I have the privilege of working for The Kiplinger Washington Editors, and my boss, Knight Kiplinger, gave a very interesting interview to Mr. Magazine about the current state of the magazine industry and the future of print publishing.

See a summary and edited text of the interview here.

Like Knight, I think the death of print has been over-stated. It strikes me as one of those extravagant “futurist” predictions like a paperless office. Does anybody have a paperless office? Of course not. In fact, we print more stuff now because it’s so easy.

We’re seeing a fragmentation in delivery options because there are so many ways to consume content. Print. Desktop. iPad. iPhone. Kindle. And that’s going to increase. Pretty soon we’ll be reading magazines on heads-up displays in our eyeglasses.

But just as AM radio is still around, print will be around for a long time. It’s a different kind of experience, and some people will prefer it.

I agree with Knight that publishers were short-sighted in putting their content online to chase after ad revenue. In the early days of the internet, an incredible amount of money was spent in online advertising, and it looked like a good deal. That ad revenue has dwindled (partially because the ads are ineffective — people have learned to ignore them) and publishers are left with an environment where people are accustomed to getting content for free. Some people even act as if it’s their right to get content for free.

We need to take a step back. Publishers should have some content available for free, but some of it should be behind a paywall.

To some extent the genie is out of the bottle. There’s tons of free content online, and there probably always will be.

However — there is a value to carefully selected and edited content. You can download the Zite app to your iPad and create a personal finance “magazine” if you like. It will pull in free stories from all over the web, and some of them are probably good stories. But which ones? Some of them are what you really need to hear and think about now, but others are dangerous nonsense. Are you sure you know which is which?

There’s a time and a place for free content, but when it matters whether the advice is good or bad, whether the facts have been checked or not, whether the data is current — it’s worth paying a little to be sure. A modest subscription fee is worth the peace of mind you get knowing professionals have reviewed and approved what you’re reading.

Business cards have changed a lot over the last several years. First, it’s easier and cheaper to print them on both sides, with both color and fancy graphics, and second, there are more things to include.

It’s not just name, title, company, address, email, phone, etc. Now you’ve got Twitter handles, facebook pages, linkedin pages, QR codes, skype addresses, and whatever new and odd technology they’ve bought into.

Personally, I think it’s best to stick to the basics. If I want to find you on Linkedin or Facebook or Twitter, I can look you up by email, right? And I really don’t want to download an app so I can scan some image off your card so I can watch a silly promotional video.

But my biggest beef with business cards is when they don’t have a plain white back that I can write on. I’d say 80 percent of the business cards I collect are from meetings, and when I get a card I like to jot down why I have it and what I’m interested in. E.g., “these guys have a service that’s like Adobe’s DPS.”

Unfortunately, my own business card has red on the back. Ugh!

If I have an apple and you steal it, I’m out one apple. But if I have a copy of a newsletter, and you borrow it for as long as it takes for you to copy it, or scan it, then I still have my newsletter.

It’s even worse with electronic files. Remember when everybody was sharing music on Napster? It made it feel like you were being stupid if you actually paid for a song.

But there are two sides to this issue. If somebody (illegally) photocopies a newsletter and likes it, they might buy it. It’s free promotion for the publisher. And if somebody watches an (illegal) video of a song on Youtube, they might then go buy the song on iTunes.

Believe me, I’m absolutely not justifying the theft of copyrighted material. The owner of the copyrighted material should be the one who decides who gets to see free, promotional copies — not the consumer. I’m only pointing out that sometimes it works out to the benefit of content provider. At least a little.

Content providers see all this theft going on and, quite reasonably, want to find ways to get that lost revenue.

“If I send my subscribers a PDF of my newsletter, what’s to prevent them from forwarding it to all their friends for free?”

One option is “digital rights management.” Various DRM packages can protect the content so that only authorized users can view it, but DRM can also annoy the heck out of your customers and can create lots of customer service problems.

Sometimes DRM can work well, but I have always felt that, when in doubt, it’s safest to err on the side of trusting your customers. Tell them the material is copyrighted and can’t be reproduced. Tell them they can’t forward it. Send them disapproving letters if they do it. But don’t make them jump through hoops, and absolutely don’t treat them like presumptive criminals.

Here’s a story that supports my idea. The New York Times seems to be doing well with a paywall that is riddled with holes.

I haven’t tried (because I respect copyright law), but from what I hear, it’s trivially easy to get past their firewall. If you want to cheat, you can. But if you’re willing to pay, you can. And lots of people have.

A colleague forwarded me a deck from a marketing presentation. It included this comment about keeping your existing customers.

Most customers leave because they simply feel you don’t care enough about them or their business.

A few months ago I called GEICO to put a car on my policy, and after taking care of business the phone rep went to incredible lengths to tell me how much she cared about me and how important I was to her personally. I wondered if I was supposed to ask her out or something.

Has this “we care about you” stuff gone a little too far?

I don’t really need all these people to care about me. I want their products to be safe and accurate, to sell at a fair price and to meet my needs. Whether the telemarketing rep sounds like she has genuine concern for me as a person is entirely irrelevant.

Back when I was an editor I recall long conversations about relevance and meeting the felt needs of our subscribers. I had always considered those “needs” to be things like “accurate information that helps me comply with government regulation.” (That’s the business we were in.)

It never occurred to me that they needed me to have a warm, fuzzy feeling about them.

So, can I please revise the statement above? How about this?

Most customers leave because your product is no longer relevant to them or their business.

During his keynote at Shop.org last fall, Urban Outfitters CEO Glen Senk revealed that the retailers’ multichannel customers spend two to three times more than single-channel shoppers. Additionally, consumers who engage with the company across three or more channels spend six times more than the average consumer.

See Marrying the Mobile and In-Store Experience

Some marketers are going to read this and think that if they can get their customers to interact with them on three or more channels, they’ll get six times more revenue from them.

This would be a confusion of cause and effect.

For example — If I really love Captain Black pipe tobacco, I’ll buy it in the store, on my PC, on my Nook, and (if I had one) on my smart phone. I might like it on Facebook or follow it on Twitter. (Does Captain Black even have a twitter feed?) Because if I love Captain Black, I’d be thinking about it a lot, and whenever I need a new supply, I’d order it with whatever is at hand.

But whether or not Captain Black is on any or all of those channels doesn’t cause me to love it. In fact, I don’t. Even back when I did dabble with pipe tobacco, it wasn’t my favorite.

So all these channels are a convenience if I’m already in love with the brand, but the channels don’t induce me to love it. In fact, when I see attempts to get me to “like” some brand on Facebook, I find them pathetic and it makes me think less of the brand.

When I do really love something — like Young’s Ram Rod — it doesn’t bother me that I can’t follow it on Twitter or order it on my Nook.

That might not be fair because you can’t order beer online anyway. At least not in Maryland. But change the example to something else, like peanut M&Ms. I don’t really care if I can order them on a smart phone.

Being available on all these different channels might be convenient for some customers in some situations for some types of products, but it’s not as if being on multiple channels is going to increase sales … just because.

There are the cool kids — who use the latest slang, wear the latest fashion and listen to all the right music — and then there are the camp followers who try ever so hard, but never quite fit in.

I’m beginning to think that all those kids went on to be publishers.

The iPad comes out, and all the cool kids go and play with it. Publishers desperately search around for a way they can play too. Never mind that customers don’t really seem to want to read magazines and such on iPads.

“We just have to do it so we can be out there.”

I heard a publishing industry exec say exactly that.

And then there’s the whole “the web is social” business.

“Oh, gee, the web is social, so we have to get on the bandwagon and be social.”

It sounds so sad and desperate.

You can’t tweet how to comply with the FLSA.

Rather than the dreamy, awkward looks at what all the cool kids are doing, publishers need to look at how their market wants to use their content … and do that. The solution may not be sexy or cool, and that’s okay.

If I steal a brick from you, you no longer have the brick. But if I make a digital copy of a song on your hard drive, we both have it.

Some people think that makes all the difference, and that copying digital information is an entirely different thing from taking a tangible thing. I don’t agree, but I realize I am biased because my career has been based on the production and sale of copyrighted material. Allowing people to download it for free completely ruins the business.

SOPA is an attempt to rein in some of this copyright infringement because, as we all know, people in the information business rely on copyright protection.

I don’t know if SOPA will pass, and even if it does, I don’t know if it will solve the problem. I tend to doubt it. It may curb it somewhat, but it won’t solve it. People will find new ways to “share” copyrighted information.

If you ask the anti-SOPA crowd how people who rely on the sale of content are supposed to survive in that kind of environment, they say we have to come up with new business models.

So, what kind of a business model can work in a world where you can’t sell your content because everybody downloads it for free?

Well … you could put advertising right in the middle of your content. I don’t mean a little space add over on the side, or an ad on page 4 of a 6-page report. Those things can be removed. I mean that the advertising is built into the content in such a way that it’s inseparable.

Here’s a ridiculous example that occurred to me this morning …

Yesterday all my truffles seemed so far away,
But Fed-Ex delivered them in a day ….

Or, in the next Jason Bourne movie, he’ll be wearing a Coca Cola hat, and he’ll give us a little discourse on why he prefers Smith and Wesson handguns. And in the next piece of fiction you read, the main character will not only remove his shirt, but tell you wear he got it and why he prefers that brand.

Hey … make your choice. Either pay for content, and protect the rights of the people who sell it, or expect all content to become a commercial.

Not that this is a complete solution, by the way. It may work to some extent for consumer products, but what kind of product marketing are you going to do in high-end, expensive legal and compliance services?

Anyway, that’s where we’re headed. If the producers of content can’t rely on sales for revenue, they’ll have to go to an all-advertising format, and it’s going to be more invasive and annoying than commercials. (At least at first. It’s possible that some people will learn to do it well.)

If you make a payment over the telephone, the guy on the other end will usually give you a “confirmation number” that’s something like this.

1H779301-0104725367489-C7283S

I often joke that such a “number” is precise enough to define any particle in the known universe, but I’m exaggerating a little.

It seems absurd that the numbers are so long, but we all know how this works. Different positions in the code mean different things. E.g., the 2 digits before the first dash indicate the 2-digit year, and the 4 digits after the dash are the month and day.

This is supposed to be more “convenient” for somebody. They can look at the code and tell you which effort it was, or which phone operator, or whatever.

But who is it convenient for? It’s certainly not convenient for the customer.

This will become an increasingly important issue for publishers as we try to link the online and the print world.

For example, we may print customer numbers on mailing labels and ask the subscriber to enter that customer number somewhere online — to synch up the print and digital subscriptions.

If the customer has to enter 1H779301-0104725367489-C7283S he’s not going to be happy. Especially if it’s case sensitive.

So when your operations people argue for reserving positions X, Y and Z to mean A, B and C, just say no. Make your customer numbers (or equivalent) as short as you can.

Unfortunately, some of us are stuck with legacy systems and these awful, long, complex numbers are built into our data. You may or may not be able to fix that, but going forward, don’t make the problem any worse. Focus on short, simple codes that customers can use.

And while I’m on that topic, if you mix letters and numbers in your codes, you should probably set up the system so you never use zeroes or o’s, l’s or ones, etc. That is, don’t use characters that can be easily confused.

I just read Ronn Levine’s thoughts on Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman.

Sounds like the sort of book I enjoy.

If you have a direct-response professional on your Christmas list, you might want to consider it.

I was the co-chair (along with Heather Farley from Access Intelligence) of SIPA’s 28th Annual Marketing Conference in Miami Beach.

It was fun and an interesting experience. Here’s my de-briefing, based on my own thoughts as well as the responses I got from attendees. (I tried my best to work the crowd and solicit reactions from the good folk who were there.)

It’s a lot of work, but the more work you put into it, the better it will be. We definitely could not have done it without the professional assistance of the staff at SIPA. They took care of a lot of the details.

You need to work with the presenters ahead of time to make sure they have enough material, that it’s well organized, and that it’s on target. Require them to submit their presentation beforehand (or at least an outline) and run it by some people who know the topic to be sure nothing obvious is missing.

You should also get some assurances that the person is at least a decent public speaker.

The #1 thing people want from a presentation is actionable content — an idea they can use when they get back to the office.

Each presenter has to ask himself, “What’s the ROI on my session?” Somebody spent a lot of money to come to this conference, and they could be using that time building their business. The presenter’s job is to make sure the content they hear more than pays for the cost of the conference.

People like interaction in the sessions, especially when the speaker is getting other opinions and perspectives on a problem. But most people don’t want to interrupt the speaker and volunteer their own thoughts. (And the people who do aren’t necessarily the ones with the good ideas.)

You can encourage conversation within the session by having a few moles in the audience. Ask the speaker to select two or three people in the audience and ask them to interject something. Ideally he should pick people he knows are knowledgeable about the subject.

Nowadays people also interact on Twitter. Some of the speakers at the SIPA conference tried to get people to interact with them via a twitter hashtag, but that didn’t work out so well. It’s very hard for the speaker to do his presentation and also watch his twitter feed.

A solution may be to ask someone in the audience to monitor the Twitter feed and get the speaker’s attention from time to time with the questions and comments that are tweeted. (BTW, I hate using that word.)

We tried something new this year. We had a “training track,” which was a series of presentations designed to give new marketers an overview of the kinds of things they should know to be effective marketers in our industry.

I was afraid nobody would attend the training sessions. I thought they might be offended at the idea that they need basic training in marketing. But it was very well attended, and there were lots of positive comments.

Anybody can issue a training certificate, and it’s a nice thing to put on a resume.

“Certificate in basic marketing from the Specialized Information Publishers Association” … or whatever.

And I think there’s some value to presenting the content in that context. If my goal is for you to leave my session adequately equipped to do X, I’m going to be a little more sure that I cover everything.

There is a custom in our organization that the people who organize the conference do a lot of the introductions and other announcements. I’m not sure that’s the best idea.

I’m decent at public speaking, but the skills you want for an organizer are not the same as the skills you want in a “master of ceremonies.”

If the goal is an excellent program, it might be a good idea to separate those functions.

Finally, on a practical note, it would be really helpful if the hotel or the conference host set up an internet-ready workstation (with a printer) so people can print their boarding passes.