Award to the Wise: Readers Are the Real Judge

At the custom publisher where I spend my waking hours, the halls are adorned with praise for well-written articles and smartly designed feature spreads—a triumphant redesign of a moribund business school magazine, a celebrity cover for a prominent medical title with a circulation that seemingly knows no way but up. The list goes on. 

We’re so proud of our accomplishments that we’ve joked about looping chains through our trophies and draping them rap-star style around our necks. It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that bling, right? Well, maybe. If your employer were, say, Def Jam Records and this were 2002.

There’s a certain satisfaction to being recognized by your peers. A couple times a year, an email goes out to the editors here: Time to submit your nominations—the very best of your very best—for this year’s round of print and online awards. We comb through our magazines with a collective sigh. (Don’t they know everything we do is great?)

The submissions are mailed. Months pass. We forget. Then one day our marketing team shows up with a wheelbarrow full of Golden Pens or Silver Lamps or whatever the heck The Panel has deemed fit to hand out this year. Somebody invariably thanks The Team. We clap. We cheer. Occasionally, there’s cake. And so, we eat.

It would be wrong to poo-poo the significance of such feats. Awards build morale. And they make for great decoration. Plus, I love cake. But, let’s be honest: The true mark of great content has nothing to do with the number of plaques on your wall.

It sounds cliché. But think about it. You don’t write articles or design feature spreads or publish magazines for the sake of awards. If you’re lucky, you might eventually win a few, sure. But the best, most effective content, whether it wins or not, has a decidedly more altruistic mission: It works hard for its audience.

This is especially true in custom media. Our clients—largely, corporations and nonprofit associations—trust us to author content (articles, websites, video, Twitter and Facebook posts) that connects with the needs of their customers and constituents.

If we’re creating a content strategy or publishing a membership magazine for, say, The World Toilet Organization (yes, there is such a thing), it’s a safe bet our cover feature on waterless urinal installation won’t garner critical acclaim from the American Society of Magazine Editors.

But, if a member of our target audience read the article and what we wrote helped that person do his or her job better, or somehow altered that person’s perspective on toilet installation, did the article serve its purpose? Our client might think so.

Start by asking a simple question: Is this relevant to my readers? Take yourself out of the equation. At the risk of sounding like a disgruntled ex, this isn’t about you.

It’s about them. And no matter how good of an editor or designer or programmer you think you are, the truth is that the client didn’t hire your firm for you. They hired you and all your many complementary pieces for its end result—in this case, your content.

Countless hours are spent honing copy, checking facts, designing pages, and choosing art. When our clients give the thumbs up, we ship the disk to the printer or upload to the web, press a button, and exhale. That’s the easy part.

The real work starts when our readers get their hands on it. It’s our content that does the heavy lifting in this relationship. And if you think winning the admiration of a panel of your peers is tough, think about what it will take to win over the guy who has to spend all day on his knees installing those toilets.

[Image: The Shorts and Longs | The Both And]