By Bob Bailey, MessageBuilders.com
January 1, 2009
Starbucks, in my opinion, is one of the more well-managed companies that is doing a lot of things right. I always feel welcome and believe I get value for the prices I pay for their products. (Their plain coffee is no bargain but I don’t ever drink that.)
Unfortunately, they fall into the same trap as many other companies. They let the techies run their website. Techies hate human contact and will do anything to avoid it: bury the contact information, FAQs, you’ve seen it all.
If only they understood that customer contact of any kind is something to be valued. You can find out what your customer thinks, fix a problem, or maybe even sell something. Sometimes an ordinary conversation is all that’s needed.
Oh, yeah, Starbucks. They offer “automatic replenishment” on all of their cards. When a card balance drops to, say, $15 they will automatically add money from your credit card. This is a good thing for Starbucks, keeps the revenue flowing, helps keep the customer from thinking about price. You pay with the card, it’s free. The card is automatically loaded, you never have to think about it. Duh.
But there’s a bug in the website when you try to set this up. To tell them about this bug required plowing through endless phone menus and then waiting. How about a “just talk to me, press 1″ option?
Those pesky customers. Always wanting merchants to make it easy for them to spend money.
Bob Bailey is a Message Builder who helps executives and organizations say more with fewer words.
Posted in Technologies for publications and Web content 
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By Joshua Malbin, Magnificent Publications, Inc.
December 26, 2008
When it comes to persuasion, Robert Cialdini has no illusions. That’s why everyone in publications should pay attention to his work. We recently wrote about Yes! 50 Secrets from the Science of Persuasion. Now this, from Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.
It’s called the contrast principle, and it’s frighteningly simple. If two things are presented one after the other, and the second is different from the first, people tend to see the second as more different from the first than it actually is.
Automobile dealers use the contrast principle by waiting until the price for a new car has been negotiated before suggesting one option after another that might be added. In the wake of a fifteen-thousand-dollar deal, the hundred or so dollars required for a nicety like an FM radio seems almost trivial by comparison. The same will be true of the added expense of accessories like tinted windows, dual side-view mirrors, whitewall tires, or special trim… The trick is to bring up the extras independently of one another, so that each small price will seem petty when compared to the already-determined much larger one.
There are plenty of applications to the world of persuasive publications too.
For example, advocates for a new public program will often compare its cost to existing budget items. They may be tempted to make that comparison to programs that cost about the same but are presumably wasteful or at least silly. (E.g., “We propose only $3 million for this expansion of pre-K education. The state spends $2.8 million on paper clips and pens alone.”) More effective would be to compare the desired amount to a much larger budget item—even if it is not strictly speaking relevant to the new program—and put that larger amount first. (E.g., “The state spends $277 million a year on its prison system. We are requesting only $3 million for pre-K education.”)
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By Suzanne Harris, Magnificent Publications, Inc.
December 18, 2008
Lots of readers of The Wall Street Journal e-mailed Monday’s interesting and timely piece about the “new class of worker,” the Nearly Autonomous, Not in the Office, doing Business in their Own Time Staff—nanobots, for short.
It’s an especially hot topic among publications managers. Increasingly, staff members want to telecommute to save gas and time, share childrearing responsibilities, and focus less on office politics and more on the task at hand. Not all senior managers are eager to manage nanobots. The usual sticking point: measuring productivity of the worker you seldom see.
If you’re among the concerned—or if you’re convinced and want more selling points for senior management—here are six techniques that have enabled most of our company to function as nanobots for 13 years:
- Create nanobot teams whenever two or more people are working on similar or related projects. Everyone stalls out occasionally, and talking to a colleague can help to jump-start the brain.
- Put all assignments in writing, in more detail than if you were explaining it in person. Nanobots get the opportunity because they’re self-reliant self-starters, but as workloads grow, details can get blurry. Create a project wiki and designate a wiki master to capture and update project descriptions.
- Set a budget, in dollars or hours, for every assignment. Few managers know exactly how to do all the pieces of every nanobot project. Set a budget anyway. Better yet, ask the nanobot to propose one. Adjust as the project moves forward.
- Agree on priorities. Nanobots tend to be high achievers who characteristically overestimate what they can accomplish in a given time frame. That helps to explain why eight-hour days stretch out into 12-hour days, productivity falls, and mistakes get made. If your nanobots aren’t already making A, B, and C lists, they need to read Alan Lakein’s short classic How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life.
- Treat nanobots as individuals. We can’t agree with the Journal authors’ distinction between “who is cut out to be a nanobot, and who isn’t.” Management skills can be learned, including self-management skills. Some nanobots need to be reminded to wave a red flag when they’re stuck—so remind them. Once.
- If a nanobot isn’t responding to management direction, cut the ties. Many work habits can be changed, but persistent refusal to recognize the chain of command—unless the nanobot persuades you that management policy is dead wrong—calls for a personnel change. Explain the reasons to the others, unless you’re pretty sure they already know.
Posted in Management of a publications enterprise No Comments »
By Joe Pulizzi, Junta42
December 16, 2008
One of the reasons I love my job is the different kinds of people I have the opportunity to interact with. Over the past year, I’ve met with entrepreneurs, thought leaders, agency executives, top marketers, social media gurus, publishing veterans, authors and others—all with particular insights and challenges about how to sell more, do more and be more.
If 2008 was the year social media went mainstream, 2009 should be the year of content marketing, the corporation as media company, the brand as publisher and broadcaster. Why? Because everyone of those incredibly intelligent people I met with, in some way or another, told me that the difference for brands who make it versus those that don’t will be relevance. How can we, as brands, be relevant to our customers? How can we create and develop real relationships with them? How do we engage?
As my friend and colleague Kirk Cheyfitz has said over and over—brands can do only two things to create the goal of 100% engagement—we can inform our customers—or give them a good time.
To help, I’ve put together 10 tactics that I believe you need to seriously consider NOW as part of your 2009 content plan (not in any particular order).
- Tell the Story Differently through Different Media - It’s frustrating to watch the sheer number of marketers tell a great story, but repurpose that story the same way in all their media. Ian Alexander over at Eat Media constantly harps (and rightfully so) on the concept that the story you tell in print versus mobile versus website versus video must be told in a very different manner. Seems obvious, but it’s not done. Most commonly, this mistake is made from taking a print custom program and just putting it online. Do you engage with content in the same way in print as you do the web? Most likely, you don’t. Do not expect more of your customers than yourself.
- Raid Traditional Media Outlets - As traditional media continues to lay off the best journalists in the world and layoffs and bankruptcies abound, your opportunity to acquire talent has never been greater. Of course, I’m biased a bit that I believe most marketers should outsource their content and find great providers through our service, but this opportunity is too good to be true. First, the talent is available now. Second, expert journalists are very open to working with corporations today. Third, you need great content to survive as a marketer. To do this, you need talent that understands how to tell a story. Go get that talent today while there is still time (and before they all start up their own content marketing businesses).
Read the rest of this post here.
Joe Pulizzi is founder of Junta42, the go-to site for content marketing and custom publishing. You can read more about Joe at his blog or check out his book, Get Content. Get Customers.
Posted in Technologies for publications and Web content, Industry trends No Comments »
By Suzanne Harris, Magnificent Publications, Inc.
December 13, 2008
An analyst with the marketing research firm Forrester recently talked to the Custom Publishing Council about online content management strategies that publishers are using to achieve growth.
While the strategies look intelligent, closer examination of the analyst’s examples reveal that they still need a little work.
Did the Sun run out of gas?
Here’s one of the analyst’s examples: The Baltimore Sun integrated widgets next to their content about gas and oil-related content help readers find the cheapest gas prices in the region.
What a smart idea. Let’s see what other useful information we can get from the site. How about a topic that matters even more to people these days: jobs. Well, first we need to find articles about jobs or the economy, which requires searching through their ponderously indiscriminate “Topic Galleries” (Jo-Ann Stores Incorporated; Joachim, Joseph; ah, here we are, job layoffs). I see it’s a beta version. Note to Sun: it would help to bold important topics or otherwise organize the thing.
“Job layoffs” delivers 112 stories and a keyword cloud of related topics, not one of which is about how to get a job. Hey, maybe your reader is out of work. How about some help?
Well, silly reader, go to the classifieds. Back on the home page, in the left-hand column, where you’d expect them. But here again we’re confronted with a less than well-conceived set of topic headings. Fifteen categories. There are thousands of different job categories in this country. How did they come up with 15? One is “executive,” not too helpful.
So I clicked on “Part-time” (yes, it’s one of the 15) and found—ta da—a work-at-home assistant for an insurance company at $2,500 a month. That would take the sting out of losing your bank job. You can even apply online.
Better still, once you get into the system you can go to “Advanced Job Search,” which lets you enter key words and locations. There you discover that 741 job openings were posted in Baltimore within the past month. Maybe you won’t need to sell apples on the street corner after all.
Need a Grown-Up
The Sun’s strategy just needs a little work. The Washington Post’s strategy requires more serious thought. The Post is teaming with Sphere to show readers who is blogging about a particular writer’s article.
The example shown by Forrester was an op-ed column “Obama’s Brain Trust” by E.J. Dionne, Jr., published on November 25. One of the three entries under “Who’s blogging” isn’t a blog post at all, but a Washington Post article about the appointment of Timothy F. Geithner, President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, as Secretary of the Treasury. But it’s been given a new headline—hold your breath—“Wall Street JEW Tapped To Head Treasury.”
Monstrous. It’s from hypercrypton, a virulently anti-Semitic Website.
Clearly, Sphere is using an automatic feed to generate the “who’s blogging” feature. At least, I hope they are. But where are the grown-ups at the Post? Is the staff stretched too thin to moderate their Website?
What is the reader to think? That the Post regards anti-Semites as entitled to their say, right next to the eminent Mr. Dionne? Would the print version have run an ad paid for by the Ku Klux Klan next to an article about our President-elect?
Please, Post online editors, if you’re going to open the doors to all and sundry, at least run a disclaimer: The following contains vile, dishonest, and potentially dangerous subject matter. Reader discretion is advised.
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By Bill Harrison, Harrison Consulting Group
December 11, 2008
Writing a script for a video is like running for an 80-yard touchdown after repeated penalties. It’s nice to be able to say you did it—better still to have others say you did it—but deep inside you know that it was possible only because of what other people did. That and some luck.
When I scripted a recruitment video for a government agency, it was the agency’s first attempt at recruitment marketing. Management wanted to train recruiters and also show the video at trade shows and job fairs, as well as hand out the CD.
Based on what they told me, I wrote a one-page treatment. (A “treatment” is just a prose description of the story a video or movie will tell.) The clients approved it after only three rewrites! Then I wrote the script. It was approved after only seven or eight rounds of review and revision (I lost count), and we proceeded to the video shoot.
In the middle of the shoot, the frantic director called and asked me to change all the words starting with “s.” It turned out that the narrator chosen by the client—the “talent,” it’s called—had a distracting speech defect that was obvious in close-up shots. Some words she couldn’t pronounce at all.
Most of the close-ups ended up on the cutting room floor. We filled the gaps with background shots from B-roll (that is, supplemental video footage) and graphics with text to emphasize key points as the narrator spoke in voiceover.
In the end we got a more engaging video than planned. There were more quick cuts from scene to scene and less “talking head.” The client loved it, and the video won a respected Telly, a national telecommunications award. The production team never let on.
My advice for scriptwriting? Be imaginative. Be flexible. Be patient. And never overlook the opportunity to turn lemons into lemonade.
Bill Harrison is a professional business writer and editor and the president of Harrison Consulting Group. You can see more of his work at www.harrison-group.com.
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By Suzanne Harris, Magnificent Publications, Inc.
December 8, 2008
My colleagues and I are fans of the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit outgrowth of the St. Petersburg (FL) Times that is devoted to improving the craft of journalism. So it’s in the spirit of collegiality that I’m responding to Joe Grimm, who writes “Ask the Recruiter” for Poynter Online.
A reader asked:
“I am a copy editor for a mid-size daily, and I’ve been here for a little less than 10 months. I was just offered a new job with a hefty raise at the same paper… I would be a Web developer, responsible for creating new products that build profit and readership.
“I think I may have been offered the job more because I’m young — fresh out of college — than because I know anything about Web developing. I looked up similar jobs, and the requirements for them include knowledge of PHP, MySQL, CSS, JavaScript, etc. I barely know HTML and haven’t even heard of some of those other things until now. I made this very clear to the paper’s editor, but she says the offer stands and that I’ll get training opportunities.”
Joe Grimm advised the young journalist to take the job, largely for the chance to move into digital journalism.
Reasonable advice, but …
We strongly encourage that young person to do three things before accepting the new assignment:
- Ask to see the paper’s business plan for the website. If they haven’t got one, respectfully (but firmly) ask for a week to write one. You don’t know how? Buy a book. It isn’t rocket science, and if you’re expected to create “new products that build profit and readership”—that is one tall order—you need management’s agreement on a plan to achieve that goal.
- Request a technical assistant from day one. Nobody can learn JavaScript and plan and populate a website in a field where as many sites fail as succeed. You’re a journalist. Technical website development is a different field. You may only need someone part-time. Get what you can.
- Get a travel and telecommunications budget and participate in every conference and Webinar you can find. Learn what other papers are doing. Ask questions. Meet people. Swim in the sea where you’re being asked to excel. A lot of people are trying to do the same thing. The smart ones want to share what they know, so that you will reciprocate by sharing what you know—or soon will know.
Good luck.
Posted in Management of a publications enterprise No Comments »
By Jason Warshof, Magnificent Publications, Inc.
December 5, 2008
What better time to introduce a new product or service than when people really care about value? Like now, for instance.
This is the point that Andrew Razeghi makes in his article “Innovating Through Recession.” Razeghi, who teaches at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern, asserts that innovations are not only more necessary and valuable during a downturn, but also easier and cheaper to manage than at other times. Some notable examples:
- In February 1930, just months after the great stock market crash, Henry Luce launched Fortune magazine. Over the next seven years, subscribers rose from 30,000 to 460,000. Fortune succeeded, Razeghi says, because it “made a uniquely important contribution to its customers’ lives” with articles they could find nowhere else.
- Miracle Whip, introduced by Kraft at the 1933 World’s Fair, gave consumers a scintillating alternative to mayonnaise at a time when limited family income often meant tedious meals.
- Applying the same basic principle to women’s cosmetics, Charles Revson and his colleagues introduced a glossy line of nail polish in shades never seen before.
So, publications and Web content managers, what do our customers need right now? A few innovations occur to us:
- A guide to the workings of real estate markets that’s based on solid economic analysis and is comprehensible to someone who is interested in buying or selling a house and is willing to invest a little time learning how the system really works.
- Information about organizations that have genuinely solved problems of intergenerational conflict in the workplace. They’ve figured out how to retain workers longer and make them more productive on teams ranging in age from 20-something to 60-something. And they have the numbers to prove it.
- Web sites for intensely local communities of interest (like soccer moms and dads in Reston, Va., or Stanford MBAs who started their own companies in Seattle) that are economically viable — that is, visitors value them, maintain them, and will pay to keep them going.
- Articles about ways to reduce your organization’s costs related to health care — not ways to spend money on wellness programs, but proven ways to bring down health care costs. (There are a few out there, but we need more.)
So what’s new with you?
Posted in Industry trends, Management of a publications enterprise No Comments »
By Suzanne Harris, Magnificent Publications, Inc.
December 2, 2008
Dan Kohan, you sly devil.
The proprietor of Sensical Design, a frequent collaborator, took issue with our recent post about Amazon’s wireless reading device, Kindle, and its pro’s and con’s versus traditional print publication. His comment chided us for neglecting the self-publishing option and its many advantages for certain writers. As an example, he cited a classic in the field, the Complete Guide to Successful Publishing by Avery Cardoza (3rd ed. 2003).
What Dan didn’t say is that, if you explore Cardoza’s career, you quickly discover the true secret to successful publishing. It’s finding your niche and taking total control of it. Avery Cardoza, a mathematical wizard from an early age, began building his empire in 1991 with The Basics of Sports Betting and The Basics of Bingo.
He has been on a roll ever since. According to Amazon, Cardoza has 20-some books to his credit and considers himself the world’s foremost authority on gambling. With titles on baccarat, poker (including Texas hold ’em and video poker), craps, blackjack, slots, and casino strategies, he utterly dominates the how-to market for those who would strike it rich at the gaming tables.
Having learned a thing or two about the culture of gambling, Cardoza soon found a natural way to expand his franchise. He launched a magazine and a website designed to appeal to a gamblin’ man.
Go to www.cardozaplayer.com, and you’ll see a young (male) risk-taker’s dream come true. For openers, the site architecture is based on the Seven Deadly Sins. Lust: An up-and-coming movie starlet. Vanity: A fashionable new cool weather coat. Gluttony: inventive dishes using Beluga caviar. Sloth: Digital cameras. And so on. You get the idea.
It’s sleek, it’s tony, it’s ever so slightly risqué. Hugh Hefner now has a worthy successor. And that’s the true guide to successful publishing. Know your audience and give them what they want—everything they want.
Of course, Avery Cardoza’s natural gift for gambling helped him find the perfect niche. Most would-be publishers need to search a little harder. Not all fields can be so neatly parsed.
Men are easy. Publishing is hard.
Posted in Framing content in print and on the Web 1 Comment »
By Gabe Goldberg, Computers and Publishing, Inc.
November 30, 2008
Some people find negotiating more painful than sitting in the dentist’s chair—and crave Novocaine or even general anesthesia for them both. But don’t shirk either one when its time arrives.
Unlike, say, buying a car, dealing with freelancers isn’t a zero-sum game. In fact, collegially and openly discussing rates, tasks, schedules, workflow, and other project aspects prevents potential conflicts and creates pleasant long-term working relationships.
Focusing frankly on real goals and constraints removes emotion from negotiations, letting you and the freelancer mutually accommodate reasonable requests. And showing respect for freelancers makes you a favored client, earning “above and beyond” effort when it’s truly needed. For example, don’t make freelancers play “20 Questions” to determine basics such as where work will be performed, whether travel time or meetings are involved, if research will be compensated, and the sort of editing required (proof, copy, substantive, etc.). Don’t be manipulative, either—for example, promising future work in exchange for a lowered rate.
Recognize that it’s hard for freelancers to bill more than 20–35 hours per week. They face noncompensated time-sinks such as marketing, meetings, skill development, and technology chores. While those surely aren’t your problem, being aware of them helps you remember why freelancers closely monitor what is “on the meter.” So help your freelancers help you by responding quickly to queries and making sure they have what’s needed to work, rather than allowing your delays to affect their allotted schedules.
The power-struggle rule of negotiating says not to be the first to mention price. But it’s unreasonable to ask a freelancer to quote a rate without fully understanding the work to be performed. And since fees can be structured by the hour, day, project, or word, disclosing as much as possible—including budget parameters—enables jointly shaping assignment descriptions best for both parties.
For long projects, and especially if you’re a new client, make an initial payment when work begins. Offering 25–35 percent shows commitment on your part, equal to that of a freelancer working for some period before being fully paid. Similarly, match progress payments to work performed.
Don’t slow-pay freelancers just because they have less clout than other creditors. Causing cash flow problems is an easy way to become a least-favored client, subject to being dropped when a better one arrives.
If you use a contract, make its terms and conditions appropriate for writing/editing/design tasks at hand. For example, a software development contract may discuss intellectual property or indemnification issues that don’t apply to editorial work. Simpler agreements may meet both parties’ needs without requiring legal review.
The Golden Rule rules: negotiate the way you’d want to be dealt with; it’s hardly unusual for today’s editorial or publishing staffer to be tomorrow’s freelancer. And you might be working for the freelancer you’re hiring today!
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