Patriotism is a regular topic in many of the magazines we publish at Hammock Inc.: Semper Fi, the magazine for the Marine Corps League; American Spirit, the magazine for the Daughters of the American Revolution; and Foundations, which we publish for the families of the Army National Guard. Now we can add one more title to that list.
In the October/November issue of MyBusiness, the magazine we publish for the National Federation of Independent Business, we honor small business owners with a military background in the feature Heroes of Small Business. They share how serving their country has helped them serve their customers.

While Hammock Inc. is known for providing a wide array of outsourced services related to media and community strategy, creation and management, we are also a “user” of a wide array of outsourced services to do our jobs and manage our business.
For example, in a typical year, we will work with around 150 freelance writers, photographers, illustrators, videographers and web developers. We also outsource a long list of administrative and technical support services ranging from managing payroll to keeping our color printers humming.
Being a customer of outsourced services has taught us a lot about being a provider of outsourced services. For the most part, these lessons have come from taking what works in one experience or relationship and applying it to the next similar challenge. I’ll admit, with much regret, that some of these lessons have come from our being “bad clients.”

No matter where you find most of the members of the Hammock Crew, I would bet we’re not very far from a computer. Sometimes that computer is a tiny one that fits in our pocket in the form of a smart phone.
Recent research from the Yankee Group estimates that nearly 7 billion mobile apps will produce $4.2 billion in revenue in the next five years. The number of smart phone users is expected to quadruple during that time, to about 160 million.

Although Hammock’s spellers gave it a valiant effort, their hopes of winning the Nashville Area Literacy Council‘s Spelling Bee for the third time were done in by the word “stratagem,” which the team missed by spelling it as “strategem.” The error eliminated Team Hammock just shy of the final four teams, who had to tackle words such as “fermata” and “triskaidekaphobia.”

With the theme of “Words and Music,” the Bee was packed with musical terms, such as “zydeco” — a spicy form of Cajun music and dance that the Hammock Team took in stride. The ultimate winner of the Bee was The Ingram Content Group. Congratulations to them!

Team Hammock is already strategizing for next year’s contest.

Team Hammock is preparing to compete in the Nashville Adult Literacy Council 16th Annual Spelling Bee Sept. 22. This year’s theme is “music” to our ears, and everyone at Hammock Inc. wishes them the best of luck!

I sat down with Megan P., Bill and Emily for a couple of minutes today to get their thoughts on the event.

Note to self: Get a tripod.

Call it a diamond in the rough. You have a Twitter account and a Facebook account — and that’s a great start — but now what? What are you going to do with those tools to really make your social media efforts shine and meet your business goals? We’ve got four ideas to keep in mind as you continue to build and use social media as a star in your marketing arsenal.

Continuity: Continuity is not a word many of us use in everyday conversation, but it simply means the “continuous or connected whole.” Your social media efforts probably have several parts and pieces. Are you using the different parts and pieces to support the others? Are you blogging and using Twitter to share your blog posts? Are you using Twitter to update Facebook? Connecting all of the tools will provide you with the most bang for your virtual buck.

Collaboration: When you join social media groups online – from Facebook “fan” groups to industry-based community forums – you immediately connect yourself with like-minded people. Use your connections to reach out for collaboration when you need to. Perhaps you need to conduct a quick informal survey of customers, members or followers, Twitter is a great tool for getting instant feedback. If you need help with more long-term collaboration, connecting with your Facebook friends or fans might be a better route to take.

Cultivation: Of course you’re using different social media tools to tell people about your business, your association and even sometimes your personal life, but are you reaching out and showing some interest in others? Make sure that you’re making the most of these community-building tools to cultivate relationships. You never know when the friend of a friend might need your services or when a “fan” might become your most active advocate or local chapter member. Reply to others, comment on pictures and blog posts, share and re-share information that others have shared with you. After all, cultivating relationships is one of the main reasons you signed up for all this social media craziness!

Creativity: Writer’s block? Word on the tip of your tongue? What exciting place can you take a new client for lunch? The social media tools that you’re already using can provide a great place to ask questions to get your creative juices flowing again. Ask your Twitter followers for another word for “big” and I would bet you get at least a dozen answers. Ask your fans on Facebook for input on a new logo, and you’ll probably get more opinions than you care for. The creativity of your network is sure to impress you if you simply look for it.

Getting the most out of your social media efforts will take time and attention, but once you make the commitment and follow the four C’s, you’ll see how quickly you can reap the rewards that will help you meet your business goals.

At Hammock, we get to interview people all across the country—and sometimes on the other side of the world. We love talking to these people face to face, but since many of them live and work thousands of miles away from our Nashville office, we interview most of them by phone. But what about the days when we can’t catch a busy business owner in the office or need to speak to a history expert six times zones away? In cases like these, e-mail is the easiest, most efficient way to do an interview.
As with anything, there is an art to conducting a good e-mail interview. While you don’t have the advantage of interacting and conversing with sources, you can still get the information you need without ending up with a bunch of stale, lifeless quotes. Here are a few of our secrets to interviewing via e-mail:

Ah, back-to-school time. Nothing says “new school year” like the smell of new school supplies, the rush of college students coming back into town—and music, for some of us here at Hammock.

Let’s just say I’m in Austin, Megan M. is in Nashville and a client contact is in Washington, D.C. We’re all working together to prepare a schedule of online content for the following month, and all the replying and forwarding of the original email is getting pretty messy and difficult to follow. Is there an easier way for the three of us to collaborate?
In a word: Yes. With Google Docs.

As soon as media planners returned from the long Labor Day weekend last month, media planning began in full force for 2010. Hammock Inc. provides advertising sales management services for some of our clients and part of that work includes the creation of media kits. That’s why we started working on 2010 media kits back in the spring.
We’ve noticed that the economy has impacted some of the buying behavior of advertisers who run in the magazines we publish for our clients. One way the impact is most visible is that rather than committing to a full year of insertions, for example, some advertisers are buying on a month-by-month or quarter-by-quarter basis. While advertisers might not buy a full year of media by the end of 2009 for 2010, we still include all editorial information for the year in the 2010 magazine kit.