#frontierpress

[jasonashlock]

Evaporating eBooks

1000 James Patterson fans. Given 24 hours to read an advance digital copy of his new book. One day later,the books self-destruct, disappearing from Kindles and iPads forever.

The same technology that enables Patterson to pull off a gimmick enables some of our more innovative clients to drive engagement during pre-determined windows, and protect intellectual property from escaping their control.

For trade shows or seminars, pitch meetings or client tours, and even for employee training, evaporating ebooks offer companies an opportunity to deliver exclusive digital content to targeted audiences — and then take it back whenever they want. Now you see it; Now you don’t. Beats the pants off a password-protected PDF.

Sophisticated technology. Straight out of a spy novel and straight into your organization’s marketing toolkit. Want to try it? Let us know.

[engagelive]

We could listen to Jason Ashlock talk all day. As the founder of Frontier Press, the next-generation publishing unit of The Frontier Project, and a former NYC publisher, we're lucky to call Jason a colleague. 

In the early months of the global recession, when the publishing industry was anxious and contracting, Jason launched a literary firm from standing start. In a few years, it had become a known industry force. He packaged books for Hall of Fame athletes and Oscar-winning actors, for Pulitzer nominees and Grammy winners, for indie film stars and fledgling novelists. In the process, he honed his skills in narrative design and product development, and then pivoted to a new mission: break the book out of its ghetto. FrontierPress is how he’s chipping away at the wall.

Frequently speaking at industry conferences, Jason is an open book on stage. Frankly, the way he speaks is intoxicating. In this interview clip, find out what Jason is inspired by at the moment, what's on his playlist, and what he thinks YOU should be paying attention to in 2014.

[engagelive3]

Announcing, Frontier Press. A digital publishing engine that combines narrative intelligence with leading-edge technology to deliver innovative ideas in storytelling packages.

Applicable to every organization that has a story to tell, either internally or externally.

Contact the founding partner of Frontier Press, Jason Ashlock.

- BC

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**This opening is now closed.**

Wildly creative. Obsessed with the little details. And (oh yeah) able to translate complex business ideas into intriguing, edgy, and visually representative materials.

If you just read a description of yourself, give us a shout. We’re looking for an amazingly talented graphic designer, and we want to meet you. Catch the full job description here, along with details on how to apply.  

[frontierdispatches]

Along with a few of our cutting-edge clients, Frontier Press is exploring a new frontier in niche publishing: internal corporate magazines. (Read the full story here.) In the coming year, they’ll produce two internal corporate magazines for two very different companies. 

Each magazine has a different intention, but the basics are the same: talk to employees, learn their stories, then share them far and wide.

[frontierdispatches]

Want Better Employee Engagement? Publish a Magazine.

Airline magazines used to be bad—really bad. You’d pick up a copy while sitting on the tarmac, leaf through a couple stories, lose interest immediately, and then shove the whole thing back inside the seat pocket in front of you.

But something is different now. Thumb through a copy of American Way, and you’ll fall into a number of well-written, captivating stories that are surprisingly good. (In a recent issue, for instance: an engrossing profile on Andy Hayler, who’s dined at every three-star Michelin restaurant, plus a nuanced travel piece on the Brazilian city of Manaus, with striking photography of the black-hued Rio Negro and tan-colored Solimoes River converging.)

And it’s not just airlines that are upping their game. Brands across the globe have taken on a new publishing role with gusto—and they’re doing it well. A flour company’s glossy spreads rival that of any other cooking magazine. An energy drink producer reinforces its thrill-seeking, boundary-busting brand with a newsstand-quality magazine. A double punch—the breakdown of traditional magazine channels and the rise of affordable desktop publishing tools—has opened the doors for brands to become publishers, targeting audiences in highly specific ways, positioning their experts as the experts on a given topic, and building immense brand loyalty along the way.

Jason, who heads up Frontier Press, has been at the forefront of this shift from traditional to brand publishing, and he’s gearing up for another major inflection point. Those same approaches that companies have co-opted to build massive crowds of highly engaged, loyal customers? 

They’re now trickling into companies, turning inward toward employees.

“The next evolutionary step in niche publishing is internal corporate magazines,” says Jason. “Your employee base is just as valuable as your customers. They’re your front line, the people making your product or service viable and available in the first place. Tapping into their loyalty and engagement is just as crucial as connecting with your customers.”

COMPETING FOR ATTENTION Until recently, internal corporation communications strategies have been (almost too literally) an inside joke, he says. There might be a clunky intranet that serves as more of an HR tool than anything else. Or a printed newsletter that’s crammed with photos from a recent golf fundraiser, bad fonts, and silly Clip Art.

If you’re not elevating your internal communications, you’re missing a huge opportunity, says Jason. “Many of the companies that Frontier works with have employees in the thousands. That’s an awful lot of people they could be connecting with in a meaningful way.”

Organizations do a lot of things well, he offers, but one of the worst things they do is force employees to subsume their identities to the organization.

“We assume that people become someone different when they step into the workplace, that they walk through a magic veil that automatically transforms them into an employee as they enter the corporate campus every morning,” Jason says. “Then at the end of the day, they pass through the veil once more, become human, go home, and have lives.”

This assumption leads us to believe people consume content—jokes, books, TV shows, internet videos—differently at work than they do at home, and that’s just not true. Their tastes don’t change.

“You can’t forget that you as an employer are also competing for the attention of our employees. If they’re drawn to People or US Weekly in their personal lives, why would they be drawn to your lackluster office publication on a Thursday afternoon?”

If we remember that the end users of our corporate magazines are real people, we’ll start building better platforms—ones that are playful, authentic, and alive.

WHERE THERE ARE PEOPLE, THERE ARE GREAT STORIES “I think the reason so many companies don’t seriously publish for themselves is because they don’t think they have interesting stories to tell. That’s a deep fallacy,” Jason says. “They assume because they work in, say, an industrial commodities business or an EPC company, their work isn’t sexy. They don’t think about their teams, whether it’s procurement or compliance, as interesting.”

But every company is made up of people, and people are drawn to stories about other people. So when you start telling the stories of your people, you’re showing employees that you see them and recognize they are important. That demonstrates something powerful: trust, respect, and, most importantly, care. When employees feel valued, they are more loyal to their company.

Besides fomenting employee loyalty, there’s another major perk to launching an internal company magazine: it sets the stage for more authentic engagement.

“I hear leaders wonder aloud why their entire employee base isn’t excited about their company’s new direction, initiative, or product,” Jason says. “But the truth is, your employees have no idea what initiatives are taking place unless you tell them. Most companies don’t.”

The native stories that companies would think are interesting, he says, tend to percolate near the top of the chain at the leadership or director level, usually in the worlds of research and development or innovation. But that’s maybe 10% of the entire company. The rest of the company is in the dark. By providing your employees with relevant information that will inform their work, says Jason, you’re welcoming your team into your vision and showing them the way forward, which naturally leads to an employee base that is more loyal to your company’s overall purpose.  

This is what publishing, especially internal publishing, can solve, and that’s what we do at Frontier Press. We borrow the best practices from the publishing world and put them to use inside organizations just like yours. We seek out interesting stories—of individuals and teams, passion projects and company-wide initiatives, projects and best practices—collate them in beautiful packages, then share them with your people.

The end product is a surprising, elegant, state-of-the art publication, but what we create isn’t revolutionary. Those best practices already exist. What we do is mobilize our team’s collective expertise around your company, and then transfer our know-how to your team.

“Our mission is to transform corporations into publishers,” Jason says. “At first, that does look like us becoming your guerilla publishing unit. But in the long term, we’ll help you develop the internal ability to do this on your own.”

In the coming year, the Press team will produce two internal corporate magazines for two very different companies. Each magazine has a different intention, but the basics are the same: talk to employees, learn their stories, then share them far and wide. See how we’re making it happen here.

***

If you’re ready to start a conversation about how an internal magazine can work for you, here’s what you need to know now:

> Your Guide // Jason, CEO of Frontier Press > Contact // jason@thefrontierproject.com

[frontierdispatches]

A Real-World Road Map for Organizational Change

We talk a lot about organizational transformation, but what does it look like in practice? And how can impact-hungry leaders like you navigate the rocky landscape of change and drive transformation?

When one of our clients, veteran human resources executive Chris Buhl, took the HR helm in North America for Kuehne + Nagel, a global freight forwarder with 69,000-plus employees in more than 100 countries, he walked in with one big question: How open was the company to the large-scale changes he hoped to lead? He'd mined Glass Door. He'd met with dozens of employees. He'd gotten to know the company and its long history. But still he wondered.

He soon discovered the company was fertile ground for new ideas that could lead to transformation, and three years later, that transformation is visible. But how exactly does that kind of change happen—and stick?

The answer, it turns out, is to start with a big, unexpected move—one we’re exploring in an in-depth case study that breaks down our partner-first process of bringing the most relevant tools and strategies to bear when clients need it most. It’s a case study in one company’s journey to organizational transformation. But it’s also a case study in how, as a portfolio, The Frontier Project makes it happen.

To make our client’s vision a reality, we pulled from across our team, starting with custom workshops and learning programs from Frontier Academy to train and engage. The rest supported what Frontier Academy started: keynotes from Frontier Live to inspire, videos and animation from Frontier Media to share the message of change far and wide, and specially-produced guidebooks from Frontier Press to support new behaviors learned.

And the transformation our client experienced? It speaks for itself. 

If you’re looking for similar transformation and change, start first by diving into the case study here. Then, reach out. We’d love to start a conversation around your organization’s potential.

> Your Guide // Ryan, Frontier Academy Facilitator  > Contact // rmauter@frontieracademy.com

[frontierdispatches]

You Are What You Read

Here's a question we've been pondering with clients and colleagues:

What's the point of business books?

We always begin a new book with a sense of hope: that we'll glean some insight that will get us a promotion, make us a better manager, or allow us to, at the very least, to drop a book title or one-liner in an important client meeting.

Often the books fail to live up to our expectations. They can be, well, less than stimulating. The content can be dry, or repetitive, or all-too-obvious. By the end, sometimes it seems the only benefit is simply the gratification we feel for completing a book. At each moment we're asking ourselves what are we learning, how the content ties back to us, and how we can deploy these new skills quickly -- and often we feel the books don't quite deliver on their promise to make us our better professional selves. So we’re left disappointed that we weren’t profoundly changed during the six hours we devoted to the text.

But perhaps it’s less that the content was ineffective and more that we were never taught how to engage with it. Reading is a learned skill and critical reading takes practice. Just because we're all able to do it doesn't mean we’re all good at it. Like with any other skill, we get better at reading when we do it thoughtfully and regularly. No doubt we all need to read more. But even more important: we need to read more purposefully.

So here are a handful of our reading strategies. Try them out. We think they'll help you make the most of your time spent reading.

Chunk: Break the book into small segments, and stop at the end of each to reflect.

Scribble: Highlight as you read, take external notes of key points you’d like to reinforce, and stop at the end of each of your chunks to free-write reflections.

Toggle: Occasionally switch from reading sentences in your mind to reading them out loud.

Talk: As you read, share stories and insights via social media and/or in person.

Happy learning.

- Us

P.S. Want book recommendations for yourself or your team? Hit up JAA, our resident book man.

[frontierdispatches]

LOCKED IN THE AUDIO BOOTH

First recording session of our Cartography of Negotiation audiobook.  That’s a bottle of kombucha in Becky’s hands, not beer (yet).

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The Book is Coming.

Stay tuned.

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AUDIENCE FIRST, EGO LAST

Despite their digital DNA, videos are predominately physical vessels -- they carry an idea, a feeling, a message. And they deposit it into the hearts and minds of whoever clicks the hovering link. And like anything meant to carry a message, videos must be designed with the audience in mind.

During leisure time or work time, for productivity or play, viewers want to feel something--or, frankly, anything. Make me laugh. Or cry. Help me connect, relate, be inspired. Help me be heard and be respected. 

Whether a video of a company's CEO meant to inspire a workforce, or a video projected during a nonprofit's annual gala to open wallets, a powerful video asset is a heat-seeking missile: it winds and finds its way to your viewer's beating heart.

Here's how:

A great video doesn't have to be the sexiest or the most beautiful. A team can film for days, striving for the perfect series of shots, only to create a video that inspires no one to action. What it must have is resonance: that powerful sense that it understands and speaks to what the audience already assumes.

To find that resonance:

+ Lay down your ego. (Do this in life, not just production.) What you want to say matters less than what your audience needs to hear.

+ Empathize. What does your audience hope for? What do they fear? What gives them power and agency?

+ Collaborate. Accept advice. Listen to critics, regardless of their role.

+ Build for the End Game. Whatever you want your audience to do, motivate that action. Don't fear the call to action. Like a salesperson who delivers a killer pitch and then never asks for business, too many video stick the landing and then never ask for engagement.

-Becky

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Design Is ________.

A piece from the stimulating collection at the Dongdaemun Design Plaza. Thoughts on design from designers. - JAA

[frontierdispatches]

Like a Smile. Or a Punch to the Gut.

Story, as a thing, does not really exist. The word is merely a euphemism, shorthand for a certain manner of ordering information, arranging it into a package that transfers meaning with penetrating efficiency. It so happens that these rehearsed mannerisms by which we gather fragments of information and place them into coherent relationship--are something we understand so naturally, something that we grasp so intuitively that they constitute a kind of universal gesture. As discernible as a smile. Or a punch to the gut. Across hemispheres and epochs. Across cultures and worldviews. Narrative logic remains the most unifying invention humanity has ever shared.

- From JAA's storytelling keynote, which he'll be delivering a version of at SXSW in March.

[frontierdispatches]

What's FrontierPress (and how do I use it)?

FrontierPress is a highly flexible publishing engine that powers the design, production, distribution and marketing of unique digital and print products for our clients and partners.

Use digital or print books as private showcases of your B2B products. As educational content for users or distributors. As employee training and on-boarding guides. Or as highly visible branding initiatives.

From elegant hardcovers and paperbacks to nimble ebooks and web-books. From apps and interactive texts to coffee table volumes and collector’s editions. We specialize in matching content to container—and then delivering it in the right context so that the audience craves it.

From a project’s ideation to its incarnation, we oversee content architecture, build written and multimedia content, and power public and private distribution of world-class publications. For one purpose: to equip clients to produce a media product that will engage audiences and shift their perspectives and behaviors.

Here’s how we work: 

FrontierArchitecture

Marshaling all our expertise in story-telling and story-selling, we’ll determine the project’s shape and substance. Matching content and form, we guide length, organization, titling, market position, voice and medium — all while keeping the project goals top of mind.

FrontierNarrative

In partnership with our clients, we build the narrative of the project.  Drafting copy and storylines to captivate the "reader" with a deeply engaging message that shifts their attitudes and behaviors.

FrontierMedia

As the narrative takes shape, we build the media assets that bring the narrative to life.  Stories, essays, photography, graphics, video, and more. Merging our award-winning design talent with the very latest in publishing technology, we structure and polish one-of-a-kind print and digital books that delight readers. 

FrontierDistribution

Wherever your readers are, and however you want to reach them, we’ll power the connection. Managing global distribution across the world’s largest online retailers as well as enabling bespoke private distribution through embeddable widgets, email sign-ups, SMS delivery, and more. We’ll target or canvas to put your book in hands and on devices.

FrontierLaunch

Tentpole and lightning rod, business card and loyalty badge, reward and introduction — the book is a powerful artifact of content marketing and brand-building. We shaping the story of its creation and purpose, and of the company or project it supports, ensuring publicity and engagement by internal or external audiences.

And finally, legacy making

Books last. It's one of the best things they do: they resist being reduced to ephemera, a quality that's not easy to possess nowadays. Embarking on this project is a de facto legacy-building enterprise. We’ll make sure that, inside your company and out, the book we produce becomes a source of lasting pride and a continual wellspring of inspiration and impact.