Recently, our excellent friend Ryan McAbee over at M-Bossed asked me if I’d be interested in talking to him about how Hotcards uses social media to promote our printing services. He had some great questions, which I responded to with many a noble sentiment on the ability of social media to connect us and create online communities that parallel the communities we develop in our own neighborhoods and cities.

At a time when printers are supposed to be packing up their things quietly and going home, we got some pretty amazing news. Last week, ICIC (Initiative for a Competitive Inner City) and Bloomberg BusinessWeek ranked Hotcards as 38th on a list of the 100 Fastest-Growing Inner City Businesses in America. They threw a big party for us in Boston, we got to mix it up with other winners from all over the country, and listen to some pretty amazing speakers.

"Business must find a way to engage positively in society, but this will not happen as long as it sees its social agenda as separate from its core business agenda."
- Michael E. Porter, Harvard Business School

Some cool facts on the Inner City 100:

"Collectively, the top 100 inner city businesses employ 10,700 employees and have created more than 6,300 new jobs between 2004 and 2008. Individually, the median Inner City 100 Company's revenues were $6.6 million. This year's winners have a median employee turnover rate of less than 8 percent and 96 percent of them provide health insurance to their workers."

Those are some nice figures, particularly if you're in the printing industry, and particularly, particularly, if you're from Cleveland. These days, all we hear are the stories about how the recession is crushing our industry and our city. But the truth is much more complex, and positive, than that.

Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the other winners fell into the IT, green business, or green technology categories. However, there were a few other printers on the list, proving, if nothing else, that…hmm…printers and inner cities go hand in hand? Simply by default, a lot of printing houses are located in "inner city areas." For a young person starting a print and design business, the space is there, and the price is right.

But in the end, success or failure comes down to a question of community. A printer can't survive, and a city can't survive, unless other small businesses, organizations, and social services survive along with it. Community creates commerce, and vice-versa. So while it's great to get our names on a list, we're not exactly surprised that our industry, or our city, is capable of great things. In fact, we like to think of ourselves as a sign of the times, and a sign of things to come.

As ICIC President and CEO, Mary Kay Leonard, put it, "We are delighted to celebrate businesses like Hotcards that are playing a critical role in revitalizing America's urban communities. Through their achievements, the Inner City 100 winning companies exemplify America's remarkable potential and the road to future economic recovery. These extraordinary companies demonstrate the market possibilities that exist within our inner cities. If we can leverage these possibilities, we can create jobs, income, and wealth for local residents and produce the next chapter of American innovation and opportunity."

So here's to Cleveland! And to the next chapter, available, let's hope, online and in print.

A recent article in AdAge looks at the growing popularity of the long-format ad. "Branded content," in the form of short films and music videos created by advertisers are the sexiest, if not the newest, high-end promotional tool going these days. People want entertainment, not advertising, so why not provide advertising entertainment?

In response to commercials and online ad spots becoming increasing brief and punchy, many advertisers have recently gone in the opposite direction, producing 3-minute, 10-minute, and even 30-minute film-style commercials. The products being advertised act as props or storytelling elements in these long-format ads, which advertisers say are engaging consumers on whole new levels.

All of which got me thinking, why can't the same principles of long-format, narrative-based advertising be applied to print? A brochure could be a novella. A catalog could be designed as a comic book. The difference in production costs should be negligible, if anything, so stop advertising and start entertaining!

Check out a brand new Design Idea of the Week for tips on how to create your own long-format print ad.

Summer's on its way, which means festival season, tons of concerts, sporting events, and huge parties/productions. People are also traveling, and spending money on tourist destinations. All of which have one thing in common: ticket buying.

We might be on the way to a future of digital tickets handled exclusively by our cell phones, but that doesn't mean it's time to stop thinking about ticket print design. In fact, as if in reaction to the digital trend, some organizers are taking ticket design to the next level with special runs of commemorative ticket printing.

This summer, for example, Lollapalooza introduced a collectible 3D festival pass. The beautifully designed tickets were produced to act "as a token of your kick-a#% Lolla weekend," and were printed in a limited edition run that sold out almost instantly.

Any event coordinator or producer can build the hype for an event by designing and printing high-quality event tickets and selling them as an advanced promotion. These special tickets act as a fan's first peek at the design aesthetic behind an event, and printing a limited edition run can work to speed and increase early-bird sales, which is always a good thing.

Living life online is all well and good, but we have to strike a balance between the lives we live on Google, Facebook, Reddit, Flickr, and YouTube, and the life we live in our bodies, out of doors and away from the computer. Otherwise, we’re all gonna end up like those sad people in WALL-E or Surrogates.

As digital technology becomes increasingly accessible and integrated into our everyday lives, balancing between the two worlds is becoming more and more a choice that we have to actively participate in. We have to decide what we want from our globally-connected, high-speed, content-rich digital world, and what we want from our physically active, movement-oriented, sensory-rich world.

As such, we’re finding ourselves immersed in a culture making choices between certain technologies that deepen our experiences in the worlds we choose to inhabit. And over the last few years, we’ve been seeing an interesting move in the direction of choosing to embrace and preserve certain tactile technologies that have been challenged by new digital iterations of the services they provide.

The world celebrated Earth Day last week, on April 22nd, and I noticed that a lot of printers ran special green printing promotions, or blogged about sustainable printing. But I hesitated to post about the day because, for printers, every day is Earth Day.

In our industry, we don't have the luxury to ever stop thinking about our environmental impact, to stop learning about how we can reduce that impact, or to ignore our role as environmental stewards.

That being said, an interesting question might be: what can printers do to improve the experience of Earth Day in their communities? It's a great day to hold events like community cleanups, and to share knowledge about environmental issues, but an even more interesting suggestion was implied by an Earth Day article on the AIGA website this year, in which author Phil Patton posed the question: "Why is there no simple single symbol or badge of environmentalism, like the peace sign?"

It was the best of times to be in marketing, it was the worst of times to be marketing…

Or at least, that's how I imagine Charles Dickens might have started A Tale of Two Cities if he was writing it today. The paradox is true. It's a tough time to sell marketing services – everyone's looking for an expert, while the terrible reality is that trends are shifting too quickly for true expertise to exist. On the other hand, there's never been a better time to be "mad men" because there are no limits, no boundaries, no set of rules to follow anymore.

At a time like this, a commodity like certainty is worth its weight in gold. A "marketing expert" who can guarantee a campaign's success will go far, until, that is, it becomes clear that – just as you suspected – there are no guarantees when it comes to promotion and advertising.

Unlike traditional forms of media, (like, ahem, print), digital and social media promise investors the wonders of being able to track the results of their investments. How much traffic has your social media campaign driven? By what precise percentage has your revenue increased?

We love being able to see these numbers, and yet, our ability to use them remains limited because of how fast the landscape is changing. What worked this week might not work next week. The company that generated crazy traffic with Twitter is not the same company that will explode on, say, ChatRoulette (and yes, businesses are starting to advertise there, too).

Nope, there are few guarantees to be had in this day and age. However, there are some things that remain true because they're older than social media, older than print advertising, older than the concept of marketing itself. And that's the little kernel of thought that contextualized human interaction as such: if I appeal to you on a personal level, you're more likely to interact with me, a.k.a. patronize my business.

Remember – think way back to, say, five years ago – when social media came into the mix? What made it special, different, better than other forms of advertising?

Way back in those halcyon days, a Facebook page or a blog or even a (ugh) MySpace page, made advertising personal again. It was supposed to make marketing friendly, accessible, individualized.

But what has it done? What happened to the greatest revolution in advertising since the town crier?

In short, it's ruined social media without actually benefiting business. The only people who have benefited from the whole process are web types who styled themselves "social media experts." This is not the fault of business, but rather of the social media platform's need to monetize. Either way, however, the results are the same, and all the numbers add up to EPIC FAIL.

If you follow the Hotcards' blog, then you know that the team around here does a lot of cool stuff. In an interview we did a while back with graphic designer Glen Infante, he told us all about a side project of his, LeBron2010. For the last two years, Glen, and other RealCavsFans, have been trying to raise enough money to have a giant banner of LeBron James printed and posted in Cleveland. The message: keep LeBron in Cleveland and on the Cavs!

Finally, after a ton of fundraising and a ton of work, the banner/billboard went up last week on the side of Nick's Sports Corner. But it didn't go up easy!

What's so great about print advertising? If you had to explain printing's role in the publishing, advertising, news, and events worlds to, say, someone from another planet, what would you say?

That's the question the bigwigs over at (deep breath) The Printing Council, Printing Industries of America, The Association for Suppliers of Printing, Publishing and Converting Technologies, and the National Association for Print Leadership are asking.

All these elaborately-acronym-ed print associations have come together to host Positively Print, a contest/campaign "designed to promote the power of print in the media mix."

After two glorious, rock 'em sock 'em terms with the Terminator, California is looking for a new governor. And at a time when the state is as hard-hit by the recession as anywhere in the world, candidates vying for a spot in November's gubernatorial elections aren't sparing a dime on campaign spending.

Under particular scrutiny, Meg Whitman, former eBay CEO turned politico. She's running for a chance at the Republican candidacy, and so far, her campaign has spent almost $60 million ($49 mil of it Whitman's own) blanketing the airwaves in commercials and the streets in political printing. She's pulled ahead of Democrat Jerry Brown and Republican rival Steve Poizner in the polls, but at a cost that makes this the most expensive nonpresidential campaign in U.S. history.

The Whitman campaign has been distributing a series of direct mail pieces slamming Steve Poizner, accompanied by a URL to a clever matching website – a good example (from a former web CEO) of how to combine political print and web advertising to create a powerful cross-media campaign.