Last week, I attended the annual American Business Media Top Management Meeting in Chicago. Rather than its typical multi-topic conference approach, the meeting focused primarily on presenting the results from a major industry study and recommendations from the consulting firm Booz & Co.
I found the approach refreshing, more like a deep-dive seminar than the typical panel-led sessions of most conferences (did I just telegraph my opinion of most conferences?). The Booz & Co. study (as reported by Hamsa Ramesha for Northwestern University’s Medill News Service) focused on “pathways to profitability” for B2B media companies in a period when traditional media is shrinking and digital media is expanding.
As ABM member companies are fully involved in events, digital and print media, it was not a Print vs. Web thing — most companies are way past that. This study was more focused on the question: “Based on the reality we’re living in, what must your company become to be successful in five years?”
Perhaps one of the reasons I really enjoyed the study results may be the way in which the findings and recommendations so closely correspond to much of what we at Hammock have been focused on during the past couple of years.
While I plan to write much more about this in the coming weeks, let me preview it by saying that the Booz & Co. study finds that for business-to-business media companies to succeed, they must focus on one of two pathways: Being a company that serves end-users (subscribers, attendees, etc.) or being a company that serves marketers (custom media, marketing services, etc.). While companies can offer services that target both end-users and marketers, Booz & Co. have not yet found an example of how a company has become a leader in both strategies.
It makes sense to me why they have not, but the reasons why that is so are going to be a part of my follow-up posts on the topic. (How’s that for a tease?)
In the meantime, let me say, we at Hammock know exactly what our pathway is: We are going to continue to serve savvy marketers in their efforts to generate more profitable relationships with their customers or members.
Our services will grow to include even more ways to help marketers accomplish that goal via print and all forms of digital and online media. Our services will also grow in ways that will offer marketers the means to measure and manage such programs in ways that clearly provide tangible business benefits to our clients.
We look forward to the continuation of this journey. And I look forward to posting more about it over the coming weeks.
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.
While many associations are beginning to see the value of how social networks and social media can help them, many still have reservations about Twitter. They might feel comfortable with writing for a blog or posting videos to YouTube, but they continue to question the purpose of a tweet. If associations will take a cue from the business world, they can harness the power of Twitter to meet some of their member communication goals.
Research from the 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study shows that almost 60 percent of Americans interact with companies on social media sites. The survey findings also revealed:
It’s clear that the majority of Americans have an expectation and a desire to interact with companies through social media online, which helps explain why Twitter is one of the fastest growing social networking sites on the web. In only the last year its traffic has skyrocketed from 533,000 to 2.4 million visitors. To respond to this demand for communication from their customers, Ann Smarty, in her Search Engine Journal Blog, shares examples of how high-profile businesses are using Twitter:
Earlier this year at Hammock, Twitter played a pivotal role in an event website we created for the National Federation of Independent Business for its National Small Business Summit. The social media site included video postings, photo sharing, blogging and knowledge-sharing powered by Twitter. Using Twitter allowed organizers and attendees to post the latest updates and news from the event.
Wonder how you can use the power of Twitter to create a new avenue for communication with your members? Contact us for social media strategies you can benefit from today.
Web design rockstar Khoi Vihn, design director at NYTimes.com, gave a ringing-endorsement point to a deck that accompanied a presentation by designer Jeff Croft.
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:
Every two years the National Federation of Independent Business holds its National Small Business Summit in Washington, D.C. The event brings together America’s most politically active entrepreneurs as well as key congressional and business leaders.
In 2008, NFIB turned to Hammock to help solve two of their post-Summit needs: 1) Provide members who did not attend the Summit highlights of the event beyond the traditional few pages of coverage in MyBusiness, NFIB’s member magazine, and 2.) Generate additional advertising revenue. To meet these goals, Hammock worked with NFIB to create and distribute a special, multimedia, digital edition supplement of MyBusiness covering the highlights of the Small Business Summit.
I loved this clever headline in Sunday’s The New York Times— “Too Beautiful for Pixels”—about the biannual art book The Last Magazine. Formatted like a newspaper, its tag line is: All things new—at last. Magnus Berger and Tenzin Wild, co-founders of the magazine, said that colleagues advised them to publish it online. The co-founders decided against the advice, however, and opted for a print-only publication because ”with print you can make something really beautiful.”
I respect their decision, trusting that they know what is best for their content, audience and budget, but I disagree with the implication that you can’t create something “really beautiful” with a digital publication. The decision to choose a print, digital or a combination for distribution of your content should be considered on a case-by-case basis. Readers interact with digital publications differently than print publications, and so those behaviors must be weighed when determining what is right for your audience. Print publications can certainly be beautiful, but don’t discriminate against digital ones—they can be beautiful too.
A few weeks ago, one of my favorite tech bloggers, Louis Gray, wrote a great item regarding the myth of “social media overload.” In it, he listed what he thinks are the types of social media a person needs to be using these days in order maintain his or her identity online and to engage in the conversations taking place on the world live web.
The list, which likely will appear daunting to you if you don’t maintain any of them, is a great roundup. As many of the accounts he mentions work with one another (as in, when you update one, it will notify the other), the task of maintaining them is not as challenging at it may appear.
Most importantly, Louis explains that you don’t need to register for every new version of each one of these categories of services. People like Louis (and me) will sign up for every new one of these we run across, but that’s mainly for research purposes.
Here’s what Louis describes as a “full deck” of social media tools:
1 or more blogs that you manage.
1 or more accounts on an RSS feed reader.
1 or more microblogging identities.
1 or more accounts on a business networking tool.
1 or more accounts on a social network.
1 or more accounts on a service aggregator or lifestream.
(Also helpful: A social bookmarking site, online photo site, music recommendation service, etc.)
While I agree fully with Louis, if I were just starting out doing all of this and looked at this list, I’d probably not start. That’s one of the reasons I recommend people set up a FaceBook account (even if they are outside its core demographics). It is one service that lets you experiment with all the types of features and functions Louis lists. Personally, I have several reasons that FaceBook doesn’t work for me, but when it comes to providing a way to manage your identity, network of connections and a means of expressing yourself online, FaceBook is the benchmark service. Nothing else — and by nothing else, I mean LinkedIn or Plaxo — comes close to packaging together so many different functions and features.
Here’s the deck of social media tools I use most:
RexBlog.com: For the most part, this is what I consider to be my professional and business-related focus (media, technology, conversational & new media, marketing, magazines). However, I do reserve the right to head off into totally unrelated topics at times.
Delicious.com/rexblog: These are sites I bookmark that are related to business-related topics. I sometimes refer to this as my “link blog.”
Hammock.com/rexhammock : My official Hammock Inc. “people page.”
RexHammock.com : Personal passions and random-topic tumble-log.
Twitter.com/r : Stream-of-life commentary in < 140 character posts, and where I “hang-out” online.
Flickr.com/rexblog : Where I post photos.
YouTube.com/rexhammock : Where I post videos.
FriendFeed.com/rexhammock : A “lifestream” (a combined flow) of everything I post anywhere.
Facebook, Linkedin, etc.: I don’t really “express myself” on these and other “social networking” sites, but on most of them, you can find me if you search for my name or the username “rexhammock.”
Bonus advice for those who have several cards from the social media deck: Use the microformat tag rel=”me” (as explained here) when you link between your “full deck” of accounts. Technically, I’m not sure what I just said, but Kevin Marks told me to do it so I do. I don’t know exactly how it works, but the result is this: When you Google my name, all of my different social media accounts show up, even though they have different usernames (rexblog, “r”, rex, rexhammock).
Funny name, useful application
We spend a lot of time at Hammock trying out different web applications and related software. Some of us are geeks, so we think that’s fun. But we also want to stay on top of the latest trends for our clients.
We’re long-time wiki fans, but we know that this kind of content management system isn’t as popular as it ought to be. A number of prominent wiki sites (like, say, Wikipedia) don’t make it as easy to contribute as they could, so we suspect a lot of people dismiss wikis out of hand.
But, wikis don’t have to be hard. (And I’ll throw in on a personal note, they don’t have to be ugly, either.) If you’re in one of the situations below, you should be considering a wiki:
Jon Henshaw, the SEO guru (among many other things) at the web-development firm Sitening, says some very nice things about the online strategy displayed on Hammock.com. Thanks, Jon. We feel like Sally Field receiving an Oscar.