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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:

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.

Many of the clients we work with are associations, and so we are always monitoring research about the latest trends in associations. The type of challenges our association clients are facing right now are closely tied to the state of the economy. That’s why having in-depth knowledge of the latest research about the economy helps us serve our clients best by being able to create solutions that solve their problems in the context of the economic environment.

One of the sources we consistently look to for research is the American Society of Association Executives. This week they released an update to their Beliefs, Behaviors, and Attitudes in Response to the Economy study conducted six months ago about the attitudes of more than 7,000 association members on the state of the economy and how it has and will influence their behavior.