Print + eMedia = Results

You really can’t have one without the other

The other day I gave a presentation to Meister Media’s sales group in which I (understandably) advocated vigorously on behalf of digital advertising. At the heart of the session were numbers – numbers, numbers, numbers. How emedia is eminently measurable. How its cost-per-impression is extremely competitive with print. (And actually it’s often far lower.) How good emedia leads to clicks, and from there – if the total campaign is crafted well – how the click results in solid and relatively inexpensive sales leads for the client.

There was plenty of receptivity among the salesfolk to the emedia message, and really there has been for some time, as Meister’s digital revenue has been growing vigorously. But there’s also a natural reluctance to disparage print in favor of emedia, and as I took pains to say – there really doesn’t need to be. The two go hand in hand.

I use the metaphor of torque (see above). Individually, print magazines, enewsletters or websites will get you down the marketing road but maybe not as far or as fast as you would like. Put them together and 3+3+3 = 4. Print is a highly effective way to build awareness. eMedia drives action – traffic to websites, advertiser/prospect interaction, multimedia and measurability.

Is any of this revolutionary? Hardly. But we in the media business have wasted a good decade-and-a-half either declaring print dead or pronouncing its imperviousness to all new oncoming competitition. We’re all wrong! And we should stop polarizing the discussion. A friend who is a professor at Cleveland State University’s noted School of Communication recently pointed out that no new medium of the past 100 years has really gone away – radio slid over to make way for movie theaters, movie theaters for TV, TV for video games and the Internet, etc. And each evolved a new business model to coexist with its newfound competitor.

Print is now sliding over to make way for emedia, and both are going to evolve into something new as result. More later on what each likely is going to become on the other side of this transformation. But for now, the message is: Print and emedia – they’re each an important part of this nutritious media breakfast.

Web Analytics’ Unforgiving Eye

As the Fastball song goes: ‘There are no lies / when you see that look in their eyes’

Is there a more immediate and honest judgment of one’s work than live performances? I think not. To a rock band I once performed with, our running barometer of success was the ability to (a) get people in the door and (b) get them to respond – ideally by dancing and raising their arms (as below) and or at least standing or at least by smiling and rhythmic head-nodding. We would know minutes into the performance what type of night it was going to be.

Similarly visceral judgments await those of us who are migrating our content focus from print to web – getting people in, then keeping them in. Web analytics provide us with an immediate and unblinking judgment: Did or did not a significant portion of our intended audience look at our content or didn’t they? A glance at the pageview totals will say yea or nay. Did they stay for long? A low average-time-on-site and/or high bounce rate will say, nope.

As I wrote in an entry of the national blog for the American Society of Business Publication Editors, gone are the days when we as print journalists could proclaim an article a success if we received a handful of favorable calls and letters or emails. Today the online brand with the most opens, unique visitors and pageviews wins. And this will be true for individual writers and articles as well. Audience response is not everything – there always will be room for the important story that absolutely must be published – but metrics increasingly will be how the money people keep score.

As journalists we can win this game. We (not publishers) must become the primary marketers of our own content. Posting our content, once the coda of our work, now is setting off a secondary step of “placing” links in social media; monitoring metrics; and modifying story angles, headlines, ledes, etc. in a gambit to reap more pageviews. This duty is falling on the individual journalist as surely as the work of crafting the very story itself.

It's What's Inside that Counts

Let’s not worry so much about the media ‘container.’ It’s mostly about the content – what it is and how it’s used.

A personal vignette about old media and the next generation.

Last night Eldest Child was squired back to the campus of The Ohio State University for the beginning of her winter quarter and a trip to the bustling (Barnes & Noble) college bookstore. Girls in Uggs and boys in ballcaps – some of the best and brightest of the world’s first wired generation – glided agilely among coffeehouse scents and the bounty of twenty-first-century distractions.

Everybody in the store was in motion, save for one. Stationed strategically between the registers and the store’s exit was a lone, still sentinel – a middle-aged man on a stool, behind a small table festooned with two simple, Gothic-lettered words: “Columbus Dispatch.”

Would you like a discounted subscription to the paper?, the gentleman asked as my daughter slipped towards the store exit.

She smiled quickly and firmly, but with not a whit of deliberation between request and response.

No thanks, she said.

Back out on the street, Eldest Child, simpatico to my chosen profession, wanted to know why the newspaper just couldn’t have offered her something online – either the come-on, or the product itself.

Good question. If newspapers don’t gin up the right answers, and soon, a recent cartoon from Ted Rall (above) will be as prophetic as it is funny. For in the lobby of my daughter’s Honors College dormitory there are not discounted newspapers but FREE newspapers, all for the betterment (and hoped-for addiction) of tomorrow’s leaders, colorfully displayed in an all-you-can-read-for-nothing banquet of Columbus Dispatches, Cleveland Plain Dealers, New York Timeses, and USA Todays – and all about as untouched as Xbox 360 controllers in a senior citizens center.

Why must this be so? Are the Millennials just not as interested as the Baby Boomers or Gen Xers have been in news, in statistical information, in colorful life stories?

Hardly! The problem, I believe, is that the Internet generation just isn’t that wedded to paper. And as journalists, we shouldn’t be either. Which isn’t to say our content won’t need to evolve to suit the online medium. It will. And how we present our content online will be every bit as important as what content we choose to present. But we must resist the urge to equate the next generation’s rejection of the medium with a wholesale rejection of content itself.

I agree with an article written for the World Association of Newspapers that papers (and for that matter, print magazines) must become not just publications anymore but “valued members of larger networks that enable their communities to gather, share, and make sense of the news they need.” In fact, I recently talked about the long history of business media as “community” – that it’s more about the brand, the community, and the conversation than it is about the medium – at a meeting of the American Society of Business Publication Editors.

How will we conjure this new vision of mediated community? We need to put on our collective virtual reality helmet and – as Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab describes it – “imagine what media consumption will look like in one, five, 10 years.”

Which sounds like way more fun than pouting like rejected suitors, sitting on the fringes of the media ball and offering our phone number to anyone who happens by.