Thursday, June 30, 2005

Can print rescue B2B digital media?

You read that correctly. Conventional wisdom says that print is on the decline and that digital media will rescue print.

But after a recent survey we conducted to readers of our Healthcare Packaging digital publication, I'm not so sure. The survey, specifically targeting those who hadn't opened the last several issues, asked why they weren't reading it regularly. Possible answers included too busy, technology problems, content not on target, prefer print, plus a host of others.

The anwers were interesting:
41% Too busy
8% Prefer print
8% Don't remember asking to receive it
...with the remainder of the responses fragmented

Turns out technology or content were never an issue (my two biggest fears).

Instead, these readers are simply too darn busy to read online. Verbatim comments fell into three broad categories, as far as I was able to tell:

1. Readers get slammed with up to 100 legitimate emails a day. That's our competition as publishers. Not spam. Regular email. These comments were typical:
I'm a very busy manager and I don't have too much time to read electronic news. I give priorities to my customer and suppliers' e-mails. I get a bunch of e-mail as spam and delete all of them including unread e-mails which are business information. [I added italics for emphasis]
I receive a few hundred emails every day and sometimes I just can't get to them all.
I just get too many emails. I prefer to have a hardcopy that I can flip through and clip what I need.

When reviewing email, I am usually reviewing or responding to immediate business issues and do not feel I can can afford the time to peruse a journal and therefore defer it. In hard copy I can review when time permits without cluttering my email inbox. The impulse to throw away a hard copy without taking a look is not as easy as hitting a delete key!
2. In general, readers are just simply busier than ever:
Too many irons in the fire. I am fortunate when I can briefly scan the numerous publications I receive as they relate to a specific project either I or a member of my team is working on.

 You don't need to do anything differant unless you can figure out how to clone me. Bear with me, I will catch up and read your emails.

 It's not your problem, it's strictly a "time available" issue with me, your subscriber...

 As I am sure you have heard before, I only need another hour in the day to get this read. Everything about your e-mag is good, I am just incredibly busy.

3. Finally, as more and more readers spend more of their day in front of a computer, the last thing they want to do is read electronic content:
I still consider the paper copy handy because you can read any part of it at anytime and [at any] location. Especially after day-long facing the terminal, I try to stay away [from] on-line as much as possible.
I rather read the hard copy than off a screen. I'm slammed by 100+ business related e-mails a day and I'm just burned out sitting at the screen.
So there you have it. The things publishers of B2B digital media fret about the most--whether our content is on target, are we bypassing the spam filter, do our fancy technological contraptions work universally--are NOT at issue.

We've never really focused on what happens after the email is delivered. And that's where the trouble starts. Worse, all of these factors are entirely out of our control.

What's fascinating is that an uber-theme that emerges from most of these conclusions is that print publishing is most often regarded by these readers as the antidote to electronic media. Now that's a message that needs to get out to those advertisers who have lost faith in the power of print.
Posted by Dave Newcorn at 2:24 PM I'm reading: Can print rescue B2B digital media?Tweet this!

11 comments:

  1. My own behavior really isn't much different between print and electronic media. I have stacks of magazines I don't have time to read, either. Sometimes I take a stack with me on a plane or in the evening in front of the TV. Is that really so different from letting an email newsletter sit in my inbox or tansferring it to an "Unread Newsletters" folder in Outlook until I have time to read it? I think not.

    My biggest complaint with email newsletters is when the senders go wild and send them too frequently.

    Daily newsletters? They last about a week and a half before I feel so overwhelmed that I am forced to unsubscribe.

    Weekly newsletters? I simply start reading every 2nd or 3rd one, and delete the others.

    Monthly is about right, and even then I might take a few weeks to get around to it. But that doesn't mean I prefer a printed newsletter -- I'd take longer to get around to reading the printed version.

    Keep in mind: there's value in delivering your newsletter via email whether the recipient reads it or not. Just receiving the newsletter keeps your publication front and center in my mind.
    ReplyDelete
  2. You raise a good point. There's no question that readers--myself included--are overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of ALL forms of media they receive. Who doesn't have the obligatory stack of print sitting in the corner? I guess one takeaway from a publisher's perspective is to keep putting out content--in all forms of media--that is of the highest possible quality.

    I totally agree with you about frequency. Unless we're talking some sort of industry bible, nearly all e-newsletters should be once a month, maybe twice a month max. I made the mistake of subscribing to one or two daily newsletters and was quickly overwhelmed by the quantity stacking up over time. I cleverly set up a folder and a message rule so that the newsletters would go into a folder and stay out of my inbox, only to realize that six months later, I had hundreds of emails that I had to go through. Who needs that kind of stress? I deleted the folder and unsubscribed from the newsletters, as you did.

    Parenthetically, as our organization investigates the blogging phenomenon, I have difficulty reconciling these two seemingly diametrically opposed trends--on the one hand, people don't have ennough time to read published material, but on the other hand, they have enough time to read and write blogs? Or are we really talking about two separate groups of people? Is digital evolution forking? Do bloggers feel as overwhelmed by the daily blast of content as the people in our survey? As we contemplate expanding our footprint in the blogosphere, reconciling user information overload with the blogging phenomenon weighs heavily on my mind...
    ReplyDelete
  3. The thing is, I use blogs in different ways as a reader.

    First, I use blogs to "filter" my reading. Since I don't have time to read everything, I go to certain trusted blogs that always seem to pick up anything really important in respect of a certain subject and point me to the underlying article or articles. I don't expect the blog to be a source of original reporting in this respect, but rather a place to locate the best articles that really matter.

    Second, I use blogs to get at original content that isn't reported in the mainstream media (such as first-hand entrepreneur reports). This is especially useful for following up-to-the-minute trends, as I do at my Small Business Trends site. I am able to "see" what is happening in the small business market and learn how people REALLY feel, by following what business owners and entrepreneurs say on their blogs and by interacting with them. That's something the typical mainstream publication is not set up to do.

    Third, I use blogs to give balanced commentary about and emphasize the most important subjects. There is so much sensationalism and ill-thought out commentary out there, even occasionally by the mainstream media, that sometimes saner heads need to prevail. And a lot of times there is just noise -- a lot of data and news reports without context or perspective. What I try to do on my RFID weblog is present a balanced view and make sure that erroneous information by the tinfoil hat types and conspiracy theorists is not blindly repeated. I see articles that are full of errors written by well-known columnists in some media publications or written by influential "experts" and feel someone needs to speak out and make sure the legitimate, knowledgeable voices are heard above these erroneous voices. I do something similar with my Small Business Trends blog, by putting context around studies, trends, etc. so that the reader doesn't just get useless snippets, but can for instance put 2 seemingly conflicting studies into perspective and understand them.

    Blogs can help us cut through the data overload if executed intelligently. If a blog is simply a collection of Google News-type links on every subject under the sun, then it is not helping cut through the clutter but is adding to it.
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