Is it just me, or is this ad from Paypal encouraging men to be slimy cheaters?
The worst part? I didn’t find it while digging around on some male-focused site like Esquire or College Humor. It’s right on the Paypal.com home page!
Marketing hint 101: If your “creative concept” runs the risk of pissing off at least half of your audience, is it that good of a concept?
Signed,
Britta, aka Peggy Olson
It’s the kind of letter you always hope to get–some evidence of making a positive impact on a young employee’s career.
In this case, he was fresh out of college and I hired him to be an editorial assistant for a regional magazine group. He was probably there less than a month when I was up against a deadline for our annual food issue–with no cover story. I took a chance and assigned it to him, and he nailed it. I’ve never seen a story about french fries tackled with such sophistication.
I received this thank you note last week after writing recommendation letters for his MFA applications.
It not only made my day week month, but it inspired me to reach out to some of the managers who made a big impact on my career.
Because when it comes to being an editor/manager/employer, isn’t that what it’s all about?
Too many companies fail to seek change until after a brand or product is declared broken. Then change is ushered through at a breakneck pace fed by panic and profits. And even after broken pieces are identified, the focus is often on plugging the dike rather than seeking opportunities to improve the entire process.
In other words, maintenance often trumps improvement. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
The problem
The distance and prerogatives between “change” and “improvement” often creates organizational pressure. The greater the pressure, the more likely employees are to play it safe and the more predictable a brand story becomes.
“But we make site changes every day.”
Don’t confuse maintenance with change. True change is made with the intention of moving the bar forward.
What’s the root of the problem?
The Opportunity
Effective change management is a brand’s greatest asset—if you don’t have the mechanisms in place to effect change, your brand story goes stale.
Ready your brand for change. Prepare your organization to be more nimble. Create systems for gathering input. Map processes for initiating cross-departmental change. Empower your management to move quickly and efficiently.
Why?
Change saves money. Change gets people excited (once they get past the fear). Change broadens your audience. Change evolves your story. Change rocks.
This email arrived in my inbox at 5:02am. Just before 33 percent of the country was about to find out that school was canceled today and we would miss yet another day of work.
What I love about this is:
a) Care.com had this email designed, approved and ready to go
b) They included extra incentive: A huge promotional discount on a last-minute sitter
c) But to get the huge promotional discount, you have to upgrade to a premium membership
d) The email arrived at the exact right time. The moment of need.
Sure, you have your holiday promotions. But what unplanned event might your company prepare for, design for, create a promotion for, and have in the queue to send out right when your customers will need it the most?
By the way, Care.com’s Founder & CEO Sheila Marcelo has one of the best parenting blogs out there.
With all this talk of the new year and fresh starts, showing up to the office today made me feel squirrely. The leftovers of pre-holiday office bustle glare against the January sun, and it’s time to take action. Once I charge through this list, I’m going to buy myself a new notebook and focus on my vision for 2011. Ah, Zen.
1) Update all passwords. Dig up passwords to the sites I can never log in to (that means you, EZ Pass). Add everything to my beloved Keeper app. Add license plate numbers and other important account numbers while I’m at it.
2) Update projects sites and remove stale people. We have a ton of outdated people on Basecamp–clients who no longer work for their former company, vendors we no longer work with, etc. Time to clean house and make room for new partners.
3) Manage email filters and subscriptions. Late last year, we migrated to Gmail for Business. I love the filters–all my newsletters skip the inbox and go straight to the Biz Newsletters folder. But based on the 406 unread newsletters in that folder, I think a better use of my time/inbox space would be updating my Google Reader and unsubscribing from 99% of my newsletters.
4) Do a massive paper purge. Before I transfer all our 2010 paperwork to those tax document storage boxes my bookkeeper orders for me, I’m going to scan and shred as much as possible. You don’t realize how much paper you have until you move offices (like we did last year). Paper clutter is a huge mental weight for me, and I want to get rid of it. Ditto for all the project folders hogging valuable space in my filing cabinet. They are all digitized and backed up–I don’t need paper copies, too.
5) Ditch vendors or services that aren’t working. For us, that means our payroll company, who insists on sending us gigantic stacks of paperwork 2x a month and acts as if we owe them the world for sending us PDF statements. Among other annoyances big and small. Switching payroll is one of those pain in the ass tasks, at least mentally, but there’s no time like the new year to tackle it.
BONUS POINTS: Block out vacations for the year. I’m determined to spend 10 days in Salt Spring Island this summer. So I’m going to put it on the calendar and make it happen.
(Not familiar with Salt Spring? Check out “What It’s Like Living Here” from my dear friend Carrie Cogan.)
–Britta
If you are going to send a holiday card out to your customers that:
Then please reconsider sending a corporate holiday card in the first place.
It’s generic and makes us feel bad for the trees, which doesn’t make us feel good about you.
Thanks.
P.S. My holidays are about these guys, not my State Farm insurance agent.
To us, building a magazine is like building a house. Here’s how to go from vision to finished product in 5 (not necessarily easy) steps.
The very first step in any redesign is discovery: collecting everything you can get your hands on about the existing magazine, the audience and your competitors.
This includes:
Look, we know you’re in a rush, but this is one of the most important steps to launching a successful redesign. Anybody can make a pretty magazine. Doing it with strategy and intention requires research.
Based on what you learn from Step 1, you can now begin to build content departments (i.e. recurring sections and columns…think of your favorite sections in the magazines you read regularly) and plot out the overall flow of the magazine. The goal is to be meaningful—and determining what will be meaningful to readers will come partly from your discovery, and partly from trial and error.
Tip: Plan to survey your audience after the redesign launches, and again after 2 or 3 issues depending on your frequency. Readers are notoriously resistant to change, which is why you want to survey them twice before you even think about redesigning your redesign. Remember all the backlash that happens any time Facebook launches a redesign? Most of those protesters probably can’t even remember what their beloved older Facebook site looked like.
Another tip: If you are under the gun to produce an issue before the redesign is complete, you can begin the editorial phase of your next issue once step 2 is completed. With all your new content departments in place and the space allotted for each piece of content, your editor can begin assigning stories. Hooray!
Ideally, your designer will present three unique design directions. For a magazine, each design direction will typically include:
From here, the team selects one design direction (typically with some tweaks) and you are able to move to the next phase.
Tip: If you’re the kind of organization (you know who you are) who gets hung up on the microscopic details, by all means give your designer images and sample text from an earlier issue to work with. Or use all lorem ipsum. Because the last thing you need is a marketing manager or CEO getting hung up on the incorrect treatment of a product name when you are only supposed to be looking at design concepts.
Once the selected design direction is fine-tuned to everyone and their second cousin’s happiness, you can begin building interior pages (with “dummy,” or stand-in, copy). These pages will act as a template for the production designer once you are working with “live” (real) copy and images.
Several style guide details are worked out in this important phase, such as how footers are handled, what the rules are for headline and subhed treatments, whether photo captions are italicized or bolded, how you are handling calls to action, etc. These are all the hundreds of little details that will make your magazine polished and professional. Most readers won’t notice these details—unless they are sloppy and inconsistent.
This is when the art director tidies up their design files and hands them off to a production designer (the person who will actually be producing each issue of the magazine). If your art director is a freelancer, you’ll want to make sure he/she reviews the files with your production designer and editor, and is available for questions as issues pop up during production.
You, the client, will want to expect some deviation from the templates, since story structures and lengths may change once you’re working with live, edited text. Also, you may not get the dream photography the art director envisioned on a particular column, and your production designer will need to adjust the layout according to reality.
All caveats aside, you are now ready to begin laying out a real issue. Take your team out for a beer.
From my former MFA writing instructor, Robin Hemley, author of Do Over!: In which a 48-year-old father of three returns to kindergarten, summer camp, the prom, and other embarrassments.
October 1, 2010 at 10:57am
Subject: Thanks and Goodbye!
Hi All:
My kind and enthusiastic neice has made a fan page for me in advance of dissolving this Facebook Group. I’m not sure what a fan page means for me. Maybe in my dotage I’ll occasionally look at my fan page and remark, “Wow, will you look at that?! Eighteen fans!” Maybe not. More to the point, I’m not sure what “liking” me on my new fan page will mean to you. Will there be a certain glow about you that others will remark on? “Why Helen (if that’s your name), you’re looking so youthful these days!” You must have pressed the ‘Like’ button on Robin Hemley’s fan page.” Unfortunately, I don’t think that my fan page will make an appreciable difference in your everyday life, but if you’re so moved to “like” me, then yes, you will make my make my coming years in the Old Folks Home pleasant ones indeed. Regardless, I want to truly (which sounds better than “sincerely” a word that always strikes me as insincere) thank you for being a part of this group and for supporting my book, Do Over!
My best to you and YOUR fan pages. May you never be “unliked.”
Robin
P.S. You can fan him here.
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