Audience development white paper

Online audience development development is heating up. The skills required are SO different, and require SO much more work than traditional circulation. Yet if we master them as publishers, it opens the door to profitable online media.

With this in mind, two years ago I volunteered to run an American Business Media task force (on the Digital Media Council) whose mission was to ferret out the best practices in online development. I interviewed a bunch of smart folks, collected a lot of great information, then promptly disappeared down a rabbit hole as things at my day job blew up.

We righted the ship, turned it around, and I started climbing out of the basement, careful to make sure the bright sunlight didn't hurt my eyes.

I began attending conferences again, including the recent Folio: conference in Chicago and the American Business Media's Digital Velocity event in New York (both in March). I began picking up more information on audience development, and finally, instead of facing two weeks of unchecked email, I instead decided to sit down and write the damn white paper, as much to organize my own thoughts as anything esle.

I'm not even sure my task force exists anymore at ABM, as I haven't actively participated in ABM's Digital Media Council for well over a year. But before I release this to the wild, I'm posting it here so that I can get feedback. Please post your feedback right to this blog. I'll incorporate the feedback into the official version. Thanks to all who contributed.