print to digital

Most, if not all, publishing businesses have had to alter their business model because of the impact of the digital age.  Amazon recently reported that its e-book sales beat traditional hardcover sales, and digital sales will surpass paperback ones in the next 9-12 months.  The concept of “publisher-turned-digital-curator” has paved the way for small publishers to jump on the digital bandwagon and gain business that would have been near impossible with only offline/traditional sales.

Yell, the UK publisher of the Yellow Pages, recently announced that profits are sharply decreasing and their stock has a junk credit rating-a hit from customers’ increasing migration from print to digital.  As a result, they have outlined a new strategy to further investment in digital and have brought in a new COO from Cisco.

The New York Times is doing a good job of incorporating digital into their platform in conjunction with print.  They are currently working on have full integration with the two.  After firing its Social Media Director, the New York Times realizes the importance of digital and how it should be fully integrated within all aspects of the Times-and not be a separate entity. They also stress to their reporters the importance of using Twitter and Facebook to stay connected to their readers.

“Simply put, the NYT understands that media organizations shouldn’t divide their print editions from their online, iPad and mobile subscriptions.  It is all the same brand to consumers, and an aligned outlet with all of its properties functioning together successfully will be more powerful and useful for readers.”

It will be interesting to see how the New York Times fairs without its social media director- and if they will need to recruit another one in the future.  As social media continues to change, who will be responsible for informing the reporters of what they need to be aware of?

Customer Engagment in the Advocacy Phase

 

A Business Case for Social Media

Advocacy in the customer engagement cycle is one of the most important phases that all business should strive to attain with their customers.  Social media can (and should) play a major role in the advocacy phase.  Customers that have reached this stage are essentially brand ambassadors promoting your organization for you.  Customers are increasingly ignoring what the brands have to say, and listening to what their friends (and complete strangers, for that matter) are discussing via social media.  For example, the success of Trip Advisor and re-defining the hotel industry is built on the foundation of customer reviews, whether they are glowing advocates or wouldn’t be paid to recommend the property.  Advocacy via social media gives a brand a customer voice that was not previously available.  If I were curious about a product or film, I’d rather read the customer reviews to see what real people, not paid businesses are saying.

Customer advocacy is crucial, as it is the main factor in generating word of mouth buzz about your organization or product.  It is through social media that this can best be obtained.

 

What KPIs could you use to measure it’s success at this point in the customer engagement cycle?

 

Share of Conversation

• Using Facebook Insights, the organization can analyze how many people are sharing information that has been posted on the page
• Other tools such as Radian6, BrandWatch, BuzzMetrics, etc. can provide information on how the level of buzz and share of conversation is increasing (or not).  For example, if an artist sends out a tweet, how many times it has been re-tweeted can be tracked

Tagging

• Track levels and users that are tagging your brand in messaging via social media.  If your organization is posting articles, photos, or videos, tracking the number of embeds via social media will give your brand a good idea of the level of true interaction.

#Forwards/Invites

• Advocates will want to forward your information on, and invite friends where they can

Feedback

• Facebook Insights can provide information on the levels of feedback via likes and comments

 

Customer engagement via social media is important in all stages of the cycle.  The awareness phase will have, most likely, a low amount of engagement-as users are just being introduced to a brand.  Engagement will be low, so for this stage, click through rates, impressions, and search rankings are of utmost importance.  Customer engagement will truly begin once the customer has reached a certain level of interest and begins sharing and discussing your brand via social media.

 

you publish content..and the people respond (badly)

So you’re an organization that pushes out some form of content either via your website, blog, facebook, or twitter.  How many times have you been barraged by a host of negative (and sometimes really nasty) comments?  What are you supposed to do? Are their comments valid?

The comments could be negative just for the sake of being mean, but they could also be making a good point.  It’s the negative comments that people publish that you need to worry the most about- good stories/comments don’t tend to go as far.  How you as an organization handles these is crucial, and a plan needs to be clearly laid out to prevent any mistakes.  You can do a couple things:

• Ignore the negative comments altogether. Be careful here, you probably want to sift through and take care of some of them.  If they’re having a real problem, talk to them.
• If you decide to engage, should it be in the public forum or taken offline?  It’s probably best to show the public that you’re reaching out and concerned-then provide a contact to take the discussion offline.
• Remove the comments. If monitoring on a regular basis, you can remove a negative comment quickly before too many notice it.  This could, however, backfire if the mean-spirited person comes back.

Some people really aren’t worth wasting your time and energy, but you never really know who might be an influencer.  You can use a data monitoring tool such as BrandWatch, Radian6, CoTweet, or BuzzMetrics to actively track your online discussions- and look at their Klout scores/level of influence to determine your order of interacting with users.  These systems are expensive, and best reserved (IMO) for larger corporations.  If you’re a smaller business, you can most likely just hit the Refresh button on Facebook and keep track.  If you have a page with 28,000,000 likes-it’s near impossible to actively monitor and respond.

What are your tips for dealing with negative comments?

 

Translate Text via Your Phone!

Have you ever been on vacation in a foreign country, and can’t read the signs?  Well, it looks like our problems are in the process of getting solved.

Word Lens, an application currently for Apple iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch(with the camera) seeks to take the challenge out of translating text from a foreign language.  All you have to do is hold up your phone with the app open, and like magic, the text changes from Spanish to English or English to Spanish.  Currently, that’s all they offer, but I’m sure that they will roll out more language functionality as they get more revenue.  You can see a video demo on YouTube- it’s pretty amazing. Check it out below:

The price point is rather high, at $9.99 per pack. From a digital publishing perspective, as this functionality gets better and more affordable- I’d love the ability to be in Shanghai with a local newspaper in one hand, iPhone in the other, and be able to read the Chinese paper.  If I had an app like this with full language functionality, I’d feel like I could buy any paper, magazine, or whatever and feel much more like a ‘local’ instead of having to watch CNN or read the Wall Street Journal everywhere I go.

I think it’d be a great marketing tool for companies to tell the local public that they have the ability to learn any language with the help of a camera on their iPhone.

I’ll be keeping an eye out for this one.

Turning Facebook ‘Likes’ into Customer Discounts

Snoop Dogg, the d-o-double g, recently came out with a fragrance.  When you think of Snoop, you totally think women’s perfume, right?  It seems like everyone and their brother has a fragrance line, but they’re all selling like hotcakes.

Whether Snoop Dogg is your typical go to for the best fragrance at your local department store, his team is doing something new via Facebook: the more ‘Likes’ the fragrance gets, the cheaper it is.  They offer a different product each day this week with the opportunity for discounts.  Today, it’s a men’s body spray starting at $7.99, with 10/20/30 percent discounts for 100/200/300 Likes, respectively.

This has made me think, why not do this for other goods?  In the digital publishing realm, I can see this being extremely popular and financially beneficial for the fledgling industry.  Why not have a Facebook page with your store attached, and have a featured book (or ebook) where the price decreases as the likes increase?  This is one idea I ‘Like.’ And yes, pun intended.

What do you think?  Do you believe that this is a good option to push books?  Or do you think it de-values the property?

Content Strategy and Measuring Success

Why is content the last thing thought about when designing a site?  We’re too focused on being flashy; if the content is terrible, nobody is going to stay very long, let alone spend their hard earned dollars.

Kristina Halvorson states that you should ask the following questions when defining your content strategy:

• What content do we have now?
• What content have we agreed we need?
• Who’s going to create that content?
• Who’s going to review and approve it?
• How often will it be reviewed and updated?
• When and why will it be changed?

Think about the lifecycle of the content:

• Research
• Strategy
• Creation
• Delivery
• Measurement
• Maintenance
• Archival

Start early!

• Work with the designers from the first phases to discuss content

Time Management is key

Deliverables vs Strategic Thinking

• Focus not just on the deliverables on the project, but the overall process
• What are the business objectives?
• Content for the sake of content won’t get you anywhere!
• It can’t be just driving business to site

Be the expert in your field

 

Now, how do you actually measure success with digital publishing?  It’s really dependent on the goals of the business.

Before pushing new content, ensure that you have established benchmarks- how many people access your content now, how much time do they spend, and how much money do they spend?  Ideally, with a clearly defined content strategy, when your new content is produced, you’ll be able to raise your benchmarks and will see the KPIs rise.

I’d love to hear your feedback on what you do to measure success of your content publishing.

ConocoPhillips uses the Zmags analytics tool to check on the performance of its newsletters.  They’ve got bounce rates below 20% and readers spend 3-4 minutes viewing content. To me, that seems like a rather high bounce rate.

At work, we’re constantly looking at the stats for our newsletters (using Silverpop) and using their heatmap functionality to see where people are (and aren’t) clicking, how many open, how many report abuse, etc.  Newsletters with the highest open rates tend to be ones that clearly have a CTA in the heading, such as a contest, upcoming tour tickets-rather than just an update.  So is it that readers just want a tangible good from the artist and don’t care about what the artist is up to, or is it that the content isn’t good enough in the updates to warrant interest from the fans? Hmm..

http://www.webvanta.com/post/295386-kristina-halvorson-interview-content-strategy-for

http://thinkvitamin.com/design/kristina-halvorson-on-content-strategy-for-the-web/

RSS Feeds, Twitter, or Facebook to get news?

 

I just started using Google Reader to aggregate some of the blogs I frequent, and I have to say, I’m not convinced.  I don’t like it as much- I’d much rather just go to my bookmarks and visit the individual pages, even if it takes a bit longer. I like to browse, and feel like with the aggregators and RSS feeds it doesn’t allow me to do that as much.

Don Reisinger of cnet wrote a blog post awhile back stating how Twitter has replaced his use of RSS readers, and I totally get where he’s coming from.  RSS feeds aren’t updated as fast, and a site such as Twitter tends to break stories first- and cuts through the searching and junk filled online.  Personally, I’m not a big user of Twitter (yet, it will probably change-but it’s one more thing I have to update and constantly work on) and have found that I get my breaking news stories via Facebook.

Most of the breaking news I found out about on Facebook comes directly from my friends, but since I follow numerous companies and news sites on Facebook, I get their breaking stories there first.  They’re always posted via Facebook or Twitter before their website or RSS feed. Why? Because it’s far less time consuming to post a quick blurb. This way, they can break the story while still working on a news article or blog post.  It’s pretty smart, actually.

A post from ReadWriteWeb confirms this. Facebook is the largest news reader on the Internet.  I have everything all in one news feed, but this article makes an interesting point from Facebook- make a dedicated list of all the companies you follow for news, and you basically have the most up to date RSS feed you could ever imagine. Genius!

It makes sense that Facebook would become a successful source for news, as we love to share and see what our friends and family are looking at.  The social aspect of Facebook and the sheer numbers of the Facebook population allow for such a larger distribution of content. The possibility of a news story going viral around the world is made far easier through Facebook than via an RSS feed.

Where do you think is going to be the best place for accessing information in the future?

Sources:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10185182-2.html

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_aims_to_succeed_where_google_reader_faile.php