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.
Fans of the old Kung Fu TV series (who get the joke of David Carradine advertising the Real Yellow Pages), will recall the tagline description of the Shaolin warrior-monks: LISTENED FOR – they cannot be heard. LOOKED FOR – they cannot be seen. FELT FOR – they cannot be touched. Which happens to be the description of an A-1 interviewer.
Fortunately, unlike Kwai-chang Caine, you don’t need to spend years of meditating and splitting boards with your hands to comprehend this. You don’t even need to get dragon and tiger brands. Lessons are all around you:
How many times has your spouse said “Are you listening to me?” and you’ve mumbled “Uh-huh.” You were being truthful – your ears were working, but your mind wasn’t. Listening is a physical function; hearing is a mental one.
Similarly, how many times have you looked for your wallet or keys, only to give up and then spot them … in a place you had looked. Again, looking is a physical action, while seeing is a deliberate mental action. You overlook things (like keys on the counter – and typos!) because your unfocused mind lies – it’s already said, “They can’t be here.”
How about touch? Back to those elusive keys – you patted your pockets, the newspaper, the sofa. You get the drift by now – your mind was lying again.
What does this have to do with interviewing? If you only listen, look and feel (a sense that is usually not that much used in interviews), you will come away with what you expected to … and possibly miss things that could have added detail and depth to your final product.
The more you can push back your preconceptions, the more room you make for what’s actually going on in the interview. This is especially important in personality profiles and human interest stories. But it’s something to practice in every interview situation – think of each opportunity as a Kung Fu Interview.
We have more interview tips elsewhere on Hammock.com. Put all these together, and over time, you will find that you have learned much, Grasshopper.
The ongoing discussion among marketers about how to measure engagement today is a bit anxious. Most marketers seem overwhelmed with the organizational challenges of measuring and analyzing ROI. The realities of having to interact with their IT departments may be more top of mind than how they can get their hands around new customer behaviors in a world of social media.
A June report from Forrester Research by Brain Haven and Suresh Vittal, “Measuring Engagement,” contributes to the ongoing conversation about how marketers should measure the behaviors of customers and relationships of customers to their brands.
Haven and Vittal lay out the four I’s of engagement: involvement, interaction, intimacy and influence. The easy-to-remember formula defines engagement as the level of the four I’s that a customer has with a brand over time.
But before we can better understand the customer’s engagement, which align with his or her buying process, Haven and Vittal note the realities that stand in the way of making and using a better measurement: lack of agreement on the meaningful metrics, trouble accessing data, inadequate analysis skills and trouble connecting the insights gained into meaningful creative content.
But before we throw up our hands and give up, Haven and Vittal offer a strategy:
• Define what an engaged customer looks like
• Audit engagement measurement capabilities
• Assess value of metrics
• Prioritize metrics
I can’t offer more specifics without violating my user agreement. Forrester offers this insight for a pretty nice fee.
I’ve got three opinions about this:
• An enlightened organization is one that will be able to work through the operational challenges and get to work on the 4 I’s.
• Technology will surely emerge to help this process.
• Staying engaged in this discussion is necessary for all of us in the custom media business.
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:
Hammock’s work with the Marine Corps League is featured in the latest issue of the Custom Publishing Council’s magazine Content. The article “Across a Crowded Room, ” focuses on how marketers and custom publishers are finding new ways to target specific audiences with custom content. In the case of our client the Marine Corps League, the association wanted to reposition its magazine for a number of reasons—one of which was to recruit younger Marines.
Read the article from Content here to learn how we redesigned, refocused and repositioned Marine Corps League magazine (newly named Semper Fi) to accomplish the goals of the League. “In the two and a half years since the redesign,” says MCL executive director Mike Blum, “membership in the Marine Corps league has increased 25 percent. Between 15 and 20 percent of that increase can be attributed to the magazine.”
Email marketing continues to be a powerful part of most companies’ strategies, but many factors can contribute to the success of an email program (text vs. email, time of day, day of the week, etc). It can be overwhelming at times to pinpoint the ideal email for your organization, and testing different combinations is often necessary.
The good news is that the London company Alchemy Worx has solved one piece of the email puzzle for us—subject line length. According to their research, response rates are highest when the subject lines are in the 50-character range or 80-character range, but they fall in the middle when the length is 60 or 70 characters. To increase open rates, keep these magic numbers in mind next time before you click send.
[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.
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.
Our friend Joe Pulizzi of Junta42 has released a new white paper called “New Rules of Custom Publishing – New Complimentary White Paper: Nine Strategies to Create a World-Class Content Marketing Company.” You can download the white paper in a digital format here.
After the jump, read Joe’s list of Nine strategies to create a world-class content marketing company. As anyone who follows Hammock Inc., it’s no surprise we agree with each one of them:
When you want to share your organization’s story, a blog should be high on your list. Blogging is an easy way to share the inside scoop and help your customers feel like they have a relationship with your company that goes beyond the transaction. Before you rush out to get a WordPress account, make sure you are really ready with these tips.
[After the jump, read the 9 Rules of Corporate Blogging]
