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

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

Is it ever OK to lie with your content?

Quick answer: Yes, but only if you are very good. More on what “good” means in a second.

Back in July, spy photos and brief video surfaced on several automobile enthusiast websites. Depicted was a prototype Porsche station wagon, known in automotive parlance as a shooting brake.

The photos and video caused a sensation and spread throughout the enthusiast community, driving loads of comments on blogs and rampant speculation as to when the boys from Zuffenhausen were going to release the official car to the public. The Frankfurt Auto Show? Tokyo? People wanted to know.

The questions continued to pour in. Did this mean Porsche was abandoning it’s oft-maligned SUV, the Cayenne? Was this new shooting brake, clearly based on the entry-level Cayman, going to be Porsche’s only venture into the world of station wagons? Was Porsche going Volvo on the world, and completing its sellout?

The company had nothing to say. And if the voices clamoring in the blogosphere had calmed down for just a minute, they might have heard the faint sound of snickering.

As it turned out, Porsche’s shooting brake was a fake. The whole thing was dreamed up by the then soon-to-be-unemployed staff of Top Gear America as a parting gift to the show’s many fans.

Most people hate being duped, but in this case, there was no backlash against the show. Accumulate enough goodwill in a community and you will be forgiven the occasional whoopee cushion on the chair.

If you were inspired by the Top Gear crew’s antics and are determined to set the world afire with your own tall tale, here are a few things to keep in mind if you want to be good and do it right..

1. Execute. The only way you have even half a chance is to come up with something clever and then make it sing. It ain’t going to work if people don’t believe it.

2. Don’t mess with people’s emotions in a negative way. I think we can all agree that the Balloon Boy fiasco—originally dreamed up as a publicity stunt—managed to generate only the wrong kind of attention once the truth came out. Nothing that ends with a criminal investigation is worth it.

3. Enhance your cool. Some people don’t react well to being pranked. There isn’t much you can do about this, but you are required to have a sense of humor when dealing with those who don’t.

4. Don’t forget your audience. The Top Gear stunt worked well because the automobile enthusiast community is used to manufacturers trying to hide new models (often in plain sight) and used to manufacturers building show cars that never make it to production. Plus, these are enthusiasts; they love to talk about cars, the good, the bad and the ugly.

5. Be prepared for blowback. Some people, bless their gullible hearts, won’t understand the joke and may begin acting on some of the falsehoods you’ve laid out. Years ago, I wrote a newspaper column, published on April 1, which stated that the legislature had just passed a law changing Daylight Savings Time to mean a two-hour forward leap instead of the customary one. Despite naming my fictitious governor’s press secretary Jacques Strap and despite reminding readers to look carefully at the dateline of the newspaper, we were deluged with calls wondering when this was taking place. Exercise your power judiciously.

—Jonathan
(@bentpiton)

New iPhones hit the stores last week, and consumers—weak economy and two-year contract with AT&T be damned—went home with more than one million of the devices.

Despite the name, iPhones are not phones; they are powerful handheld computers. I own a first-generation iPhone and it can do things that early cell phones could never dream of; in fact, it can do things my first Apple product, a Macintosh SE purchased in 1990, never dreamed of.

Sure it can do all the standard smartphone tricks—texting, calendar, camera, maps with turn-by-turn directions, etc., but where the iPhone really excels is in it’s expandability through The App Store.

There are more than 36,000 apps available for the iPhone and those apps will do just about anything. Apple maintains tight control over the types of apps approved for distribution, but that has not stopped a flood of fart apps from spewing their effervescence throughout the App Store.

Without further ado, here’s a glance at the apps—good, bad and ugly—that grace the iPhones here at Eat Media:

Britta
My five favorite apps:
1.    Camera (Blackberry didn’t have one. Don’t know how I lived without it.)
2.    Maps
3.    Facebook
4.    YouTube (for playing Sesame Street clips to a cranky baby in the car)
5.    Amazon.com

The most disappointing app: Twitteriffic

The app that likely no one else in the office has: iPregnancy

Wendy
My five favorite apps:
1.    History Lite
2.    Wikipanion
3.    Facebook
4.    Pac Man
5.    NPR Mobile

The most disappointing app: UrbanSpoon is a great idea, but always recommends me to go to restaurants in St. Pete and Tampa. None of the suggestions are helpful, and Sarasota seems to be off the map.

The apps that likely no one else in the office has:
1.    The “Festivals” app, which lists every major religious festival this year and next, for eight major world religions.
2.    ”Snow,” which features snow falling across the screen while “Snow!” flashes. For some reason, I haven’t deleted it.

Jonathan
My five favorite apps:
1.    Oakley Surf Report: With a five-year-old obsessed with his Boogie Board, a good surf report is essential each weekend.
2.    Flashlight: Simple, but useful.
3.    YouTube: Time-kill central.
4.    Stars: I love the seasonal ballet in the sky and Stars helps me keep track.
5.    3banana: Note taking that syncs with my desktop computer at home.

The most disappointing app: Adventure. Thought this would be a fun trip down memory lane, but it was just sad to see what used to pass for quality entertainment.

The apps that likely no one else in the office has: Tracking the Eye. Hurricane season is on here in Florida.

—Jonathan (@bentpiton)

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.

Last Sunday, The New York Times Style section featured Gwyneth Paltrow’s new newsletter/blog project, GOOP.

GOOP (Gwyneth’s initials, although we never find out what the double O’s stand for) features G-Palt’s wisdom on everything from family-friendly recipes to assembling a fail-proof mommy uniform. I visited the site Sunday morning right after I read the article, and I signed up for the newsletter (who wouldn’t want banana-nut muffin recipes and fashion advice and from Gwynnie?).

But apparently the GOOP team wasn’t expecting the article to run that Sunday. In the Style section. As the lead feature.

Fair enough. I’d give them some time to scramble for more server space.

A few hours later, same error message.

And today, four days later, same error message.

Where is Gwyneth’s web team? How many hundreds, thousands, millions of subscribers have they lost from this oversight?

UPDATE: Strangely enough, I just received a newsletter from GOOP, as though their “something went terribly wrong” never happened. What??

TAKEAWAY: Crazy that we even have to say this, but it’s never okay to skip any form of testing (load testing, browser testing, user testing and re-testing, etc.). Never. But especially when you know you are about to receive national media attention.

–Britta

Confession: Up until this week, I’ve been building production schedules in Excel. It’s something I started in my early 20’s at Ammirati Puris Lintas, where I wore miniskirts and three-inch heels and tracked 100 unique print ads a month for the Dell account.

(That was before my eventual transition down to the creative floor, where, as a copywriter, I wore red corduroys and green Nikes and got to hang out in the creative lounge dreaming up campaigns for Montblanc and Marriott. Life was much better on the 35th floor.)

After hammering out dates for a July launch only to realize that a September launch would make much more sense, I loathed the thought of reworking the entire schedule. Which is when my brilliant partner Ian informed me that everyone else in the office uses ConceptDraw to build their production schedules.

Is this a print vs. web thing?

Lured in by the pretty colored lines that show intersecting milestones, I downloaded ConceptDraw and got to work. I endured multiple crashes and some annoying usability issues, but I got through it. And the launch date still wasn’t quite right.

Which is when I realized just how much extra work I had been creating for myself as an Excel devotee (er, dinosaur). Because a Gantt chart calculates the total number of days for each project phase, all I had to do was plug in the new launch date and—presto magic!—the schedule updated itself. It even knew the difference between work days and weekends.

Sometimes it’s shocking to realize ways in which you are (i.e. I am) behind the times. I use Mint.com on my iPhone. I Twitter occasionally. We play Pandora in the office on our George. I’m a slave to Basecamp and Backpack for project management, and can even work my way around Dreamweaver. So why was I still using Excel for my production schedules?

Because that’s the way I’d always done it.

Which goes to show that just like our clothes closets (i.e. miniskirts and chunky heels), our Applications folders could use a seasonal assessment.

Meanwhile, I wonder if could still rock the red cords?

–Britta

It was only a 20-second fill before the top of the hour during NPR’s Morning Edition today, but I laughed so hard I nearly plowed into the bus that had suddenly stopped in front of me.

Here was what host Ari Shapiro said: “Author Jane Austen might be rolling over in her grave. A book called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies promises ‘all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action.’ And there’s the film: Pride and Predator. The New York Times says it will ‘Juxtapose brooding aristocrats with a brutal alien that lands in 1800s-era Britain, attacking residents and leaving them with neither sense nor sensibility.’

A quick search later in the morning revealed that, yes, there is a whole industry that marries literary classics with aliens or the undead.

Mashups of seemingly disparate concepts are nothing new, just look at what Harry Turtledove has done with historical fiction and his classic “Guns of the South.”

And now, they are part of the backbone of most user-generated content on the internet. I wonder, though, is the world is really ready to see what happens when Lizzie Bennett meets the living dead?

— Jonathan