Ahh, the hyphen. The self-proclaimed grammar geeks here at Hammock have had many a debate about when to use it and when to avoid it. As with every rule regarding the English language, there are exceptions. But here are a few instances when using a hyphen is necessary and even makes sense:

The Custom Publishing Council’s fifth annual Pearl Awards ceremony took place Nov. 13 in New York City, honoring the best in “design, digital, editorial and strategic initiatives for B2B and consumer custom publications”. Bronze, silver and gold awards were presented to 53 companies from more than 600 entries. Two of those awards — one gold and one bronze — went to Hammock Inc.
DIGITAL | Best Use of Alternative Media or Multimedia Technology
Gold: National Small Business Summit Website, Hammock Inc. (NFIB)
EDITORIAL | Best Overall | Less Than 50,000
Bronze: American Spirit, Hammock, Inc. (DAR)
For a close-up look at how we developed the winning website, read this recent post on Custom Media Craft.
See a full list of winners and learn more about the Custom Publishing Council.

The election is in the history books. The Halloween candy is gone. And the holidays are sneaking up quickly. How will you be getting your holiday message out to current (and potential) customers and clients? Now is a great time to add social media to your marketing efforts if haven’t yet. And if you’ve already embraced it, getting your holiday message out is a great way to use the hand in your social media deck.

A number of us here at Hammock are real political junkies. We’re all over the spectrum, politically, but we share a love of politics, media, and the crazy things that happen during campaigns and elections.

For a number of years, we’ve shared our political enthusiasm with our clients at the National Federation of Independent Business — the nation’s leading small business association. This year has been no different. Our campaign work with NFIB started months ago, and we’ve worked on a number of election-related projects with them — all designed to raise awareness of small business issues during this campaign. For one fun project, we created an election countdown widget for NFIB.com.
For true political geeks, today’s the best day of the year. We’ll be glued to the computer, cell phone and TV til the wee morning hours. Best of all, growing media use of social networking tools means you can follow the action wherever you are. Rex is keeping a running tally of fun election tools over at the Rexblog.

Hammock has enjoyed working with the National Federation of Independent Business since the early 1990s. NFIB is the nation’s leading small business association, with offices in Washington, D.C, and all 50 state capitals. We work with them to create MyBusiness, their member magazine, and manage NFIB.com, their website.
Every two years, NFIB hosts a National Small Business Summit, a biannual event to explore important policy, business and economic issues facing small business. In the past, we worked with NFIB to create an event website for the Summit, which included news stories from the event. Good, but we wanted to do something more dynamic in 2008.

This year Hammock worked with NFIB to develop a site where small business owners who couldn’t come to Washington, D.C., for the Summit could still participate in the action online. We built and managed a social media site for the Summit with video posting and photo sharing, blogging and knowledge sharing from sessions. We continued the effort post-Summit by developing a digital magazine that is focused on building attendance for the next Summit.
While tools like Flickr, YouTube and Twitter each serve a unique purpose, we’ve found that pulling them together into one interface can often serve your audience best, particularly when you’re sharing information about a single event. While each individual feed is still available, if someone only wants to see the photo updates, for instance, but the event-focused website shows a complete picture of the event — photos, video and all. For many associations, online marketing is still website and email focused. Hammock’s approach is different. We take unique advantage of social media but still provide a central home for all event-related content. If you can’t attend, it’s the next best thing to being there.

Hammock Inc. runs SmallBusiness.com, a wiki-based site designed to connect small business owners and their expertise with others. The site covers any topic related to running a small business, and the wiki format lets small business owners contribute their knowledge to the community, as well as learn from the expertise of others.
A long-time feature of SmallBusiness.com has taken on renewed importance recently. We’ve had a small business news wire on the site for some time — we tag the day’s biggest headlines for small business and pull them onto the site. It makes SmallBusiness.com a one-stop shop for small business news and information.
We also offer those headlines via Twitter and RSS. Recently, as businesses large and small have focused intently on the daily economic news, the SmallBusiness.com News Wire has given small business owners an easy way to keep up with the latest financial events that may affect their businesses.

If you’re a fan of anyone or anything, it’s always great to be around other people who share that passion. But if your coworkers, family or closest friends don’t share in that excitement, where is a fan to turn? Online, of course.
Several of us here at Hammock are fans of the TV show LOST. (The new season in February can’t start soon enough!) But any time we want to talk with like-minded fans when we’re not in the office with each other, a simple Google search of “LOST fan forum” will bring up 984,000 results.

Think about your favorite websites, the ones you frequent most often for news, sports, shopping and entertainment. What do they have in common?
Now think about your own website. Does it have those same characteristics? If not, it may be time for a simple update or a total redesign. Here are five questions to ask yourself:

We were delighted to have two websites we created receive “Standard of Excellence” recognition in this year’s WebAward competition. The Hammock.com site and the NFIB National Small Business Summit site both received this honor, announced last week by the Web Marketing Association, the WebAward sponsor.
The Web Marketing Association is a long-term player in recognizing excellence online — this year’s competition was the 12th annual. Sites are judged against other sites in their industry, on design, copy writing, innovation, content, interactivity, navigation and use of technology.
We’re proud of the honor!

It’s almost cute to hear a little girl dressed up like a princess say things like “I is a big girl.”
But when an international car company runs a national commercial with a terrible example of subject-verb agreement — “Its popularity in the hearts and minds of millions have solidified its reputation for quality and high MPG.” — it’s not so cute.
I won’t mention them by name, but “oh what a feeling” of pain I endured when my ears first heard that. I had to rewind a couple of times to make sure I heard correctly.