Every day we make it, we'll make it the best we can

his week I'm on the road in Nashville, working at the IndustryWeek Best Plants Conference.  It's a gathering of manufacturing leaders who are striving for continuous improvement in their manufacturing facilities.  As part of the conference we offer plant tours, and today I was the tour captain of a journey to Lynchburg, Tennessee to visit the Jack Daniel's distillery.

One of my favorite takeaways from today's tour (other than the whiskey tasting) was the culture the company pursues.  Jack Daniel himself uttered these words about the company's Tennessee whiskey: "Every day we make it, we'll make it the best we can."

Every day you come to work, are you doing your best at your job?  Are you going out of your way to put the best possible ingredients into your work, like Jack Daniel's puts into their whiskey?  It's a simple concept, but sometimes when we get lost in the daily grind, we need a reminder.

Squeeze new life out of your existing content

Your content is valuable.  You spend lots of time and money developing white papers, articles, and other pieces of content for your website and other electronic offerings.  But how often do you let your content go stale?  Once it's finished and published, that shouldn't be the end -- it should be the beginning of the process.  There are so many ways you can continue to use content that's already been developed.  Repurpose it!

A great example is Time Inc's new custom magazine, called MINE.  Readers can sign up to receive five free issues of MINE, which contains re-purposed editorial content that previously appeared in one of Time Inc's or American Express Publishing's magazines.  Interestingly, it's a custom publication that's specifically designed for each reader.  A reader has eight magazine choices -- from Sports Illustrated to Golf Magazine to Food & Wine.  The reader chooses which five magazines they're interested in receiving content from, and the custom publication is sent to them.  In addition, readers can choose whether to receive their custom magazine in a printed or digital format.  Think of it as a remix of a magazine.

It's an interesting model because it:
1) Capitalizes on previously developed magazine content that would've otherwise been generating little interest in Time's archives, so it's inexpensive for Time to do.
2) Satisfies Lexus, the sponsor of the whole initiative, because it generates leads (from the MINE registration form).  It also helps Lexus position itself as a brand that listens to customers, since it's giving them a free subscription to a customized magazine.
3) Gives the reader what they want -- a mix of content they're interested in, but might not have otherwise been exposed to.  Chances are good most readers aren't receiving five different Time magazines, so this gives the company a chance to showcase several of its other titles to an audience that might not have otherwise seen them.  For example, I chose Travel + Leisure as one of the titles in my custom magazine -- a brand I've never interacted with in the past.  This could help Time get readers hooked on new titles and interacting with brands they were previously unaware of.  In short, it's a clever circulation initiative too.

Is this the future of magazines, where consumers can choose the content and "bind their own"?  Probably not.  I think publishers would quickly find the costs to be too high to do this on a large scale.  But it's an interesting custom project when it leans on repurposed content from past magazine issues, as Time and Lexus are doing.

Think about this model.  Are there new and different things you can be doing with your content?  How can you repackage your content and bring it to the audience in a different way?  Maybe it's not a huge component of your overall content strategy, but why not squeeze a little more life out of your existing content?  After all, you already paid for it.

Photo by jrob86

Three value-conscious tools for online marketers

Digital marketers need to wear a lot of hats.  One minute we might be writing copy, the next we're tweaking graphics in Photoshop, and the next we're shooting or editing video.  This profession takes a variety of skills, and it also requires a lot of tools.  Often those tools need to be as inexpensive as possible, because while some projects have big budgets, others are being run on a shoestring.

Today I'd like to look at a few simple tools that can make your life easier without breaking the bank.  (All of these are written as my own personal viewpoint...nobody's paying me to write these endorsements.)

• Need to shoot good-looking video, but don't have the budget for a studio?  The Westcott Photo Basics PB500 Educational 3-Light Kit can provide good lighting for simple "talking head" or interview videos.  Of course for less than $500, you can't expect professional quality...especially when pros are easily spending 10 times that amount for a simple lighting setup!  But this kit gets the job done for non-pros, even people with no previous experience in lighting.  It comes with an instructional DVD and a reference card that will get you set up.  Even though the DVD focuses on still photography, it still provides good takeaways that apply to simple video shoots.  With a Google search, I was able to find this kit for $369 here.
  
  
• For podcasts and simple audio editing, Audacity is a solid product at a price you can't beat: free.  It doesn't come with all the goodies you'll want (like MP3 capability) with the main download.  You'll need to spend a few minutes downloading add-ons and filters that do everything you need.  But that's a quick and painless one-time process.  The software itself is solid, fast, and relatively easy to use.  There are a few controls that aren't the most logical, and newbies to the audio editing world will need to spend a few hours playing around with the software and reading about it until they feel comfortable.  Luckily, Audacity has some great documentation, tutorials, and even a wiki where you can learn how to do just about anything.  Goldwave is another solid choice for audio editing that I used for many years, and it comes with more capabilities.  But it also costs $45.  Audacity can get the job done for free, which is why it's a no-brainer for podcast and webcast audio editing.

• My favorite new tool is called Dropbox.  It's basically like a Flash drive that you don't need to carry, but even better.  With Dropbox, you can store files online in an easy-to-access tool.  It has automatic synchronization so the files are always ready on your computer when you need them, which is especially handy if you regularly work on more than one computer.  You can also use it to share files with friends -- either a single file they might need to grab quickly, or an entire folder for long-term collaboration.  The software you download onto your computer is slick, giving you drag-and-drop ease of use.  It has a web interface too, so you can access files from a friend’s computer or wherever you are.  With Dropbox, you might never need to email files to yourself anymore.  I've tried several online file exchange services before, and Dropbox is by far the best.  Plus it's free for 2GB of storage space!  You can pay for additional storage if you need it.  (If you sign up using my referrer tracking link, you get an extra 250MB of bonus storage...and I get an extra 250MB too.  Here's my referral link that gives you the bonus 250MB.  If you don't want to use my referral link and you're happy with the standard amount of storage, you can sign up here).
  

Front row tickets in row G? Give your audience the experience they're expecting

It's the first week of the baseball season, and that means another season of trips down to the ballpark, hot dogs, and some great baseball action.  This morning I was thinking about my beloved Cleveland Indians and my plans to visit Progressive Field a number of times this year.

I love Progressive Field and I think it's a great place to watch a baseball game.  But one thing in particular has always baffled me about this ballpark, ever since I saw the first game played there in 1994.  It's the numbering (or actually lettering) of seating rows.  Depending on where you are in the ballpark, the first row isn't always row A like you might expect it to be.  In fact, the Diamond Box and Field box seats -- the premium seats closest to the field behind home plate and both dugouts -- have a notoriously odd lettering system.  In most of these sections, the first row closest to the field is row F, G, or H.

I know why they assigned the row letters this way (or at least I suspect I know).  Because the ballpark has contours and a unique layout, this type of system makes it easier to create uniformity with all areas of the park.  So the system makes sense from the perspective of allowing row Z in one part of the ballpark to line up with row Z in another part.  But to fans who aren't familiar with row G being the front row, it can seem quite strange -- and it probably hurts the Indians' ticket sales.  I don't understand why the Indians don't make row A the front row around the entire ballpark, since it would 1) conform to fans' expectations that the first row is row A; and 2) it would make every seat more attractive on paper, which might increase the value of those seats and the Indians' revenue as a result.

Whether it's baseball tickets or anything else -- don't forget that when you're marketing, make sure you're giving the customer the experience they're expecting!

Last Friday I was comparing my group's digital marketing materials and media kits.  There are a lot of different sites in the group, and each one is customized to the particular market, as it should be.  But there were a lot of odd differences across the media kits -- similar to the Indians' odd choice of row G as the front row.

• Some of the pricing is expressed in gross terms (before the 15% agency discount) and other prices are expressed in net.
• Web ad specifications don't necessarily agree across the sites, despite the fact that we're using a common platform for ad serving.  For example, some sites list the file size maximum as 25KB, when others say 35KB for the exact same ad.
• And perhaps most puzzling, the same product on two different sites can have two different names -- and the same name might mean two very different things to different sites!  On one site, a 125x125 might be called a "Square Ad", while it's a "Marketplace Ad" on another.  It gets really confusing when a Rectangle Ad means 300x250 on one site, and 180x150 on a different site!

I'll definitely be asking my team to standardize their terminology and ensure it's consistent across the entire group in the future, because otherwise we're presenting information to the market that causes needless confusion.

Are you consistent with the way you present information to your audience?  Does it make sense?  But most importantly, is it the experience they're expecting?  In other words, don't call your front row tickets "row G", otherwise you might be making your job harder for no good reason.

Photo by Chris Metcalf

The ad-supported Internet

This is somewhat related to my last post about "the free lunch" that consumers get from ad-supported websites and services.

I ran across a presentation from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) about the current state of online advertising.  This slide jumped out at me for a couple reasons:

• The first bullet point says 70% of consumers want ad-supported services (read: free services where they'll tolerate a few ads) for video.  I'm shocked the stats only came back at 70%, because I would've expected that number to be closer to 90% or maybe more.  I don't think there are too many people who would be anxious to pay a bill for Internet video, just like they pay their cable bill and phone bill now.
  
  
• The second sentence in the second bullet point made me laugh.  "66% of all Internet users would click on more online ads if they were better targeted to them."  I guess this is a perfect example of how people can't predict their own behavior.  When given a survey question that says something like, "Would you click on more ads if they were more targeted to you?", I'd expect a large number of yes responses.  But when it comes to actual behavior, it's funny to see how far from the truth that is.
  

In late 2007, Facebook came out with a system called Beacon for better targeting of ads and offers based on its users' behaviors.  But Facebook was forced to pull back on this effort and remove it from default settings because of a huge public outcry that it was an invasion of users' privacy.  Likewise, behavioral targeting -- the targeting of ads based on users' behaviors -- was recently investigated by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

People say they'd click on more ads if they were more targeted, but the moment the ads become more targeted, users panic because they feel creeped out.  There's lots of data that digital marketers could be using -- for example, detailed click-through data on enewsletters that could be passed along to advertisers -- but most don't because of the fear of user backlash.  I don't know if this phenomenon will ever go away, or if the erosion of privacy will chip away at most users' objections to super-targeted ads and tracking information.