Why companies fail, from The Atlantic magazine

It's not about publishing companies, per se, but the lessons are there:

 http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/03/why-companies-fail/8887/

The good quote:

"Ask Jeff Stibel, and he’ll tell you: because that’s what troubled companies do. Stibel, once an aspiring cognitive scientist in Brown’s graduate program, is now a serial entrepreneur who has led turnarounds at Web.com and Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp. “Once the human mind has set out to do something, or has gotten in the habit of doing something,” he told me, changing it is “very hard.” When you add group dynamics, it’s even harder. You don’t need to be a brain scientist, of course, to know that people resist change … and yet, even knowing that, you’d be surprised at how many firms keep driving toward inevitable disaster at top speed. GM’s record is very much the norm, not the exception.

Years ago, I listened to an earnings call with the head of a biotech firm that had sold off the income streams from all its patents, had nothing in its pipeline, and was rapidly burning through its cash. Nonetheless, the CEO kept talking about “our future” as if the company had one, other than liquidation. The equity analysts on the call didn’t seem fazed; apparently, that’s how companies in these situations usually behave. Management and workers seem oblivious to their failures. They wait too long before they act, and even when they do take action, it’s often inadequate."

Determining a publication's contents: a thought experiment

The thought experiment:

Imagine you're responsible for determining the content mix for a regional general-interest newspaper. From reader surveys you know their main interest is sports and local news. International news is (say) fourth on their list of priorities.

You know that a major national newspaper covers international affairs far better than you ever could. Should you  abandon coverage of international affairs?

What if you know that 95% of your readers also read the that national newspaper? Presumably they're reading both your insipid rehashed coverage and their far superior coverage. Should you abandon your efforts?

Now, what if you know that only 5% also read that other paper. Does that change your mind?


Another thought experiment:

Instead of international news, let's think about gadget news: phones, tablets, exploding pens, that sort of thing.

There are five million or so news and review sites that cover these items in excruciating detail. Your paper will never be able to compete.

Should your general-interest newspaper cover this field? Your readership is interested in the subject, but it's not the main reason they read your paper.

Once again, assume that you know for sure that 95% of your readers also read one or more of these gadget sites. Should your paper cover the same material? Now assume only 5% also consume the good gadget media. Thoughts?

One more thing: what if you discover that although it's not the main reason they read your paper, your readership reads everything they can about gadgets. They'll read 20 reviews of the latest gizmo, regardless of quality or how much they've already read.


The train story:

Apparently there was a train enthusiast magazine that discovered that one thing their readers really like were photos of classic engines.

To cash in on this they created a calendar. Twelve months, 12 train pictures. It was a huge success. And yet, they weren't in the calendar business. There was no way they could compete with calendar companies. But they had an audience that loved train pictures.

They created coffee-table books, models, and all sorts of things. All were successful, because the company offered products that these people who love trains were willing to pay for.

They didn't branch out to create car or plane magazines; at least not with this audience.


What's the lesson?

That every paper should have a train section? Maybe, but perhaps more importantly is to understand what people are doing with the publication. If it's read because it's a general-interest publication there should probably be a mix of content, even if someone else is doing it better. Or does it mean everything should be really specialized, in which case there will be no more general-interest publications.

How useless is Twitter for politicians?

Another municipal election has come and gone.

This year, 2011, was the first year that social media tools had enough oomph to be considered as part of the media strategy for politicians and groups seeking to influence. How did that go?

Not so effective, based on monitoring Twitter feeds and conversations for the Surrey election.

The background
Surrey is British Columbia's second largest city. The mayor is very popular, so popular in fact that the main opposition, the SCC, didn't even try to run a candidate. They concentrated instead on trying to win Councillor and school board seats.

As part of my experimental site South of the Fraser I was collecting tweets that mentioned Surrey and posting those daily. It's through this monitoring of conversations about the city that these observations are drawn.

A few difficulties
It's taken several months to come up with the tools and methods to collect a reasonable sampling of mentions about Surrey. Here are some of the challenges:

• There's a Surrey in England. Tweets had to therefore be geographically based.
• Originally I started with just the hashtag #surreybc, but this is not consistently used. Many people don't use hashtags, and some will use #surrey. The search therefore was for surreybc or surrey, based on an area of 65 kilometers centred on Whalley.
• I don't know how Twitter finds out where the user is located, but some accounts will not show, even though they must logically be within that range.
• A few weeks before the election the hashtag #sryelxn started to be used. Because my main concern at the time was looking for mentions of "Surrey" I didn't monitor this tag until quite late.
• Twitter is used by different people for different purposes, from personal communications, through sharing, to outrageous spamming. The variety of uses creates a lot of noise. It's because of this noise that I limited searches to items that specifically mentioned the city's name.

The observations

The frequency and number of posts mentioning Surrey by name increased significantly during the election. If a typical day would have 120 posts (after various filters have been applied), a pre-election day could have 300-400 posts. Politicians, supporters and interest groups used it. Quality of posts (by my standards a quality post should tell me something new, or direct me somewhere) varied significantly, from shrill POSTS IN ALL CAPS to informative details.

Worth mentioning were live postings of all-candidate debates. Two or three journalists (whether professional or otherwise) took up this interesting exercise.

Which politicians tweeted, and how?

The medium is still new for most people, and different people used it in different ways. Bob Bose, for example, didn't appear on the radar until a week or so before the election, publicly thanking each new follower with a standard message that there were 13 other candidates in his slate (SCC). Many candidates didn't tweet, didn't use the word "Surrey", or use the hashtags "Surreybc" or #sryelxn. The Mayor, Diane Watts, for example only appeared on my records twice, even though I know she uses the service. Her communications officer did show up consistently.

There were a few politicians that did use it often and in a manner that was personable, showed up on searches and provided information that put them in a good light, but in a non-pushy manner. Stephanie Ryan and Paul Hillsdon are active users. After a few months of seeing their tweets I feel I have a sense of them as people. Tweets included personal commentary, but not the excruciating minutiae that invites toggling that "follow" button to "don't follow". They also consistently used terms that would show up in searches, not just #surreybc and #sryelxn but also #bcpoli and a few others.

If the politician's challenge is to meet people, convince them they are their friend, are hard-working, competent and can be trusted, then these two people used Twitter most effectively.

But did it matter?

No.

Neither Stephanie Ryan or Paul Hillsdon were elected.

Here are a few numbers:

Total voters: 70,253 (25% of the 279,140 total numbers of possible voters)

For mayor

Diane Watts: 55,826 votes (2997 followers on Twitter)

Ross Buchanan: 6267 votes (48 followers on Twitter)

Councillor: 
Judy Villeneuve: 45,514 (174 followers on Twitter)
Stephanie Ryan: 11,781 (612 followers on Twitter)

School trustee:
Shawn Wilson: 41,900 (can't find him on Twitter)
Paul Hillsdon: 15,451 (1,009 followers on Twitter)

Watts' Surrey First team swept council and school board, even though they were largely invisible to searches about Surrey.

What are the lessons for politicians, special interest groups and political junkies?
The major outlines of the election were a foregone conclusion, but for people who live by what they consume through online activity the numbers are out of sync with what could be seen online. Obviously, Twitter is not a major media for politicians to reach constituents.

However, it is a medium that potential voters could be using, and deserves some attention, both for developing a personal brand and communicating with people. What can politicians do to increase their exposure, authority and likability?

• Become familiar with the tools and standard best practices. There are 5 millions blogs out there all telling you what and how to develop your 'personal brand'.
• Think about how users will search for topics of interest to them. Use those exact term in your posts. For Surrey politicians for example, every post about Surrey should either use the word "Surrey", and/or the hashtag #surreybc. Sometimes it's easy to forget this one if you have a post about incinerators, for example.
• During an election try to use the hashtag that's being used, in this case it was #sryelxn. Bear in mind, the people monitoring specialized hashtags are probably news or election junkies. People who follow tags, or search key words are likely to retweet content (your content!) if it's informative or considered worth sharing.
• Monitor the tags and words that your constituents will be using and searching for. You can then respond directly to posts as they appear, or retweet them.

A few items that fall under the rubric of best practices:

• Don't use ALL CAPS.
• Make sure your picture is good, that you don't have red eye, and that your face fills the frame.
• Make sure your profile links to your personal site, and has as much information as possible on it.
• For content, don't forget that Twitter is like a conversation at a party: you don't know who is eavesdropping! 

Online marketing for a magazine launch: an example

I thought this was interesting. A series of magazines are launching. How do they present themselves online and entice people to get a subscription?

First, the email invitation:

The four magazines are ostensibly about using social media for business, but the copy of the email reads more like a breathless b2c (I've changed the font size, but not the bolds, etc):

We've got the TOP MINDS in business and social media today collaborating together to create the definitive magazines on leveraging social media for business. 
CLICK HERE to get full access to ALL FOUR magazines -- GRATIS! 
Here are just some of the more useful articles and stories our staff loved from the premiere issues -- available to you right now:

• The New Rules of Social Media

• A Look At How Politicians Use Social Media To Gain Mindshare--and How You Can Use It, Too!

• How To do It RIGHT--Instructions On Over 14 separate Social Media Topics

• How The Social Media Revolution Directly Effects (AND BENEFITS) Your Business

• How To Harness Grass Roots Energy For Your Business

• How To Best Use Social Media As A Mass Marketing Tool

• Why Most Small Businesses Are Failing With Social Media and Five Tips For Better Success

• 10 Ways To Market Your Company On Twitter

• Google and YouTube: Overrated Deal Or The Marketing Synergy Of The Century?

• The Outstanding Advantages of Google+

• Truth and Facts About SEO and Internet Marketing

All this information, all these ideas, all these answers are awaiting you--the moment you CLICK HERE.

Want to read on your smart phone or tablet? No problem. The magazines are "smart" and know which device you're accessing from and will automatically display for you in the proper format. Try it out now, CLICK HERE and get started!
Want to read on your smart phone or tablet? No problem. The magazines are "smart" and know which device you're accessing from and will automatically display for you in the proper format. Try it out now, CLICK HERE and get started! 
A Favor... 
While I've got you, let me ask you a favor. I'd really like to know what you think of the magazines and hear your suggestions on ways we can improve. If you'd take a minute write your thoughts in the comments section below each magazine, I will not only read your feedback, but in all likelihood will begin acting on it before your virtual ink is dry. 
Thanks so much for being part of our launch! 
All my best! Larry 

Click through to the landing page:

Link: http://socialmediamags.com/customissues/ad/gsg-worldmedia/premiere-issue/?utm_source=oct11in&utm_campaign=gsg

Note their main sponsor, Office Depot, is on the top right.

Open one magazine for a sample:

This screenshot doesn't do it justice, but I wanted to show the whole page. In  reality your screen will be taken up by the digital "flippity-flip" edition, with just a bit of the content below peaking up from below the fold. Note Office Depot is the only large online advertiser. Is this because they are the primary sponsor?

When we clicked on the magazine on the landing page previously we don't go to the homepage of the magazine, we go to the "multi-media" page. The flippity-flip book shows us the magazine in the usual flash format. Traditional publishers go nuts over stuff like this because it looks interactive and shiny. Comments are allowed below. Heavy use of sharing icons on top, very prominent. The only potential downside is there is no immediate call to action, like "subscribe now". I have to look for it -- not that it's hard to find -- but I have to want to subscribe.

OK, I'm curious. Maybe I'm willing to subscribe. But first, let's see what else is on this site. I'll click the home page.

The home page:

http://liandbusiness.com/

Once again, I wanted to show the whole page. The initial screen ends around the bottom of the Office Depot ad.

This is the home page, and presumably where most people will land from regular internet search or links. It looks like the now classic blog format: header, a splash bar for featured items to scroll across, content down the left, other stuff down the right.

I tend to look for the call to action on the top right, or maybe the top left. Here the top right is the picture of the latest magazine, with links to: 1) the multi-media version (which we saw first), 2) the text version, and 3) the subscribe page. Subscribe is also the link on top.

Below is the newsletter, two small ads, and invitations to their linkedin page and their facebook page. After that are their "top stories" and a request for contributions.

If they are ordered by priority, we can assume they're pushing for the reader to become familiar with the magazine and it's content. Presumably enough desire will build up to subscribe.

But first, let's check out the content some more.

The text page:

What's the difference between this view and the home page view? The articles are different. Perhaps this view is the magazine's content, while the home page's content has been optimized for search. These are the real articles, the home page is bait to pull in potential readers. That's just a guess.

Ready to subscribe?

I didn't bother with the full page screenshot for this. All they're asking for is your email address. This is an introductory offer. I'm not putting in my email address because I'm afraid, despite their assurances that they respect my privacy. But see how easy it is! If I really was even mildly interested the friction to try it out is very minimal.

How about advertising?

It's a fair guess they want more advertising, and that's why it's one of the main navigation links at top.

This leads to another site that's geared towards the marketer. 

Lessons learned?

The point of this exercise was to follow a campaign and see what people are doing. I'm not going to draw any best-practices lessons out of this. I don't have access to their numbers, and I won't know how well it succeeds. And that's the only metric that matters.

With that caveat, it appears this publisher has created an email campaign that leads to a specific landing page that leads to individual magazine sites. Each magazine presents its content as a flippity-flip book and as a traditional web page. But... their home page has been optimized for web traffic, including either different articles, or articles that have been re-ordered and/or reworked for this medium.