The Structural Graphics Blog

Content Structure and Cutting Through the Information Landscape

By, Andres Aguirre

The media landscape today is evolving at an extraordinary rate. The ways in which we create, perceive, process, and interact with information are fundamentally altered almost faster than we can realize. Whether it’s the new mobile computer technology such as tablet computers, or discovering a brand new use for an old apparatus, technology itself and the vast amounts of content that it brings are able to be structured, purposed, and formatted in virtually limitless styles.

The way in which the content is structured has much to do with the way in which the information can be used. Sometimes content on the web can be very broad and open-sourced, enabling cooperation and expanding creativity. It can also be streamlined and dispersed for a wide audience, or vice versa, funneled or filtered, and personalized to match a specific user or viewer depending on the intended purpose of the information itself.

The truth is whatever the intent, there’s an absurd amount of information out there, and because of this, getting your information into the right hands is quite complicated. If the intention is to sell, then simply placing your message ‘out there’ is not going to cut it. The chances of someone coming across your ad, clicking through, and then deciding to purchase are extremely slim, so as a result content structuring has become user-centered and highly personalized. People are constantly searching for ways to organize and simplify the content that they care about. The internet learns a lot about you and what you like, so it can filter and display relevant content based on your previous browsing patterns. Some examples of this are applications such as Flipboard for the iPad. It takes content that you and your close circles of friends are interested in, and it arranges and presents it to you in a coherent magazine-like format. Facebook and YouTube also feature algorithms for filtering and displaying only the content that is similar to the content that you have previously engaged in.

For advertisers, this user-centered tendency of organizing content means that you can have enhanced targeting online. You now have a better guarantee that your message will be relevant and more effective online. Yet, users will also become wary of this fact and you still have no guarantee that the user will engage in what you have to say and that it will transform into some sort of interaction with your business.

This is where Structural Graphics comes in. A highly engaging and interactive piece is hard to ignore. People will remember that 3D book cube with lights that popped out from a holographic folder, and the morphing roller with sound. Chances are highly likely that they will keep it, show it to friends and thoroughly digest that content because it’s not online, and it’s not competing for their attention in cyberspace. Instead, it’s completely demolishing those competing envelopes containing bills.

The Case for Direct Mail

By, Andres Aguirre

In today’s increasingly competitive marketplace, many companies and businesses are relying more on their brands to stand out and to differentiate themselves among their competitors. The necessity of a strong customer relationship with the brand has never been more important, and a mixed multimedia presence is required in order to create and maintain such relationships. The economic recession heavily impacted many businesses and the most direct result was usually a slice to their ad spend. And while most companies dropped advertising and marketing from the top of their lists, the ones who saw the most success and a faster recovery were the ones who were able to sustain a consistent branded presence throughout several communication channels - including direct mail.

Direct mail marketing has the advantage of being easily targeted in a very accurate manner, delivering extremely efficient campaigns and high returns on investment as opposed to a radio ad or TV ad, or online banners for example. However, some industry experts have expressed concern over the future of direct mail advertising, and reasonably so. With today’s constantly evolving and diversifying media landscape made possible by mobile broadband internet, it’s no wonder why more and more people are reading their mail, newspapers, and magazines online. After all, it costs less and it’s much easier to deliver content over the web.

Yet, there are some things that simply cannot be translated; some sort of immutable and irreplaceable properties of the medium itself that are somehow lost in translation. Paper is something tangible that you can feel, pick up, turn, fold, and manipulate in ways that are simply impossible with a pdf file. There is no way to translate these aspects into the digitized format – it’s fundamentally different. A computer can help you collect, organize, and visualize complex data into a coherent and apparently similar form, but it also has the ability to malfunction and to distort information. You can’t feel, taste, or smell the internet, and you don’t get nearly as much junk mail as you do junk e-mail. On the internet it is easy to get lost in the virtually limitless amounts of information, infinite numbers of web pages, and vast quantities of user-generated content, whereas traditional print is strictly bound to what is transcribed. No hyperlinks or pop-up ads to take you away to another dimension.

My point is- there are some very elemental differences between our digital worlds of new media and ‘traditional’ media formats. A new emulation or digital incarnation of a preexistent medium should by no means be taken as a substitution for it. This should never happen. Instead it should be seen as an additional communicative tool, another channel by which to reach prospective clients and customers, and obtain feedback, information, and research.

So don’t be in a huge rush to move all your ads to Facebook. Instead of assuming that one medium can perfectly replace another, pursue the creative, interactive, and integrated use of all media. The key to a long and prosperous brand life is taking advantage of the multiple communication channels that are available, and using them to their full potential in order to introduce your brand message and personality - or in short - a consistent integrated multimedia presence.

Structural Graphics Wins 2 Awards of Excellence!

Not to boast or anything, but we were so very excited to find out this morning that we won 2 "Awards of Excellence" at the 16th Annual Communicator Awards that we just had to share the news! The winning pieces were the FlapJack media kit we produced for Cartoon Network and the self-promotional pharmaceutical mailer we produced titled "Tell us where it hurts!".

The Communicator Awards is the leading international awards program honoring creative excellence for Communications Professionals. This awards event has been around for a decade. Communicator Awards receives over 9,000 entries from companies and agencies of all sizes, making it one of the largest awards of its kind in the world.

Categories include print, video, integrated campaigns and audio. Click here to learn more about this event.

Top Five Personalization Gaffes

I have a special folder (digital and snail mail) where I collect interesting marketing pieces I receive. Of course, I like to save those that are amusing for one reason or another. The coupons aren’t bad either, but I never seem to use them. How does a nice iced mocha latte for $.99 sound? Oh sorry, that coupon expired last year.

My all time favorites are the personalization gaffes. I don’t mind that you bought or stole a list that didn’t include my name, but for crying out loud, why does your default title have to be so cheesy?

These are the top five most frequently used default-salutations.

#5. Dear Marketing Professional: Believe me I am flattered that you consider me a professional and that you know I am in marketing, that’s impressive data quality.

#4. Dear Professional: Okay, this is a little less impressive because you didn’t know I was in marketing, but heck, you consider me a professional. I thank you for that because I have been called much worse.

#3. Dear Sirs: Okay, I am a male and occasionally someone calls me sir; but I am only one sir, not two or three, so no need to make that salutation plural. I see this frequently for some reason. It makes me wonder under what circumstance this would be correct. Perhaps if me, and a few of my colleagues (who were male) happened to all open the same piece of mail together. In that case, this would be dead on.

#2. Dear Communicator: Well now this is just plain lazy. You don’t know my name so you have to put something. Technically, I do communicate, so you do get points for that. But so do birds and monkeys, so I am not feeling too warm and fuzzy about this one.

#1. Dear Sir or Madam: This is my favorite and the all time most used by spammers and lazy marketers alike. Somehow you got my email or mailing address but you were not supplied with my name or anything else about me that would indicate my gender.  However, you are pretty sure I am either a male or a female. Well, I can’t argue with that logic.

So that’s my top five. I was going to do a top ten but these are really the most frequently used salutations I have seen. I think the moral of the story is, be sure to personalize with a name, at the very least. Besides, if you don’t know my name than the odds are you got my information from a terrible list broker, skimmed it off an article or website, or obtained it through some other unethical manner. Either way, if I am not that important to you, your message isn’t going to be that important to me.

Surely, you have seen some funny salutations in your day. I would encourage you to share them with us below in the comments section.

Controlling Your Online Reputation

As we spiral into, or rather burst into an age where so much is controlled online, a new buzz word has come into mainstream. “Online Reputation” never really had a meaning before Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, but now companies need to pay as much attention to this area of their business as they do their offline public relations efforts.

An interesting example of how online reputations can spin out of control is with Twitter. It’s free to sign up so you’ll find many imposters pretending to be another person or company. Often these fakes can get lots of followers and fool many people. Take for example this fake AT&T account, or this Steve Jobs account. Both fake accounts with thousands of followers and free to post whatever they want in the name of a real person and company.

User forums can be a great way for your customers to interact with your brand and each other. They can provide you great feedback and criticisms to help steer your business, but they can also get a bit ugly. When someone is behind the vale of anonymity that a user forum provides, they are free to say whatever they want without direct consequences. You might not tell an intimidating executive in person that his product stinks, but you probably wouldn’t have a problem with that if you were online and out of reach! It’s important to monitor your user forums to find inappropriate or inaccurate postings and remove them. However, you shouldn’t necessarily sensor or restrict users from expressing their true feelings about your business, even if they aren’t flattering. Instead have an executive in your business respond to the posts with the company’s position.

As an example of dictatorship-like control of a user forum, I once posted on the Apple forums that I was thinking about getting rid of my iPhone and replacing it with a Blackberry. I listed all the reasons and then sought people’s feedback. I never got any feedback from my post because within a minute or two of submitting my post it was deleted. I understand why it was deleted, probably automatically, because I used the word “Blackberry”, but in reality, this should have been valuable feedback for Apple and a chance to keep a customer.
 
What online reputation really boils down to is what appears when someone searches for your company name. If it’s a bunch of anti-you sites than that is definitely going to be bad. You can’t directly control what appears in the search results, but you can help effect it. Try the following:

 

1. Be sure your employees have LinkedIn accounts and that they link to your company website.
2. If you don’t have one, create a blog and add relevant and interesting content about your company and especially your industry.
3. Setup active Facebook and Twitter accounts and be sure to maintain them.
4. Create YouTube videos about your product or service and add relevant keywords and links to your company website in the description.

 Keep in mind that search engines are increasingly adding live, up-to-date information to their search results pages, so you will start to see your Tweets and YouTube content show up under your company name. This is all good and essentially allows you to control what people are seeing when they search for you.

The online community is a wild untamed landscape, but that doesn’t mean you can’t maintain a polished image. Practice good social networking habits and keep quality up-to-date information on your websites and blogs, and you’ll have as much control over your online reputation as is possible. Resist the temptation to spend tens of thousands of dollars to have an outside firm do this for you, as there are many that would be willing to. Remember, they don’t have anymore control over the web than you do. You’re a willing (or unwilling) participant in this jungle so speak up!

The $30,000 Typo and the Value of Mistakes

We never really discuss mistakes much because I think its human nature to avoid highlighting them in any way. In fact, most people get very uncomfortable at the mere mention of a mistake, especially in business, because it calls their own competence into question. Therefore, many organizations are doomed to repeat their failures.  I think most of you will agree that it’s more productive to recognize mistakes, make corrections and move on.

This week I was chatting with an old colleague from my days in magazine marketing. She was telling me how much our department had changed and then she brought up something I had forgotten about. It was one of the costliest mistakes in our department’s history and it was all mine.  

In early 2000 I was a fairly new campaign planner for a large magazine with a circulation of more than two million. We were planning a subscription renewal test to see which price point attracted more subscription renewals. Oddly enough, you would think the lower price would win but that is almost never the case, but I digress. The test was going to go to about 100,000 subscribers and I was in charge of checking the art work and letter for all three versions to make sure they were cohesive with the various offers. For some reason, most likely because I’m a human, I missed the fact that the designer had put the same price point on all three versions. The mailing went out that way and the test was totally blown.

When I discovered the error I informed my boss, who then told her boss, who then told the publisher. I was never reprimanded, screamed at, made to feel bad, or anything at all. We simply had a meeting about what had happened and came up with a system to avoid the problem in the future. We wrote a new offer-coding system that allowed for fulfillment to immediately recognize an error in the mailing if one occurred. So in the end I really didn’t waste $30,000, I simply diverted the funds to be used in designing a new and better way of doing things. I like the way that sounds, but still I opted not to list that as one of my accomplishments on my resume.

I have to really credit the magazine I worked for. They knew mistakes were going to happen, but they also knew how to handle them in an effective way. I have experience in organizations where this was not the case. Instead there is a culture of fear. Usually this tone is set by the head of the company and it is made very clear that failure is not an option. Unfortunately, you can’t just say something and make it true, so despite management insisting on perfection, mistakes happened. Instead of dealing with them in an effective way, management came down hard on the offenders (or, human beings as I like to call them) and thus creativity, innovation and risk-taking was stagnated.

Have you taken a look at how your company deals with mistakes? Do you discuss them in an open and honest setting or are employees forced to hide from them, cover them up, or even worse, play the blame game? You may not have thought about this in the past, or even thought it mattered much. I believe it does. It’s all part of the culture of a company and ultimately, that culture is what attracts talent, keeps good people and produces results.

Here at Structural Graphics we make mistakes too. Gasp! Not all mistakes you can learn from, you just have to chalk it up to human error. However, there are those mistakes where we gain great insight into our processes and our people. We learn what we can and move on. Of course, as is always the case despite how we may feel during tumultuous times, the sun rises the next morning just as it has for billions of years.

What happened to DMDays and trade shows for that matter?

This week I spent a day at the DMDays conference in New York.  This was a conference that we had exhibited at for many years up until 2007. The show is much smaller than it used to be, but it was still nice to see a lot of familiar faces and visit with some new digital marketing companies. It was also a reminder of why we stopped exhibiting at the show.

I can remember the last DMDays show we exhibited at vividly. We were at our booth greeting people who walked around and realized that almost all of them were exhibitors themselves. The conversations always started like this; “so what do you guys do”? Or, “How is traffic for you guys”? It was painfully obvious that attendance had fallen sharply and the show was, well, dead.

Trade shows are a great way for us to interact with new prospects and show off some of the cool projects we have done. I used to love meeting the people and watching their faces as I showed them how the latest design or technology worked. However, at some point the investment became far greater than the reward and that realization came during that last show.

Let’s consider for a moment what is involved in exhibiting at a trade show in New York, specifically the Javits Center, where DMDays was held up until this year. The fairly high exhibiting fee is just the beginning. We had to ship our booth by pallet to a holding center in New Jersey, then pay the DMA’s own “logistics partner” to bring it to the Javits Center. From there, we had to pay the Javits staff to fork lift it over to our booth. So how much does a fork lift ride from the loading dock all the way to our booth slot 100 yards away cost? Roughly, $225. Then of course there is electricity cost for two days (about $150) and cleaning services (about $100). And if you should need to rent anything like a chair or lamp, they will gladly provide that at roughly three times the cost of actually buying one. That’s no exaggeration.

We used to joke that the reason they can charge these fees and get $4 for a water bottle, or $15 for lunch is because it’s all fake money. When a trade show staff is expensing everything it really doesn’t matter, does it? So the end result is less small companies attend these shows and many larger companies simply scale back their trade show calendars as we did.

Getting back to New York, I was thrilled that they had finally moved the show from the Javits to the Hilton. It’s much easier to get to the Hilton in midtown Manhattan and for the exhibitors, everything is just a bit cheaper. I wish the DMA had listened to their members years ago when they complained about ridiculous fees from their logistics and services partners and of course the poor service that usually accompanies those fees.

When I was walking the floor at the new DMDays show I was remembering what it used to be. I was remembering the hundreds of exhibitors that came and the thousands of visitors the show once attracted. There’s no doubt that trade shows have been hit hard by a suffering economy and greater internet technologies allowing industries to interact like never before. But I also feel like they have grown into this big bloated industry hell-bent on taking advantage of companies, all in the name of being a part of an “important industry event”. For me, I will miss meeting a lot of people in the industry that I have come to know, or shaking hands with our clients and prospects that I only know by name. That was all a lot of fun. But for the cost of train fare and an exhibit hall pass, I’ll enjoy being a spectator.

Let's get Personal!

Personalization has long been a staple for marketers looking to increase response rates. Using variable data to make a piece truly unique is a time-tested and proven method. However, we took that one step further last year and introduced a line of dimensional direct mail pieces that can be printed digitally and personalized. So is this going to be a long and shameless plug? Well, some may see it that way, but I prefer to think of it as a wake up call!

When you combine a high-impact dimensional piece, which in its own right is a powerful ROI booster, with the benefits of personalization, you get amazing direct mail. Furthermore, if you have a good list you can really have some fun.

Personalization goes beyond seeing your name on a printed piece, although people love that. I don’t know what it is, but people like seeing their name and are always surprised by it. If you have the right data you can do so much more. What about sending a piece with geographically relevant images on it? For example, a recipient in New York can see the beautiful city sky line, while someone in Wyoming gets an image of a huge pasture with cattle grazing. They have cattle in Wyoming, right? Or, maybe a cruise line could send a piece to current customers featuring images from a cruise they have not been on yet. By the way, whenever I am fortunate enough to book a cruise we always receive brochures from other cruise lines all the way up to our sail date. What is the point of that?

Recently we offered a way to take personalization to the natural next step. Adding a personalized URL (PURL) to your piece adds a third element of engagement for the recipient. Several recent campaigns have used a personalized piece with a PURL and have seen great results. Let us combine all three of these elements along with a good list and compelling offer and well, you’ll have yourself a winner.

To learn more about BtoMe, our line of high-impact data-driven pieces click here.

Twitter Contest - Win a $100 Amazon Gift Card

If you’re into Twitter you may be interested to know that we have a little bit of a contest going on, which is to say, we’re bribing people! We got the folks in accounting to authorize three Amazon.com gift certificates worth $100 each, and we’re giving them away to three lucky people on twitter. All you have to do is follow us on twitter before June 14th and you’re automatically entered into the contest!

I wanted to give away something super-sexy like an iPad but since the good people in accounting had no idea what that was they said no. But hey, a hundred dollars to spend at the largest online retailer isn’t too shabby, especially since all you have to do is click “follow” and you’re in! The three winners will be announced using Twitter on June 14th so be sure to check your account for direct messages! Oh, and we’re not one of those companies that has ten trillion followers but only follows a few people. We follow everyone who follows us.

Follow us now

Depending too much on volatile social networks

There is no doubt that social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter offer unbelievable business opportunities. However, when businesses rely too much on the emerging medium, still in its infancy, there can be problems.

This week Twitter announced that it will no longer allow third-party applications to advertise in their live tweet streams. But guess what was announced last week? In-stream Twitter advertising platform, Ad.ly, just secured an additional five million dollars of angel funding. There is no word yet on how Ad.ly will deal with this, but it seems pretty bleak for the young startup. There entire business model will be obsolete when Facebook enacts this new restriction next month.

The folks who probably are affected most by sudden regulatory changes from the major social networks are developers. The rules for developers are constantly changing, especially on a major platform like Facebook. For example, Zynga, developers of Farmville and Mafia Wars, two of the most popular third-party apps on Facebook, face this same danger. What if Mark Zuckerberg, 26 year old CEO of Facebook, wakes up tomorrow with an itch in his throat and decides he doesn’t like cute little farm animals and doesn’t want them on his site?

Last year the enormously popular website Tr.im ceased operations. Tr.im was a service that allowed Twitter users to shorten long URLs to preserve space in their 140 character tweets. After offering the company for sale and failing to find a buyer, they had to shut down. A company representative said there was just no way to monetize their site traffic. Isn’t that something they should have thought of sooner? Anyway, all of the millions of people that used their shortened URLs now found them completely useless. Dead links everywhere!

Of course I am not advising that you drop your social networking efforts or cancel your Facebook account. We have seen lots of success driving new people to our brand through Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. But with companies increasing their online spending every year, you have to wonder if some of them are putting all of their eggs in one basket. Smart marketers are finding ways to utilize digital and traditional mediums through highly effective integrated campaigns. These campaigns take advantage of the best of both worlds, which makes a lot of sense given how volatile online networks seem to be.