The Hammock Blog

As Rex and I are the resident Mac-heads in the office, I thought I'd use this "count-down week" to interview him about why he believes the iPad is such a big deal -- especially when it comes to the business we're in: Custom media and content marketing.

That's not unusual. We've been rethinking it constantly since we first launched it in 1995.

I used to think a website -- the design and structure part -- should last for a couple of years. While I've always thought the content should constantly change, I thought the "look" and "feel" should stay fairly constant. Such a personal bias can be seen in my 10-year-old blog. Despite undergoing three or four significant re-designs and three changes in content management systems, even a regular reader would be hard-pressed to point out anything that has changed about the design of RexBlog. Being subtle with the changes sometimes is more difficult than a major overhaul.

I've also always believed (and still do) that different people visit a site for different reasons and a company should make the site's navigation flexible enough for any of those reasons to be satisfied. Unfortunately, I've discovered over the years that no matter how flexible you make a site, it won't work for everyone. So you keep trying.

Today, we've thrown out the two-year rule. Today, we accept the reality that a company's website design and structure should be constantly reconsidered. Things change -- rapidly. And the need to have a website change along with new ways people use the web should be a part of your approach to maintaining the site.

This morning Rex, one of the founders of CPC (oops, make that, CCC), moderated a panel of custom media CEOs and industry veterans. Chris McMurry, CEO of McMurry, Diana Pohly, President/CEO of The Pohly Company, Valerie P. Valente, SVP/Publishing Director of Rodale Custom Publishing and Cameron Brown, President of King Fish Media shared strategies for evolving their content services to better meet the needs of their clients. The panelists acknowledged that 20 years ago their businesses were focused on magazines and newsletters while today those offerings have expanded to video, social media, event media and more.

Even though platform choices and vehicles have expanded, their focus remains the same: Meeting their clients’ goals with custom content.

Do you know how well your content is working for you? If you can't answer this question with confidence, you aren't alone. Most marketers today lack a clear idea of how their content is helping them meet their business objectives. But with all of the money and resources invested toward this content, they can't afford to be in the dark about how it's helping them meet their goals.

Enter the content audit. At Hammock, we understand how important such an audit can be. That's why we provide services to evaluate how clients' current use of media and other content is working for them. Immediately after starting a relationship with a client, we conduct a Hammock Content Marketing Intelligence Report, a comprehensive look at which content is currently working and what changes are needed. This report involves an intake assessment, in which we collect all relevant information from the client for our research. (We provide a simple checklist of what we need so it’s a pretty painless process.)

I hand made the magazines and complied statistics about the teams, players and games of the NASL. My mother, who was a teacher, allowed me to use the mimeograph machine at her office to make a dozen slightly wet and purple copies, which were stapled. I brought the issues to school, and offered them for sale in a unit of my class that was devoted to helping us understand economics. We reserved two hours at the end of the day each Friday to buy and sell to our classmates.

A guy named Sunil Chitra sold erasers with staples pushed in that could be used in our games of racecar before school. Sam Fowler made some sort of kettle popcorn. They met their goals. I know I bought from both of them. My foray into magazine publishing ended with two magazines sold. By the standards of how success could be measured in that situation, it was clearly a failure.

Creating content today can be a pure passion (like fanzines about NASL soccer) for fun, or it can be used to drive business aims, in which case it must be measured for its effectiveness. Content today is just as critical to the growth of a business as capital or access to credit. But content has to move the needle, and we need marks to tell how far the needle has moved.

At Hammock, we create custom content strategy based on our client’s goals and we benchmark and measure those things that we can influence and which drive the business goals. We then create and source the best content for the job. But that’s not enough. We set the marks with our clients, and track the movement of the needle every month, using custom reports to show how it’s working, and when necessary, make a course adjustment.

It’s still great fun to be in a business of creating content. But you can’t buy popcorn or little eraser cars unless you can create content that works.

Guadalcanal. Bougainville. New Britain. Saipan. Tarawa. Peleliu. Guam. Tinian. Iwo Jima. Of all the names steeped in blood and honor during Marine campaigns of World War II, Iwo Jima has always resonated most deeply in the American imagination. The March-April issue of Semper Fi magazine, which we publish for the Marine Corps League, commemorates the American capture of that desolate little volcanic island.

But neither casualty statistics nor the strategic importance of its airfields explains why Iwo Jima emerged as an icon. It’s the photograph … THE photograph. Joe Rosenthal’s image of four Marines and one Navy Corpsman raising the second American flag atop Mt. Suribachi flashed around the world days after the event.

Ever wonder how all the puzzle pieces come together to create a bimonthly publication? Take a peek into the process for American Spirit, a history- and preservation-focused magazine Hammock publishes for the Daughters of the American Revolution. The upcoming May/June issue is a special one, as it will be distributed to all DAR members to commemorate the three-year term of President General Linda Gist Calvin. No two cycles of the magazine are the same, but here are roughly the steps the editors and designers take from initial story ideas to the magazine landing on the coffee table:

The illustration of a fashionable woman with a sky-high wig gracing the March/April issue of American Spirit, the magazine we publish for the Daughters of the American Revolution, is for a story on 18th-century hairstyles. It's a relief to learn that an obsession with how our hair looks is far from a modern phenomenon. Our early American forefathers spent time and money on their hairstyles -- whether importing wigs from Europe or forming their own distinctly American looks. In our cover feature on “Revolutionary Hair,” readers learn more about big wigs, men in pigtails and the origin of the term powder rooms.