Last week we somehow missed the news that Hammock won a fourth APEX award, this one on behalf of its client BNP Solutions.

BNP Media’s eBook on Integrated Media Campaigns won an APEX award of excellence in the category of Electronic Publications.

Screen-Shot-2015-09-20-at-2.54.35-PMThis month marks the beginning of Hammock Inc.’s 25th year as a marketing services company focused exclusively on what is now called “content marketing.” During the last 25 years, we’ve been able to work with many great clients in developing all forms of print and digital media used to build long-lasting relationships with their customers. 

One important thing we’ve learned during the past quarter-century is that unlike traditional advertising, customer media and content can play an important role throughout the relationship between marketer and customer. To explain what we mean, we’ve published the Hammock Idea eBook, Content Along the Customer Journey. You can download it below.

five tips for successful eBook subscription series Our current Idea Email is focused on the customer relationship-building opportunities of using a subscription model for the distribution of ebooks.

Here are 5 tips we believe will help such a series of ebooks to become popular with your audience.

Keep it Short

By short, we mean 5,000-10,000 words. This is the length of a long magazine article. A business-to-business marketer may offer longer books, if your audience seeks content of a technical or academic nature. And a how-to or recipe series may be comprised of ebooks with less words. However, the success that Amazon.com has seen with Kindle Singles provides the proof-of-concept that short books are popular among people with demands on their time, but who desire more understanding than a blog post (like this) can provide.

hover finger william sonoma customer media

To find these features on Williams-Sonoma.com, hover your cursor over the Recipes tab.

In the current issue of The Idea Email, we explain why we’re inspired by how the retailer Williams-Sonoma has made the creation and use of customer media and content a part of their mission statement.

Here are three of our favorite ways they display their commitment to “helping customers become great cooks” in a way that adds value to the cookware they sell. (We could have added lots more.)

sous-chef series logoThe Sous-Chef-Series: Williams-Sonoma has partnered with The Tasting Table for a free weekly email and website series featuring the stories of up-and-coming chefs from around the U.S. Why we like it: Great stories and recipes are coupled with Williams-Sonoma cookware that’s related to the dish being shared. A great example of “content-enabled commerce.”

Book creator- Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, know content [A version of this post was cross-posted on RexBlog]

Yesterday, Wikipedia added the “ePUB” file format as an export option for collections of Wikipedia articles you want to compile. This may not sound like something new, as the ability to compile — and even order a print-on-demand version of — such a collection of articles has been around for a while.

What makes this new feature significant is that ePUB is a format optimized for display using all the major ebook reader devices or apps (Kindle, Apple iBooks, Google Books, Nook, etc.). While PDFs of such articles were readable on such devices or apps, the ePUB format will provide you with a document that is more book-like.