We’re proud of Rex for his foresight in helping to found the Custom Publishing Council (CPC) back in 1998. The CPC has always been a special partner with Hammock in promoting and creating excellence in custom media, so we were thrilled to attend CPC’s first conference, the Custom Content Conference, held in New Orleans earlier this week.

Here are some of my favorite quotes and highlights from the sessions I attended:
Joe Duffy, Duffy & Partners: “Yesterday’s consumer is becoming today’s programmer.”
Remember when Time named its 2007 Person of the Year “The Consumer”? As Joe’s session illustrated, now consumers are in control—from the color of our Nikes to the playlist on our iPod to the design for our Mini. In this atmosphere, it’s vital for brands to deliver authentic experiences. One exciting way to make that happen is through custom content.
Robert Passikoff and Amy Shea, Brand Keys: “The percentage of contribution that ‘customization’ makes to products and services through engagement, adoption and loyalty is 18%. It was 4% in 1997.”
People are bombarded with advertising messages all day, every day. To cut through the clutter, you have to speak directly to your audience with messages targeted specifically to their wants and needs and desires. With customization’s growing reach, how can you afford not to?

Joseph Plummer, Advertising Research Foundation: “Engaging storytelling campaigns prove superior in creating relevant, lasting connections with consumers that enrich brand meaning and ultimately impact brand behavior.”
At Hammock, we say “Your Story Starts Here.” It’s not only a catchy slogan, but it represents how we feel about the work we do for our clients. To us, a client’s story is the essence of their brand, so our primary goal is to communicate that story in the most engaging way possible to their members and customers.

Summary:

The goal of most corporate and association marketers is to use digital and online content to generate actions, not to attract eyeballs. The content doesn’t need to be on your website — the content needs to be in the hands, and ears, and eyes, and heads of your members or customers.

Action for Savvy Marketers:

Unless your business model is advertising, page views are not the correct metric to measure your online strategy. Action, engagement, sales, enrollment, loyalty, retention, increased contributions, advocacy and education are business goals that require you to get content in your audience’s hands, eyes and heads — in any way they want to receive it. In 2008, let your content extend beyond your website. Cast it out in any way you can.

As we discussed in the accompanying post, The Year of Mediacasting, the goal of most corporate and association marketers should be to use digital and online content to generate actions and build loyalty. The goal is rarely about converting page views into advertising revenue. Your content doesn’t need to be on your website — it needs to be in the hands, and ears, and eyes, and heads of your members or customers. Here are ways to “cast” your content in the ways your customers and members already want to “catch” it.

1. Podcasting: Perhaps one of the best known of the new casting models, podcasting is simply the idea of distributing MP3 (audio) files in a way that listeners can subscribe to and “catch” them when you distribute a new one. There are lots of options on how to distribute such content, but iTunes, email or attaching a file to a blog post can provide most everyone in your audience a way to receive such content in the way they choose. Links: Our favorite Podcast tool, and What is Podcasting? by Make Magazine’s Phillip Torrone.

2. Videocasting: Sometimes, called video podcasting, the idea is the same. A video file can be distributed through various channels (email, iTunes, attaching to blog posts, posting on video hosting services or social networking sites) so that your audience can receive them when you release them, not just when they land on your website.

3. IMcasting: Do you have customers, members, students, fans, employees who communicate via instant messaging? A simple way to cast to these in your audience is through the microblogging service Twitter. Link: Twitter.com FAQ: How to Twitter via IM (scroll down).

4. SMScasting: What about those in your audience who communicate primarily via text messaging? Services like Twitter allow your customers and members to following you via text messaging as well as IM. Link: Twitter.com FAQ: How to Twitter via SMS (text-messaging) (scroll down).

5. PDFcasting: Did you know you could distribute a PDF or digital magazine via iTunes or RSS feed? Well, you do now. No longer do you have to limit your audience to subscribing to a digital publication via email or, worse, coming to your site to download it. The idea also works for PowerPoint presentations or Excel documents. Simply enclose (attach) a document with anything that generates an RSS feed (a blog post, for example) and you can start document-casting immediately.

6. Photocasting: Like with audio or video podcasting, you now have several ways to distribute photography in a way that fits into how your customers and members are experiencing photography online. And by photography, we mean any form of visual content that your customers or members may enjoy — or find important — to receive from you. Link: Share Business Images by Photocasting (Apple.com)

7. Screensaver-casting: While the idea has been around for a long time — some of the earliest forms of push media used the concept — we’re testing some early versions of such tools, including FlickrFan (now, Mac only) that distribute content in ways that will make it easy for members, customers or employees to view ever-changing content (headlines, photography, web links) while their computer monitor or Internet-connected HDTV is in a rest mode. Link: FlickrFan Turns Any Photostream Into a Mac Screen Saver

8. Linkcasting: One of those easy-to-overlook content ideas is the low-effort, high-reward service you provide when you share current links to content on the web that your audience will find engaging. In addition to emailing links, take advantage of the wide array of ways to feed links to your customer or member’s desktop. Link: Here’s a “feed” of links we maintain related to media industry news.

How we’re using wikis to power knowledge-sharing communities

Okay, everyone knows about Wikipedia, the user-edited encyclopedia (actually, ecyclopedias as there are different versions around the world) with information on just about everything.

However, Wikipedia is not the only website — nor was it the first — to utilize the approach of allowing users to both read and edit the content of a web page. That style of website, nicknamed “wiki” after the Hawaiian word for fast (wikiwiki), was developed (and named) by Ward Cunningham in 1994. According to Wikipedia (we thought it only appropriate to cite the source), Cunningham was inspired by software we at Hammock loved back then, as well: Apple’s HyperCard.

At Hammock, we love wikis. That’s not surprising as we’ve been creating and managing wiki-like, online sharing communities for clients since the early 1990s. We were even forum sysops on CompuServe, for any of you who can recall that far back.

In 1999, we began the development of what turned into a massive knowledge-sharing user community called SmallBusiness.com. The site was way ahead of its time in what folks now call “social media.” While SmallBusiness.com was extremely popular with its nearly 100,000 registered users, the dot-com bust of 2001 nonetheless put our plans for SmallBusiness.com on hold. The overhead necessary to continue developing the proprietary platform on which the site ran proved too challenging during the early 2000s.

However, in 2005, we began to take note of what was happening at Wikipedia and determined that it employed the main principle on which we developed the first iteration of SmallBusiness.com: sharing knowledge at the grassroots level. Better yet, we observed that the site was running on open-source software using the kind of scrappy, low-overhead approach we were looking for to revive the popular service.

And so, in late 2005, we began work on launching a new wiki-powered SmallBusiness.com. We discovered that many of the lessons learned in our earlier experiences with online communities — or, as we like to call it, “conversational media” — worked well in the context of a wiki. The dynamics of community-building (motivations, identity, networking) seemed to translate well.

SmallBusiness.com — in addition to once more becoming the leading online sharing community of content contributed by small business owners and managers — is an incredible laboratory for the Hammock Team to experiment with ways that wikis can be used in the marketing, customer-care and membership-building efforts of our clients.

For example, in 2007, we created a wiki for the American Watercraft Association that serves as the hub of a wide range of information sharing among their members, owners of personal watercrafts. There’s even a part of that wiki that allows their members to share maps of their favorite places to use their PWCs.

While we still love publishing magazines and helping clients build traditional websites, our experience in creating and growing wikis and in helping clients develop engaging, valuable conversational media programs and platforms are also a part of our legacy — and future.

Coming soon to Hammock.com: Hammopedia: The Hammock Wiki.

I wish I could say I am a devoted reader of The New York Times every Sunday, but perhaps I can add that to my list of New Year’s resolutions for 2008. This Sunday, however, I instituted a “stay as far away from the mall as possible” rule, so I was able to enjoy reading the Times at home. I usually start with Sunday Styles and then move to the Magazine section, but this week, the Travel cover and title “The 53 Places to Go in 2008” grabbed my attention first.

I quickly skimmed the 16-page section to discover which wonderful place I should go to in the coming year, but felt a little frustrated. Something in the story or the layout didn’t feel cohesive, but I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what was missing until Monday morning, when I clicked on nytimes.com. Under their Most Popular (most emailed) list of articles, I stumbled across this:

Problem solved! The presentation and design of the article in its digital form addressed what had been nagging me the day before—wanting to see the entire list in one place. And this digital list featured an entire page of stunning photographs, which encouraged your eyes to jump from one to the next and back again. My frustration was gone. I wanted to click every link.

This is a case in which The New York Times embraced the flexibility and capabilities of their online platform to enhance their reader’s experience and engagement with the article. The simple change of showing photos of all 53 locations transformed the story.

Now back to my travel wish list for 2008…

How Hammock.com uses Flickr as a marketing tool — and a content management system

(“How’d we do that?” is a continuing series that examines the creative ways we do things at Hammock. Sometimes, it’s hard to make things look easy. Warning: Don’t try these at home — call us.)

By Rex Hammock & Patrick Ragsdale

Back in early 2007, when we started talking about creating a new Hammock.com, we determined that it should be a laboratory in which we would test various approaches and technologies and demonstrate the results — especially approaches to web development about which we are enthusiastic, but maybe not quite ready to recommend to our clients. That’s one of the reasons you will — if you look closely — see us constantly adding and removing things from the site.

As part of our laboratory approach, we decided to do two things:

1. Create the entire site using software and development approaches that were designed first for blogging, social networks, and other collaborative or conversational media. Whenever possible, we’ve opted for open source platforms or freely available (and sometimes free) services. We wanted to display how flexible and adaptive the software can be to a wide array of story-telling approaches.
2. Utilize an approach to creating and managing content that will allow us to tell our story both here at Hammock.com and, simultaneously, at a wide variety of other places around the web. We’re constantly telling clients that “there’s a big conversation taking place out there and you need to be a part of it” — but we weren’t practicing what we preached. Related to this, we decided to put an emphasis on ways we could streamline the management of content so, whenever possible, content updated on place would be reflected elsewhere across the web.

We’ll be sharing several examples of such approaches in future “How’d we do that?” pieces, but it seemed obvious to us that this first look behind the curtain should be at how we’re using the photo sharing service Flickr on Hammock.com — and on Flickr.com/hammock — in a wide variety of ways that help us tell our story in a creative, efficient and, excuse our boasting, extremely cool way.

First, it might help to explain Flickr and why we chose that service to use in our experimentation. Now owned by Yahoo!, Flickr started out as features that were part of a multi-player online game. It may look like a place simply to post photos, but the service’s DNA is all about community and sharing and story-telling and discovery. We started using Flickr early-on. Blogging pioneer Rex was enthusiastic about the blog-like approach the service used to re-think how a photo-sharing service can work (reverse chronological display, commenting and RSS feeds were conventions Flickr launched with). The photos Rex hosted on his Flickr account — like, for instance, his photos of Nashville Greenways — have been viewed over 200,000 times.

At the same time, Patrick became a student of the way in which Flickr allows its data to be accessed and displayed in a wide variety of ways utilizing RSS feeds and (sorry for the geeky acronym) third-party developers who use Flickr’s API. For those not schooled in web-tech alphabet soup, that simply means Flickr allows its users to pull data (i.e., the photos stored there) and to display that data on other websites. The more open a service’s API, the more creative a web developer can be with data from that service. And Flickr is a good service when it comes to allowing a developer to build on its API.

Here are just some of the ways we’re using Flickr:

We’re hosting many of the photos seen on Hammock.com at Flickr.com/hammock. Typically, a web developer places images in a file, hidden away on a server somewhere. We decided that we wanted to use Flickr.com as another platform to show off our work and people and so, when you visit Flickr.com, you can browse around and get a good look at hundreds — and soon to be thousands — of images. In almost every instance, those images are also used here as part of our galleries or, well, almost anywhere you click.

We not only pull photos from Flickr, we pull text: We decided to use Flickr.com as a content management system (CMS) to handle the names and captions that accompany photos on Hammock.com. In other words, rather than entering text twice — on Flickr.com/hammock and on Hammock.com — any person on our staff can name and describe a digital photo, then upload it to Flickr. By utilizing Flickr’s APIs, we then display all of that information whenever a user clicks on a photo. Also, by thinking of Flickr as an easy-to-use content management system, we’ve now got a way that everyone — and we mean everyone — who works at Hammock can manage photos that appear on their people page. No one has to give any photos to a webmaster (what’s that, anyway?) to post or know anything about posting to their page. By just dropping a photo in a set on Flickr, their photo automagically appears on Hammock.com.

We decided not to reinvent the slideshow wheel. On the last iteration of Hammock.com, we had areas where a user could view our work as a Flash slideshow. We’re not big fans of having Flash all over a website, but we know, used correctly, it is a great story-telling tool. Because we were in the mindset of utilizing the tools already baked into Flickr, when the topic turned to displaying our work in Flash, we decided immediately to skip building out that feature ourselves.

There are a few other Flickr tricks sprinkled throughout Hammock.com — and we’re adding more all the time. In the future, we’ll use another “How’d they do that?” to review them.

For now, just smile and say cheese.

From Rex Hammock:
Last week, I heard about the impact Katrina had on the publisher and staff of a New Orleans-based magazine and felt Hammock Publishing could reach out and help.
Romney & Charley Richard, publishers of Louisiana Cookin’ Magazine were flooded out of their home and office in New Orleans. (They still haven’t been able to return to either.) They are now living in an RV parked at their daughter’s home in Baton Rouge. Likewise, their staff are all direct victims of the disaster and are now evacuated across five states.
Committed to keeping Louisiana Cookin’ alive, yet consumed with the personal struggles she and her staff are facing, Romney sounded understandably dazed when I spoke with her for the first time last week. I told her that getting out a magazine is something we at Hammock Publishing know how to help her do…and that I know a lot of folks throughout the magazine publishing world will also love to volunteer to help out.
We’ve launched a weblog at KeepCookin.org. Please link to it. Please subscribe to its RSS feed. I know a lot of folks who read this blog are media-types, but we also really want to reach out to food bloggers, as well. Pass the word along to them.
Also, please purchase a subscription to the magazine. It’s a great magazine for folks who enjoy Louisiana cuisine or who have enjoyed the restaurants of New Orleans. Subscribing via the Louisiana Cookin’ website is perhaps the quickest and most-direct way that individuals can help support Romney’s efforts to get back up and running. (That, and advertising, which we discuss on the Keep Cookin’ blog.)
If you’d like more information regarding Keep Cookin’ or would like to volunteer your support, visit KeepCookin.org or e-mail: helpkeepcookin (at) hammock.com
Also, if you’re a blogger, as you make posts about this, please use the tags: magazines, louisianacookin, keepcookin.org

“This Hammock T-shirt was at the Sturgis South Motorcycle Rally in Sturgis Mississippi before riding home (Franklin TN) along the Natchez Trace Parkway. More pictures next month – riding to Texas via Clarksdale Mississippi and God Knows Where…..” Robert Jansen

We’re happy to announce that Hammock Publishing (along with WKRN-TV and the Freedom Forum) is an underwriter of BlogNashville, a three-day event that will include Bloggercon Tennessee, the unique unconference-conference that has previously been held at Harvard and Stanford Universities. The May 5-7 event is being hosted by and will take place at Belmont University. We’ll be blogging lots more about the event in the coming days and weeks. Our friend and fellow Nashville Blogger, Bill Hobbs, has a press release about the event.