Creating content simply because you (or your boss) think you should will keep your site or blog or Twitter feed full but may not satisfy your readers. Frank Reed, owner of FT Internet Marketing, argues that it’s more important to create content your readers actually look forward to receiving.
Statistically speaking, the number of people who really look forward to your next installment likely represents only a fraction of your total traffic. But Rich notes, that fraction comprises the true believers, the true fans – think the 80/20 rule.
But they tend to be overlooked in the drumbeat to peg SEO goals – which is a sure way to squelch their interest. “They are your most valuable customers yet they are sacrificed in most marketers’ attempts to get bigger numbers rather than a better (albeit smaller in many cases) audience of true fans,” Rich writes.
So, Rich says, hone your content creation to cultivate that loyal fan base. “The old axiom of ‘Quality beats quantity every time’ holds true in the content world as well,” Rich concludes.

Traditionally known for their ability to do much with little and to improvise, the United States Marine Corps is nevertheless going on a diet. During it time as a “second land army” In Iraq, the Corps “got heavy” as its leaders express it, relying on massively mine-resistant vehicles to protect its warriors, who also strapped on personal armor and other gear often weighing 90 pounds or more.
All this extra mass required correspondingly greater amounts of fuel and electricity to run. Now, eying a return to its seafaring roots, the Corps is slimming down. From battlefield to base barracks, the Corps is particularly interested in curbing its appetite for fuel and power. The July-August issue of Semper Fi, the magazine of the Marine Corps League, examines how the Marines plan to get back into fighting trim.
Some of that new equipment was on display at the recent Marine South Military Expo aboard Camp Lejeune, NC. Sponsored by the Marine Corps League the Expos showcase the finest gear available to the military in the world.
Elsewhere in this issue, we meet a Marine veteran who did a tour in Korea during that “Forgotten War,” leading a squad of airplane mechanics who kept Marine aviators in the air around the clock. Flight mechanics had to go up with pilots to check out repairs, leading to some hair-raising moments – and a very personal commitment to do it right – first time, every time.
Semper Fi also remembers the Navajo Code Talkers of World War II, who used their native language to transmit unbreakable messages during the bloody battles with the Japanese on remote Pacific Islands. With only a few left, they are pursuing a new goal: To build a museum and veterans center honoring their legacy.
The new issue also coincides with the League’s 87th National Convention in August in Greensboro, NC, and the magazines salutes retiring National Commandant Jim Laskey.
The issue also reports on progress toward a cherished League objective — redesignating the Department of the Navy as the Department of the Navy and Marine Corps. Though approved by the House and with most of the Senate signed on as cosponsors, the effort still faces potentially stiff opposition when debate starts sometime this summer.

One of the major obstacles to implementing a B2B social media marketing plan is skepticism that social media are a passing fad, without foundation. Ironically, it often happens that when a business does start building social media awareness, it doesn’t take the time to lay that foundation.
In her brief essay, “The Four Pillars of Social Media Marketing,” Liana Evans points out that social media marketing takes work, both pre- and post-launch.
It really doesn’t “change everything” (let’s hope we never hear that phrase again), because it must be approached like any other kind of marketing – with research, strategy, engagement and measurement.
The tools and media are different – just as mass print media, radio, TV and Internet were different in their turns – but the methods are the same:

What does your audience want/need to hear, what and how can you tell them, how can you keep them coming back for more, and, how is it working?
In the end, the essential haven’t changed since Homer spun out the Odyssey in exchange for his supper, or Scheherazade (right) told her tales in exchange for her life.

“A veteran – whether active duty, retired, National Guard or Reserve – is someone who, at one point in his (or her) life, wrote a blank check made payable to the United States of America for an amount of ‘up to and including my life’.”
Memorial Day has been set aside as a time to remember those who have paid that ultimate price, and also to honor and thank those who returned from their time of service.
We think often of our military serving overseas, but time and again, they have come to aid citizens here when floods, blizzards, hurricanes and other disasters strike. It matters not whether they faced combat or served in a time of – always relative – peace. What matters is that they were willing to put their lives between us and our enemies in serving America.
Hammock Inc. has the privilege of publishing the member magazine for the Marine Corps League. None of us is a veteran, but as we tell members who ask, we try to be a friend. And though most of the rest of the year we’d argue that the Marines are America’s best, on Memorial Day, and Veterans’ Day, we lay that aside to honor all equally.
In the 4 years that we have worked with the League and heard amazing stories of heroism and hardship, I’ve often thought back to the immortal speech William Shakespeare gave Henry V before that battle on St. Crispian’s Day. It’s worth repeating part of it here, as a reminder of why veterans deserve honor not due to us civilians:
” We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.”
(Photo At Top: Airman Jacob Proffer, a member of the Air Force Honor Guard, pauses to salute a grave after placing a miniature flag at its base during the “Flags In” tribute at Arlington National Cemetery, May 21, 2009. “When I do this, it makes me take a lot more pride every time I put on my uniform, seeing the measure of sacrifice so many have made,” he said. DoD photo by Donna Miles”)

Though good-quality and engaging video production can be a daunting task, it pays off for some businesses. The popularity of YouTube can be turned to commercial purposes, and ROI can be gauged using the site’s analytics functions.
Creating your own channel is a particularly effective strategy to attract visitors and monitor viewings, comments and feedback. Once you’ve created a channel, you must maintain it much as you would a blog or text-oriented social media presence, according to Mashable.com’s “Top 10 YouTube Tips for Small Business.”
The advice on using YouTube’s social capabilities – favoriting appropriate videos and making “friends”; using tags; and promoting your videos elsewhere – are particularly important in getting noticed.
We’d add an 11th tip: Determine your audience before you go on air. That will help shape the content and production of your videos, as well as whether YouTube is a good fit in the first place.

Writers and editors frequently need to find experts who can speak authoritatively on the subject of an article. Journalists who specialize in a given field soon accumulate a list of go-to gurus, but generalists don’t have that advantage.
Probably the first thing you try will be a direct online search. You may strike gold—especially in the sources cited by sites such as Wikipedia—or you may be overwhelmed with irrelevant sites. And even after refining your search, the results may still be ambiguous or less than solid.
Here are some suggestions for narrowing your search:
• Ask your editor for suggestions about experts.
• Run a search for other articles on the topic to see who’s been consulted previously, or, even better, experts who write on the topic.
• Blogs can be a good source of leads to experts. Similarly, Twitter may help you find people who post regularly on a given topic.
• Contact relevant professional or trade associations. The organization itself may include highly knowledgeable individuals, or they can direct you to members who are versed in the subject. Suite 101 also recommends consulting universities, whose faculty may be knowledgeable or can direct you to colleagues who can help.
• Websites such as Help A Reporter Out and Media Bistro serve as a crossroads for writers seeking information and public relations professionals and businesses eager to supply it. The Adventurous Writer recommends Prof.net as a source of professional experts.
• JournalismNet describes itself as “a free web site with over 600 pages … designed to bring you an investigative guide to the Internet – the best tools, tricks and websites from around the world.”
• Friends and colleagues may be able to help—writers and editors minds are attics where all sorts of odd facts lie waiting to be discovered.
Once you have a list of experts, take time to check them out online to see what others have said about them, such as possible biases. You may still use an expert with a known slant, but you will be able to include that as a caveat to your readers.

Forrest Gump famously compared life to a box of chocolates, in that “you never know what you’re going to get.” Social media can be a little like that, but fortunately you can measure its effectiveness and fine-tune your approach to, ahem, sweeten the results.
At a recent Social Media Breakfast in Seattle Katie Paine, from KD Paine & Partners, outlined to a packed house a 7-step program to determine the ROI on social media.
As reported on the University of Washington “Web Tools for the Digital World” site, measuring social media effectiveness isn’t all that different from measuring other media.
As with other media, you need to define your goals, your audiences, your benchmarks and your metrics. Make your messages credible and closely track responses. Encourage word of mouth. Learn from mistakes and adapt – social media will tell you much more quickly than other forms whether you’re on track.
Above all, remember that social media is not a magical cure for deeper problems with a brand or business. If you choose to use it, you must see it as part of a suite of tactics to help fulfill your long-term strategy.

This post appeared recently on the eminently snarky and cynical website Overheard in the Newsroom: “Social media editor: “I’m too busy. I can’t use my brain.”
If your organization has leapt into social media, the people responsible for that may well feel that way. But it’s something they have to do every day, because a day online is like a month (or more) in more traditional marketing.
It’s also important to take the time to analyze your social media’s effectiveness – if for no other reason than to justify your efforts. Just make sure you use meaningful metrics, and understand what those metrics can and cannot say about their success.
For example, if you or others at your group blog, notes Galen De Young at ProteusB2B, business bloggers need to look beyond metrics such as numbers of visitors or RSS subscribers.
“In my opinion, one of the best ways to gauge the success of a B2B blog is to analyze how much traffic it’s generating, and to analyze how hard those blog pages are working for you,” De Young writes.
Those measurements include how people found your site, where people land on your site and how much time they spend there, he notes.
At Hammock, we call that a Content Marketing Intelligence Report or CMIR, and it’s what we do for every client at the start of a relationship and at regular intervals thereafter. That’s how we measure up.

As America’s rapid response armed service, the US Marine Corps early saw the advantages of adding air power to its traditional amphibious capabilities. Marine Corps aircraft, flown by legendary figures such as Medal of Honor recipient “Pappy” Boyington and his Black Sheep Squadron, helped win pivotal victories in World War II, Korean, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
The May-June issue of Semper Fi, the magazine of the Marine Corps League, which we publish for the League, looks at what’s ahead for Marine aviation. With its long-awaited new bird, the tilt-rotor Osprey, racking up impressive service in Iraq and now Afghanistan, the Corps must aggressively update its other rotary wing aircraft, as well as acquire a new generation of fighters.
The article explains the urgency behind these replacement programs and what the Corps expects from birds that Pappy and his boys would’ve given their eyeteeth to command.

Our client the Marine Corps League held its annual Marine South Military Expo aboard Camp Lejeune, NC, on 21-22 April. The event afforded more than 200 military vendors and hundreds of Marines a chance to hold frank, face-to-face discussions about equipment.
The opening ceremonies included a brief address from Major General Carl B. Jensen,
Commanding General, Marine Corps Installations East. He drew an appreciative chuckle from the assembled vendors, Marines and Marine Corps League members when he bluntly described the equipment on display as “slicker than deer guts on a door knob.”