Why not just be honest?

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“Thank you for calling. Your business is important to us, but we really don’t want to talk to you, so please go to our website. It’s a great website that makes perfect sense to us, because we use it all the time, but will confuse the heck out of you.

“Of course we could talk you through it, but … he he … we don’t want to talk to you.

“If we haven’t yet convinced you to get off the phone and go to our website, you can sit through this horrible automated voice system. We know it doesn’t make any sense — that the categories don’t cover everything you want to do, that they overlap, that we use confusing terms and all that. We designed it that way because we want you to give up and go to our website.”

Then after you use the website it says, “sorry, there’s something wrong with your request, please call our friendly customer service hotline at [the number you already called].”

Why pay for a conference when you can read the white paper?

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I used to manage the audio conference department for a publishing company that sold legal reference guides. The guides covered everything you needed to know about the topic, and had monthly updates. If you needed instant information, you could call the editor.

Nevertheless, we had a successful business selling 90-minute audio conferences on some narrow topic that was already covered in the guide. And our subscribers were our best customers.

So why listen to an audio conference when you can just read the relevant section of the book?

I ask myself the same thing when I see a conference that interests me. Why go? I could spend 1/4 the time and virtually no money scouring the internet for articles and white papers on the topic, and probably learn more than I’d learn at the conference.

And this has made me wonder if companies should give employees a day every once in a while to spend entirely on their own, off site, just studying some topic. I’ve done this sort of thing myself, and I’ve learned a lot.

Still … there’s something about a conference. You come away from a conference with a different perspective, and it can’t all be explained by the content. So what is it?

Maybe it’s a matter of different learning styles. Some people learn better by hearing, or seeing, or being shown how something is done.

Maybe it’s the ability to focus on the topic. When you’re at a conference, your attention is corralled into a narrower band, without the distraction of phones and emails and such. I find that I think more creatively about a topic when I’m listening to someone speaking about it. Somehow it’s easier to let my mind wander and think about related issues and their application to other things.

Sometimes you’re not hearing anything new, but the focus reminds you of things you know you ought to be doing.

Maybe it’s the presence of your peers. We like to think that we’re independent thinkers and come to our own conclusions, but we’re just kidding ourselves. We’re incredibly influenced by our peers, so perhaps seeing all of them concentrating on the same topic reinforces the gravity of the topic and helps us to be serious about it.

But there is definitely something different about a conference, and I think it’s worth the money.

Way to go Playboy and Rolling Stone!

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I’m generally not the type to be giving a shout-out to Playboy, but I was encouraged to read that both Playboy and Rolling Stone have started using HTML5.

This sidesteps the Evil Empire’s app store. Hurrah!

So, to mix my sci-fi references, resistance is not futile, and the more you tighten your grip, Governor Tarkin, the more star systems (publishers) will slip through your fingers.

More on publishers and the Kindle Fire

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Suzanne Vranica has a very good article about the Kindle Fire. See Magazines Join With New Tablet Challenger

She is right to point out the growing overhead associated with all these devices.

“With each new tablet comes a long and expensive process for publishers, which have to retrofit their content for each device.”

That’s exactly right. It would be so much easier if all these devices adopted a common standard.

There is another thing that often gets overlooked in discussions of Kindle, iPad and such, and that’s the ability to synch the digital subscription with the print subscription. This is important for making combination offers (e.g., print + digital), but it’s also important for customer service.

If a customer has a Jan. to Dec. subscription and wants to convert it to digital, or add digital access, there’s no way to do that if the print subscription record is controlled from one system and the digital subscription is controlled from another.

Amazon and Apple are completely correct in trying to make the purchase process as easy on the customer as possible. That is, if you’re in the iTunes store, all you should need is your iTunes login.

However, they need to add the ability to synch up their record with the publisher’s record.

This would do two things. First, it would alleviate publisher fears that Apple and Amazon are trying to steal their customers. Second, it would promote the “buy once, read anywhere” model that everybody wants.

What should publishers do about Amazon’s Kindle Fire?

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Publishers are desperate for new sources of revenue, so every time some new gadget comes along they think, “Can this save us?”

The answer is usually no.

I have a Nook Color, which is a pretty cool little tablet. It’s not much good for “productivity” stuff. I wouldn’t want to compose a document on the thing. But it’s a great option when you want to check your email while you’re watching TV, or if you want to listen to Pandora, or, of course, read a book.

Amazon’s new Kindle Fire seems comparable. It might have a few advantages. We’ll have to see.

But the immediate question the launch of the Kindle Fire raises for publishers is “how should I change my strategy now that this game-changing new product is on the streets.”

Not at all!

Do not feed the beast! Amazon (and Apple, for that matter) is not your friend.

Here’s a quick list of the publisher-unfriendly features of the Kindle Fire. (That is, if you try to serve your content through Amazon.)

  • You have to convert your publication to their proprietary format, which adds to your production costs.
  • They take 30%.
  • They don’t give you all the customer data.
  • They restrict what kinds of offers you can make (e.g., length of free trials, how you bill for subscriptions, etc.).
  • They won’t integrate with your back-end system, which means that you can’t synch up a customer’s subscription very easily. (For example, if your print subscriber has a Jan. to Dec. subscription, there’s no way to bundle that with Kindle delivery because the Kindle is operating off an entirely different account.)

Amazon knows e-commerce as well as anybody, and they may have the tech geniuses to make the best version of the Android OS on the planet. Only time will tell.

I have great respect for a lot of what Amazon does, but they have not spent the time to learn how publishing works and what publishers need, and they’re not interested because they don’t want to accommodate your business, they want to take it. You absolutely should not play their game.

Instead, you should adopt a mobile web strategy. Make your content available through the browser. That’s the common denominator on all these devices, and while nobody seems interested in following the alleged “standards” for ePubs, everybody (pretty much) follows standards for html.

In other words, converting your content into html for delivery on desktop and mobile browsers will be a whole lot easier than trying to convert it into everybody’s proprietary format.

Control subscriber access with hooks into your own subscriber data. And if you want subscribers to be able to read offline, create an HTML 5 app. They can download that from your website (don’t mess with the Apple store), and you still retain control of your customers!

The bottom line is that Kindle Fire is probably going to be a cool new device and a good option for your subscribers, but that doesn’t mean you have to play Amazon’s games. Control the content and the relationship with the customer yourself. Don’t give in the the evil empire. (Either one of them.)

Why the WSJ can charge for online content

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I just got an email from The Wall Street Journal advertising their digital edition.

Part of the ad reads …

When it comes to getting critical business news, there’s no substitute for The Wall Street Journal.

You may agree or disagree with that claim, but at least it’s a reasonable claim that some people will accept.

Can anything like that be said of The New York Times or The Washington Post?

“When it comes to getting X, there’s no substitute for The New York Times” ???

It’s hard to imagine what that might be.

And that is why the WSJ can sell online subscriptions.

“What’s the ROI of social media?”

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Andy McLaughlin told me today that every time someone asks the question in the headline of this post, a kitten dies. (He was quoting some tweet from the SIPA conference in June.)

Sorry, kitty.

The canonical response seems to be “That’s the wrong question,” which simply makes my head hurt.

When someone asks about the ROI of social media, what they’re really asking is “why should I do it?” And when the social media evangelist replies, “that’s the wrong question,” what they hear is, “Oh. Then I guess I shouldn’t bother.”

“That’s the wrong question” reinforces the impression that the “social media” craze is some weird trendy thing that people (a) want to do but (b) can’t justify and will (c) get over in a couple years.

Of course I realize that return on investment is, in fact, a calculation that simply does not apply to lots of things that a company should do. Even though every expenditure should have a rationale, that rationale isn’t always expressed as ROI simply because we don’t always have the numbers.

For example, if someone were to ask, “What’s the ROI of good customer service?,” you might be tempted to answer, “that’s the wrong question,” because you can’t attach clear numbers to the benefits you get from good customer service. But I think it’s the wrong answer. The correct answer would be something like, “we have no way of knowing the ROI, but we believe it’s a net benefit to the company.”

Which, of course, raises the next question: why do you think that?

And that is what is meant when people ask “what’s the ROI of social media?” They want to know “what do I get out of it, and how can I know?”

So when someone says, “What’s the ROI of social media?,” if you truly believe it’s the wrong question, please excuse the ignorance of your interlocutor, charitably replace the ignorant question with the correct question (“what do I get out of social media?”) and answer that!

There are certainly things that can be done in social media that are a ridiculous waste of time. If your CEO is spending his day interacting with people on his jogging schedule and sharing his opinions of the merits of various home health remedies, there are better things he could be doing.

How, then, do you distinguish the wasteful stuff from the beneficial stuff? Or, if I dare to put it another way, how do you distinguish the things that have no return from the things that do? How do you rationalize your investment? How do you make sure you’re not just spinning wheels? How do you know you’re doing the kinds of things that actually help your company?

Forget the calculations for a moment. Isn’t that what people mean when they say “what’s the ROI?”

So then, how do we answer that question?

First, we recognize that companies have to invest in different sorts of things. Some, like a direct-mail campaign, have a relatively clear ROI. Others, like branding campaigns, have a partially (almost sorta) measurable ROI. It’s part math and part faith. And then there are other things, like deciding on the color of your logo, which are too abstract for anyone to calculate.

Second, we have to divide “social media” into its constituent parts, because it’s not all the same. What we call “social media” is part customer service, part branding, part publishing, part community building, and maybe, if you’re lucky, part lead generation / marketing / sales.

Rather than asking about the benefit of “social media” as a whole, it might make more sense to develop a strategy that recognizes the different components and functions involved, and assign relative benefits to each.

Some of those components clearly don’t have a measurable ROI, while others might. But all of them have benefit, and that, in my opinion, is what the question is all about.

“Buy once read everywhere” needs to include print

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Netflix has the right idea. With my Netflix subscription I can watch movies on my TV, on my PC, on a mobile device — wherever I want. I have purchased the rights to watch the shows, and I should be able to do that where it’s convenient for me.

Customers to subscription products want the same thing. They don’t want to have to buy one version for their PC, another for their iPad and another for their smartphone. They want to buy once and read anywhere.

Amazon is moving in the right direction with Kindle. If you buy a book on Kindle, you can install the Kindle reader on your PC (or smartphone, or iPad) and read it there. It’s a good idea and a good service.

What Amazon is missing is that this has to include print as well.

People have been saying “print is dead” for a long time, but print is far from dead. People like ink on paper. It’s convenient in ways that an electronic device never will be. And subscribers to a print magazine or newsletter also want to be able to read their issues anywhere. They’re not interested in technological excuses, and they’re certainly not interested in power grabs and jockeying for power between Apple, Amazon and the publishers.

Customers are asking “Why can’t I get my subscription on the iPad / Kindle / Nook?” And so far the answers are pretty dreadful.

Until very recently, Amazon and Apple simply didn’t understand the periodical publishing industry. They seemed to think they could treat magazines the same way they treated music or books, and they thought controlling the customer relationship was important to their business model and to the user experience. But there are signs they’re waking up to the reality of subscription publishing, and that is necessarily going to mean sharing customer data with the publisher.

Apple and Amazon want publishers to think of sales on their platforms as incremental sales — like magazine sales at a newsstand. The publisher doesn’t know who bought the magazine at the airport, why do they have to know who bought the magazine on the iPad?

It’s a flawed analogy.

If I have a print subscription to a magazine, and I forget to bring my print copy with me to the airport, I expect to have to purchase another print copy at the newsstand.

But if I own a print subscription to a magazine, I expect to be able to access the digital version online for free.

Well, actually I don’t, because I know that the publisher incurs costs in converting the magazine for digital delivery. But the average customer does expect this. The customer expects to be able to take his laptop / iPad / smartphone to the airport and read his subscription on the device.

In order to do this, the device needs to authenticate the subscriber, which means it has to have access to the publisher’s subscription database. So when Apple and Amazon try to own the customer relationship, they’re actually undermining the value of their own devices and services.

Right now, publishers are still print-centric because most of the money is in print publishing. This means that publishers create products for print and then “convert” them for digital delivery. When the customers scream for access on their iPads, the publisher has to (1) convert the print-centric format into some weird proprietary format specific to the device, and then (2) pay some sort of fee to the platform.

The customer expects to get this for nothing, because he sees it as his subscription, and he thinks digits are free anyway. “All you have to do is send the files to my device. Easy!”

Of course it’s not that easy, and this is the problem publishers and digital platform owners need to address. Here’s one way to do it.

Products need to be designed for digital in such a way that they can be easily converted to print. That is, digital first, then print-centric features are added later.

This means there has to be a standard digital format. We can’t have ePub and HTML5 and PDF and any other crazy thing that some new reader or tablet comes up with. There has to be one format. I know that’s been the dream of the publishing world for more than a decade, and that it’s not likely to happen. But it has to happen.

Pricing needs to be based on access to the digital product with other delivery options as an extra cost. The pricing structure has to be (1) pay for the content, (2) pay for extra delivery options.

Since Amazon and Apple and Kobo and B&N and everybody else want to take their cut, this might make for some complicated revenue models, but I can imagine a three-fold pricing structure.

• Digital access on the publisher’s website for $X.
• Universal digital access (adding iPad, Kindle, Nook, etc.) for $X +.
• “Read anywhere” access, including print delivery, for $X ++.

Customers get the idea that printing and mailing cost extra. In fact, that’s part of the problem. Customer think they’re saving the publisher money by abandoning print to get digital delivery. In some cases that’s true, but often it’s not. The cost of converting the files to the appropriate digital format and then paying the platform for delivery far overshadows the cost of paper and a stamp.

Nevertheless, it’s an easy sell to ask people to pay for printing and mailing, so do it. Design the price of the product around digital delivery and pass along the additional costs of printing and mailing.

One last thing. Just as this model requires a single standard for digital files, it will also require a standard for customer data on the back end. Apple and the fulfillment houses and Amazon and publisher software vendors are going to need to agree to a standard and stick with it.