You may have noticed some small tweaks to Sparksheet’s design in recent days. While they may seem cosmetic, these changes are part of a larger effort to make sure our content works on a variety of screen sizes, from the smartphone in your pocket to the HD TV in your living room.

Responsive web design is the sweetheart of the web design community right now, and with good reason. It allows publishers to be cross-platform without sacrificing content or redesigning from the ground up every time a new device comes out.

Ethan Marcotte first coined the term last year, but this design philosophy has gained a lot of steam recently (check out the newly-designed Boston Globe website), and there’s no doubt that it will become the standard as more and more connected devices come out.

Really, did you think everyone would just make an app for every single website on every single device?

We first decided to take the plunge into the unknown with this approach for our redesign in June, but now we’ve really tightened the screws. Since our fastest-growing audience segment consumes Sparksheet content via mobile device, it only makes sense that our on-the-go users get the experience appropriate for them.

To test out the responsiveness of the site (without fishing out your phone), simply resize your browser by dragging the corners of the window. Notice how the elements on each page shift as the browser changes sizes, while our carefully-curated hierarchy stays intact.

Awards season is upon us and last week alone Sparksheet received an eye-popping eight nominations – seven for the Canadian Online Publishing Awards and one for the Eddies!

For the COPAs, which are presented by Masthead, we’re a finalist in the following categories (B-to-B division):

• Best Online-Only Site
• Best Web Design
• Best Blog
• Best Use of Social Media
• Best E-Newsletter
• Best Mobile-Optimized Site
• Best Article or Series (for our long-form feature on Cuba’s first branded film)

At the COPAs last fall we won a record four awards and we’d be honoured to do nearly as well this year.

We’re also super excited about our first-ever Eddie nomination. The Eddies are Folio magazine’s awards for international excellence in magazine editorial. Sparksheet is a finalist for Best Online Column or Blog (B-to-B) for our Creative Director Charles Lim’s blockbuster column Print in Digital Clothing: The Problem with Magazine Apps.

It feels great to be recognized both in our home country and internationally, and for everything from our editorial and design prowess, to our social media chops (kudos to our Community Manager Joey Tanny for the latter).

It goes to show that Sparksheet has become, in just two short years, a truly multiplatform magazine brand.

The 2011 Canadian Online Publishing Awards will be handed out on October 24 at The Gladstone Hotel in Toronto. The 2011 Eddie Awards will be presented on November 1 in New York City. Hope to see you there.

Congratulations to the other nominees, including our talented colleagues at EnRoute, Experience, Fairmont and In magazines!

How do you maintain Playboy’s unique voice, outlook and culture across so many disparate media, from print and video, to Facebook and Twitter?

It’s a challenge to ensure that all of our mouthpieces are aligned in terms of voice, tone and messaging. Back in the day, the magazine was it.

Now we have constant external communications on TV, radio, Playboy.com, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Ustream, TheSmokingJacket.com and other communications vehicles.

Each of these platforms must stick to the brand’s identity and [they] are constantly monitored to make sure they’re on-brand and in line with Hef’s vision and our editorial director’s ideas.

That said, each platform communicates and publishes differently and may also have separate audiences, so the way they represent/interpret the brand may differ slightly.

What’s the goal of Playboy’s social media activity, and how do you measure success?

We have a number of goals in social media. First, building celebrity for our Playmates and models. Years ago TV was the only way for a Playmate to make the major step from centrefold to household name. Pamela Anderson and Jenny McCarthy are prime examples, but since we know that every Playmate with some charisma and a story to tell isn’t going to end up on TV, social media is the way to grow their audience.

Each new Playmate goes through our social media training and is introduced to our fan base (5 million+ on Facebook, 250,000 on Twitter) when her issue comes out. Within days she’ll have a thriving fan base of her own and we’ll work with her to create content and identify digital influencers to interact with. There are over 90 Playmates actively using Facebook and Twitter with a combined following of over 2 million, giving Playboy the sexiest army of digital brand advocates in the world.

Second, increasing engagement with our fan base beyond the pages of the magazine. We create specific content franchises for each platform in order to properly use each channel and not just post content for the sake of having a presence on a certain site.

Third, generating revenue. A few years ago, managing social media for a brand was mainly focused on growth, engagement, listening or some other buzz term. Monetizing was a nice-to-have but certainly not a primary objective.

Now once we reach a certain scale, revenue is a must in order to justify the existence of jobs like mine, right? True success in this space is quantifiable.

How would you describe the quintessential Playboy reader, and have your perceptions of him or her changed as you’ve engaged with readers online?

In terms of our social media audience, it spans beyond just the obvious, which is the guy who appreciates beautiful women.

Some of the other types we see include people that love the brand and its history, women that became fans after watching The Girls Next Door on E!, women who are aspiring Playmates, and people in search of men’s entertainment and lifestyle content.

We all know that Top 10 lists and sexy photo galleries are good for traffic, but Playboy has made its reputation on long-form articles and in-depth interviews. How do you attract eyeballs without sacrificing the quality of your content?

It’s important for us to recognize that there are many different types of people that come to Playboy.com via many different entry points. For example, if someone gets to the site to check out the latest Playmate, how can we make them aware that there’s a great interview or gaming feature they’d be interested in?

Or if they got to Playboy.com from a site that linked to an interview, how can we keep them on site to enjoy the eye candy? The “link-bait” may bring in more visitors, but the “long form” is what will build a true audience for a site.

With the Playboy mansion, you guys were pioneers in extending the “magazine experience” into the real world. Do you think being involved with things like events and nightclubs is an increasingly important part of what it means to be a magazine in the 21^st century?

Absolutely. Playboy allows consumers to interact with the brand and experience the Playboy lifestyle through parties and experiences at the Playboy Clubs. In 2006, we opened a multi-faceted entertainment venue in Las Vegas. More recently, we’ve opened Playboy Clubs in London, Cancun and Macau and look forward to continuing the expansion.

The Playboy brand has always been representative of “the good life” and we have always offered exclusive opportunities to enjoy that good life via nightclubs, parties and special events.

Playboy.com features a mix of free content and premium stuff. Do you think you’ve struck the right balance between the “open web” and “walled garden” approaches to online content?

Playboy has a number of web properties that aim to reach different audiences. Playboy.com includes a mix of girl features, entertainment stories and longer articles.

The Smoking Jacket, Playboy’s safe-for-work site, includes shorter posts, lists, “quick hits” that you’d want to pass along to your friends, and non-nude girl features. Playboy’s subscription sites offer extended girl content.

Our sites aim to attract different readers and viewers; we work to give fans a variety of content, both free and paid.

When people think of Playboy, they obviously think of your founder, Hugh Hefner. How have you brought Hef’s considerable legacy and personality into the online space?

Hef is extremely active on Twitter and it has become a part of his daily routine. People always ask if it’s really him, and it is Hef on his iPad from the Playboy Mansion. A lot of his tweets are answering fan questions, good or bad, so Twitter truly is an engagement platform for him.

Photos courtesy of Playboy

Image by victoriapeckham via Flickr

There is a new formula for success for content publishers and it’s moving editorial collaboration from physical newsrooms to online newsrooms.

The new formula, developed by digital innovators like Gawker and The Huffington Post, involves a leaner editorial team, a larger pool of outside contributors, and a dramatically higher volume of content; whereas a print magazine might publish 10 articles per week, their online successors are now routinely producing 15 posts a day.

As the web spawns more and more publications on myriad topics, successful content creators have to “own” their niche. A fashion site, for example, can’t simply cover the royal wedding; they need to publish dozens of posts, in various media formats, analyzing the outfits of Westminster’s celebrity guests.

The efficient digital HuffPo/Gawker model is moving from web pioneers to traditional media publishers and even brands – who are applying it to their content marketing efforts (see American Express’ Open Forum or Amazon’s Backstory).

But while this efficient digital model is great for publishers, editorial teams are bearing the brunt of the stress.

The editor’s dilemma

The reality of the new digital publishing world is that fewer people have to manage the creation of more content by more contributors who are increasingly scattered around the world.

The result is that editors are being overwhelmed by logistics and don’t have the time they need to think about their audience and their content.

Editorial teams have looked to technology to overcome this challenge and boost productivity. But while the big-name sites have invested millions in custom software to manage their operations, the majority of publishers – operating on a shoestring – are limited by the free tools available to them: e-mail, IM, Google Docs and generic project management software.

So the typical online newsroom looks something like this:

• a Google spreadsheet to keep track of pitches
• a Google spreadsheet or Google Calendar to keep track of an editorial calendar
• a Google spreadsheet to keep track of payments owed to contributors
• a Google spreadsheet to keep track of metrics on how contributors are performing
• an e-mail inbox filled with invoices, pitches, various drafts, and other messages

Designing a new newsroom

The newsroom has finally made the leap from paper and whiteboards to digital, but it’s still tremendously disorganized and difficult to manage.

Information is duplicated across various documents, collaboration is limited by an editor’s inability to granularly control who can edit what on a document, and every action still needs to be followed up by an e-mail so everyone is on the same page.

While these new cloud-based tools have helped, most online editors still find themselves drowning in logistics and serving more as a traffic cop than an editor.

Much is changing in the new era of digital content. But the primary functions of an editor – analyzing audience, curating content, verifying accuracy, selecting contributors, refining articles – are as important, or more important, than ever.

It’s time to design online newsrooms that reflect the new realities of online publishing and allow editors to devote their time and energy to, well, editing.

As you know, we’re big believers in making content accessible to people wherever they may be – at home, on the go, or even in the air. So the Sparksheet iPad App is just one more platform for you to access our award-winning think pieces, Q&As, videos and other original and curated content.

Unlike some other magazine brands (you know who you are), we’re not trying to reinvent the wheel with a flashy-but-clunky app that puts design before content, and print before digital. Besides, Sparksheet.com – our newly redesigned website – is already optimized for the iPad and all sorts of different screens and mobile devices.

The Sparksheet iPad App keep things simple, searchable and clean – just the way we like it. Let us know what you think!

New York Magazine is the latest in a slew of magazines that has taken its brand into uncharted territory. MediaPost reports that the weekly mag has teamed up with HowAboutWe.com, a dating site that allows users to choose partners based on date proposals. Basically, you post a date idea and find someone who digs your proposal.

This may seem like an odd coupling, but think about it: New York Magazine’s website devotes an entire section to restaurants and another one to bars. A partnership with a dating service that focuses on dates – which often take place in restaurants and bars – seems like a no-brainer.

HowAboutWe isn’t some fledgling startup either. It’s been garnering buzz for the past year or so. Mashable, Gawker, CNN and The New York Times are just a sampling of the publications that have covered the free dating service.

So it seems like a smart move for New York Magazine to jump on the bandwagon and collaborate with an up-and-coming brand.

Of course, New York isn’t the first magazine to extend its brand through innovative partnerships. TechCrunch reported back in February 2010 that Lucky Magazine had partnered with location-sharing site Foursquare to create a tool that offered tips to New York Fashion Week attendees on the best places to get coffee, WiFi access, or other necessities.

Foursquare has also inked deals over the past year with the likes of Bravo, Spin, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

Whether these partnerships go on to become success stories or not, the bottom line is that the notion of what a magazine brand is and does has changed forever.

Don’t be dazzled by those flashy iPad magazine apps or digital page-turners. Creating something like the Wired iPad app may get a round of high-fives from print designers, but put it beside the web experience and it becomes decoration more than anything useful.

The mentality with most magazine apps seems to be, “Let’s make it look just like print.” After all, a tablet is roughly the same size and thickness as a print magazine, so users will use it the same way, right?

Wrong.

Technology changes the way we use things

Think about the evolution of the calendar. A printed calendar typically consists of 12 pages: new month, new page, new cute kitten image.

For added convenience, there are also miniature versions of the previous month’s and next month’s layouts, and on the back of the calendar there’s a grid of all 12.

You simply fill the boxes with content, then flip to the next page when the month is through.

Now take that static interface and translate it to a digital device. On a dynamic interface, time can be represented in a variety of ways and the content can be manipulated to suit whatever you’re interested in at that moment.

You can sort by hours, days, weeks, or months. Or you can choose to view only work appointments or your kid’s soccer games or jam sessions with your band. You don’t have to see everything at the same time.

By shifting to digital, a calendar becomes more versatile and useful than ever. And because of alerts, we don’t even have to check it anymore!

Screenshot of Klok, a time-tracking app.

So what does that have to do with magazines?

What makes a magazine is a whole other discussion, but I think we can agree that it’s not about the neat columns and colourful pages. Ultimately, it’s about the content and the experience of consuming that content.

The goal of designing magazines for the screen should be to improve the magazine experience, even if it means breaking some of the rules of print.

While the print reader is forced to move from issue to issue, page to page, column of text to column of text – next, next, next – the web reader scrolls through at her own pace and can fly off to anywhere she pleases.

There is no one direction. If there is a natural “next”, there will be an easy way to get to it, placed right where she’d expect it.

On a touchscreen tablet, swiping is so much fun that designers have started using it as a way to move to the next article (instead of the next page), transforming our conception of a magazine from a series of pages to a collection of articles.

This is a significant shift, but again, swiping is meant to mirror the way we flip through pages in a print publication. It’s still about moving forward. What if we were no longer compelled to move in a single direction at all?

The Wired magazine app includes a sentimental artifact of print design: long texts broken into columns on a screen.

What’s “next”?

The “linear to web” shift that we saw with calendars hasn’t happened yet with magazines, and won’t happen until we rethink the idea of “next.”

From radio to TV to print, the old media paradigm is all about one thing (program, ad, article) leading to another. But the web experience isn’t linear. Instead of a single thread of content it’s, well, a web.

New media already got over this hump a decade ago. A network consisting of linked web pages (you know it as the World Wide Web) really took off when users were able to easily browse and contribute to that network (Web 2.0.).

Now our networked devices weave that content into our daily lives through things like blogs and RSS feeds and cloud-based organization tools (see: Google).

The reason this content is so nimble is because it was born digitally and is semantically formatted, not bound to a series of arbitrary separations like pages in a PDF.

How can magazines catch up? Wouldn’t you like to know!

For starters, design for the medium and stop making magazine apps that simply add a pretty layer of decoration to an existing product. Focus on the content and the experience. And don’t try to make it look like print, just because.

Branded Content + Entertainment

SET Japan creates pop art QR codes for Dom Perignon’s Andy Warhol tribute.

Home Depot’s DIY specialists set up shop… everywhere?

Dominos pickets pizza-hating holdouts, with entertaining results.

Airlines + Travel Marketing

JetBlue and Southwest consider your baggage.

Online travel companies join forces in an attempt to block Google’s proposed ITA software purchase.

Stardate 10/22/2010: Foursquare user becomes first person to “check” in from space.

Media + Magazines

Magazines are entering “the conversation business,” conclude the folks at this year’s Reimagining the Future conference.

Seeing the world through rose (and blue) colored glasses – Japan releases a 3D newspaper.

Social publishing junkie Hugh McGuire constructs a new home for audiobooks.

Media + Magazines

Design buffs are abuzz about the new Writer app for the iPad (we’re loving the product brief as much as the app).

Living up to the hype: the US eBook market expected to reach $500 Million in 2010.

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow: a look at the state of the magazine from three distinct angles.

Airlines + Travel Marketing

A self-proclaimed “Instapaper for the real world,” Foursquare’s revamped iPhone App offers location-specific “tips” and curated “to-do” lists.

The no-nonsense bus gets a business casual makeover: bus lines step up to compete for the business travel ticket.

Photographer Nick Gleis offers exclusive views into the world’s most opulent private aircraft.

Branded Content + Entertainment

Why marketing heads should turn to Hollywood for cues on branded content.

Ad network VideoEgg acquires conversational media company SixApart to form SAY:Media.

Time Magazine’s curious countdown of oddball celebrity endorsements.

Photo by Yoshimai via flickr

I walk down the air bridge practically naked. My iPhone and laptop are packed away, my latest issue of The New Yorker is sitting at home with the mail.

In my civilian life, I won’t go to the grocery store without bringing an emergency supply of podcasts for the 15-minute trip.

But for this nine-hour journey from Montreal to Frankfurt, via Amsterdam, I decide to put my media and entertainment destiny entirely in the hands of KLM Royal Dutch Airways.

Customization vs. Curation

Both in flight and on the ground, most new technology falls into one of two categories: curated or customizable. On one hand, on-demand entertainment (think TiVo), à la carte purchasing (think iTunes) and personalized aggregation (think RSS) have put content consumers in control of their media diets.

At the same time, there’s still a hunger for professionally and thoughtfully curated material. The magazine, the TV series and even the venerable album may be going digital, but they’re not going away.

We’re seeing this tug-of-war play out in the airline world as well. While British Airways, for example, continues to stack its seatback system with new content and features, Southwest Airlines is set on helping passengers connect to the Internet using their own laptops, tablets and mobile phones.

At home, I’m a media control freak. I get my news from a hodgepodge of hand-picked feeds. I stream the TV shows I want, when I want (so while everyone is talking about Treme, I’m just getting into The Wire, two years after the finale).

But when I’m in the travel headspace, I prefer a more select menu. I want to see that movie I missed in theatres or immerse myself in a long, juicy read. And I don’t want to think too hard about it either. On this flight, I want KLM to do the work for me.

The Magazine Experience

Like many of my fellow passengers seated in economy, I begin my trip by reaching for the inflight magazine. The June issue of the Holland Herald is rather vaguely called “The Together Issue” and features a hand-drawn flock of flamingos on the cover.

Despite its newspaper-y name and so-so art direction, the Herald is a rich and engaging read. I enjoy a history-laden feature on Hangzhou’s enormous bike-sharing program (the first in China), a narrative story by French author Dominique Lapierre about driving a Rolls-Royce across India in the 1970s, and a shorter piece about an IKEA-made flat-pack home in Sweden.

Equally varied are the Herald’s advertisers. In addition to the usual suspects (Armani, IWC watches), I flip through ads for Bose headphones, select-service hotel chain Radisson Blu, a Dutch beach-tour company and the city of Free State, South Africa.

It’s nice to see an airline acknowledge that not every passenger is looking for ­– or can afford – a luxury car or designer perfume.

The Interactive Experience

After wearing out my eyes, I plug in my headphones and prepare to be entertained. KLM’s inflight system consists of a relatively small seatback screen and a hand-held controller that looks like it was designed by the makers of Super Nintendo. The controls are awkward and stiff and the response time is frustratingly slow.

But KLM offers a good deal of eclectic – if oddly categorized – content (who knew Mars Attacks was a “classic drama”?) The world movie section features dozens of Arabic, Dutch, Italian and Japanese films. My musical options range from Beyonce to Itzhak Perlman, and the audio book library includes titles by Michael J. Fox, Cormac McCarthy and Jules Verne.

I watch an episode of the new Jason Schwartzman comedy, appropriately titled Bored to Death, followed by the Coen brothers’ stark and stunning A Serious Man, which had been on my radar for a while.

I then indulge in a game of Tetris which, I’m delighted to learn, is an extremely faithful remake of the original Nintendo version. That explains the retro handset.

Back to Earth

After a stillborn nap, I decide to cozy up with the most innocuous movie I can find: Steve Carrell and Tina Fey’s Date Night. The system warns me that the film is longer than our remaining flight time, and I can’t help but feel a twinge of disappointment. That’s when I realize KLM has done a pretty good job.

Given the wealth of Dutch design talent, it’s time for the Netherlands’ national airline to recruit some first-class graphic artists to dress up its magazine and interaction designers to bring its GUI into the touch-screen era. But when it comes to providing diverse, relevant and compelling content, KLM is on top of its game.

With only 30 minutes to make my connection in Schiphol I hightail it to the gate, spurred on by the pep talk I received from the KLM check-in staff at YUL. As I step onto the Cityhopper to Frankfurt, I see that the seats on this smaller plane are screen-free. And for the first time all day, I miss my iPhone and the freedom that comes with it.

by Steve Rosenbaum (@magnify) via flickr

You’ve led parallel careers as an advertising columnist and media critic – and we now find ourselves in a world where the two are converging. Why are you giving up the AdReview right when things are getting interesting?

Well, for several reasons. The first is that if I didn’t get rid of AdReview now, very soon, AdReview would have gotten rid of me. It is not exactly a bull market for full-time critics these days. They’re dropping like flies. There’s just too much revenue pressure on my publication and they’ve been looking at me funny for years.

I also want to see if I can make some money as a consultant. I took a vow of poverty to be a journalist. And I’m thinking that maybe there’s a way to actually redeem my accumulated knowledge for cash.

What role will branded content play in the future of media? In The Chaos Scenario, you talk about branded apps and widgets that deliver compelling, utilitarian content. I’ve heard the government, the public and philanthropists all put forth as possible saviours for the news industry. Why not companies?

I don’t think that’s going to be the saviour of anything. It will help inject a little extra revenue into the marketplace, but the overall curve is still going to be down, down, down all the way to oblivion.

The predominant use of branded content these days is in television, and I believe it’s already reached the point of obnoxiousness. It’s yet one more factor in the disaffection of audiences. People don’t mind commercials, and they’re willing to put up with any old crap on TV, but they’re weirdly resistant to the idea of their TV crap being adulterated by commercial messages within the stories.

How about in the print world? Do you think that companies could sponsor good journalism in a way that doesn’t completely obliterate the “Chinese wall” between editorial and advertorial?

Well they’ve been doing it for three and a half centuries, haven’t they? They’ve been underwriting journalism with brand messages, and that’s called advertising.

However, all of the attempts so far – especially in the digital world – to somehow scale the Chinese wall have pretty severe ethical issues attached to them. For example, it seems like a no-brainer in a book review to link the book being reviewed directly to Amazon and the newspaper that runs the review would simply be one of Amazon’s affiliates and get paid for every click through, right?

Unfortunately, that creates an automatic and direct conflict of interest because it means that newspapers will get more money if they review books that are mass market, and they will make more money if they review things favourably.

So it gives them two gigantic disincentives to play it straight and that’s enough to raise the issue in the reader’s mind as to whether the reviewer is being a fair broker of the material.

Now, to the extent that in the digital world, advertisers can provide utility or entertainment in widgets or apps, I don’t see any ethical problems with that.

The main problem with apps and widgets is getting distribution. We are awash in both of them. So, how do you get your particular Home Depot App in front of the reader?

We recently spoke to Jeff Jarvis who has been a regular guest on On the Media. He says journalists are becoming more like brands, and brands more like journalists. Is that the “chaos scenario” – a society in which media and marketing are no longer symbiotic but indistinguishable?

That’s exactly what the chaos scenario is about. More specifically, it’s about the interregnum from the time that everything collapses in the old world, and is rebuilt to everybody’s satisfaction in the brave new world. But in that time, we will be living in a world with just a handful of newspapers instead of thousands of thousands of newspapers. There’ll be only a few survivors.

So if you are a journalist, and wish to have distribution for your ideas, and earn a living, you better figure out a way to become a brand because you’re going to have to do it yourself.

Has it become essential for magazines and newspapers to foster a strong brand independent of content, that can be parlayed into events and products and conferences?

Of course it’s important, but with very few exceptions, none of the revenue streams that you’re going to develop by holding New Yorker conferences or selling New Yorker tote bags is going to replace the revenue that you had in the good old days of advertising.

If I’m a publisher, I am looking for ways to extend my brand. I’m trying to figure out ways within the confines of ethical conduct to think of myself not as a newspaper, for example, but as an intelligence-gathering brand.

But every newspaper and magazine in North America has decided it’s got to be in the conference business. So now there are more than 403 trillion conferences every week, and this is obviously unsustainable.

As the man behind Comcast Must Die, any advice for how brands can avoid running into their own Bob Garfields?

My advice to brands would be to look for their own Bob Garfields out there. You attend to their issues as rapidly and transparently as possible.

And here’s what happens: The squeaky wheel is not only silenced but seduced, whereupon they go out and become your greatest evangelist. You already know they’re not shy. Well now they won’t by shy about telling the world how great you are.

It’s jujitsu and it’s just so basic and so obvious, but it is also so contrary to all of the instincts of every corporate PR person who has ever lived. Their instincts are to deny, to deflect, and to quash.

Well, in the connected world, you can’t do that and so that’s why you should cultivate even your worst critics.

In the first chapter of the book you issue this stark warning to brands: “You are not in control of your message, your image or your reputation.” Does this render public relations departments, ad agencies – and the whole notion of branding – effectively futile?

You know, as bearish as I am about the future of advertising and media, that’s how bullish I am about the future of marketing and PR.

Within the balance of legality, the ability exists for marketers to know more, and to slice and dice better, and to target their consumers better than they ever have before.

They also have the ability to have their audiences be their de facto PR agents because word of mouth, which has always been the most credible sort of advertising, is much more readily exploited in the connected world.

The Internet is a word of mouth machine. Once brands let the people formerly known as the customer base into the tent, they have the benefit of their knowledge, their passion, their ideas, and especially, their communities. And these possibilities are staggering.

Branded Content + Entertainment

NewFront took place on June 10th, and if you missed it, you missed a stellar lineup discussing the future of branded entertainment.

The upside of branded content: Brands can give back… Let’s call it “branded altruism.”

As the World Cup gets underway, what should we expect? A “South Africa [that] will never be the same.”

Media + Magazines

Earlier this week, the Webby Awards took place, honouring the best of the web. Our two-part feature interview with Roger Ebert was released in conjunction with him being awarded the Webby Person Of The Year award.

The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a 3-D section in their newspaper with 3-D glasses included. An old technology that is coming back… with a vengeance.

The Red Bulletin June edition is out, and you don’t want to miss it. Why? Because it is one of the best examples of print 2.0 we’ve seen. Download the PDF to see what we are talking about.

Airlines + Travel Marketing

Airline satisfaction is reported to be at a three-year high according to this research.

May was a good month for the airline industry, in terms of kilometres travelled, if only because of all the chaos from the month before (due to a certain ash cloud).

Big Brother may be coming onto a Lufthansa airplane near you.

Spirit becomes the latest airline hit by a pilots’ strike, while Swedish pilots went on strike as well.

What stories made your headlines this week?

Since it has survived bankruptcy and been purchased, I am no longer as pessimistic. But I do own the rights to all my material, and could doubtless find a home for it.

In your own experience at the Sun-Times, what are some of the business model problems you’ve seen as the newspaper transitioned to the web?

The same as everyone’s: Monetizing the site. You’d think I’d have more movie ads, but one studio actually told us, “We don’t advertise on Ebert’s site because he’s too influential.” Many studios prefer fluff sites with gossip, screensavers, premiere photos, etc.

You’ve said that you don’t particularly enjoy experiencing a novel on an e-reader. Who is the e-reader for? Why would they prefer a digital experience to a tactile book?

I don’t know. I’m just finishing Dombey and Son. I experimented with it as an e-book on my iPad, but I simply couldn’t read it. The experience was maddening. My eyes kept slipping off the page. I go into another room from the computer, sit down, and lose myself in a book.

You’ve recently confirmed that you’re working on a memoir, your first book of the iPad and Kindle age. Were there any notable differences when you negotiated this new contract?

eBooks are now part of contracts. I personally don’t use them, but a lot of people do. A friend of mine in London, one of the most avid and widely-read people I know, says she prefers her Kindle to a book. Whatever rocks your boat.

Are books headed towards the same path as newspapers and magazines? If so, how can writers make any money doing what they love?

There will always be books, newspapers and magazines, and people will have to write them. I think Nicholas Negroponte at MIT was right in Being Digital, his book at the dawn of the Web, that we will move toward two models: A free web, and a micropayment web. Some people will pay a fraction of a cent for my review rather than read a free review from Joe PropellerBeanie. Of course, I could be wrong…

Blake Eskin, the New Yorker’s Web editor, describes magazines as a meditative experience – something you “sit with” – and the Web as a “distracted” experience. Where do your reviews and your online journal fall? How much time do people want to spend with your reporting?

I agree with him. My average review is around 700-1000 words, and for that you don’t need to be meditative. My blogs are longer, but judging by the comments, a lot of people read them.

What are some of the newspapers or magazines you like to “sit with?”

The [Chicago] Sun-Times, The New York Times, Discover, The Economist, The Spectator, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Sight & Sound, MacWorld, Scientific American, New York Review of Books, McSweeney’s…

Here at Sparksheet we’re always interested in the way people consume media and content when they’re in transit. Having recently returned from the Cannes Film Festival, what were you able to observe about your own media consumption habits when you’re on the move (and, incidentally, on a borrowed computer)?

I spent most of my time online. I read the daily trade papers (in print), and such newspapers as the International Herald-Trib and the Independent.

What about when you’re on a plane. Do you prefer to read or watch inflight movies?

I’ve never watched an in-flight movie. I take a novel, magazines and newspapers.

Read Part II. We speak to Ebert about personal branding, film criticism, and his exclusive Ebert Club.

I don’t think there’s anything yet online that replicates that immersion experience you get with print […] We collect magazines, hoard them, put them on our coffee tables. They can be a conversation starter, a relationship starter. When you’re online you have to bend forward, look at a screen, touch, click, search. But with print you lean backward, hold it in your hand – the magazine experience comes from inside the pages toward you.

For Husni, magazine reading is a solitary experience better suited to the comfort of your living room than the social web of the Internet. While magazines may attract like-minded people, he thinks the content is enough to make people feel connected:

I don’t think readers want to get together. I think they get satisfaction from being part of a community, yet acting on their own. The way we use magazines and interact with them is completely different from the way we use and interact with the Internet…In this case, readers connect through the pages of the magazine.

Not everyone agrees. Earlier this week we spoke to author, blogger, and journalism professor Jeff Jarvis, who thinks the best asset magazine brands have is their subscription base:

Magazine readers are smart and brands have an advantage because they have a community already. Brands have to figure out how to mobilize and enable that community to do what they want to do.

Media scholar Susan Currie Sivek, whom we spoke to in March, specializes in magazine communities. She thinks a publication’s form is irrelevant, whether it’s print, online, mobile, or social media. For Sivek, magazines are fundamentally linked to our personal identity:

Certainly we have to move beyond the idea of the magazine as this printed and bound thing that’s on the newsstand or that comes in the mail. Fundamentally, if you’re reading a magazine, you’re reading it to be immersed in content that speaks to a part of your personal identity. I think that if you listed off all of my magazine subscriptions you’d get a pretty good idea of what I’m all about.

The New Yorker’s Web editor sees it both ways. Last month, Blake Eskin told us that The New Yorker’s print edition is “a meditative experience,” while the Web is “fundamentally a distracted experience.” But Eskin believes that a magazine brand can be extended into the digital space in complementary, and non-contradictory ways:

Some of it is a generational question. For a 55-year-old reader, the idea that someone might both be interested in reading a 15,000-word piece about a shooting in Zambia and also be an active user of Foursquare is kind of anathema. But there are a lot of 25-year-olds who don’t see a contradiction between those things.

What do you think?

Tell us: What is a magazine?

Photo by re:publica10 via flickr

Jeff Jarvis is Associate Professor and Interactive Program director at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism. He was the creator and founding managing editor of Entertainment Weekly.

Are we entering a world where journalists are becoming more like brands, and brands more like journalists?

Yes, I think so. We have to teach students how to market themselves and market what they do. We see journalists doing this everywhere by linking to their stories on Twitter and having Facebook pages and so on. So yes, journalists should become more like brands.

Back in the day, the big brand of the newspaper would rub off on the journalist. In this new world, journalists’ brands add up to form the bigger brand of the media outlet.

In your book you explore how brands, companies and entire industries can re-shape themselves in Google’s image. What would Google Airlines look like?

Airlines are kind of a problem now. They tend to treat their costumers likes prisoners. In the U.S. we have legislation that guarantees customers air and water, but not a great experience.

Now that we can get online before and during our flight, we can create networks. We can go on and say, “Who else wants a ride downtown?,” “Where should I eat in Ottawa?,” or whatever.

There is wisdom in that cabin. And a smart airline will try to figure out how to get that wisdom out of it. When I fly tomorrow, the airline should ask me where I stayed, where I ate, what was good and what was bad.

In other words, I have value as a passenger. Now, if they did that, they could become a publisher and they could end up reducing their costs. That’s just a small example of how they can build relationships and work with their costumers instead of fighting them.

Airlines have us by their scarcity because only certain companies fly to certain places, but the model of trying to charge you for a pillow or a pretzel is not a viable business model in the Internet age.

What would Google do if it were a magazine publisher?

I think it’s the same for magazines. Magazine readers are smart and brands have an advantage because they have a community already. Brands have to figure out how to mobilize and enable that community to do what they want to do.

Sparksheet recently spoke to New Yorker.com editor Blake Eskin about how the 85-year-old magazine has embraced the digital age without compromising its content or its brand. Do you think that’s possible for all media outlets?

I think that the New Yorker is unique. The New Yorker has a strong voice and they’re reluctant to change that – and perhaps they should be. But they are also at the center of a community, of a smart crowd, so they have a great opportunity to collaborate with their readers and to get new content and new information out of them.

Let’s talk about personal branding. How did Jeff Jarvis go from unknown magazine editor to notable media critic and professor in just a few short years?

Every point in my career was purely accidental. That sounds a little bit like false modesty because I do have an ego and I like the attention – I won’t deny that – but it was never a smart strategy. It just kind of happened.

Photo by Warren Parsons via flickr

Halvorson is the CEO of Brain Traffic and author of Content Strategy for the Web.

Let’s start with the question you’ve probably answered a million times. What is content strategy?

Well, I started out as a freelance Web writer. And what I quickly started realizing on the projects I was working on was that by the time they called me it was sort of at the end of the project. And it would be a disaster.

There would be 10 times more work than they originally scoped for, which also meant 1/10th of the time in which to do it. The source material they thought would work hadn’t been looked at very carefully. It was outdated or redundant or not very useful. The information architecture wasn’t detailed enough or didn’t give enough direction about what the messaging hierarchy should be. I could go on and on.

What would end up happening is I would either write what I could, as quickly as I could, and then not want to put it in my portfolio, or the client would decide at the last minute to just retrofit whatever content they currently had and then try to fix it later.

So I started asking questions and offering ideas about how things can be avoided the next time. I told them that if they would give me a few more weeks, I would do the work to get everything better prepared before starting to write.

And what I didn’t know at the time was that I was backing into something called content strategy.

While “content” has become a media, marketing and Internet buzzword, “content strategy” is still relatively obscure. Why do you think that is?

Content strategy has been around since the Web. It’s just that for Web professionals and practitioners it has been easier and more interesting to focus on the visual, on front- and back-end programming, on user experience design and now on application development.

All those questions that I said were left unanswered are not very exciting. No one wants to think about them. But those are the questions that are going to bridge the gap between the high-level strategy that’s been defined and the tactics that people will be able to use to implement that strategy.

The question is whether those tactics are really realistic with the time and the money and the internal resources that they have.

We recently spoke to Blake Eskin, The New Yorker’s Web editor, who has the tricky task of adapting the magazine’s highbrow narrative content for the online space. You’re an expert in writing for the Web, but how can print publications bring their existing print content online without compromising their voice?

This is something that so many organizations are still struggling with. I met Blake at SXSW and while his team is doing great work, they have incredibly limited resources and are still struggling to find an organized, sustainable content strategy.

People want to make the most of the content that they’ve put their time and money and energy into. It’s the same with brand work or technology that we have invested in. So I think that everybody’s rushing, which is understandable because magazines are fighting for their lives.

The critical component is sitting down, looking at what the current work flow is, what the current skill sets are, how many people they’re actually going to have working for them and how their time and attention and skills should be allocated.

It’s not just a matter of figuring out what you’re going to publish online or what technology you’re going to use. How are you going to sustain it internally without asking all your current writers and graphic designers to basically take on a second job?

Content marketing evangelist Joe Pulizzi wrote a piece for us last year called “Multitasking Makes You Stupid,” in which he argued that companies should outsource their content creation to copy writers or journalists. Do you agree, or do you think content should come from within the organization?

It totally depends. I know Joe and we’ve had lots of good conversations about this. I think that to say “Outsource your content” as a blanket statement is bad advice, because it’s simply not a good idea for everyone, especially if you’re a small organization. Because the message that’s sending is that more content is going to cost more money.

I just came back from the Government Web content managers conference in D.C. One of the quotes that got tweeted a lot was from the speaker from Starbucks who said, “Don’t outsource your voice.”

On the one hand, that’s a really great quotable line. On the other hand, refusing on principle to outsource content is just impossible for most organizations. If you can’t hire anyone internally to do the editorial stuff, you’re going to have to outsource because you can’t just publish Web content and leave it there. You have to take care of it over time.

In a presentation at last year’s Web 2.0 Expo [embedded at the bottom of this post], you quoted authors John Gerzema and Ed Lebar who wrote, “Brands are now used more than they are preferred.” Does it follow that branded content is only valuable insofar as it is useful to the consumer?

I have such a love-hate relationship with content marketing. Pushing people to do better content that audiences care about is great. Pushing people to acquire or create content and then try to get people into their site because of their content is doing those organizations a disservice.

If you’re an agency, yes. You need to be creating some sort of intellectual property to demonstrate your expertise. If you’re an e-commerce site, yes. You need to be creating content that positions you as having useful, usable, relevant information about whatever it is you’re purchasing.

But if you’re a construction company, your website is a one-stop hit where customers go to check out your credentials before engaging you in conversation. Why would you want them to keep coming back?

The first time I contacted Joe Pulizzi it was because I was so incensed by the title of his book, Get Content, Get Customers. I called him up and said, “You can’t just tell people to get content. That’s not how it works.” You can’t just go to the content website and load it on the content dolly!

I think that continued conversation between content marketing proponents who are saying, “This is what you need to do,” and content strategists who are saying, “This is how you need to do it and what you need to think about first,” is really critical.

Let’s talk about corporate blogs. It seems they’re either guilty of being too promotional and self-referential, or they simply die out because nobody’s reading them or because they don’t seem to be generating any ROI. Are corporate blogs still useful?

I feel like a broken record but I’ll start again: If you’re going to do a corporate blog, the first question is, “Why?”

Shelly Bowen, an independent consultant on the West coast just wrote a great blog post called “Should you blog? No, you should not.” Her whole point was that if you’re asking yourself if you should, you probably shouldn’t. You have to start with, “I want to,” or “I’m ready to.” You cannot fake authenticity.

When’s the last time you came across some truly useful branded content?

I come across useful branded content all the time. REI.com has a really great expert advice section with well-written text and well-shot video on what to look for when purchasing outdoor gear. That’s actually useful, so that makes sense.

Part of why I shop at Zappos is that I really like their product descriptions. They are really clearly written, not super marketing-y, and always answer my questions really quickly.

When people think about branded content they usually think blogs and articles. But you’ve also got your interface copy, you’ve got your help copy. If you’re just focusing on marketing copy you’re losing a huge opportunity to ensure that your content experience is really holistic and powerful.

Photo by Tim Needles via flickr

You were hired as The New Yorker’s first Web editor in 2006, when NewYorker.com was relatively primitive and “blog” was a four-letter word to most staff writers. How have attitudes toward the Web changed since then?

They’ve changed a lot. We relaunched the site in March 2007 but when I came it hadn’t been redesigned since March 2001. You really couldn’t find anything other than the current week’s content, and even that packaged better would have been more appealing to people. But because of the late 20th-century Web design of it, it was a narrow, dark page.

Some of my job is being the Web evangelist in the office – getting people involved and explaining why the Web is helpful to them and their story. One of the reasons we started the Out Loud podcast was the chance to sit down with someone every week and introduce this stuff to them.

It’s comforting for a writer to know they’re in a magazine with a circulation of 1 million people, but it’s a different thing to be able to chat with 30 people who are engaged in a topic you wrote about last week. And writers who are hesitant to do that end up really enjoying that kind of connection with readers. It’s also a good way of reaching a different audience, people who might want to be reading The New Yorker but have to drive to work.

How has the Web changed the magazine’s content? Are writers encouraged to write pieces that will be shared on social networks? Are editors taught to write SEO-friendly heads?

The only changes you see in the magazine are the digital Eustace Tilley in the front-of-book with a box on the contributors page saying what’s online. We also run Web refers as notes at the end of a piece. We leave the headlines on our pieces but we use more SEO-friendly page titles. Not necessarily Digg-style page titles – just straightforward page titles with the proper nouns that refer to what’s in the story.

So no Top 10 lists or other “link bait” stuff?

Well, David Remnick did a long piece about jazz DJ Phil Schaap in the magazine, and wrote a list of his favourite jazz albums for the website. We called it “100 Essential Jazz Albums” – and that got a lot more clicks than his article.

We also did a contest on our books blog called Critterati, encouraging people to dress up their pets as their favourite literary character. We’re aware that people like looking at pictures of dogs and cats on the Internet but if we threw all our energies into this stuff we obviously couldn’t support the kind of journalism we do. You can’t send someone to Rwanda for a month on the kind of revenue earned from pictures of cats!

But fundamentally, The New Yorker is something you want to sit with and not be distracted by. I don’t mean this in a spiritual way, but it’s a meditative experience. The Web is fundamentally a distracted experience.

Businesswise, what’s the goal of the website? Are you trying to monetize through clicks and ads, or is it ultimately about getting new subscribers?

The most immediate business goal of all Condé Nast websites is to generate print subscriptions. Having a website is much easier than sending out a lot of mail to people – especially younger people who don’t necessarily open mail. And the website has been a consistent generator of subscriptions.

We’re also trying to raise awareness of our stories and our magazine. We don’t post the whole magazine online and we keep an eye on what kinds of stories tend to do well. We’ve also seen more and more traffic for our online-only content.

We do a lot of thinking about what it means to be a magazine brand, and The New Yorker has one of the strongest brands in media. How do you take an 85-year-old institution and bring it into the digital age without compromising its identity?

It’s a really good question because if you had to come up with a list of adjectives for what the New Yorker brand represents – excellence, polish, depth – those aren’t necessarily things you can achieve on a blog, podcast or Twitter feed.

When we started the website the original plan was to fact check blog posts and that just doesn’t work. You can’t ask people to write in a freer, more immediate way and then put them through the same editorial machine. But New Yorker writers tend to have informal voices that are a lot more formal than most.

In terms of podcasts the revolution is that we’re able to take an office without windows, outfit it with a Mac, a couple of microphones, an M-Box and a phone box and operate at a very high level. We try to bring that sense of polished editing and excellence to things we can do simply but well.

Probably our biggest success on the site was a video of a man trapped in an elevator for 41 hours, which was a companion to a Nick Paumgarten piece in the magazine. I had gone to enough Web seminars where they say videos on the Web have to be less than three minutes long, so I handed off the elevator surveillance tapes to a multimedia producer and told her to cut it down by tomorrow. It became a big viral success and brought a lot of people around the world in to read an 8,000-word piece on elevators.

Who runs the magazine’s Facebook and Twitter accounts and how do you ensure they remain in line with the New Yorker brand?

Facebook and Twitter are joint ventures between our Web department and our public relations department. We joined Twitter fairly early on, before Ashton and Oprah. The New Yorker is all about cutting through the noise and telling people about the few things they should know. Our Twitter philosophy is very much the same: You put a couple of things out there a day, and only when they’re really important.

By far the best conversation about the Obama fist bump cover – in terms of diversity of opinion and civility – took place on our Facebook page. It was the kind of discussion your high school social studies teacher would be proud to have. But we’re not as informal or personal on Facebook or Twitter as some people have chosen to be. I don’t think anyone is tweeting from inside editorial meetings. That’s not the culture of this place, and I don’t think that would come as a surprise to anybody.

Does all this multimedia content merely expand the New Yorker brand experience for existing readers, or are you engaging people who might not read a 10,000 word article but will happily listen to an 11-minute podcast?

I think we’re doing both. Some of it is a generational question. For a 55-year-old reader, the idea that someone might both be interested in reading a 15,000-word piece about a shooting in Zambia and also be an active user of Foursquare is kind of anathema. But there are a lot of 25-year-olds who don’t see a contradiction between those things.

So in some ways we’re trying to cultivate the next generation of New Yorker readers. Some of it is giving people a taste of what they’re missing, some of it is supplementing the magazine experience, and some of it is about reaching a more international audience.

The New Yorker is not a magazine for everybody, but I think we have to make sure to reach the audience it can reach, and the Web is a great way of doing that.

Photo by oenvoyage via flickr

Airlines + Travel Marketing

Airlines, scientists split over impact of ash: A sober report on the story that defined the week.

Boarding pass design doesn’t have to suck, says one angry blogger.

Ford’s Sync Brings the App Revolution to Your Wheels. We’re keeping our eyes on Ford’s new in-car entertainment system, which is dripping with potential…and safety concerns.

Branded Content + Entertainment

Hulu is pushing forward with $9.95 subscription service

Content is making a comeback, according to Advertising Age

Transmedia is going mainstream, says producer Jeff Gomez

Media + Magazines

E-Reader Owners Love Magazines. So are e-readers creating magazine customers or converting them from print?

BusinessWeek’s new design emphasizes the Bloomberg brand

Is Conde Nast infringing on ad agency turf?

Susan Currie Sivek is an assistant professor in the Mass Communication and Journalism Department at California State University, Fresno, and the magazine correspondent for PBS’ MediaShift.

Let’s talk business models: Will magazine executives look toward the music industry (think iTunes and events) or TV (think cable subscriptions and ad-supported partnerships like Hulu) for salvation?

For magazines, micropayments aren’t necessarily the best fit. I don’t think the digital experience as we currently know it is enough of a draw to get lots of people to pay small amounts for it on an ongoing basis.

But I think the subscription model still makes sense, and that magazines still have the ability to attract small, specific audiences and sell them to advertisers. Right now we’re seeing digital subscriptions as add-ons to print subscriptions. They’re not a big selling point in and of themselves, but that’s because online magazines are just digital versions of print magazines. They’re not very interactive. As they innovate, digital subscription will become more attractive.

The iPad has the most transformative capability in that it’s not just a replication of the magazine page, but a true multimedia experience.

Will the digitization of magazines allow publishers to embed ads and revenue streams into the content, and how will this affect the traditional “Chinese wall” between editorial and advertorial?

I think it’s going to be very tricky to do without making magazine content a slave to the advertising opportunities out there. As a reader, I don’t want to be constantly having suspicions about the content, wondering why a particular brand is mentioned in an article, and whether they’re just trying to monetize.

There’s always the Google model of using automatically placed ads based on keywords so you don’t have human interference in the process. But anything that starts raising red flags with readers and disrupts their experience is going to be damaging in the long run.

While most of the magazine industry has suffered in the past few years, custom publishers have thrived. Why do you think that is?

I’m not an expert in custom magazines, but it’s obvious why companies and organizations would want to have access to the magazine experience. It’s a type of advertising that people will actually willingly expose themselves to. As consumers try to tune out other types of ads, this is one area that readers find fun and relaxing and interesting.

Maybe this says something about needing more transparency in journalism overall. If I know that the content is clearly the perspective of the publisher, I can keep that in mind as a reader and get out of it what I want.

Your research focuses on magazines as media communities. In the sense that they both connect like-minded people, are the Internet and magazines made for each other?

Like the Internet, magazines are all about identifying groups of people with similar ideas and similar interests. So just by existing and creating content around that particular theme, they’re really pulling together that group. But there’s a back-and-forth relationship where magazines attract like-minded people, and also help define communities.

There’s World of Warcraft magazine, which took an existing online community and built a magazine around it, which makes lots of sense. Then there’s Make magazine, which organizes Maker Faire events for readers to get together and work on crafts and projects built around the magazine brand. So some types of content are more suited to real-life events, and others to virtual communities where readers connect through the content itself.

Back in the ‘90s, news and culture websites like Slate and Salon proudly pronounced themselves “online magazines,” but today sites like Mashable or Gawker or The Huffington Post just call themselves blogs. So here’s my final, dramatically-phrased question….

What is a magazine?

I think we have to think of magazines as a very fluid concept at the moment. Certainly we have to move beyond the idea of the magazine as this printed and bound thing that’s on the newsstand or that comes in the mail.

Fundamentally, if you’re reading a magazine, you’re reading it to be immersed in content that speaks to a part of your personal identity. I think that if you listed off all of my magazine subscriptions you’d get a pretty good idea of what I’m all about.

We talk more and more about social media as a method of curation and a way for individuals to organize the stuff that’s most meaningful to them. And that’s essentially what magazine editors do.

So it’s not so much about the medium anymore but about finding content that resonates with you. And if you can recognize that experience, I think you’ve found yourself a magazine!

After take-off we slip on a pair of headphones and zone out in front of Die Hard, or reach for the inflight magazine and start visualizing our next winter getaway. Then, once we’ve reached content overload, we might pull out our journal and start scribbling about the trip ahead or the memories behind us.

Yet, as we’ve reported on this blog, many of the latest airline tools and developments seem to be geared toward making air travel more social.

Last month we told you about Lufthansa’s new MemberScout app, which encourages frequent flyers to share travel tips, between-flight cocktails and even a taxi ride from the airport.

In a similar vein, Air France/KLM has launched a trip-planning portal called Bluenity, where prospective passengers can gather real-time travel advice from local residents and meet with people with matching itineraries.

Meanwhile, non-airline actors such as Satisfly, Eezeer, Dopplr and FourSquare are coming out with apps and services that promise to make flying a friendlier affair.

Factor in the slow rise of inflight WiFi and it’s clear that air travel is being transformed from an introverted media-consuming experience into a social event.

Although we’re all about engagement and relationship-building here at Sparksheet, we have to ask: Is this really a good thing?

What sorts of privacy and liability issues will brands face if folks are using airlines as matchmakers? What does this all mean for the future of inflight entertainment and Transumer-oriented advertisers?

Is this a question of cultural differences (i.e. Americans love talking on planes, Brits hate it)?

Tell us: Is air travel a social or solitary experience?

flickr.com/photos/abennett96

Relationships rule

One of the most rewarding aspects of the conference was how many interesting and engaging people I met. We make so many connections online that it’s refreshing to make some actual friends. It’s not only good for the soul, it’s good for your brand—personal or otherwise. After all, these are the people who will retweet your updates, comment on your posts and add you to their blog roll.

New and old media are not in a zero sum game

Despite some stinging comments hurled at CNN anchor Don Lemon during one panel, I was surprised by how much love “legacy media” were getting in BlogWorld. NYU journalism prof Jay Rosen advocated using search data to determine what readers care about. Blogcritics publisher Eric Olsen waxed nostalgic about the tactile experience of print magazines. Rather than eye each other suspiciously, old and new media types shared best practices and ideas for preserving quality journalism.

Don’t forsake video

Since most of us bloggers came out of the print world, we sometimes tend to overlook the power of multimedia content. But panelists ranging from Facebook evangelist Shama Kabani, to consultant Jay Berkowitz warned that anyone who forgoes video is leaving money on the table. According to Berkowitz, only four percent of marketers use YouTube, even though the video-streaming site is also the world’s second most popular search engine. So whether you’re filming it or embedding someone else’s, video ought to be part of your content strategy.

It’s all about search

Speaking of search engines, almost every BlogWorld speaker mentioned the symbiotic relationship between content and search. Chris Baggott, an expert on corporate blogging, said that many content creators foolishly buy into what he called “the myth of the audience.” Most websites get roughly 66% of their traffic from search engines, Baggott said, and so all content should be written for the first-time reader. This means defining—and relentlessly repeating—a strategic set of keywords that people are likely to search for. “Think about what [prospective customers] are going to type,” Baggott said, “And talk about it.”

At first this rubbed me the wrong way; I’m a big believer in fostering community and building relationships with readers over time. But I now realize that these things aren’t mutually exclusive. Defining a set of keywords and writing clear, pithy content around them is simply good communication. One thing that Twitter has demonstrated is that brevity can go a long way. People don’t have time to decode your cutesy headlines when their RSS feeds and Twitter Lists are packed with goodies. So don’t just think of search engine optimization as a crude marketing strategy. Think of it as good writing.

Nice guys finish first

In the heady days of ink-stained newsmen and billionaire publishers, loutishness was a virtue. Think of newspaper tycoons William Randolph Hearst (the inspiration for Citizen Kane), Conrad Black or Rupert Murdoch. But now that media is no longer a product but a conversation, to paraphrase Dan Gillmor, the meek have inherited the (Word)press.

The “rock stars” of BlogWorld were celebrated not for their egos but their generosity. This was evidenced by the drastically different receptions given to Guy Kawasaki—billionaire venture capitalist—and Chris Brogan, the so-called “nice guy” of social media.

Brogan is known for superhumanly responding to every @reply on Twitter and playing “matchmaker” between vendors and clients, as he put it. Kawasaki is notorious for his automated “robo-Tweets.” During his keynote, Brogan preached mantas like, “Selling is never about getting more than you give” and “I like making relationships before I make money; I’m not a hooker.”

During his moment in the spotlight, Kawasaki reminisced about cruising down the streets of L.A. in a Ferrari and stubbornly refused to play along with comedian Kevin Pollack’s hilarious “Larry King game.”

I met lots of people at BlogWorld. There was the group I joined for dinner after they put out an open invitation on Twitter, and the successful podcaster who told me about his family on the way back to the hotel. And then there was the guy who ping-ponged from table to table pitching his product and boasting about the 500 business cards he had “collected.”

I’m not sure how many cards I collected. But I’m certain I got more out of BlogWorld than he did.

As long as there are human beings we are going to have print media. There’s no substitute for something audiences can feel and touch – something that they can call their own.

What is the “magazine experience” and does it translate online?

I don’t think there’s anything yet online that replicates that immersion experience you get with print. We’re talking more than just ink on paper here. We’re talking about an entire package in your hand – the photography, the colours, the design, the copy. We collect magazines, hoard them, put them on our coffee tables. They can be a conversation starter, a relationship starter. When you’re online you have to bend forward, look at a screen, touch, click, search. But with print you lean backward, hold it in your hand – the magazine experience comes from inside the pages toward you.

Let’s put it this way: you can never lose yourself on the Web. You do not like what you see or read you are only a click away from something else.  Magazines are the slow food that you can own, savor and digest. You may own your computer, but you do not own anything that comes through it. You own your copy of the magazine.  Marrying a virtual spouse will never result in children.

Addressing magazine publishers on your blog recently, you wrote that “There is a big difference between a ‘brand experience’ and a ‘magazine experience.’ Please do keep the ‘magazine experience’ well and alive and the ‘brand experience’ will follow.” What did you mean by that?

People don’t have experiences with brands. They don’t experience Nike, they experience the shoe that Nike makes. They experience the product. If it’s good for your feet, if it’s comfy, if you like the design, then you might feel warmly toward Nike. But no one says, “Oh, I just love that Nike brand.” It’s the same thing with magazines. You’re not going to get me to fall in love with the “Car and Driver” brand. I need to engage with a product and have a product experience before I have a brand experience. If the product is relevant to you, enjoyable to you, then you’ll start believing in the brand.

What role do you think branded content will play in the future of print media?

That will play a big role. Branding is still very, very important. But you want to make sure readers know that your content – whether online or in print – is both necessary and sufficient in each medium. People won’t hop around from medium to medium because they love your brand. So if I’m reading a magazine, don’t send me to the Web to get the rest of the story. You need to meet readers in their media of choice.

Why is it that inflight magazines, despite being the original custom publications, tend to get a bad rap?

Well, where do they get their bad rap from? From the passengers who read them or from our colleagues the magazine snobs who thumb their noses at Sky magazine because it’s not The New Yorker? I love Felix Dennis, the guy who started Maxim magazine in this country, who always used to tell his staff, “If you ever win a national magazine award, you’re fired.” Because that’s when you know you’re not designing a magazine for your audience, but for your colleagues in New York.

The important thing to remember about inflight magazines is that, yes, we have a captive audience, but passengers can bring with them as many magazines as they want. And so you have to include information about the plane and the airport in every single issue. In that sense, you’re always designing for the first-time user.

But your content has to reflect the majority of customers on that airplane – their lifestyle, their attitude, and also their fantasies. Sure, I may not be able to fly to Bangkok right now but I know the airline flies to Bangkok and here’s a great piece of writing from Bangkok. So one of these days I might go for it. It’s this combination of service and fantasy in inflight magazines that have given them that “must have” factor.

You like to say that publishers need to start “concentrating on customers who count, rather than just counting customers.” Doesn’t every customer count?

The magazine business model that we created in this country after World War II was based on delivering numbers to advertisers. In the beginning it was a great model, because the numbers were important. People had to buy a magazine from a newsstand or pay for a subscription. And then toward the ‘80s we got into the business of tricking people into looking at our magazine, of creating numbers to show advertisers. That’s what I call the business of counting customers.

For example, I just read that I can get 24 issues of Tennis magazine for free. Now, if someone pays $24 to receive Tennis magazine, I can guarantee that she is going to spend more time with the magazine’s content, and its advertisers, than someone who found it in the mail.

That’s what’s great about custom magazines – they’re not aimed at the lowest common denominator. You have a set lifestyle in mind. You have an audience that counts. If you don’t fly at least three or four times a year, an inflight magazine probably isn’t aimed at you. Customers who count are those whose lifestyles match the marketplace.

Do you think the Internet has the potential to enrich the magazine experience by bringing like-minded readers together?

I don’t think readers want to get together. I think they get satisfaction from being part of a community, yet acting on their own. The way we use magazines and interact with them is completely different from the way we use and interact with the Internet. And that’s why each medium has to be both necessary and sufficient. In this case, readers connect through the pages of the magazine.

So what’s your favourite magazine?

I never choose favourites amongst my children.

As director of partnerships for Fairmont hotels and resorts, you’ve joined forces with a variety of brands – from Adidas and Aveda, to Lexus and Napa Valley Vintners. Can you talk about some of the mutual benefits of these partnerships?

Our partnerships fall into three categories: the environment, food and beverage, and health and wellness. Adidas and BMW fit nicely under health and wellness. So what Adidas gets is brand exposure at every one of our properties globally through a variety of ways.

If you are a Fairmont President’s Club member, in the top two tiers, you can have your apparel size and shoe size on your profile and every time you stay with us you can have Adidas apparel and footwear delivered to your room. Adidas provides us with great pricing. We purchase the Adidas apparel. They get some great market research and our customers are very happy.

BMW is our exclusive car partner in Canada. Later this year we’re rolling out the new X5 Diesels as our official courtesy cars at our Canadian properties. But in order to highlight BMW’s green positioning as well as ours, we thought providing all of our Fairmont hotels in Canada with BMW bicycles was a great way for our guests to stay healthy and also see the local surroundings. That’s just an extra surprise and delight for our guests.

Transumers love buying things that enhance their experience, but I imagine they also see hotels as a kind of sanctuary from the 24/7 hustle and bustle of consumer life. How do you make sure guests don’t feel barraged or overwhelmed by brand partnerships and promotions?

We have opt-in-permission marketing rules that we adhere to fanatically and that ensure we are not bothering our guests with these partnerships and promotions. A lot of them are tied to our Fairmont President’s Club and the co-branded materials that we produce are subtle. But if you look to classic CRM (customer relationship management) strategies, every program we launch is deeply rooted in what our guests tell us they want.

So our belief is, if you have a very subtle piece of paper that’s in the check-in slip when someone picks up their key, and it’s something you know that is consistent with the psychographics of your guest, they’re not going to feel offended. I think guests feel offended when they’re getting barraged by marketing messages that mean nothing to them.

So it’s about providing content that is useful and not just advertorial?

Yes. It’s providing content in context.

Fairmont has been a leader in environmental policies and partnerships since 1990. Now that hotel greening campaigns have gone mainstream, how do you demonstrate to guests that you’re not just “greenwashing” to cut costs? How do you go beyond those “please re-use your towel” cards to show that sustainability is not just a marketing buzzword but an integral part of your brand?

We’ve been focused on this for 20 years, so we have some pretty innovative things like our rooftop herb gardens and our bees that produce fresh honey for our guests to enjoy at breakfast. And we also mandate that we source locally and, wherever possible, organic. We feel very passionate about this. We do not have a huge laundry list of global food suppliers so that when you sit down at the hotel restaurant 99 percent of ingredients on the menu are coming from one of the top five food conglomerates.

Do you think you’ve led your guests onto the local food bandwagon, or are you simply responding to customer demand?

We had such a head start but consumers have really caught up. That movie Food Inc. is striking a chord with a lot more people than you would think. A lot more people are starting to become very, very concerned about what’s in their food. So in some ways we are meeting expectations of our guests, and in some ways I think we may be ahead of the curve and we might be introducing a new way of eating to some customers.

Fairmont is known for its iconic, historic properties. How do you incorporate cutting-edge technology into a centuries-old shell without ruining the effect?

It’s really hard and really expensive. It is something that our global tech team is very focused on. Absolutely our guests need to be connected. A huge number of our guests are Blackberry users – it’s a disproportionate amount of Blackberries at our hotels. And so we have to accommodate that. It’s constant upgrades. It’s finding creative ways to use wireless technology. The guest does not care that they’re in a beautiful iconic property if they can’t check their e-mail.

As the traditional magazine industry struggles to retain its footing in the Internet age, custom publications like Fairmont Magazine [published by Spafax, Sparksheet’s publisher] are weathering the storm quite well. I know your father was the publisher of Flare magazine for many years. As someone who grew up around magazines, do you think branded content can save print media?

Our research shows that the people spending the most time with our magazine are the highest tier Fairmont President’s Club members and the most affluent. The content in the magazine is an opportunity for them to explore a brand that they feel very strongly about, that they already connect with. So again it’s about content in context. The magazines that really provide value to readers will thrive even when others are struggling.

We feel that in the intimacy of our hotel rooms there is a good opportunity for our guests and a good opportunity for us. People have a lot of time, more time perhaps than they do at home to pick up a magazine. And so it’s an opportunity for guests to explore relevant content, and for us to strengthen our bond with customers.

Many see what’s happening in newspapers and magazines (layoffs, closures and print reductions) and blame a broken business model turned upside down by the Internet – with its free content and classifieds. Others, though, would argue that the traditional print product and model – including the production and distribution models – is fatally flawed. So, is it a content issue or a monetization issue?

I don’t think it’s an either/or proposition. If you look at the newspaper model, it’s not completely broken. The industry last year made almost $50 billion and the advertising situation is not as bad as a lot of people think. In fact, newspapers have gotten back most of the money lost on classifieds through their online operations. Almost $4 billion a year is coming into the industry from newspaper websites. That’s one of the things that get lost in this discussion. Yes, classifieds are moving out, but there is a new revenue stream moving in. In fact, if it weren’t for the recession, it probably would have equalized this year. Now, it will take another year or two. That being said, the big-city, mass-audience format of the newspaper is no longer working.

In an op-ed piece in the Christian Science Monitor last month, you argued that journalists deserve to be underpaid. You wrote: “If journalists want to promote good journalism and value creation that makes them earn more pay, they will have to take more responsibility for coverage decisions and content choices so that journalism becomes more valuable.” What sort of coverage decisions do you suggest they make?

What I’d do first is get a good understanding of who’s reading the newspaper and what their interests are. Generally, readership studies have been done very badly in the newspaper industry and the magazine industry as well, because they tend to put a great focus on those people who aren’t reading. One of the biggest problems is that people who actually buy the newspaper, the core customers, don’t read 75 percent of the content. That’s costing companies an awful lot of paper, a lot of production, a lot of salary. And they need to figure out how to get rid of that stuff and replace it with content that readers are not able to get elsewhere.

Conventional wisdom says that if you let readers guide content decisions, all we’d be left with is Britney Spears-type coverage, at the expense of investigative or public service reporting. Is that true?

That’s not true. In fact, if you look at core newspaper readers, that’s what they hate most about the paper. That stuff has been put in there to get the people who don’t want to read about public affairs or the economy. And so what they’re trying to do is retain this mass audience, even though the mass audience has been leaving at about 2 percent a year for the last 30 years. Those people don’t want to read about Britney, they’d rather see her on video, on the Internet or on TV. Yet, publishers are still saying, “We need to get everybody, including people who aren’t invested in news.” That model’s not working. It has never worked. It’s been an absolutely steady decline for almost four decades.

Will online advertising rates ever catch up to those in print, making an Internet ad as profitable for news organizations as print ads used to be? In a sense, shouldn’t online ads be more valuable since they’re so targeted, measurable and could actually send you straight to checkout?

I don’t think it will ever happen. Online works pretty well for branding and for loyalty campaigns, but it’s not particularly effective for retail ads. If you look across nations, you find that in terms of cross-elasticity, magazines and the Internet are closer than newspapers and the Internet, while magazines and TV are closer than newspapers and TV, in terms of what advertisers they attract and the willingness of those advertisers to substitute media. Each medium has its virtues. People use the Internet to find products they know they want to buy. So it’s not a simple thing to say you’re going to take all this local advertising and throw it online.

We at Sparksheet have been looking at the ways in which companies are using social networking sites to connect with customers and build their brands. You noted recently on your blog that companies should think twice before jumping on the Twitter or Facebook bandwagon, that they should be realistic about costs and effort. When is it worth it for a brand to join the social media fray, and when is it better off sitting it out?

I think it becomes worthwhile when you have regular content and regular transactions with your customers. So, for instance, if you’re a distributor and you have an overstock that you want to move rapidly, at that point it becomes reasonable. But the problem is, when you have every company sending messages to everybody all the time, it becomes just a blur of spam. It’s the same way with news. People want some breaking news about some things but after a while, if they get too much stuff, folks will start tuning out.

Do you see branded content as a solution to the news industry’s woes? Is there a way to have a “Mercedes Wall Street Journal” or “60 Minutes by Whole Foods” without dismantling the traditional “Chinese wall” between journalism and advertising?

The Chinese wall is actually a rather recent thing in journalism. If you look historically, it’s something that was built after the professionalism of journalism in the 1920s and ‘30s, and it was always breached at various times. I think the wall will be more porous than it has been, but if it breaks down too much, you lose your credibility, in which case you lose your audience anyhow.