This weeks What We Do’s

— Ian

Much as we bemoan the death of print, let’s take a moment to bow down to its beauty. Plazm, Wallpaper, ID.

The Finality of Print

The sheer volume of people sitting at your local Borders or Barnes and Noble leafing through stacks of magazines is proof positive that the tactile article/advert is a wonderful medium. Difficult and limited, but wonderful. The inherent beauty/hurdle of print’s finality holds communication secrets that digital should, but doesn’t always embrace.  One of the most prevalent being — just because you have the ability to change and modify doesn’t mean you should publish/go-live with the strategy of “fixing it later” or “trying it out.” In print, blueline changes cost money and ink on paper is final. But more interesting is that the experience is one-way. It could be months before results come can be calculated for magazine or its advertisements. The hope of the editor/designer/publisher is that the content and design are engaging enough to encourage users to do something. As we move to more digital, fluid forms of communication and shorten that feedback loop to seconds, I believe the foundations of print are even more valuable.

Magazine design, poster design and newspaper layout are the foundation of how we interact with all media today.

Simplicity and Immediacy

Constraints are wonderful things. Constraints provide context and force agencies (and clients) alike to focus on business goals. Which in the case of, say a website, is to get the user to do something. As our methods of communicating with users become more sophisticated we need to deliver digital solutions with the same tact and efficacy that we do for print. While we now have the ability to change/iterate in code or CMS, this option should not serve as part of the solution but rather it should be looked on as a gift to improve the experience and the outcome. Interaction/Web design are grand mediums for designers interesting in exploring a more immediate, two-way conversations with users. The primary distinction between print and digital is the measurable immediacy of the interaction — the time between launch/publish and action/result.

In simpler terms. Do less better so you can measure results more effectively.

—Ian

Keep an eye out for Print to Web – #2 (Why both mediums need to survive and integrate.)

Earlier this month, I started a four-week Introduction to Meditation course. My journey to becoming a beginner was a winding road, with good books and great talks, even a three-day silent retreat. And a lot of time sitting on the floor with a wandering mind.

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Our assignment for the first week wasn’t to meditate. Instead, we were told to spend a moment each morning thinking about the day before us, and the following tasks:

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1. Refrain from destroying living creatures.
2. Refrain from taking that which is not given.
3. Refrain from misconduct due to sensual desires.
4. Refrain from false speech.
5. Refrain from intoxicating drinks and drugs that lead to states of carelessness.

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Then, right before going to bed, we reviewed the day. Our teacher, Lennart, who spent years living as a monk in Sri Lanka, reminded us that these were training rules—not commandments—which would probably break (but should try not to), that build the determination, awareness and the concentration necessary for a strong meditation practice.

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Going into my week, I thought my only challenge would be red wine. But, when I took a few moments to slow down and think about the day before me, something wonderful happened. I became more alert and aware of my actions as I moved throughout my day. As you might imagine, I wasn’t contemplating killing anyone, but as I hardboiled my morning egg, I wondered if that counted.  Ants appeared out of nowhere, and I did my best to sweep them outside. I was house-sitting, so “taking that which is not given” was a particularly tough call. And the only night I forgot to reflect on my day was Friday, when I did have too much wine, but was mindful of every glass ordered.

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All this got me thinking about office life. In any monastery, Lennart told us, monks don’t sit down for hours at a time without doing something first. It can be as simple as lighting a candle or giving an offering, but the action clearly begins a long session of meditation.

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When we sit at our desks in the morning, how many of us think about the eight hours before us? If you’re like me, you dive into your inbox or create a to-do list. But, what if, we took a moment at the start of every day to think about five rules to try and follow?

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Here are mine:

1. Don’t take what isn’t given. And be a good listener.
2. No false speech.
3. Be mindful of your time and everyone else’s.
4. Tell one story a day. Look for lessons where you least expect them.
5. Think about the big picture.

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What office rules do you live by?

—Wendy Joan

For me, the hardest part of an interview is listening back to the recording. I’ve had enough practice not to hate how strange my voice sounds, but no matter how great the content is, I’m always disappointed by the overlapping “mmhs” I always add in solidarity with my source. And the crinkling paper. And the pen drops that my handy-dandy Zoom never fails to record.

But, maybe there’s more to those “mmhs” and little interruptions than we all thought? I’ve been reading Storytelling for User Experience, and finding a lot of great parallels between storytelling and listening for UX that can be directly applied to interviewing.

“Good listening can be addictive,” writes Quesenbery and Brooks. “If you have ever been really listened to, then you know its power. We then want it, even crave it and seek it constantly.”

Even though listening to someone speak seems simple enough, we’re more used to not being listened to. We’ve developed “highly effective defense mechanisms”—like raising our voices or pausing at the threat of interruption—which detracts from really listening. Or really telling the story we want.

Those paper crinkles and pen drops, however subtle, are interruptions that prevent you from really listening, and might ultimately prevent the source from sharing her deeper thoughts.

Here’s a list of five tips on learning to be a good listener via Mind Tools and Storytelling for User Experience:

1. Pay attention. Give the speaker your undivided attention and acknowledge the message.
2. Show that you are listening. Use your own body language and gestures to convey your attention.
3. Reflect back. Show that you understand what is being said by paraphrasing and summarizing periodically.
4. Defer judgment. Allow the speaker to finish. Don’t interrupt.
5. Respond appropriately. Be candid and open in your response.

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Sounds easy enough, right? But if your audio sounds like my audio, you’ve got a little bit of work to do. Your source—and your story—will thank you.

—Wendy Joan

(Photo by Melvin Gaal)

“A few well-chosen stories might be just the thing to get everyone to put down their Blackberries and join the conversation.”
—Storytelling for User Experience

Photo by: Britta

Where taken: Connecticut

Camera used: Sony Cybershot

It was the last summer before we all had babies. Eat Media was less than a year old, and we took the business “on the road” for the month of August. This was our first stop: our friends’ lake house in Connecticut. We would work until 4pm or so, go water skiing and then go back to work. This photo captures the freedom we felt that summer. The freedom to invent the business and the life we want.

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Photo by: Wendy Joan

Where taken: The Harmandir Sahib (Golden Temple), Amritsar, India

Camera used: Sony Cybershot

I spent most of 2007 living in Pondicherry, India, with eight rowdy American girls and one French guy. That May, three of us travelled more than 1,700 miles north to Amritsar. Shortly after arriving, I quickly snapped this photo outside the gates. The sun was shining straight in my eyes and I couldn’t see a thing. We spent the next few days exploring the temple and Punjabi countryside before heading for the Himalayas. I so close to Pakistan I could have touched it through a chain link fence, and would have done so if the border patrol didn’t have such big Kalashnikovs and so much ammunition.

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—Wendy Joan

“Time” and “tracking time” are very different things. Seconds aren’t real. Neither are minutes. Neither are hours. The only real thing is a day – one rotation of the Earth about its axis.

—Every day is a revolution. Suit up to communicate, fight for change or make peace.

Professor Philip Zimbardo talks about: The Secret Powers of Time.

—Ian

I’m on a mission to keep August Fridays interesting. What better way than with a little story?

Share your own tales from the city.

—Wendy Joan

Walking through downtown Minneapolis
I’m wondering why we
are most ourselves
in the least amount of space.

My heels have healed
from an unfortunate new pair of shoes
and I’ve snuck
half an hour away.

I turn corners and
cross at red lights,
pretending to lose myself
even though I know where I am,

inventing personalities for avenues

and side streets

and fleeting glances
from people who interest me.

I am in love with the urban—

the hot dog cart apprentices

and saxophone players who persevere
through old reeds and pocket change.

Content Marketing and Content Strategy both suck at 2 things.

1. Describing the interrelationship between one another.

2. Highlighting the difference between content types.

There are only 2 types of (ongoing) content types that companies can create:

TRAFFIC/SEO Content

— Content that is generated to drive traffic.

— Content generated solely for SEO will lure users to a landing page but is not, and in most cases cannot be tailored to, engage.

* Costs for traffic building content can be as little as $5 an article.

TRUST/Trustbuilding Content

— Content that is created to build trust with visitors through the delivery of relevant and timely information.

— Content generated specifically to generate trust won’t always be as keyword rich as SEO articles.

* Costs for trustbuilding content can cost as much as $1 a word.

The implied value of these services/deliverables are very clear. Getting visitors to your site is not at all the same as keeping them there. Inversely paying for good trustbuilding content without a comprehensive search strategy that includes SEO is also shortsighted.

—Ian

It seems every publisher has an ironclad policy when it comes to letting sources review stories pre-publication: either they forbid it, or they require it. These policies were set in stone some time around the Mesozoic era and any troublemaker who tries to alter them clearly does not understand A) journalistic integrity or B) the business objectives of the publication in question. In fact, these policies are taken so seriously, anyone who violates them faces grounds for immediate termination.

A post on UMagazinology, a blog about university magazines published by the editors of Johns Hopkins Magazine, tackled the subject of pre-publication review in a recent post (the bolding is mine):

“Why not? What’s the harm?

The harm, I think, is to our standing as professionals, and that is not a minor thing. University magazines produce the highest-quality work, and thus best exemplify and promote the excellence of their parent institutions, when they are allowed to approach the work as professional journalists. And it is part of journalistic professional practice to not show stories to sources before publication. No matter how strongly you stipulate that you are showing a piece to a source only for verification of accuracy, you are implicitly inviting everyone who reads the story to approve it, advise on how it should be written, and grant permission to publish it, and all those things undermine our standing as professionals. That in turn undermines our ability to argue for the freedom to publish substantive, credible stories that will be read because they matter and because our readers trust how they were produced. We don’t advise chemists, physicists, surgeons, literary scholars, historians, biologists, or mathematicians on how best to do their work. If we genuinely believe that what we do merits professional respect and an essential measure of autonomy, why do we so willingly accede to non-journalists telling us how to do our jobs?”

Yeah! Like they said!

Print-to-Web integration and the Advent of New Devices has Shaken Up Production. This coupled with the adoption of more user-friendly CMS systems and device driven publishing taxes most organizations on the production, project management and change management fronts.

“Publishers have got to do things that are richer, more dynamic and interactive, not just transfer a static page from print to digital.”

Steve Grande, VP of Sales for Fry Communications

This is exceedingly difficult when many publications originating as traditional print based pubs are now transitioning (see struggling) to move to digital. Excessive stakeholder reviews and print based project management/review processes are dinosaurs in today’s digital world —a world where news is immediate, influence is measured by trust and originality expands with devices and technology.  Brands that want to be successful need to embrace speed and adopt the concept of being nimble, whether they inhabit 500sq ft or 50 floors. It’s not just about undermining an editor’s expertise or dragging out a project. It’s about the final outcome. It’s about your brand.

—Britta

We recently launched a redesign for a university magazine (finally!) and thought we’d pass along some of our favorite tips for making your own custom publication better.

1) Rethink your magazine architecture

BEFORE A front of book section that didn’t evolve with the magazine’s needs. Too many new sections had been added over the years, and the naming convention was starting to not make sense.

AFTER Help readers hold their place by redesigning the flow of the entire reading experience. For example, we converted several choppy sections into one umbrella FOB section that encapsulates the university’s mission. We gave the client a menu of various columns/formats that can be rotated in and out of this section from issue to issue.

This new format also creates a stronger branded magazine that a) is not re-invented each issue and b) begins to build recognition with readers.

2) Kill the “Wall of Words”

BEFORE Each page had one story and an average of 550 words. There were excessively long narratives about a single source. An earlier attempt to break up this text with subheads was ineffective because subheads were the same size/style as the body text.

AFTER Chunky, colorful, big and juicy. Get away from a traditional narrative style—there are a million ways to tell a story. Put two or three stories on a spread and let stories cross the gutter (which also means you’ll greatly increase the number of voices in each issue). Make numbers and subheds stand out from body text. Update your fonts.

Even better, ask yourself if your story could be more quickly communicated in a chart or graphic. For inspiration, start collecting “charticles” from New York, Esquire and Good. Think those publications don’t apply to your trade pub? Check out what Inc. has been up to lately. Bring some much-needed inspiration to your weekly status meetings by sharing examples from Information Is Beautiful.

3) Don’t tell a life story in every story. Or any story for that matter.

BEFORE A 150-word piece about an award recipient, once in the hands of marketing and product stakeholders, morphed into a 600-word monstrosity.

AFTER Focus on a tiny sliver of the story. Do this by establishing very clear column descriptions and criteria (complete with word counts!) in your redesign. For example, one of the goals of this particular magazine is to get alumni to re-enroll. So we created a column called “How it Paid Off” which essentially demonstrates the “ROI” of spending thousands of dollars on an advanced degree. This could easily eat up 1,500 words. Instead, we created a list format:

HOW IT PAID OFF

Name/Degree
Job title before degree
Job title after degree
How my degree helps me make a bigger impact
Biggest benefit of earning my degree at x university.

We captured this in 102 words. In and out.

4) Use better art (without necessarily spending more)

BEFORE Stale headshots, outdated stock illustration styles, far too many “grip and grin” photos

AFTER Instead of sending distant sources to their local mall photo studio (shudder!), we worked with the same art budget and hired photographers across the U.S. who could capture environmental portraits (hint: get your sources outside). We also pushed sources for submitted images and gave them ideas on what we wanted to see. When we got good images, we ran them big. We saved the standard headshots for thumbnails (or not at all).

5) Remember: What’s important to your administration is probably not what’s important to your readers

BEFORE Too much real estate given to university news, and placed where the university thought it belonged—right up front. Long articles covering university events that already happened.

AFTER With a 2x/year frequency, news is not a primary purpose of this magazine. So we moved news section to back of book and capped the word count for each “brief.” (Again, build this criteria into your redesign. The more “rules” you can establish up front, the better chance you have against word creep.) Each news piece ran with a call to action to get the full story online (interested to see the metrics on those redirects).

For event coverage, which used to eat up spreads at a time, we offered up one 1/3 column where we ran big, chunky sound bites. Outcome? We were able to “cover” four events in 139 words.

What would have made this project even better?

A print-to-web integration, which is something all clients should include as a mandatory line-item on their publication budget.

Check out some great examples from min online.

Ready to launch your own redesign or improve your print-to-web integration?  Give us a shout.

—Britta