Great to see Peppermint magazine promoting newsagents as the for the latest issue out this Monday. They tweeted 14,000+ followers with the news. In checking them out I discovered Peppermint is Australia’s first and only eco and ethical fashion magazine. I did not know that. The information makes it useful in promoting the title.
Every social media reach-out by magazine publishers promoting us is valuable as they are speaking to their community.
The response to 9 Things Travel Agents Won’t Tell You in the US Woman’s Day magazine has been ferocious in social media. Twitter and Facebook are alight with travel agents striking back at the magazine, seeking to hurt it commercially for an article they claim will commercially hurt them.
Not only do publishers have to create a sustainable model in a mobile and digitally enabled world, they need to be able to handle the fast assembling of a crowd baying for blood of what they publish.
I am in the US and have been impressed with mainstream media handling of the horrific broken leg suffered by Kevin Ware on the basketball court on Sunday. The Sydney Morning Herald went to Twitter to note that the gruesome injury was all over social media. They should have checked their own site. The Age website had the video. Meanwhile, most mainstream media outlets here in the US did not show the injury. Instead, they reported the shock and seriousness of the injury by showing the reaction of ware’s teammates.
Click on the image to see an example of how a social media mention can support newsagency businesses. While not earth shattering of itself, here we have a Corey Taylor (lead singer for Slipknot) fan tweeting the fan club about a tweet and seeing the magazine in a newsagency.
If the tweet mentioned a national retail brand they would respond. Since newsagency businesses are independently owned, no one responds to these random tweets – thanking the person for mentioning us. I have on occasion and the response is usually appreciation for noticing.
I love it when newsagencies are mentioned like this in tweets – it maintains a digital presence for the channel.
Watermelon Red, a hip interiors store in Coolum, is featured in the latest issue of Real Living magazine and they Tweeted about it, recommending that their followers purchase the magazine from a newsagency. Nice!
If you have customers who could be into graffiti and the art of graffiti, I recommend Australian magazine Clouded Thoughts to you. It is distributed by IPS.
We have decided to take on the title for at least the next few issues as it appeals to a demographic we’d like to encourage, one that will be likely to purchase the art-focused tattoo and similar titles.
We are carefully building our magazine range, working with those in control of allocations who want to work with us, giving us the ability to choose what titles we take and the volume.
Clouded Thoughts is a natural fit in our desire to be a relevant specialist magazine retailer.
The beauty of social media is that you can research new titles like this. Check out the Clouded Thoughts Facebook page here. Check out their reader blog here. Check out the IPS page for the title here. Hey, while you are on the IPS page, click on the map and see the stockists. We are there. This is a brilliant resource and wonderful support for retailers from IPS.
For a while now I have been questioning the value of Facebook as a marketing platform for business. Their constant changes of what shows in the news feed and changes to business rules have made the platform frustrating.
While it is terrific to get plenty of likes for your Facebook page and there are some who successfully use this to communicate with their customer community, there is a growing community of people concerned with where facebook is headed.
Mark Cuban, Chairman of the Dallas Mavericks and Chairman of HD Net, wrote about this recently at The Huffington Post. He gets to the heart of what Facebook in:
Facebook is what it is. It’s a time waster. That’s not to say we don’t engage — we do. We click, share and comment because it’s mindless and easy. But for some reason Facebook doesn’t seem to want to accept that its best purpose in life is as a huge time-suck platform that we use to keep up with friends, interests and stuff. I think that they are overthinking what their network is all about.
As far as a platform for reaching out to uncover new customers for any of my newsagencies, I am finding Twitter to be a far more useful and less costly platform. I am also able to more easily see the reach of what I put on Twitter than Facebook. That said, I’ll still use Facebook to connect with existing customers. We do live, after all, in a world with more routes to market than ever before.
I mention this today as there are social media experts pitching their service to newsagents, saying they can help you achieve plenty of likes for your newsagency Facebook page. Do your research before you go and give them money to achieve something that may be of questionable value.
Thanks Peter Lucas for supporting newsagents by promoting the Best Bets is available in newsagencies. I love seeing our channel promoted on Twitter.
Check out a Tweet today promoting Goulburn Valley Bride magazine and newsagents:
@leannewhitely
Be sure to head down to the newsagent for the latest Goulburn Valley Bride just out, in newsagents ( around… http://fb.me/CfheHim6
Thanks @thexfactor_au for telling your 116,903 Twitter followers that the official X Factor magazine is available tomorrow at newsagents. Newsagents appreciate the support.
We will be supporting the magazine through placement with weeklies and at the counter.
Check out the tweet from a One Direction fan who was thrilled to see “the boys” on magazine covers. I mention it today as a reminder that in this twitter world, word of mouth (via tweets) spread faster and wider. It’s also a reminder that we can connect to this world and the fan base of brands and music groups through careful tweets of our own. It starts with each of us having a presence of Twitter. Sadly, our channel is poorly represented.
I appreciate time is a challenge for newsagents. Maybe we are spending too long on old processes and opportunities and not enough on the new. The world has changed.
Checkout the Girlfriend magazine Twitter feed and see the buzz they create prior to the launch of the next issue (out today). Reading the posts and feedback you get a feel for a magazine very engaged with its readers. Knowing about this can help us understand the articles of particular interest and to tap into reader passion.
I appreciate we don’t all have time for this type of research … but a few minutes spent online can be illuminating.
I received a letter from the publisher of Inked magazine yesterday highlighting that they now had in excess of 44,000 Facebook fans. The letter outlined their goal to grow this by 10% to 15% every 4 – 6 weeks. If you cheek out their Facebook page you;ll see them regularly promote newsagents as the go to retailers for the title. The more magazine publishers engage with Facebook as the place to promote us the better.
The Facebook engagement for promoting Inked is impressive and it made me wonder whether newsagents have a similar target – to grow social media engagement by this much every 4 – 6 weeks. I know some newsagents chase this. The challenge is that many mix business and private content. If you check our the Inked page you’ll see how well they nail their message for their target community.
Being on Facebook can help a newsagency build its profile in its local community and beyond. Facebook is about connecting people who know each other and with common interests. There are several newsagencies already using facebook with terrific success. The photo shows how newsXpress Gympie promotes their Facebook page out on the street in front of their store.
A good business Facebook page:
Each of these goals and activities can be achieved through wall posts on the business page. It is simple – as Facebook itself is. Once you start a Facebook page, however, you need to work at it, keep it going. People join to find out more and if you stop providing this they will soon fade away.
To build your Facebook friend numbers you will need to promote your business page. This is done in a variety of ways:
The best way to grow your Facebook presence is to become friends with others. This broadens the pool accessible to you.
The best use of Facebook is to tell stories about the business for it is through well written stories that the narrative of the business is expressed.
Tell stories about your people, special events, seasons… anything which provides a more complete picture about the business, its points of difference and why it is a good place to visit.
Don’t overwrite, keep it simple and keep it personal. The better people get to know you the more they will feel connected to the business. Don’t try an sell stuff.
Newsagents should embrace the Facebook opportunity and be prepared to learn more about your business and your customers along the way.
Thanks to Rob Curley, speaking at the Beyond the Printed Word conference in Vienna last week, I discovered this quote from William Allen White, Pulitzer Prize-winning editor and publisher, in 1931:
“Of course as long as man lives someone will have to fill the herald’s place. Someone will have to do the bellringer’s work. Someone will have to tell the story of the day’s news and the year’s happenings. A reporter is perennial under many names and will persist with humanity. But whether the reporter’s story will be printed in types upon a press, I don’t know. I seriously doubt it. I think most of the machinery now employed in printing the day’s, the week’s, or the month’s doings will be junked by the end of this century and will be as archaic as the bellringer’s bell, or the herald’s trumpet. New methods of communication I think will supercede the old.â€
William Allen White, April 21, 1931
in a personal letter to Lyman B. Kellogg
White is right. How we access news and information will change. That it is published will not. This is why the goals of publishers do not match those of their distribution network. We are in different businesses. We must understand that if we, newsagents, are to make our own future. Not today or tomorrow but sometime soon our network will lose its value and, I suspect, be cut loose. We must pursue new customer traffic generating models for the future while ensuring the maximum return from the newspaper generated traffic we enjoy in the meantime.
The best connection I can see with the next generation of news and information distribution is through mobile access recharge. These are transactions of fractional value compared to newspaper sales. Today, we make between 18% and 25% on the sale of a newspaper and 5% on the sale of mobile device recharge. I’d expect the mobile device recharge to fall to 3% within the next year. While recharge generates traffic such customers are not loyal and we cannot therefore rely on them for traffic. So, in reality, mobile recharge is no replacement for newspapers.
Core to our challenge is that our channel was created by publishers. For our entire history we have looked to publishers to lead us by providing new products and partnering with us in their own innovations. This cannot continue given that mobile and other non-print distribution models do not require out network. Hence our need to find our own future.
I’ll have more to say on this at a future time. For now, I wanted to share the prescient quote from William Allen White.
Source: Rob Curley, VP New Products development, Washington Post, Newsweek Interactive.
As the IFRA Beyond the Printed Word conference wound to an end this afternoon in Vienna I was left with more questions than when the conference began. Publishers I talked with see a rapidly approaching cliff in terms of print sales and ad revenue and some are rushing to find replacement revenue. Some openly say that the paid (over the counter or subscription) newspaper as we know it will be dead, in Europe at least, in a matter of years and will be replaced with an entirely new premium print model. They are the early adopters of new models. They are balanced with others who are yet to treat an online presence other than a poor cousin to the print edition.
Back to the questions I arrived with: Is there a common strategy being adopted by publishers to find sustainable online revenue? Who is doing it well? Will online provide the revenue the shareholders in publishing firms are used to? Do the publishers get it that they are no longer newspaper publishers but, rather, media companies? Is there a place for the current distribution system (newsagents) in their thinking about the future? Do publishers really understand the Internet? Is there a revenue model which can work?
In hindsight the questions were naive in that this is all very new and publishers are learning as they go.
I saw heard about some excellent initiatives – Naples News is one, demonstrating what a newspaper with a circulation of 50,000 can achieve. What they are dong is way advanced on any Australian news site. They created this within a year. Core to their success was them taking the online move seriously from the top down and driving change. Check out their restaurant reviews and sports scores – yeah, the sports side of the side is truly amazing. The power available to the reader makes them the expert thanks to smart organisation of data.
The conference is proof that publishers the world over are taking the online challenge seriously and that print circulation marketing today is more about delaying rapid decline than achieving growth. I know there are publisher executives in Australia who disagree with me. Let’s check in in a year, two years and five years and see if I am right. If we follow the US and European examples sales will fall. However, I accept that our marketplace is different so who really knows when the inevitable change will hit. The keys are broadband take up, lower cost wireless devices and peer pressure. My plea to Australian newspaper publisher executives is – don’t get newsagents investing beyond what is absolutely necessary in and chasing paid circulation growth. Newsagents themselves need to ensure that every capital investment is for their future and not just to help publishers tread water.
Newsagents are middlemen. This makes us servants. We are not part of any publisher’s online strategy. I’m okay with that. Publishers need to do what is right for their shareholders. For our part, newsagents need to see the future and act now. We need to break out of being middlemen. We need to get smart about online. We need new revenue streams and they need this now for it will take years to change the habits of consumers.
Just as publishers have come to conferences like Beyond the Printed Word, so, too, should newsagents congregate and discuss their life after print. This is the biggest challenge in the 120 years our channel has existed.
While I am leaving the conference with more questions than when I arrived I have a better understanding of how publishers see the online opportunity and some of the strategies being employed and for that I am grateful.
I’m at the Beyond the Printed Word conference in Vienna along with 450 representatives of newspaper publishers from 41 countries. Everyone is here to talk about how newspapers can make money from online plays and retain (and even grow) shareholder value in this rapidly changing world.
Day one has been kind of a show-and-tell event with publishers presenting what they have done. For me, the most interesting presentation today was by Mikal Rohde of Schibsted Sok AS in Norway. In just over a year the Sesam search engine developed and launched by this publisher has become the hit of Norway. In a globalisation sense it gives me heart that there are some who can beat giants. They are playing in a space few other publishers play in yet it is a logical place for a publisher because what is a search engine but an aggregator of content?
From an Australian newsagent perspective, what is most important about day one is what has not been discussed that much – that print is old news. Some people on the floor talk as if print is already buried. No, it won’t go away but, boy, will it go through some changes. Everyone at the conference is focused on moving the publisher brands born in print to the online world and while many speakers discuss how their online strategy is supporting their print model, the reality is that profit will determine how this plays out.
Newsagents need to understand that newspapers will not be the traffic driver to our retail businesses in five years that they are today and even less so in ten years. This is why what we spend on our infrastructure must change not only to draw new traffic but also to de-emphasise newspapers and to not provide them the most expensive real-estate in our stores.
I was surprised at what some companies have achieved with very small teams. Some excellent sites and services have been established with teams of ten or less – in businesses employing thousands in their print operation. I was also surprised that most of the companies so far are talking about almost single online strategies. Okay, these single sites have depth. I would have thought that is they were looking to replace a significant portion of print revenue they would need many online strategies. Connecting with an online consumer is not a once a day event to get the purchase and leave them be as is the case with a newspaper. For many, online consumption is 24/7 while with others it is many times a day through many channels – hence the need for publishers to break out from behind the masthead and connect through these channels.
Back to Norway, I like that Schibsted has created their own search engine. The control this provides will prove invaluable to their future.
Live coverage is available in part as a demonstration of some of the technologies on show.
Stand up Online is a soon to launch place for comedians and would-be comedians to strut their stuff. Free. Videos, sound files and scripts of comedy routines can be loaded for viewing and voting. Comedians can also list gigs and contact details.
The site launches in a few weeks and is in need of content. If you know someone funny this is their opportunity to star. Stand up Online is a great way for comedians to get noticed and gain a following.
A feature of the site is taking the piss – a place where we uphold the Aussie tradition of takin the piss out off someone with a high profile. It’s our intention that takin the piss routines are good humored and not vicious. One way we Aussies show our respect for someone and their achievements is to take the piss. All through development of Stand up Online Steve Irwin was the first takin the piss character. As a result of Steve’s untimely passing we are launching with Mel Gibson.
Social media is hot right now with sites such as YouTube, MySpace, Second Life, Flickr, leading online traffic across a range of key demographics. Australia is yet to have a big hit in the social media stakes.
TV Viewing and online traffic data tells us that more and more people are enjoying consumer generated content. Stand up Online is all about that – anyone who think they are funny can get a go at our microphone. Who knows, we could find a star? Along the way we’re sure to have plenty of laughs and that’s what Stand up Online is about, laughing. Our tag line, demand almost, is make us laugh.
We’re independent – not connected with any comedy venue, radio station or artist management – and we’re serious about voting – allowing just one vote per IP address or per logged in person per IP address.
Here’s the call to action: if you know someone who is funny or at least thinks they are funny, tape them doing a brief (5 minutes) routine and load it on the site. Who knows, they could be the next big thing!
Stand up Online is part of our Find It online classifieds offering which we are launching in partnership with newsagents. (See a map of our newsagent network here.) Stand up Online and two other yet to launch social media offerings form part of the traffic generating strategy for Find It. We see online classifieds as social and therefore consider it appropriate that we have social media offerings connected with Find It. Find It is currently in pre-beta and will commercially launch early in 2007 – all ads are currently free.
