper.” Being head helper for a project as big and complex as a 20,000-entry (and growing daily) wiki running on the same software platform used by Wikipedia has given me a few years of knowledge that is limited to a rather small group of people. (And, as I’ve attended one, I can even tell you where you’d find them.)
While Hammock is likely the only custom media and content marketing firm to create and grow such a large-scale wiki project as SmallBusiness.com, I predict others will enter the field as companies and associations become more aware of the hidden magic of the wiki platform. To be honest, if for no other reason than trying to figure out why Wikipedia shows up on the first results page of nearly any Google search, I’d be spending time trying to understand everything there is to know about Wikipedia, even if I wasn’t a wikimaniac.
Here are, in no particular order, some of the most important things you should know about wikis – straight from an official wiki “head-helper”:

“People don’t care what you say about your products. They want to know what other people say about your products.”
After hearing that message from marketing speaker David Meerman Scott and embarking on a seemingly unrelated search for New York pizza, ClickZ blogger Sage Lewis realized just how much user-generated content dominates his decision-making process.

We think that The Wrap’s list of the “Top 25 Must-Follow Media Insiders” is right on. And we promise it’s not just because Rex is the third insider listed. Why does The Wrap’s Dylan Stableford believe media-obsessed Twitter users should follow Rex? Dylan says it’s because, “Hammock, aside from running a custom publishing operation in Nashville, is a serial adopter of new media tools (as evidenced by his one-letter Twitter handle) and has plenty of worthwhile opinions on them, and others.”
Yes, we knew all that about Rex. We’re just glad more Twitter users are now catching on.

When a visitor arrives at one of your landing pages, it’s critical the page is designed to make it easy for the visitor to perform a desired action. These actions can be varied—for some of our clients it can be to fill out a form or to watch a video. For others, the action can be to spend more time on the site, clicking to other pages. Good, relevant content makes these actions happen and we help clients create this type of content that meets their goals. Michele Linn of socialemailmarketing.eu has some great tips for how content marketers build better landing pages: