We’ve found that organizations seek the help of a custom media partner like ours for lots of different reasons. Some have internal communications departments, but don’t have the editorial, design or production expertise to accomplish their goals. Others recognize the cost savings and predictability of working with a partner rather than keeping the resources necessary to produce media in-house; while others have expertise in one type of media, but look to us for help creating and integrating new media. Our relationships with our clients are all unique, but here are some of the more common reasons we have found for organizations to hire a custom media company:

Earlier this year, American Business Media launched a custom media microsite. We are members of ABM and Barbara Logan serves on the Custom Media Committee. The new microsite promotes the value of business-to-business custom media. Research, white papers and case studies are available to marketers interested in learning more about custom media and how it can benefit their organizations.
Check out the site today to see Hammock’s Custom Media Craft blog and our work with the Marines Corps League featured.

A report recently released by Junta42 and BtoB magazine reveals that business marketers spend on average 29.42 percent of their budgets on custom content. This is slightly higher than that the 2007 studies by the Custom Publishing Council and Publications Management, which found marketers spending 27 percent on average for B2B and B2C. Spending on custom products is on the rise, too. In 2008, 42 percent of business marketers increased their spending on customized content marketing.

Find the full list of custom products used by marketers responding to the study here.

A few weeks ago my two- and a half-year old Motorola Razor’s screen turned white. After troubleshooting ended in failure, I was forced to make a trip to the Verizon store. As soon as I walked in the door, I was bombarded with questions: Was I looking for a phone with email capabilities? “No.” What about MP3 capabilities? “No,” I responded again. The salesperson’s dismay was obvious. “What about the ability to watch TV?” At this point I simply replied, “I just need to be able to call people.”

I consider myself a fairly technologically savvy person, thanks to colleagues Rex and Patrick R. who keep me up-to-date on the latest and greatest tools and products, but when it comes to my cell phone I just want the basics. What I realized after my shopping experience, however, is that these days wanting a cell phone that is just a phone puts me in the minority.

I’ve recently posted about how Rodale and Hearst publishers have taken advantage of the reality that most of us are literally physically attached to our phones. If you’re like me, if I forget my cell phone at home, my day feels off until I’m reunited with it. With this reality in mind, and in an effort to serve the needs of advertisers who are demanding deeper levels of engagement, calls to action, new ideas and measureable ROI, these publishers have rolled out the SnapTell and ShopText technologies to many of their titles. These code-enabled advertisements allow readers to buy items or receive promotions via text.

Today, magazine readers utilize their cell phone’s camera and texting features to take advantage of the promotions offered by these text-enabled ads, but that’s just the beginning. Based on the success of these campaigns to date, I predict there will be more to come—more publishers offering more technology and more advertisers buying in. If my cell-phone-buying experience is any indication, developers are already building the next advancement that will connect readers to the magazine print ad via cell phone, elevating the interactiveness of the magazine print ad and signaling the ad campaigns of the future.

Back in December I wrote about my issue with the way The New York Times presented its “53 Places to Go in 2008” cover article for its Travel section. I explained how the digital version of the same article was far superior because of its clear and logical organization, not only in the presentation of the information but also the design.

Imagine my dismay therefore, yesterday morning, to flip to the Travel section to the “31 Places to Go this Summer” cover article to see a repeat violation. The headline grabbed my attention, but the design is another disappointment. It’s visually entertaining, creative and playful, but it doesn’t serve my need for access to the information in a concise way. I am not engaged. I quickly remembered that not all was lost as I quickly clicked on my nytimes.com bookmark. Sweet relief yet again. While the Times fails in print, it succeeds to surpass my needs with the online version of the article. The design copies that from the December article: All 31 places are presented with a small thumbnail image. Now, where will I go this summer?

Three thousand members in your Facebook group! You’re following 5,000 on Twitter! You’re well on your way to social media nirvana, right?
Maybe.
The low barrier to entry for most popular social media tools today means that anyone can be in the game. But it also makes it very easy to abuse your audience, perhaps resulting in the opposite of what you intend.

[Cross-posted on rexblog.com]

Wired editor and author of the book, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson, posted an item on his blog today that contains an observation I believe is so obvious, it is completely missed by many self-appointed experts. (Okay, I’ll admit I live in that glass house.):

“Not only do small (Long Tail) publishers montetize their content at 3-5 times the rate of the larger publishers in PubMatic’s survey, but they’re improving in the current environment while the big publisher decline.

This is a fact of life in business-to-business-media, where the business model has long been focused on “free” distribution of content to decision-makers in specialized fields. The “cost per thousand” (CPM) model of advertising sales does not exist as a metric in this long-tail of the media world. Of course, if an advertiser selling a $100,000 piece of equipment can reach 90% of the decision makers in a market of 5,000 specifying engineers, then, hell-yeah, the publisher of that content should be able to monetize it at hundreds of times the rate of, say, a newsweekly.

The lesson here: Online, if you want to monetize content, the number of eyeballs seeing your content is less important than who those eyeballs belong to. And the more helpful that content is in assisting real people make important and valuable decisions, the more “monetizable” it will be.

My 8-year-old daughter is studying the Oregon territory and she refreshed my memory (thanks, Wikipedia) that the U.S. and Great Britain were involved in a land grab during the 1840s. The U.S. ultimately prevailed and a treaty was signed establishing the 49th parallel, the line that runs between the states of Washington and Minnesota on the U.S. side, and British Columbia north of the boundary.

Determining the 49th parallel in the media world is happening right now. The territory in question is the very fertile territory known as engagement. We are witnessing a land grab to define and determine how we will measure and monetize audience engagement with Web media. And there are all sorts of parties putting forward ideas of how to redraw the lines on Web analytics so this idea of engagement is more relevant to current Web media experience.

Like most people in this business, I have become obsessed with this discussion surrounding the idea of engaged audiences, particularly as this discussion centers on Web analytics. (I’m not sure I speak from personal “blogging” experience about engaged audiences when my last post to this page was in January. Mitt Romney looked like our next president when I last blogged in this space). Regardless, I’ve been paying attention to the people who have been trying to define this idea of engagement.

Forrester, who has been all over engagement for more than a year, is the latest with a set of metrics. Forrester Research’s last month at their annual Research Marketing Forum in L.A., which are based on the concepts developed by analyst Brian Haven in an August 2007 Forrester Research report on the same topic, lay out the ideas of Involvement, Interaction, Intimacy and Influence. Haven’s full report on these metrics, “Measure of Engagement,” which is co-authored by Suresh Vittal, will be published this month.

Will Haven’s metrics stand the test of time. I think Haven’s metrics ( I look forward to the full report) are an advancement in our quest to understand what sometimes seems like the unknowable: what does she think, what is she going to do?

We have ways of of trying to evaluate something like engagement in the print world. As Josh Chasin, chief research officer at comScore, admitted in a column he wrote about engagement, he doesn’t really know what engagement means. I can detect enough sarcasm to hear what he’s really saying: he believes we don’t know what engagement means.

Chasin knows that print and, now, online media, are evaluated based on reach and frequency, which might sound like engagement, but it’s not. He’s right. We ask how many issues out of 4 do you read?, and how much time do you spend with our magazine? Do you take specific actions as a result of reading my magazine? How many people other than you read this issue?

While I always thought those standard measurements were a little too crude to evaluate the experience a reader has with a magazine, and they never claimed to be engagement, they are pretty darn close to Haven’s 4 “Is.”

Much closer, in fact, than the idea of trying to use the same reach and frequency measures online, in a medium where the media itself isn’t a reach and frequency medium anymore.

But Haven’s metrics fall short of being useful for all purposes. While the end goal for most participants in this conversation may be an easier way for advertising agencies to come up with sound ways to direct their client’s spend of dollars, that’s not the defined goal for all observers of this discussion.

At Hammock, we’ve noticed how the metrics used to evaluate advertising-centric measurements aren’t intrinsically useful discussions for some clients. If selling Web advertising online is even one of the top five things under discussion with an association client when we talk about the Web site, it’s rare. The purpose of the site is to create a greater sense of value of membership to the visitor. The purpose of the site may be to spur a call to action. The purpose of the site might be a serve as launchpad for a set of helpful links. It might be a place where members can find helpful tools and advice, it might be a place to renew, or register for a products for which members qualify for a discount. It might even be a place to, yes, engage members, because all associations need ways to ensure that there is some way they can continue to drive home what is valuable in their proposition.

I agree with Chasin about the value of measuring “against a clearly defined set of goals.” Chasin points us to Eric Peterson, author of Web Analytics Demystified. Peterson has a series of quantitative and qualitative ways to analyze engagement. It comes down to an idea that what you measure is tied to an idea of what you want the experience of the visitor to be.

Setting goals that can be measured makes sense to me. If generating advertising is the goal, then I await the best sets of metrics for that purpose. If it’s not the goal, I think it’s on us to develop better ways to measure what we know is engagement.

We love to tell great stories. We love to hear them, too. That’s why our ears are always perked for good ones. And sometimes, good stories come in the form of podcasts.
In a nutshell, a podcast is an audio file, distributed over the Internet, which is ready for playback on your computer or a portable MP3 player.
Although they started out as a way to distribute radio-type shows, podcasts are also being used to market new products, distribute class lessons to students and share news. Podcasting and other forms of social media like blogging and photo-sharing are popular and effective ways of telling a story. And a growing group of associations are embracing the trend as a new and popular way reach out to their members and potential members.
Here are a few good ones we’ve noticed recently.

Bill’s post earlier this week celebrated all that we love about magazines and their punny, punny headlines. But you’ll notice here (“How to Write Headlines for the Web”) we’re playing it straight. And there’s good reason for that.
When you’re titling articles, posts and features online, your headline has to do a lot more than look pretty and act clever. Since headlines may show up as links, and often help with search engine results, they have to cut to the chase: Just tell us what the page is about.