For the Content Hungry: The Eat Media Blog

I just listened to a presentation by the super cute and wicked smart Liza Kindred from Lullabot. Presenting at DrupalCon San Francisco last April, Liza gives us a peek into Lullabot’s company’s structure, core beliefs and business strategies. You can listen to the full presentation, but here are some highlights:

1) Make mistakes.

Lullabot prides themselves as an awesome place to make mistakes. When an employee made a terrible data error, co-founder Matt Westgate told her, “You made a giant mistake, and you really screwed up here. That is why you are now Lullabot’s data import expert.” The company also bought her a massage.

Environments where people can’t admit mistakes become very hostile and dishonest work environments.

Fess up to your mistakes. Make them a highlight of your weekly team calls.

2) Room for stupid.

Smart people can ask stupid questions. “Take your stupidness and help other people become less stupid.”

3) Give it away/Have faith

Find out the awesome things you do and give it away. (But not all of it.) Have faith that by giving it away, you are making the pie even bigger.

Out-teach. Out-share. Out-contribute.

(Props here to 37Signals)

//

But one of my favorite parts was how they select clients.

When a potential client comes to Lulllabot, they need to meet 2 out of the 3 criteria:

1) They are a nice person.

2) They have a healthy budget.

3) They have a fun project.

“And one of them has to be that they are nice.”

How’s that for a rule to live by?

–Britta

Web people just loooove Zappos.com.

I’m an avid online shopper and a lover of all things shoes, yet I’ve never bought in to the Zappos hype. Why? Here’s why.

Most popular women’s sandals on Zappos.com:

As a new mother of two, I’m one bad click away from Keens, Danskos and “FitFlops.” I don’t need any encouragement.

Meanwhile, over at Piperlime, the trusty “comfy and cute” search option offers me this:

Which means Piperlime wants to make sure I don’t show up on the next episode of What Not to Wear.

And I appreciate that.

When it comes to fashion, I don’t want to wade through all the Teva look-alikes to find the good stuff. Because truthfully, I don’t trust myself to make good decisions. I need somebody to present some carefully edited items and say, “Here. These are your options.”

Because if you spend too much time looking at Keens, Danskos and “FitFlops,” you start to think, “Well these ones aren’t so bad…”

—Britta

I’m a continuing education junkie. Ever since college, I’ve had a goal of taking at least one class each “semester.”

That worked out especially well when I was fresh out of school and working in advertising in NY. The options were endless, and my company footed most of the bill. I took portfolio-building classes at School of Visual Arts, teaching English as a second language at New School for Social Research, fiction classes through Gotham Writer’s Workshops, summer writing sessions at Sarah Lawrence. I took Susan Shapiro’s legendary “How to Write for New York City magazines and Newspapers” at the New School (she started the class by handing out a three inch thick stack of articles her former students had published as a direct result of taking her class. Talk about a selling point). Then I tried online courses—creative nonfiction through Naropa Institute, travel writing and a bunch of others through MediaBistro.

When the market tanked and I got laid off, I did what any reasonable person would do—I let the government lend me money while I got a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction. (And surprisingly, I use the skills I gained from that degree every single day.)

In the past five years, I’ve been too busy rebuilding a 1920’s cottage, growing a business and having babies to take classes. These life ventures have commanded all my research hours. But I’m happy to say I’m back on track, and this time I’m taking something I’ve never done before.

Tennis.

I am a complete tennis novice. The first day of class, I felt like a ridiculous tennis bunny imposter walking out of my house in my little getup and the racquet I dug out of the basement slung over my shoulder.

I’m such a novice that one of my hour-long lessons consisted solely of my instructor trying to show me how to throw a ball straight up for a serve. “Put the ball in your fingers like this…” My excuse for this pathetic lack of ball manipulation skills is that I was never allowed to do sports or dance or art in school because I was so busy kicking ass on the violin. But anyway.

In today’s lesson, after the miserable faux pas of whacking the ball into the players’ court next to mine—FIVE TIMES, and getting run ragged by a set of forehand topspin/backhand drills, the instructor left me with a little gem.

“It’s never about your opponent,” he said. “It’s only about the ball. Once that ball crosses over to your side of the net, it’s about what the ball is going to do, and nothing else. All you have to worry about is getting that ball back over the net.”

As I drove back to my desk all revved up and flush-faced, thinking about the challenges I needed to solve before picking up the little ones from school, that line really sat with me.

It’s never about the opponent. It’s only about the ball. It’s about getting that ball back over the net with the best form possible—no matter what condition it was in when it landed in your court.

—Britta

The last time I was at SXSW, it was year 2000. I convinced my ad agency bosses that as a copywriter on the Dell account, it was imperative that they send me AND my art director partner (the extraordinary Enrique Mosqueda) out to Austin to investigate all this interactive hoopla.

To put things in perspective, these were the days when we were making ads for PC’s that played music (replace your stereo!) and “Workstations” with “RDRAM technology, dual processor capability and a 133MHz front side bus.” (I can assure you no one in our company had the faintest idea what a front side bus was.)

At SXSW that year, there was a panel on something revolutionary called a Weblog. Epinions.com had just come out of preview mode. And panelists spoke of a future where Broadband would make it possible “to watch videos on our Palm Pilots and beam them to friends.”

And there was a group of cool kids who called themselves Content Strategists. These were the copywriters of the future, it seemed—the ones who would still have jobs in the foreseeable future. They lived in San Francisco, slept in late, worked from home or cafes, were incredibly well spoken and making tons of money. Some of them had blue hair. All of them wore jeans. (I have torn apart our office to no avail in search of my business card from 2001 with the title of “Content Strategist” printed in a glamorous shade of black. Enrique even jazzed it up with ironic lo-fi black square dots. No doubt it is in an old coin purse with expired credit cards, chinese fortunes and cute boys’ phone numbers pre-husband.)

Back in NY, agency folks from junior AE’s to group directors started jumping ship, trading the agency’s pristine environment of glass, leather and steel, where fresh flowers sat on reception desks of the agency’s 15 floors, for poorly ventilated one-room startups stuffed with desks, computers, bean bag chairs and boxes full of dotcom t-shirts. They traded print ads and press checks for banners and HTML, which they learned from Webmonkey cheat sheets.

Back then, we weren’t sure who would be left standing once the glitter inside the Silicon Alley snow globe settled. But we copywriters were adding “content strategist” to our business cards just in case. Even if we had no idea what it meant to be a “content strategist.”

Here we are 10 years later. I’m a partner of a content agency, which means I’ll be footing my own bill to SXSW 2010 (goodbye Driskill, hello Sheraton). Ian will be speaking about web content. And everyone will be talking about the iPad and its promise to bring our favorite magazines back from the dead. Looking forward to 2020, when all of next week’s excited chatter will seem just as archaic as that “front side bus.”

—Britta

Kevin Allen has done some great writing for Eat Media in the past. In this video he portrays writers 1-4 on MyRagan TV

“So, I think I know what I’m talking about there…Sparky.”

The comments on the video are classic.

—Ian

The list of oldest registered domains starts on March 15th 1985 with Symbolics.com. The top 25 oldest domains contain a who’s who of heavy computing including IBM, SUN and INTEL to name a few. Today’s top 25 most popular websites either provide content, store content or search for it. Where things are is important and SEO/SEM have a place (even if it is not in my heart.) Content may not be a magic elixir but it is the web. Take it away and you have a big fat buy button.

*This post was inspired by one of my favorite comments on the web:

—Ian

Seriously.

Because as one of the sources in the Today Show segment said, “I just wanted to learn a little bit about a world that seems to be still asking for content.”

–Britta

As a former literary agent, friends and family are constantly asking me advice on how to get their book published. And since I end up giving out the same information over and over again, I thought I’d share a recent email I sent to a friend.

Chris emailed me because his friends have a b-to-b title they’d like to shop around. Being that the authors are M.I.T. graduates and have a successful medical consulting company, they have a pretty solid chance of getting noticed by a professional/medical book publisher. Here’s what I recommended.

//

Hi Chris,
Ian sent me your email. My experience is in consumer publishing, so I don’t have any editor contacts in the b-to-b sphere. However, some of the same search tactics still apply.

I did a search on Amazon for professional>medical books and got this result.

From this search, you’ll be able to identify book publishers who publish in your category. This is a good way to figure out who you should submit your proposal or manuscript to.

(NOTE: Chris doesn’t necessarily need an agent because his project is a professional/technical title. See below for more info on whether or not you need an agent.)

Once you narrow down your list, go to each publisher’s website to get specific instructions on how they want material submitted. And by all means, follow their guidelines so your manuscript doesn’t get trashed by some intern who was told to go through the pile and light fire to any submission that doesn’t fit their submission criteria–seriously!

McGraw-Hill is a good publisher, and you’d want their Professional-Medical division. From their description, your book would be right on target:
“McGraw-Hill MEDICAL provides students and professionals with the global standard of best healthcare practices by delivering current and comprehensive resources from leading authors and institutions.”

Here’s their page for authors who want to submit proposals.

They have a series of pages about submissions, and you’d want to be sure to go through their checklists before submitting.

In this case, it looks like they would want to see the full manuscript (vs. a book proposal).

However, if you find that other publishers want a proposal and if you need help writing one, I highly recommend the book How to Write a Book Proposal by Michael Larsen.

//

More about finding a Literary Agent
Authors hoping to get published by a mainstream consumer publisher (Random House, Penguin Putnam) will need an agent. Most mainstream publishers no longer accept submissions directly from authors. And no author should even think about signing a publishing contract with having an agent or experienced publishing lawyer (i.e. not your brother-in-law, the criminal lawyer) reviewing it first.

Don’t be stingy about giving away some of your royalties, even if you already have an offer in the bag. There are hundreds of stories about an author who didn’t fight for film rights—or foreign rights or that extra ½ percent—who got royally screwed. Agents typically have “boilerplate” contracts on file with major publishers. These boilerplate contracts represent years of haggling with the publisher’s legal department.

How to find a literary agent? Start by reading the acknowledgments page of your favorite titles in your category. Authors usually thank their agents, and agents tend to be interested fresh takes on the same topics. Don’t fret if a junior agent expresses interest in your project—do you really want to share an agent with Stephen King?

Additional tools for finding a literary agent:

• 2009 Guide to Literary Agents by Chuck Sambuchino
• Jeff Herman’s Guide to Book Publishers, Editors & Literary Agents 2009
• Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction–and Get it Published by Susan Rabiner
• MediaBistro.com’s “Pitching an Agent” column

But don’t just find the agent: find the agent who is going to add the most value.

In his recent post, “Where Have All the Agents Gone,” Seth Godin wrote, “Literary agents are crucial when publishers believe that their choice of content is essential but have too many choices and too little time. But publishers don’t trust every literary agent. They trust agents they believe in. Key point: anonymous agents are interchangeable and virtually worthless.”

Good luck!

–Britta

For the past few weeks, my existence has consisted of eating, sleeping, working and daydreaming about a tortoise. Discouraged by my new landlord’s no pet policy, a tortoise seemed a perfect low-profile pet candidate. My imaginary but soon-to-be pet tortoise is a girl and has a name—Priscilla.

To the best of my knowledge, a tortoise doesn’t bark or meow or chew up the baseboards. Best of all, tortoises are herbivores, so Priscilla won’t require any mashed up meat from a can.

After a week or two of dreaming about Priscilla, my fantasy was interrupted by a harsh dose of reality: tortoises hibernate. For several months. All winter long. I decided that Priscilla can not be, because when she hibernates, I will miss her too much.

If Priscilla were a website, we’d tell her that a hibernating site is a site no one wants.

We’d say, “Priscilla, before you become part of the world wide web, you need to get this through your exoskeleton:”

• What is going to keep your audience engaged and coming back and wanting more?

• Will your content hold your audience’s attention with it’s every move?

• Will your audience be unable to resist photographing it to document every new development and forwarding updates to family, friends and everyone and anyone else in their contact list?

Don’t let your content curl up for a couple of months and go to sleep while your audience checks back, obsessively at first, looking for any sign of life, then frequently, then seldom and then, maybe . . . not at all.

–Wendy Joan

PS. I’ve just learned that not all tortoises hibernate. And even the species that do can be kept awake if they find a good domestic setting. Which just goes to show that even if your content is suiting up for a long winter’s nap, there’s still time to change it’s natural instinct to ensure it never hibernates again.

There’s something intriguing about giving up a vice during the 40 days of lent.*

And while some people take the easy way out (liver and onions) others take the high road and give up chocolate. Or cheese.

Which got us thinking–if you had to go on a 40-day content fast, what would you give up?

Here’s a sampling of “chocolate and cheese” sacrifices from those in the office who were brave enough to answer:

Jonathan

As a news junkie who visits dozens of sites on a daily basis, my top 5 toughest sites to let go of for a month would be:

1. New York Times — It may not be making enough money, but it’s still the most comprehensive and best news site on earth.

2. Huffington Post — The design is a wreck, but it has plenty of compelling content.

3. Extra Mustard — Sports Illustrated’s offbeat sports site. Hilarious.

4. My seasonal niche sports site. In winter, it’s Ski Racing; in summer, it’s Velonews.

5. Apple’s movie trailers site. I love movies, and trailers are about all I have time for these days.

Wendy

Facebook. As a chocolate and cheese sacrifice, rather than liver and onions. Would I be out of the loop after 40 days? What kind of information would I be missing? I’m interested how much “knowledge” I get from Facebook–am I subconsciously or consciously getting local and world news from Facebook via status updates, updates from family up north, or is Facebook just feeding me things I don’t need to know, and aren’t important to me in the big picture of existence?

Ian

Techcrunch. Checking NBA scores. Hearing the sweet voice of Pomplamoose on You Tube.

Britta

Saturday mornings would feel empty without Apartment Therapy and Ohdeedoh.

Even a week without Amazon.com would suck. I’d have to say yes when my local bookstore clerk says “Sorry, that title’s not in stock, but we can order it for you!” And there wouldn’t be any brown paper packages to greet my return home.

My Google homepage. Because between Google Reader, New York Times most emailed, CNN.com, weather and the current moon phase, I can stay reasonably plugged in without working too hard at it.

Miller

Print newspapers. This is not a liver and onions sacrifice. I am actually one of those old fashioned types that reads three (!) print papers every am. Seriously.

–Britta

P.S. Eccentrics (and those who smack them down) won’t want to miss this article from the March issue of Inc. magazine on the Wexley School for Girls.

*When it comes to religion, we here at Eat Media take no sides and welcome all.