I didn’t count them, but I bet the June/July issue of MyBusiness, the member magazine we publish for the National Federation of Independent Business, has more than 100 tips on how to protect your business from, well, anything and everything.
From a natural disaster to employee theft to bad-for-business regulations, the threats facing the small business owners we interviewed for this issue are real and could happen to any business any day. Just ask Nichole Yarbrough, owner of Shepherd, Texas-based Shepherd Auto Sales, whom we talked to for the Crisis Averted feature. In one day, everything she worked to create was taken from her when a thief stole her purse, which contained credit cards, checks, $5,000 in cash and more than 40 car titles. It was a rough two months putting the pieces back together, but she survived and has since learned the important lesson of protecting her business from theft by backing up data (and not keeping car titles in her purse, of course!).
Turn a few pages past Yarbough’s story and you’ll meet Michael Nevins, who is fighting a much different kind of threat—a challenging small business climate in Michigan, where his business, Full Spectrum Solutions, is located. Nevins uses his involvement in NFIB as a shield to combat onerous regulations. In this article, he explains why his commitment to NFIB is so important.
Also check out the MyBusiness Manual: the Essential Guide to Safeguarding Your Business, where you’ll find tips on assessing your insurance needs, how to prepare for an OSHA inspection and protecting your business against hackers and scammers.
For this and more, check out the “Current Issue” section of www.mybusinessmag.com.
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.
Hammock has some really talented designers — and I’m not one of them. So I asked our art director, Kerri Davis, to help me understand what goes into the font choices designers make when they’re laying out a spread in a magazine.
I tend to think things I don’t understand are just magic — don’t we all? But Kerri shared with me the guidelines she follows as she starts her work. The end result still looks magic to me, but we can all learn from the method behind it.
I took Kerri’s notes and marked up two spreads that I posted on Flickr. Click over to see her thoughts.
More: Seth Godin also had a great post this week on using fonts and type effectively.
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?
Warriors have always struggled to find uniforms that provide both protection from the elements as well as from enemy arms. Solutions have ranged from the bronze greaves of Achilles’ armor before the walls of Troy to the colorful garb of Louisiana Zouaves to the bulky battle uniforms seen on the cover of the new issue of Semper Fi, the Magazine of the Marine Corps League.
Though not as heavy as medieval armor, today’s battlefield attire and accompanying gear can add up to 150 or more pounds to the average Marine’s 163 pounds. Much of that is in the form of composite armor plates designed to stop a supersonic bullet or red-hot shard of shrapnel. Add to that eye protection, fire-resistant uniforms, weapons and ammo, communication gear, rations and water, and it’s a wonder the Marine can move at all.
Today, I received an email from a client wanting to know when she would receive the postage estimate for her magazine. Usually, postal estimates are one of the last things clients want to receive. Checks have to be requested, approved, written, signed and Fed Exed to the USPS Postmaster by a certain date. Often, after the magazines are mailed, excess postage accumulates in the account. The post office will not refund this money, but only hold it for future mailings with no interest paid.
But a year or so ago, Hammock helped this client switch to the USPS CAPS (Central Automated Payment Services) system for submitting postage to the postmaster for her association’s magazines. Using CAPS, a client sets up a trust or debit account for payment of postage.
One or two days before the postage is due in the account, the client is given an actual expense for postage, and her money can be deposited in the account the next day. There is no overage for accounting errors added to the amount as there is with an estimate.
For the above client, it has worked really well. She is included in a co-mailing pool with other magazines that utilize CAPS. Not only are her postal costs reduced because of shared freight charges, the magazines get to local post offices quicker and into the hands of her members. Plus the balance in her account at the end of the mailing is $0.
It can be cumbersome and time-consuming to navigate the postal system, but we have helped many clients achieve similar efficiencies. We serve as a bit of a translator for the intricacies of the postal system for our clients.
The May/June issue of American Spirit allowed us to get a little crafty … with scrapbooks. Carrie Wakeford designed a beautiful layout to spotlight smart, simple ways to compile an archival-quality scrapbook. Carrie’s creative take on preserving family history meant that, for a few days, Hammock’s library was covered with buttons, bits of wallpaper, colored paper, stickers and other scraps. Savvy readers will be able to pick out her clever use of childhood photos of editor Bill Hudgins.
And what would a family scrapbook be without those faded photos of Aunt Norma and Uncle David posing in their Sunday best? Our cover story, “Treasure Hunt,” outlines new resources to track down family photographs. Thanks to digital collections at libraries and historical societies and Web sites devoted to genealogy, it’s easier than ever to find photographs of long-lost relatives on your family tree–and we show you how.
Our client’s magazines were being delayed once they entered the Bulk Mail Center. The magazines were entering a facility that served a large area of the heavily populated northeastern United States, but the magazines weren’t making it to our client’s members’ homes for three or four weeks. They were being transported from postal facility to postal facility to postal facility until they reached the local post office for delivery.
While participating in a webinar on postal concerns, I learned about a company that co-mails magazines together. We worked out a plan where:
Plus, the client paid less in postage or postal freight.
This is not yet another Earth Day post telling you how environmentally conscious our company is.
I assume you’d not be surprised to learn that we, like you, have grown more-and-more committed to thinking green. I assume you’d not be surprised to learn that we are working with our clients to increase their use of recycled paper products. I assume you would not be surprised that we are committed to working with printers who practice green manufacturing approaches like our largest vendor for the past 16 years, Quad/Graphics, that is seeking certification from the U.S. Green Building Council for all of its major manufacturing sites. I assume you’d not be surprised that we are enthusiastic supporters of all the efforts in the printing and graphics industry to encourage environmentally-friendly industry practices.
What I don’t applaud are the efforts by some to turn any discussion of the environment, printing and paper into an opportunity for shouted accusations and knee-jerk rebuttals.
For example, a few months ago, Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson made a good-faith effort to measure the impact on “climate” of the content delivered in the paper version of the magazine vs. the content delivered via the Wired brand’s digital properties. “Are dead-tree magazines good or bad for the climate?” he asked. As expected from Anderson, the author of the best-selling business book, The Long Tail, his blog post was a detailed comparison of the carbon footprint of a magazine like Wired (the impact related to paper, printing and distribution) with the carbon footprint related to the energy necessary to power each of the computers used to read the same content online. What he discovered was a surprise to some: the carbon footprint of the paper version of the magazine is not that different from the footprint of the same content delivered digitally.
As you can imagine, the debate over Anderson’s post (see the post’s comments) raged on for months — and is still raging, with back and forth arguments about Anderson’s motivation and methodology. Last week, on the Huffington Post, activist Todd Paglia even used a post criticizing Vanity Fair’s annual green issue to divert into yet another blast at Anderson: “Chris Anderson’s (post) about the magazine industry’s carbon impact came off less like the work of a cutting edge tech mag and more like a rehashing of the moribund timber industry’s lamest propaganda.”
Rather than point out the obvious fact that Paglia’s post came off less like a work of cutting edge environmental advocacy and more like a rehashing of lame anti-paper and anti-printing propaganda, I’d like to call on those who want to out-green one-another to recycle some of this energy into something productive.
As both a magazine-industry observer and participant, it’s rather obvious to me: Throughout the magazine industry, there is a recognition that adopting practices with less environmental impact is not only good for the environment, it’s good for business. And while we may want to believe that “going online” is a more environmentally friendly form of publishing, we often don’t take into consideration the unintended consequences on the environment of digital media. As we become media companies that are “multi-platform,” and not merely “print,” we must realize that “thinking green” is not limited to properties we create using paper and ink.
Rather than debate about who or what is more green today, I think a better approach is to stop arguing and start acting for tomorrow.
Here are a couple of suggestions about where to start:
Read Cherly Dangel Cullen’s, “18 Tips for Environmentally Conscious Publishing.” At Hammock, we’ve taken several of these steps and are working on more.
Check out the KinderHarvest program from our friends at MagazineLiteracy.org. The program rescues and recycles children’s and other consumer magazines that would otherwise be discarded and destroyed, and distributes them to children’s literacy programs.
Let’s celebrate Earth Day. Not argue over it.
The Custom Publishing Council (note: Hammock is a founding member) has just conducted a survey called, “Characteristics Study: A Look at the Volume and Type of Custom Publications in America” that indicates custom publishing is thriving. According to the survey, in 2007 a record number of marketers used custom publishing solutions to promote their products and brands – with impressive results. Other industry reports show that spending on alternative media jumped 22%, with more advertisers seeking out new channels. Custom publishing can be expected to grow even more in 2008 with the increase in Internet distribution of content and creative new media solutions.
[After the jump, view statistics and other highlights from the Custom Publications in America survey.]
