Like most publishers, our next stage of growth will come from online and events, to make up for the decline in print. However, more and more, I'm convinced that as we begin to expand beyond "magazine" web sites, we're firmly entering a Web 2.0 world where nothing looks familiar.
As we move away from B2B publishing 1.0, here's what will come next. We just need to figure out how to adapt these trends to our markets and our audiences. And then figure out the revenue angle.
1. No editors. (Did I mention that?). Look for communities to generate their own content that's much more meaningful to the community. For the community. By the community. No editors necessary. (Keep the editors doing their jobs on existing mature properties. But no need for hiring new ones just to launch more e-properties.)
2. Instead of suppliers/advertisers managing customers, we'll want to consider ways we can allow customers to manage suppliers. This is called vendor relationship management and inverts the whole supplier/buyer paradigm. Publishers connect sellers with buyers today. Tomorrow, they will need to learn how to connect buyers with sellers. On buyers' terms. As publishers, we need to ingest this into our DNA. That'll be tough...many of us are focused on how we can deliver buyers to sellers, on the sellers' terms. (Think lead generation.)
3. Sophisticated invitation-only social networking tools allow buyers control who they let into their networks. Think buddy list for B2B. By the way, this isn't for liver-spotted white males over the age of 40. This is for the mypsace-wielding set coming out of school now and getting their first jobs, quite used to social networking in school, and willing to use such tools for work.
Some links that I've been reading/listening to and finding interesting, in support of the above:
The social customer blog
The Clue Implementation unit -- a hands-on podcast about connecting customers, communities, and business.
The E-Sourcing Forum blog.
And more. Will continue to share new things I find.
Friday, February 16, 2007
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1 comments:
Ah, Dave, welcome to the Web 2.0 world. I see you must be reading Doc Searles on VRM. It's still just a theory, but it could get traction (we hope as customers, anyway). Regarding the editor comment, that may be overly hopeful. People have been trying to build "communities" on the Web for a very long time. It's the original reason I was on AOL before there was a Web (just the Internet, remember then?). Actually, what is happening in a lot of Web 2.0 things is that it's easier to become an editor. What I mean is, you can just decide that you want to write about a topic. Now, you may not get paid. And you are not guaranteed readers. But you can put stuff out there. Jason Calacanis made a lot of money starting a company of bloggers which he sold to AOL (sorry, I can't link right now, I'm just back from a week-long trip during which I was supposed to be getting a magazine out).
Web 2.0 also means searchable--something Jim C and I kept pitching during our Web redesign discussions. Speaking of which, I was just reading Dave Winer (scriptingnews.com) last week sometime where he was using Google analytics to analyze his two Web sites -- davenet and scriptingnews. The first gets a high proportion of unique visitors, the second a high proportion of returners. His analysis--davenet is a repository of information about opml, rss and the like. So people come for information and leave (hmm, sounds like a magazine site to me). Scriptingnews is his blog site, therefore it generates regular readers who want to see today's thoughts. So, if our magazine site is largely uniques, it makes sense. That means it needs to be findable on Google, Ask.com, and so on. If we want regular viewers, then we need an interesting site that adds information most days.
Anyway, early Saturday thoughts after a long trip (to Orlando returning to over 12" of snow on the ground).
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