Publishers need to create a content and e-commerce strategy around relevance, Thomas Chaffee, ceo, ePublishing Inc., told SIPA's annual conference. It's all about audience, he said, and "traffic is not an audience. Tactics about tweeting and Facebook are about traffic, not audience."
Nowadays, publishers need to think in terms of a platform that's focused on the reader and that provides a single editorial and customer interface across print, e-mail, social media, fulfillment and web. "You want to serve your subscribers, when, where, and how they want," he said.
Relevance drives retention, revenue, usage, presentation and delivery, he said. Relevance in presentation extends to whether it is a mobile screen, or a high resolution screen--or a fax. "Ad Age has 3,000 subscribers who get a fax every morning, because that's how they want to get their information.
Ad Age brass thought the idea of get a fax was just too old fashioned, Chaffee said, so they nearly doubled the price. Circulation of the fax product went up 10%, he said.
Publishers have lost control of their readers, Chaffee said. That's because they devalued their content, giving it away for free in hopes that advertising revenue would make up the difference.
Now there's just too much information, too much data on the internet for executives to cope. So the pendulum Is swinging. "Data in itself is just a commodity on the web. But if it is organized and reliable, it becomes information," and people will pay for organized, reliable information.
Chaffee says the Twitter generation was "more of less." He suggests shortening a story, or breaking it into multiple short articles. Assign keywords to each article, and you can send it out with out pieces that also have that key word.
What sort of key words? Brand, company. Slogan, generics, acronyms and industry terms.
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