Dan Blank: Publishing, Innovation & the Web

Will you wake up on Monday, and think to yourself:

Today is the day that I will do the same thing, in the same way, for the same amount of time.

Today is the day I will fight the tide of change by focusing on my goals, not those of my customers.

Today is the day that I will assume the solutions to my problems lie with the same tactics I tried yesterday.

Today is the day I will speak to the same few colleagues, instead of my customers.

Today is the day I will ignore customer research and behavior data, and hope that what I am doing works.

Today is the day I will blame my customers for not seeing the value in what I am offering them.

Or, will you wake up on Monday and think to yourself:

Today is the day I will listen.

Today is the day I will think critically about the needs of my customers, and collect as much data and observe as much behavior as possible.

Today is the day I will start with the need and end with a product - not start with a product and try to imagine a need.

Today is the day I will focus only on tasks and processes that help the customer, and reconsider the return-on-investment of my efforts.

Today is the day I will focus more on giving, and less on taking.

Today is the day that I will remember we are all in this together.

Today is the day I will see my challenges as opportunities.

Today is the day that I will be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

Today is the day that I won’t stand on the sidelines, won’t wait for others to come up with ideas, and won’t be the last to volunteer.

Today is the day I will realize that your problems are my problems.

Today is the day that I will not blame - and I will understand that we can accomplish amazing things, if we don’t care who gets the credit.

Today is the day that I will try to make customers and co-workers smile.

Today is the day that I become essential to helping my customers realize their goals.

Today is the day that I will matter.

This week provided another example of Twitter’s usefulness, as it became a primary communication tool to get first hand news from Iran. I have to say, I keep waiting for the Twitter hype to end, except it keeps becoming more and more useful!

Here is Clay Shirky’s take on what happened this week:

"This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted "the whole world is watching." Really, that wasn’t true then. But this time it’s true … and people throughout the world are not only listening but responding. They’re engaging with individual participants, they’re passing on their messages to their friends, and they’re even providing detailed instructions to enable web proxies allowing Internet access that the authorities can’t immediately censor. That kind of participation is really extraordinary."

If this is how social media is affecting politics and the fate of a nation, imagine what it can do within B2B media and publishing. Earlier in the year, I wrote two articles about Twitter:

• Expand Your Brand & Career: Open a Twitter Account. Right Now.
• The ROI of Journalists and Magazines Using Twitter

Today, I want to take another look at how Twitter and other social media sites are reshaping how B2B journalists cover their industries.

In the past several weeks, I have met with almost every brand here at Reed Business Information to discuss their use of Twitter, and share some tips and ideas to help maximize its benefits, and find more efficient ways of using it with their existing resources. Here’s a snapshot of some of RBI’s brands on Twitter:

Brand	Followers	Following	Updates
B&C	430	10	31
BuyerZone	277	94	206
Casual Living	250	262	14
Chain Leader	178	112	54
Construction Equipment	203	210	213
Converting	76	41	46
Custom Builder	115	146	27
EDN	531	67	156
Foodservice Equipment & Supplies	135	105	29
Furniture Today	870	126	36
Home Accents Today	589	90	295
HOTELS	2694	285	205
Housing Giants	229	82	258
In-Stat	196	60	70
Interior Design	5105	225	285
JCK	48	50	5
Kids Today	1387	205	351
Library Journal	5559	218	571
Library Journal Book Review	1630	613	565
Logistics Management	208	200	79
Modern Materials Handling	307	276	169
Multichannel News	295	48	1800
Packaging Digest	231	43	124
Playthings	327	53	114
Publishers Weekly	5487	64	523
Publishers Weekly Reviews	282	226	64
Purchasing	214	65	170
Reed Construction Data	302	61	117
Reed Construction Data Canada	443	15	343
Restaurants & Institutions	967	79	262
School Library Journal	2153	381	1799
Semiconductor International	161	15	51
Supply Chain Management Review	66	138	4
Tradeshow Week	394	146	51
TWICE	542	191	906
Variety	12514	1280	5058
Video Business	169	78	250

But this is just part of the story - many editors and staffers have their own Twitter accounts that they use to monitor the news in their industry and connect with their sources and readers. Another sampling:

What’s more is that their industries are getting on Twitter: their competitors, their sources, the companies they cover, executives at small & medium sized businesses, their bloggers, and so many others. It’s happening quickly, and the value that it is bringing is surprising. Let’s take a look at an example…

Social Media Case Study: Tradeshow Coverage

To gauge social media’s affect on event coverage, I want to share with you a little case study on an event that happened this week. Interior Design magazine was covering the NeoCon tradeshow this week in Chicago. Here’s a description of NeoCon:

"At NeoCon World’s Trade Fair, discover thousands of innovative products and resources for corporate hospitality, health care, retail, government, institutional and residential interiors from more than 1,200 showrooms and exhibitors."

Interior Design had staff members at the event, coverage on their website, a custom online navigator, two Twitter accounts setup (here and here, plus one of their bloggers here.) and they produce the official show daily and directory for NeoCon.

But of course, they weren’t the only people covering the event. I focused in on NeoCon coverage on Twitter, Flickr and YouTube, and did a small analysis of everyone who used the event hash tag "#neocon09," in order to see what the full coverage looked like across various social media sites. Here’s what I found:

• 4,200+ Twitter Updates
  
  This is just on the days of the show itself, not including pre and post event Tweets. This works out to 1500 or so Tweets per day, with more than 400 people updating. These folks were either at the event, or talking about it. Above is a montage of some of the folks talking about NeoCon on Twitter.

• Hundreds of Photos
  
  There were tons of photos linked through Twitter, via Twitpic. Check them out here. There were also more than 200 NeoCon photos on Flickr. For an event that is so much about product and style, this becomes a candy shop of ideas.

• Dozens of Videos
  
  These videos were shared on YouTube, giving you a first hand look at the event. Some were quite professional, while others were less so. Either way, each gave you an immediate sense of the people, the place, and the products on display.

Sure, some of these efforts are by other trade publications, some from manufacturers trying to show off their goods, some from PR agents, and some from fledgling designers trying to grab attention. There was even a contest at NeoCon and an effort to get attendees Tweeting to enter it.

But plenty of these Tweets, photos and videos were shared by industry insiders, regular attendees, and fans. The overall point here is that:

This content is being found on social networks not associated with a single media brand.

This content is being published more broadly to the web, and then shared and talked about in places that no single company could ever control - they can just try to be there in ways that helps their audience.

How to Integrate Social Media Into B2B Industry Coverage

Clearly, how people cover and interact with each other at an industry event is changing. Here are some tips to consider if you are getting ready to report on a conference, tradeshow or other event:

• Videos & Photos Make for Engaging Coverage
  
  One of the many things I love about B2B is the passion that each person has for the nuances of their industry. At an event like NeoCon, the products take center stage, and they are amazing. But ensure you are capturing the personalities, the places, the stories that shape your industry.

  Sure, quality counts, and it is ideal to have superb photos, and professionally edited videos. However, that is not essential, and it is amazing the video quality you can get on a cheap Flip video camera, and a cell phone camera.

• We are Coming Closer to a Day Where an Industry Will Report on Itself
  
  This is a core way that the role of reporters is shifting - everyone is now a reporter. The tools to share your experience with the world is literally in your pocket - in a mobile device. Anyone can update Twitter or Facebook from their phone, share pictures instantly, and take video with zero preparation.

  What’s more is that people are now more willing to not just capture this content, but actually share it. The adoption rate of folks using Facebook and Twitter is astounding - and it is inherently about these people coming out of their shell and sharing. In the past, this was the role of the few… trained journalists and media professionals. Not anymore.

  And you can add into this mix the fact that manufacturers and marketers are now leveraging these tools to bypass intermediaries and connect directly with their audience and customers.

  What this means is that journalists, publishers and media companies need to rethink their roles, and the value they are offering their industries.

• Filtering Information is a Much Needed Resource
  
  For all the amazing things people are using social media for, I have to say, filtering that information in an engaging and useful way is still incredibly valuable.

  This week, if you searched Twitter for the hash tag #iranelection, and began reading the results, within 20 seconds, you would get a message saying 500+ new Tweets were added with the hash tag #iranelection in those past 20 seconds.

  Even in my examples above from NeoCon, I had to search out this media and comb through it myself, slowly finding the best content.

  On the flip side of things, I have had quite a few people tell me that they no longer use RSS, and instead rely on Twitter to find links to interesting articles. By following smart people and relying on the links they share - it becomes an intelligent filter to find the items people are talking about.

• Social Media is About Serving the Needs of Niches
  
  Social media scales well, but I find that the real beauty of it is that it serves the needs of small niches incredibly well. On Facebook, I am amazed at how well it serves a niche I am a part of: people who went to a certain elementary school during a certain decade. I am able to find people, photos and stories from that very tiny niche.

  When considering your social media strategy, keep these niches in mind. Can you have multiple brand accounts on Twitter in order to serve the needs of very specific audiences you serve? If you are creating a Facebook group - are you targeting your industry broadly, or focusing in on the one subgroup who is most passionate about a key aspect of things?

  Social media strategy can become very sophisticated very quickly, but can be more straightforward if you always consider the needs you are serving and work to measure what is working and what isn’t.

• Immediacy is Your Competitive Advantage
  
  The concept of "breaking news" and "scoops" has changed in the age of 24 hour digital media. That’s a longer discussion for another time, but I will say that if an event is happening today, that is an opportunity to bring your audience into it as its happening - and to actually interact with it, instead of simply "consuming" content about it a day or two later. Consider ways that social media can enhance not just reporting, but interaction.

• Get in Front of the Parade: Lead Your Industry to Social Media
  
  Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are mainstream tools, yet people are still confused how to make it useful in their lives. Within your industry, lead the way. Find ways to make it fun, to make it easy, to make it useful. For everyone I have seen become a social media convert, there is an "ah-hah!" moment, when to changes from becoming something foreign to becoming something personal.

• Move Beyond the Event
  
  In the example above, I focused only on NeoCon coverage during the 3 days of the event itself. There was plenty of chatter on Twitter before and after the event. This is another opportunity - to engage with your audience and to find out how you can serve their needs.

• Integrate Social Media Strategy into Existing Processes
  
  Undoubtedly, using social media is a time-intensive investment. Consider how you can integrate it into existing processes. For example, getting in the habit of sharing the link to an article the minute after you post it to your website - or use Twitter in the process of identifying topics to write about, or ways to cover an event.

  There’s no magic bullet here, but social media offers an opportunity to connect more with those who matter most - the people within the industry you cover.

• Make it Fun
  
  Social media should be fun - it should engage the passion of your readers and customers. If it’s not fun, then you’re not doing it right.

Publishers and media companies are all looking for the big answer - how to create a profitable publishing and media company. They are searching for that one thing - that huge idea that will push their business model from a flat line to a steep upward angle.

But that one thing doesn’t exist.

There is no single idea that will reshape your business, deliver ever increasing revenue, keep costs manageable, bring in new customers, please existing customers, align to the needs of business partners, and speak to the competencies of your business structure.

Why? Because serving customer needs and creating great products is just not that easy.

And this is a good thing. Good, because it empowers each and every member of a business to make a contribution; to deliver on business goals; to make a product better; and most importantly - improve the lives of customers.

This is not a privilege reserved for a select few - it is an opportunity made available from everyone from the top dog down to the lowliest intern. (sorry, interns.)

And it goes beyond revenue, beyond page views, beyond any metrics that can be expressed as a quantity. Qualitative metrics are an equally important measure of your value in the lives of your customers. Even in a recession - there are ways to improve products and serve customers that might not deliver immediate growth, but set you up for significant post-recession success.

Here’s my favorite metric:

How many smiles are you creating within your industry each day?

I don’t mean smiles that says "Yes, I liked that article." I mean smiles that says:

Because of you, my business is more secure;
Because of you, we are bringing in more customers;
Because of you, we are edging out our competitors;
Because of you, I have solved a problem that was keeping me up at night;
Because of you, I am thriving in my career, and better able to provide for my family.

Can this be seen in page views and revenue? Maybe, but that only tells one piece of the story. And it only speaks to one way that you and your team members can contribute to business goals. In reality, everyone can have a significant role in serving customers, making products better, and growing the business.

Small Things

Big successes are really made up of a series of small improvements. Each becomes an essential part of the whole, and each has the same goal: making your customers happy. Let’s look at one example of how from this week:

This week, the next version of the iPhone. I watched the 2-hour presentation where Apple introduced this product and several other upgrades to its existing lineup, and I was floored by the attention to detail, and how each was measured for improvement. Some examples:

• 40% greater battery life in their notebook computers.
• 60% greater color gamut in their laptop screens.
• 45% faster installation of new operating system.
• 230% faster to move a mail message.
• 50% speed bump in their web browser.
• 50% smaller operating system size.
• 50% speed bump to open an image.

Plus other small improvements to make their products more environmentally friendly:

• The creation of a new manufacturing process (unibody construction) for their laptop computers that creates less waste.
• Every notebook meets environmentally friendly product standards.
• Smaller packaging.

All of this, and they are dropping prices on many of their major products by hundreds of dollars.

What you are watching them do is measure everything, and each year, working to create constant improvements. In the presentation they call them "little touches," "small benefits" and "refinements."

People ogle at Apple’s products, but from a design perspective, the product is not the goal. Revenue is not the goal. Those are almost by-products. The goal is to solve problems and deliver something that makes people’s lives better.

This is even more imperative in business-to-business media. Wherever I go, I am reminded of who my company serves:

• Jewelry store owners who are working to find growth in a tough market.
• Furniture manufacturers who have run their family owned business for years, and are now struggling to survive.
• Librarians who are trying to deliver on increased demand for their services, while facing budget cuts.
• Product designers who are trying to understand new technologies, and how to use them efficiently.

• Media executives who have an unmatched passion for their industry, but trying to understand what it will look like in 5 years, and where they fit in to that future.

The brands I have the pleasure to work with are making my community a better place. And that is why small improvements can have such a profound affect.

Small Things Add Up

Each day, each week, each month - what is one thing that you can do to make your product better - to better serve your audience and solve their problems? How can you measure yourself by customer experience?

When you identify ways to solve customer needs, you are inherently identifying ways to create new revenue streams. Quality pushes quantity, not the other way around. Revenue and page views are end result metrics - they are outcomes of making great products that serve critical customer needs.

So if this is the first question:

What is the one thing you can do today to better serve your audience’s needs?

Then this is the second:

How are you linking this back up to revenue generating products that serve those needs?

If you are an editor, you might want to consider the following: What is the one ACTION you want your audience to take when they read your articles? Some ideas:

• Signing up for a newsletter.
• A single link you want them to click on.
• Registering for a webcast.
• Downloading a white paper.
• Contributing to a survey.

Nuances of product design are such an inherent part of the Apple because they realize that is how they express their relationship to their customers. Every element - how it looks and how it functions - is to include only the most useful things. The rest is cut away.

In the same regard, what are small daily changes that an editor can make to drive business goals? The action for their audience is not "to read," but rather, "to solve."

Measure

Unless you are measuring the performance of what you are doing, how do you know what is working? Here’s an example of what I mean:

Let’s say a blogger looks at their monthly page views. If those metrics go up, the blogger thinks to themselves: "I worked hard last month, and obviously, I am doing the right things." But the reality is much different. If you look deeply into the metrics, you will often find one or two things that are working really well, and a hundred things that are barely delivering on the needs of their audience.

You will often find one blog entry that delivered a sizable chunk of their traffic. Or a single day that drove more page views and a higher level of engagement than others. Or one source that delivered most of the traffic.

Without understanding these nuances, the blogger is flying blind - pursuing tactics without a strategy.

Look at metrics, but use them not to look back, but to create a strategy for moving ahead, create benchmarks and set goals.

Likewise, connect with your customers and your readers as often as possible. Consistently gather research, ask for feedback, and review metrics on their behavior. How else will you understand your customers better than your competitors?

If You Don’t Fail, You Can’t Succeed

Every failure is one step closer to finding success.

"Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time."
-Thomas Edison

When you do fail - share those failures. Whether it is a failed product, a failed attempt to connect with readers, or a failed ad campaign. Share it with everyone on your team, to ensure they understand why things work, and why things don’t work.

Whenever you learn something about your audience, your customers, your advertisers, and your industry - share that with your team. Likely, each of you collects a separate set of data & information about those you serve; when you bring this information together, it gives you a powerful tool.

Help. It’s Your Competitive Advantage

Profitable businesses are inherently about helping. Getting in the way will not create a loyal customer base, even if you can manage to sell it. Seth Godin calls this "permission marketing," and you can see it’s affects all over the web in things like "banner blindness," where web users ignore ad banners because they are so common, and so easy to recognize as information that is not helpful to their goals.

Helping does not just apply to customers - it is a 360 degree process of listening to your co-workers, your advertisers, your business partners, your customers, and anyone who touches your industry.

It is the nuances of understanding their needs that allows you that rare chance to grab an idea that will solve needs better than your competitors can. Think about it this way:

Are you someone that your industry goes to for help?
Or are you just another hand in their face, asking for their precious resources?

I work from home full time, and it has improved my career for two reasons:

1. I am wildly more productive.
2. I am dramatically less stressed.

Both of these things make me a better employee, and allow me to focus intently on helping the company I work for succeed. So today I want to look at the reasons why working from home might be able to help you, and share some tips on how to make it work.

When I tell people I work from home, I generally get one of two reactions:

1. Complete jealousy.
2. A sad look of disapproval that says they think I just committed career suicide.

I have worked from home full time for close to two years, and had done so one day a week for a year prior to that. I work in online publishing, in a corporate role that has me working across 40 brands based in 6 major U.S. locations.

The Benefits of Working from Home

• Become a More Productive Employee
  
  When you remove the distractions of a typical commute and office life - you are left with total, complete focus on getting your job done. I find that not only do I do more work, but I am able to complete my projects to the degree of quality they deserve.

  Again and again people tell me that their "plate is full" at work. The implication is not just that they are trying to do too many things, but that they know they are only getting them done to the most minimal levels of acceptance.

  Imagine if you could do more in terms of quantity, and do more in terms of quality - that you are living up to 100% of your potential, or at least something close to it. That is what working from home has given me. Simply put: I am a better employee and better serve my company by working from home.

• Gain Hours Each Day
  
  When I travel into my office, I have an average commuting time of about an hour and a half door to door. Even though the train ride itself takes only 45 minutes or so, getting to the train, waiting for it, and walking to the office once I get off the train adds considerable time. If the train is late, which is not uncommon, things get stretched out even further.

  When eliminating commuting time, I save at least 3 hours each day. When you count prep time in the morning and that first half hour of unwinding when I get home at night, that adds another hour or more of formerly unproductive time each day.

  What’s more: the hours spent preparing for the commute and the commute itself are hours full of distractions, which takes my focus off the things that matter most during the day: helping my company become more successful.

  The benefits of this time extends even further: this is 3+ hours that I can do more work, take better care of myself, focus more on my family, and become a better member of my community.

  I tend to go into the office one day a week for meetings, yet I still gain about 600 hours a year by not commuting the other 4 days. That is literally an extra 25 days a year I just gained!

• Reduce Stress Levels
  
  When you remove the distractions of commuting, of maintaining an office, of the unproductive aspects of office life - it is astounding how much it shifts your mood. I am a very positive person, and usually full of energy and passion for my work, even when commuting. Yet, I couldn’t believe how my world changed when I began working from home.

  Think about a typical workday when I commute:

  • Wake-up, shower, shave, iron, get dressed.
  • Pack my bag for work.

  • Make sure the house is left in decent condition and nothing is left on that will burn it down. (I am paranoid in this regard.)
  • Walk a mile to the train.
  • Wait 5-10 minutes for the train.
  • Find a seat on the train (not always simple.) Sit on train for 45-50 minutes.
  • Be herded with thousands of other people in Penn Station.
  • Walk close to a mile to work, stopping off for a muffin.
  • Unpack my bag.

  • Go to the bathroom.
  • Boot up my computer, say hello to those I pass, get a napkin and cup of water.
  • Just for fun, let’s assume it was raining this day too.
  • NOW, I get to start work.

  On the flip side, you have this same scenario reversed on the commute home. Now let’s consider my day when I work from home:

  • Wake up, shave, shower, get dressed.
  • Boot up my computer and start working.

  The difference is mind-boggling. For a morning person like me, it means that I can give my company the most attention at my most productive hours of the day, instead of wasting those hours running around, or sitting bored on a train.

• Avoid the Dilbert Moments of Office Life
  
  I do not mean to sound negative here, because I am a very social person, love my coworkers, and appreciate how the nuances of office life can move business forward.

  But let’s face it, a TV show like "The Office" and comic like Dilbert resonate with so many people for a reason: because they are true.

  I go into the office one day a week for meetings, and it allows the best of both worlds. When home, I can have targeted communication with my coworkers via phone, online meetings or email. When in the office, my days are scheduled completely, ensuring that each interaction has a purpose, and is given the time it deserves.

  There are many good things to office life - such as Google’s belief that small teams that work closely are the best way for projects to move forward. I can’t argue with that, but I can say each role and each company is different.

  Other proponents of office life will talk about the unstructured aspects of bumping into people in the kitchen, and how it creates cross-pollination of ideas. Pixar famously designed their office to promote this.

  In my experience, I have found that many of those kitchen conversations to be pleasant, but don’t do much to move the company closer to it’s goals.

  Please don’t think that I don’t value the social aspects of office life. Anyone who I work with will tell you differently. I make an active effort to reach out to people from different departments and roles other than my own. I believe in cross- pollination of ideas, but am not going to rely on the same 12 second kitchen interaction with the same 6 people to move our company in the direction it needs to go.

• It’s the ‘Green‘ Thing to Do
  
  Yes, the train still runs if I am not on it, and no, my company doesn’t unscrew a single light bulb when I am not there. But, at least I save on the electricity costs of ironing each morning!

  Seriously: technology has provided us amazing communication and productivity tools, yet society still runs in inefficient ways for social reasons. I am not at all asking for a revolution - I realize working from home full time simply won’t work for plenty of folks.

  But what if a company offered this option one day a week to their employees. Could they cut down on electrical costs, commuting costs, emissions, etc by 20%? Perhaps. Maybe it would just be 10%. But that’s a great start.

• More Quality Time With Family
  
  When you remove commuting time, you not only gain more hours to work, but you gain more quality time with family. When you end your workday, you don’t have to start an exhausting commute - you can effortlessly shift focus to family life.

  I have found that my personal life is in dramatically better order now that I work from home. Dishes are done, bills paid instantly, bed always made, carpet always vacuumed, and no piles of paperwork and projects I am trying to get too.

  When considering the extreme demands of managing kids - the affects are even more dramatic.

• Save Money
  
  Commuting isn’t cheap. There are hard costs like gas, tolls, or train tickets. There are soft costs like wear and tear on your car, or how often you go through an expensive pair of shoes on all those walks to the train. If you drive to work - imagine if you drove 15,000 fewer miles a year.

  Food costs also add up (and I would argue, it is more difficult to eat healthy when on the move.) Coffee, bagel, sandwich, snack… it adds up quickly.

  There are costs on the other end of things too, for your company, to light/heat/cool/clean your space.

  I typically go into the office one day a week, yet I still manage to save thousands of dollars each year in commuting and food costs. I estimate I save around $3,000 a year in commuting and food costs.

These benefits might differ for you, based on your role, personal and professional life. But let’s say you are going to try out working from home one day a week - here are some tips to get things started.

Tips for Working From Home

• Setup a Work Area
  
  
  I have heard this repeated by others who work from home - have a space in your home that is just for work. It helps keep you focused, and is a signal to your family that you are not to be disturbed.

  I have a large empty desk that I use. It is always empty, and when I work, contains only my laptop. I went paperless awhile back, so that helps.

  We don’t own a TV, and decorate very sparingly, so the room has no other distractions. Nothing in terms of entertainment, and no personal to-do’s to capture my attention.

  I setup a large mirror in front of the desk that reflects the light from the window, which is important for me - I never liked working in a cave, even if that cave was an office on Park Avenue in New York City. Humans need sunlight, in my opinion.

  The only other thing on my desk is my cell phone, which I use frequently to stay connected with those I work with across the country.

• Create a Schedule and Set Goals
  
  Undoubtedly, working from home requires discipline and a passion for your work. There are no external cues that you are now a "role," and meant to act in only professional ways. Unlike Batman, you don’t get to change into a costume.

  I create a loose schedule each week, and goals each day. I am very strict in judging how much I deliver to my company’s goal’s each week.

  Likewise, it is important to take scheduled breaks, to get away from that desk during your lunch break. If you want to do personal stuff during your lunch break, do it on your personal computer, and away from your "work area."

  I find I work more and work harder. I set higher standards for myself because I am paranoid about ever feeling "out of the loop."
  

• Stay Connected
  
  People are afraid of "out of sight, out of mind," - that if their coworkers don’t see them working hard each day, that their jobs will be at risk. So you have to actively work to keep in sight, and there is no better way to do this than delivering on your objectives and helping the company reach their goals.

  To stay a part of the office social circle, you have to become an expert communicator. Pick up the phone instead of replying to every email; make scheduled weekly or monthly visits to your office; go out to lunch with colleagues; make it a point to meet new people within your company.

  I am a strong believe in teamwork, and understand how in-person meetings and events can have benefits that virtual meetings can’t. Make it a point to schedule these meetings - to meet with colleagues. But do so efficiently, scheduling them all on the same day during the week.

• Get Active
  
  When you aren’t forced to leave the house each day, you have to be mindful of your health. Take a walk in the morning, at lunch or in the evening. Go to the gym. Eat healthy. You can even consider working from a cafe or park on occasion - people are social animals.
  

I remember having dinner with friends awhile back, and one of them asked with a smirk on their face: "Do you get more or less work done at home?" I could tell they felt I might just be goofing off all day. Before I could even answer, my wife cut in with this answer: "More work!" It felt good to hear that - that she saw the dedication and effort so dramatically.

I think the greatest barriers to working from home are not physical or technical barriers - but social barriers. It takes a certain level of trust between managers and their employees to begin a process like this.

I realize that working from home is not for everybody. But you might want to consider trying it out one day a week to see if it can work for you and your team. Even working from home a single day a week can have a dramatic affect on your career - helping your company meet its goals.

In the past few weeks, I have been talking about product development in B2B media and publishing. First, we looked at how to put customer needs first, and then at revenue streams that publishers have at their disposal. Today, I want to extend this discussion by looking at how editorial, sales, and advertisers can coordinate their efforts to create sustainable revenue generating products that meet the critical needs within their industries.

Let’s start at the end, and work our way backwards. This chart outlines a potential lifecycle for product development for B2B publishers and media companies. When looking at this chart, you can think about a scenario where an editorial team wants to do a big feature about sustainability in their industry. Timelines for each role (journalist, sales, etc) start on the left and move to the right, from idea to execution.

Things to look for in the chart:

• Waldo, of course.
• How the editorial and sales process aligns. How can they better integrate their efforts?
• The repeating theme I mentioned 2 weeks ago: "Listen. Listen. Do." So, for every point on the timeline that a publisher is providing a solution to their customers, you should see two different points that they are gauging the needs and behaviors of those customers.
• That customers and business partners are active participants: not just consuming information, but interacting with it, the content creators & sales teams, as well as ach other.

This chart is organized from the viewpoint of journalists and content creators. In reality, it should be flipped, with the customers on the top and journalists on the bottom. Here’s why:

B2B content should be both a RESULT, and a CAUSE.

It is a ‘result,’ because content creators should be responding to audience need. Likewise, understanding the needs of advertisers and business partners is a critical first step. Next comes potential product options (the blue line in the middle in the chart above.) Finally, we come to the sales and editorial teams within media companies, coming together to address the needs of their various audiences.

It is a ’cause’ because the goal is not to simply "inform" an industry through reporting - but to become a partner who solves critical business needs for those they serve. This is not to imply that editorial content will lack creativity or be able to set the agenda - to identify topics or viewpoints that need to be addressed. But that should come after analysis, not as a constant stream of editors filling content buckets each month.

Obviously, this paradigm is just one of many that B2B publishers and media companies can use. Either way, I think that these are some of the key elements for potential models moving forward:

• Publishers Should be in the Business of Solving Problems.
  
  Editorial and sales are a process of managing relationships and meeting needs. While writing an article or closing a sale is a key part of this - the goal is to have a measurable affect on the businesses they serve. This is why constant research and measurement is critical to drive business forward.

• There Should be Multiple Product Offerings from Each Editorial Effort.
  
  Editors do an incredible amount of work for each article and feature they produce. However, they often lose the return-on-investment by focusing on a single product (an article), instead of building multiple revenue generating products that can sustain the business, and target the many ways their audience can consume the information that the editors are producing. A single effort can easily be extended to create several products, each with their own sales channel.

• 70% of an Editor’s Job Should Occur After a Feature Launches.
  
  Editors are now marketers, and they have previously unheard of ways of connecting with and partnering with their audience. Likewise, measurement tools are now inexpensive and available, allowing them to understand both the nuances about the needs of those they serve, and to what degree their efforts meet those needs.

• Solving Advertiser & Business Partners’ Needs is Essential.
  
  Advertisers now have many ways to directly reach their intended audience - and media companies are not always a part of that equation. This is a huge opportunity for publishers to understand the business goals of those business partners, and to assist in educating them and becoming an essential business partner. This is not just about serving an advertisement for them - this is about becoming consultants who can increase their business performance along very particular metrics.

• "Reporting" on an Industry is Not Enough.
  
  There was once a time when "an industry wouldn’t report on itself." That time has past, as each industry is rapidly learning to do just that through websites, blogs, twitter, social media and virtual events.

  Advertisers and industry organizations are now direct competitors with media companies, providing training, information, news, and services directly to their audience and customers. For publishers and editors, this opens up an opportunity to not just report - but to get involved, assist in building their industries by serving advertiser’s and audience business needs.

  Especially in B2B media - people might now expect information to be free, but business solutions that drive revenue and make industries more efficient - that is (and should be) expensive. This is where the modern B2B media company will find their future.

• Editorial, Sales and Marketing Teams are Partners in the Product Development Process.
  
  These three teams are each full of ideas, data, research, and deep connections to different parts of their industry; Each understands critical needs that need to be met; Each needs to partner early in the process of product development, to ensure that products are not just ‘good’ - but ESSENTIAL to those they serve.

In the past couple of years, I have dramatically changed the way I work. The changes have made me more focused, more productive, less stressed, and overall: a better employee.

Today, I want to take you through four of these changes. Each may not be perfect for you, and I am always working to perfect them myself.

Email is Not Your Friend

It is easy to spend the whole day trying to keep up with email, and yet, accomplish nothing. This is a huge problem for companies, as workers feel productive, feel stressed, yet spend too much time reacting, and not enough time focusing on projects that move the business forward.

Here are a few ways I have changed the way I deal with email:

• Demote the value of email.
  My life is not longer run by the whims of email. It is an essential tool, but I now focus much more on in-person and phone communications - and do everything possible to work on projects that contribute to the business goals - not in replying to email in a split second.

  A couple of weeks back, I talked about the streams of information that inundate our lives. For many people, email is top on this list. This needs to change.

• Reply to emails sparingly.
  Every email I send means I am getting 2 more back. So I try to be efficient and complete in emails that I send, avoiding those long email chains. I have a rule I try to go by: if an email chain gets past 3 rounds of replies, I pick up the phone.
• Embrace the phone.
  As often as I can, instead of replying to emails, I pick up the phone. I especially do this with people that I don’t work with that frequently in order to establish a closer relationship, and humanize our efforts.

  There are also practical reasons for this, For instance, if I am trying to schedule a meeting time between 3 people, it can easily take a dozen emails back and forth. Via phone, it takes 1 minute.

• An empty inbox is the goal.
  At the end of each week, I strive to have an empty inbox. This ensures that I start the next week focused on my essential projects, not on getting to 78 outstanding requests. These are tough economic times: the business I work for needs me looking to solve critical problems, not bogged down in basic requests that I should deal with efficiently.

• Turn off email, and manage it in batches.
  I get the most done when I shut down email for 2 hours. It gives me laser-like focus on the task at hand. In order to ensure I don’t miss any mission-critical communications, I have spent the past 2 years telling people that if they need something: call me. My phone number is blanketed everywhere I can - I am reachable 7 days a week, any time.

  Each day can be slightly different, but an average morning might look like this:

  • 8:30am-9:30am Check email, and take action on those that require it.
  • 9:30am-11am Turn off email and work on a single project. It could be diving deep into metrics, creating a new strategy, implementing that strategy or creating a presentation.
  • 11am-11:30 Work on a different project.
  • 11:30-Noon Check email again.

  It should be noted that my role is all about communication - at any given moment, I can have editors from 40+ brands sending requests to me, or 200+ bloggers who might need my help. And that is just one part of my role. And yet - without being chained to email, I am able to be responsive and helpful - instead of overwhelmed.

• Don’t use email defensively or aggressively.
  There is a whole high-school social structure to email that people rarely talk about. Some people want all communications to go through email so that they have a written account of everything. The theory here is that you can never accuse them of doing something wrong - or that they have proof if you do something wrong. In my opinion, this creates negative relationships with coworkers and business partners - and the serendipitous moments that occur in conversation never happen in electronic media like constant email.

  Second, there is a tactic that people use to "put the ball back in someone else’s court." So, if there is an email in your inbox that you don’t have time to get to, but don’t want to seem unhelpful, you can get rid of it by asking a question or making a request of the other person. This buys you time, yet makes you seem responsive. You can stretch out tasks for weeks by doing this.

• Flush the Blackberry.
  The social constructs behind Blackberry usage are fascinating. We all want to feel needed and essential, and the Blackberry fuels this desire. I would catch myself going to check my Blackberry at the oddest times: 5:30am on a Saturday morning; while on vacation; while at lunch with a friend. Why why why?! Who do I think I am? What do I think happened in the half hour since I left my office? Who is having an emergency at 5:30am on a Saturday, and decided to send an email, but not call?

  So, I have established some loose rules around Blackberry usage:
  Don’t check blackberry in the evenings or weekends: People should know that I am happy to help any day, any time: but that phone is the way to reach me. This means they are connecting with me instead of dumping work on me. I love chatting with bloggers I support on a Saturday morning - this isn’t work to me, because I truly want to help them.

  I am up extremely early 7 days a week, and stay up late enough to be able to answer the phone at any reasonable hour. Call me: 973-981-8882.

Clean Out Your Work Space

I am a huge fan of organization guru Peter Walsh who talks about people’s emotional relationship with stuff. I come from a family of "collectors" - we were stamp dealers in the 70’s, baseball card dealers in the 80’s and each of us has had more collections of stuff than I can remember.

For about 5 years now, I have been on the road to minimalism though - I simply got tired of dusting all my stuff, and spending my free time buying or selling stuff. Life should be lived.

I believe these issues come right into our work lives as well. I love walking around offices and seeing how much stuff is in people’s offices and cubes. There are several goals to this stuff: to seem busy and essential, and to make the space reflect each individual’s personality.

Here are a few things I have done to clear my desk, making room for the thing that matters most: getting things done.

• Clear your desk.
  I know that some people work well in chaos - their minds are wired differently than others. But for most people - all the junk on your desk is useless, and simply serves to get in the way of your future accomplishments.

  I work from home full time, and have a desk that is completely empty. When I am not working - nothing is ever on it. When I am working, only my laptop is on it. My files have been reduced to two thick folders, and even those, I am working to digitize.

  For years, I saved every paper - for fear that one day I would need it. But through several office moves, I realize something: it’s all garbage. So, that’s where I put it all. Unbelievably, in 2+ years time, there has never been a single instance where I would have needed anything in the files I threw away. This rings true for all the books I had in my office, extra office supplies, etc.

• Go paperless.
  To do this, I had to change a few habits, because it’s not easy to go paperless. Instead of relying on notepads to take notes in meetings or work through ideas and strategies, I now keep my iPhone or laptop with me to do these via digital files. The beauty of this system is that it is searchable - something my paper files NEVER were.

  When I ask colleagues for copies of presentations, I always ask for a digital version - and am diligent about going through any paperwork I do receive. Piles are the enemy. They don’t just clutter your desk - they clutter your mind.

• Keep things clean.
  This is about your health as much as simple good hygiene. Have you ever sat at someone else’s desk and been afraid to touch there mouse because it was just filthy? I have. Crumbs embedded between every key of their keyboard, rotting food in their drawers, dust everywhere. This is not healthy. This is not professional. Once a week, go through the papers on your desk, run a wet wipe across your keyboard, mouse, screen, and desk. It takes 5 minutes. Why do your hair each day, put on a nice outfit, only to sit in a filthy office?
• Don’t chain yourself to your desk.
  People seem to be training for an Olympic event of "logging in hours at their desks." This is a pointless exercise that makes some people feel superior, even though they don’t necessary get more done that their counterparts.

  Occasionally, work from a park, from a cafe, from a comfy chair, or from home. Work hours that make you the most productive. For me, I am a morning person, I have a ton of energy and ideas at first thing, so I tend to start work ASAP in the mornings. The fact that I work from home means that I get to spend my most productive hours working, instead of sitting through a stressful commute or - even worse - ironing.

  If you are in a competition with co-workers to get in earlier and leave later, then you need to reconsider the priorities of that work environment. Is the goal of the company to find real business growth, or simply log hours?

Be Aggressive About Task Management

Like everyone else I know - there are any of 200 things I should be doing on a given day. Each will make me feel productive, and meet someone’s expectation of me. But only a handful of these things will actually deliver results that will drive my company’s business forward. Here are some ways I have shifted how I reprioritized my tasks and projects:

• Stop doing 80% of what you do.
  I’m serious here. A couple of years back, I hit a point where I loved my job, but felt that I wasn’t accomplishing all that I was capable of. There was so much on my plate that I was never able to do anything 100%. I was doing 200 things, each of them just 70% as well as they should be done. It was horrible - loving what I do, but not feeling like I was living up to my own expectations.

  So I made some hard choices.

  I reviewed everything I was tasked with, and thought about the next 5 years. Where did my company need to be in 5 year’s time? What do I want to accomplish in my career - which projects will allow me to grow? Which processes seem essential, yet if I had to be honest - really aren’t?

  I read a quote recently that graveyards are full of people who are absolutely essential to their jobs. I don’t want to be one of those people who felt essential, but was not delivering all that I could to my company. I want to over-achieve.

  Dump projects that don’t deliver measurable results. If you aren’t measuring the value of each of your tasks in hard numbers, then you need to start doing so.

• Create a list of goals for each week, and each day.
  It’s so easy to get off track on business goals by responding to email, management fires and any of 100 other things. Set goals, and create an ever-evolving list of priorities for each week.

  This also helps set expectations with your manager. The last thing you want to do is work hard at your job, only to find out that your manager is disapointed because you didn’t meet his or her expectations. Understanding their priorities will make it easy to set your own.

  Perhaps you feel that your manager has given you 100 items, all of which are of equal priority, and would be impossible to do fully. This is your chance to reshift the conversation - to identify whether your career is better off doing 100 things poorly, or 20 things incredibly well.

• Keep track of your accomplishments.
  Each month, keep a list of your accomplishments. This serves several purposes:
  • It challenges you to have accomplishments. It also allows you to visualize a month ahead: what do you want to say that you have done in the next 30 days. What will make you essential to the business?
  • It feels good to look back at the month and see a list of everything you have contributed.

  • Send this list to your manager each month. It ensures that they are aware of your value, and helps them communicate their team’s accomplishments up to their manager. Whenever you can: share credit with as many people as possible - you don’t want to seem too self-serving here.
• Rethink your job every quarter.
  The world is changing quickly - and depending on your job, it is hard to stay relevant. Do you want to simply be employed, or do you want to be someone who stands out as a star performer at the office.

  Most people think that to do so, you need to log in more hours. That is the wrong mentality, and often the one that people follow most often when trying to get ahead.

  Instead of focusing on quantity at work - focus on quality. Instead of logging in more mindless hours, focus your resources with greater efficiency on the right projects.

  Don’t allow yourself to be defined by the mundane things you do to "keep the lights on." Push yourself into new areas. Find out what ideas your boss is most excited about, and work on pushing your skillset to delivering on them.

Be a Human Being, Not a Role

The people you work with are the most important people in your career. Treat them that way. I realize that every office can have a social and political culture not unlike The Office TV Show, but don’t get wrapped up in arbitrary boundaries that mimic High School.

Each of us has run into others who base their interactions as a cold process that you might not fit into. It is times like these that I remember one of my favorite quotes by Scott Johnson: "Caring is a powerful business advantage."

If you define your interactions based on your responsibilities, then you are missing out on creating relationships that will serve your business, and move your career forward.

Here are a few ways I have tried to be more helpful in my job:

• Meet new people often.

  Whenever I work with new people (which is frequently), I make an effort to learn about them - their personality, their needs, their goals, and their challenges. People that are particularly intriguing, I try to meet them for coffee, breakfast or lunch. Being forced to sit with someone for an hour takes conversations in wild new directions - and I have found that they are always meaningful places.

• Network within your company.

  People talk a lot about "networking," and I think that the biggest opportunity to do so is within your own company. What’s great about this is that it allows you to better serve your company, as you will have a deeper knowledge of the people, their roles, and how you can evolve your role to serve them better.

• Help.

  Help everyone you can. If you aren’t making people smile each day, then maybe you need to rethink your career.

• Never complain.
  Not about people - not about projects - not about things you are afraid of. I think it was Woody Allen who said that 99% of the things we worry about in our lifetime never actually happen. So stop complaining about them. It doesn’t make you seem more important, and won’t do anything to advance your career.

I hope some of this is helpful. Feel free to share your own productivity advice!

Last week I talked about rethinking the publishing model to focus less on creating content, and more on creating products that solve reader need and establish the foundation for sustainable revenue. Today, I want to review the many online revenue models that publishers and media companies have at their disposal. 

The goals of this exercise:

• To more deeply involve editors in the business, and move away from "filling buckets" with content.
• To better leverage customer data, preference and behavior metrics. To move beyond using metrics as a tool to look backward, and use it to help set strategy.
• To identify revenue models beyond placing ads next to content, with the goal of capturing a lot of eyeballs.
• To understand the common needs of editors and salespeople within a media company, and look for ways they can work more closely, without editors feeling like they are selling their soul.
• To develop products that become essential to customers. In B2B publishing and media, the goals of customers and audience members is not to read an article, but to solve a vexing business problem. How companies serve these needs can take many forms.

To start things off, let’s look at a list of some online business models that media companies have at their disposal. This list comes from Chris Anderson, Fred Wilson, and Michael Rappa.

• CPM ads ("cost per thousand views"; eg: banner ads)
• CPC ads ("cost per click"; eg: Google ads)
• CPA (Cost Per Action, sometimes known as Pay Per Action (PPA) or Cost Per Transaction (CPA); The advertiser pays for each specified action (a purchase, a form submission, and so on) linked to the advertisement.
• Lead generation (you pay for qualified names of potential customers)
• Subscription
• Registration

• Affiliate revenues
• Rental of subscriber lists

• Sale of information (selling data about users–aggregate/statistical or individual–to third parties)
• Research or Audience measurement services
• Licensing of brand (people pay to use a media brand as implied endorsement)
• Licensing of content (syndication)
• Getting the users to create something of value for free and applying any of the above to monetize it. (Like Digg or our own Reddit)
• Upgraded service/content (ed: aka "freemium")
• Alternate output (pdf; print/print-on-demand; customized Shared Book style; etc.)
• Custom publishing/services/feeds. Similar to the concept of commissions.
• Live events

• Co-branded spin-off
• Cost Per Install (popular with top Facebook apps who can help others get installs)

• E-commerce (selling stuff directly on your website) This can include micro-payments.
• Merchandise/Souvenirs

• Sponsorships (ads of some sort that are sold based on time, not on the number of impressions)
• Listings/classifieds (paying a time based amount to list something like a job or real estate on your website)
• Paid Inclusion (a form of CPC advertising where an advertiser pays to be included in a search result)

• Streaming Audio or Video Advertising
• Marketplace exchanges
• Paid directory services
• In-video product placements
• Donations

Overwhelmed? Me too. So, let’s look at some examples as to how publishers and media companies can leverage combinations of these models. And let’s make this more interesting making them super cool revenue robots!

The main goal here is for editorial teams to be pursuing fewer standalone articles that rely solely on CPM ads, and look to more integrated packages that build many products from a single effort. On the one hand, these products may appeal to the variety of ways that their audience learns and approaches finding solutions to their needs; On the other side of things, these products will help create multiple revenue streams from each individual editorial strategy.

Revenue Robots: 

GargantuTron:
Lead-Generation, Registration and Sponsorship, CPM Ads

Let’s say an editorial team creates a series of articles around a single topic. The first revenue stream is CPM ads. Then, how about bundling the series into an eBook or white paper, and selling lead generation against the downloads. Next, create a webcast based on the findings and feedback on the series, which may include a panel discussion and Q&A. The webcast would - ideally - be sponsored. You can also charge a small fee for participants to register. If you can get 500 people to register and charge them $5 each, that’s $2,500, which is just an example of ways to cover the cost of production.

 

MegaForce2000:
Sponsorship, Subscription, CPM Ads, Data Collection/Sales

Organize a panel of experts to discuss a hot topic or training around a key area. These will be articles and videos, and be sold as a sponsorship opportunity. The feature will be rolled out as a weekly session, as it if is a class curriculum. Access can be granted in two ways: subscription to the entire series for $9.95. Or, access individual sessions for $1.99 each.

As a part of their participation, each panel and registered member will fill out a survey. This data will be used to create a “State of ____ report.” This report will be a big web feature 1 month after the session, and be posted for free on the website. CPM Ads will, of course, flank the article pages. The full data itself can be sold back to the sponsor or added to the site as a download.

 

UltraZorg:
Registration, Subscription, Sponsorship, Lead Generation, Merchandise, CPM Ads

Extending the idea of a training curriculum, participants can earn credits and a certificate. This is a new system that can be created, ideally partnering with an industry organization, and add to your audience’s career development. There are obvious examples of this in technical fields, but also look at the sheer amount of courses in areas like media on MediaBistro’s courseware. So there is a registration fee for each course, or subscription fee for a series.

Highlights from these courses can be leveraged in articles (CPM ads), webcasts (lead-gen) and in-person events (sponsorships.) In addition, participants can gain exclusive access to course forums. Workbooks can be created and sold as well - adding merchandise sales.

An underlying theme in many of these is to create evergreen content whose shelf life is longer than a news article – with multiple segments that extend the ways you can market it and sell it. Focusing on business needs beyond the cycle of "breaking news" may diminish the reliance on the single revenue model of advertising.

These are, of course, not the only potential revenue streams or ways that media companies can leverage them. But I think that discussing scenarios like these are good exercises for editorial teams to go through.

There are really two sides of this:

• Editorial teams mapping out a product roadmap, not just an editorial calendar. As I discussed last week, getting closer to customers is a critical part of this.
• Editorial teams working more closely with their sales teams to come up with these ideas, and ensure that the sales dept has this information with enough time to test the market, and ideally, sell these products.

The goal is not to question the work of what has been done at your organization. The goal is to consider what it will look like in the very near future. Newspapers and magazines are shutting down at a rapid pace. Advertisers have more options than ever, and can directly reach their target audience without intermediaries like media. Your audience is becoming increasingly sophisticated in finding ways to server their business needs – they are no longer wed to a single source for content, information or business solutions.

Finding the business model that will support the future of publishing and media will not be easy. But it all starts with a simple question: what do your customers and audience members need in order to grow their business?

Last week, I talked about streams that inundate your customers, your audience, and likely, your day as well. Today, I want to discuss barriers that prevent many businesses from creating sustainable revenue streams that are based on serving customer needs.

Lately, I have been rethinking everything about how I do my job. This is why:

• Many publishers have identified ways to engage an audience on the web, and to sustain this process.
• But many publishers have NOT identified sustainable ways to drive online revenue on the scale to which they have become accustomed.

My conclusion is that publishers are not in a paywall crisis - they are in a product crisis.

So I want to reshift my work day so that I am focused less on just one half of that equation (capturing attention) and more on integrated solutions: creating products that garner attention & solve needs, but also build sustainable revenue streams.

Below, I will take you along on this thought-process, with the goal of becoming better attuned to customer needs, more nimble in finding ways to serve those needs, and with a strong eye on creating products that support the business as well.

The Problem With the Way We Work

For the average worker, their day is filled with a thousand tasks, and I imagine the process for each one looks somewhat like this:

This could be editing an article, formatting a newsletter, preparing graphics, etc. Over a monthly or yearly time period, attention to this task might look like this:

As an example, let’s assume the task is to write an article about how the green movement is affecting your industry. Sustainability has become a huge topic, so three months back, your team made the decision that a weekly column would be warranted due to the growing conversation within your industry. So each week, you fill the "Green Article Bucket:"

Each Tuesday, you write the article, publish it in print and online, include it in a newsletter, and maybe you Twitter the link out to your followers. A job well done, and next week, you will repeat the process.

But wait… perhaps you do more. Perhaps you check your web performance metrics once a month, and maybe you even include a question in your yearly reader survey about their needs for green-related content. Likely, when you attend industry events, you might bump into a few folks who say that they love your columns. So that process might look a bit more like this:

And this is a problem. As reader behavior changes, as new competitors show up each month, as the business of publishing continues to be expensive, but revenue becomes more questionable, this is a problem. Here’s why:

• The voice of the customer is not an integral part of every action. As the web reshapes their behavior and how their needs are met, it is increasingly important to understand the nuances of these changing needs and behaviors.
• Doing the same thing, just more of it, will likely not deliver the exponential growth that you need.
• A strategy of Do, Do, Do, Do is not really a strategy at all, it is a series of tactics, one after another. A brand that follows this line of thinking misses new opportunities because they check-in with customers too infrequently, and reshift product strategy more slowly than increasingly nimble competitors.

Doing vs Listening

For many publishers, even B2B publishers, providing "coverage" of their industry is becoming harder to monetize. Reporting alone, and matching advertising next to it, will likely not be able to sustain a recognizable model of publishing in the near future.

I don’t say this to be negative, I say this because I am seeing newspapers close with greater frequency; because magazines are closing with greater frequency; because publishers are shrinking; because online advertising revenue is not equal to what it was in print; because new competitors and services are encroaching upon brands that have existed for decades; because readers and customers have more options than ever to find information and solutions to their problems.

So the concept of filling buckets - of outlining tasks and repeating them each week - this concept is outmoded for the current situation in publishing. What is the key to moving forward? Listening.

Listening can take many forms:

• Watching customers use your products and services
• Studying web performance metrics
• Consistent surveys
• Usability testing

• Engaging with your industry via social media
• And many other forms of research…

Some questions to ask yourself:

• When was the last time you watched someone use your product or service? (and when was the time before that?)
• How often do you run surveys or a similar form of research?
• Do you look at individual web metrics in aggregate, or do you segment metrics for specific product channels and look at combinations of metrics? How often do you do this?
• Do you test ideas for new products before you try to sell them or put them in front of a live audience?

• How do you communicate all of this information within your brand or company? Does it largely stay with a few people, or is everyone given the information and asked to use its lessons to reshape their role?

There is no doubt you already do some of these things, but likely, you don’t do them with the frequency or depth that you might like. There are only so many hours in the day. But without doing them, these are some potential affects on your business, your brand, and your career:

• Creating products that don’t serve the most critical customer needs
• Creating products that aren’t attuned to customer behavior
• Following "good ideas," that might not bring you much of a return-on-investment, using up your very finite resources
• Doing 100 things each week, but only 2 of which have a direct effect on supporting the business

• Not quickly identifying new opportunities

Listening as an Integral Part of Serving Customers

Here is one model for publishing to consider that brings customers more closely into the process:

So what the heck does that mean? Let’s look at an example.

Now, what might this look like in the daily grind… when you have to approach writing a column each week:

Tearing Down the Wall Between Editorial & Sales

(I know, I’m digging my own grave here, but bear with me…) Explain to me how this is supposed to work:

• An editorial team works all the way on one side: creating content that serves their industry and creates relationships with readers.
• A sales team works way on the other side: creating campaigns and relationships with the businesses that support not just your brand, but a fair portion of the industry you cover as well.

So what does your industry end up with in a process like this? Ideally, it would be highly targeted editorial, perfect matched with highly targeted advertising: a blend of things that help. But that model doesn’t seem to be cutting it anymore for many media brands, at least not on the web.

The thing that concerns me is that when editorial and sales don’t integrate their efforts, information is not shared as much as it could be; ideas are not shared as much as they could be; innovations get slower traction; and, overall, one hand does not know what they other is doing. This becomes especially compelling as new media makes it possible to create a wider variety of products & advertising opportunities, such as online events, multimedia, social media, etc.

Obviously, it’s different at each company, but I often wonder how closely content creators and sales people work to develop new products. Both serve the same goals: establish deep relationships within your industry, and serve them to the best of their ability.

Here is one way that revenue streams can fit into the publishing model:

The Future of B2B Publishing

So how will "Listen. Listen. Do." create sustainable revenue models for publishers? Well for one thing, it probably won’t involve a paywall as most people commonly understand it. Likely, it’s not about a lot of things:

• It’s not about providing media, but about providing solutions.
• It’s not about "reporting," but about providing solutions.
• It’s not about commoditization, but about providing solutions.
• It’s not about getting in the way through interruptive advertising, it’s about providing solutions.

The bottom line is this: I am not the one who can tell you how to create compelling products that your industry is willing to pay you lots of money for. The only person that can tell you that is your customer. And I am sure they are dying to tell you more about their problems - things that they need solutions for.

The next big thing - the thing that will give you substantial revenue growth - is being talked about every day… all we need to do is listen.

(Credit where it’s due: these are ideas I have been contemplating for months, but I am heavily inspired by Avinash Kaushik’s book "Web Analytics: An Hour a Day." It’s filled with great ideas on creating a customer-centric business.)

Your customers, your audience and your business partners are all swimming in streams - streams of information, of communication, of work, of worries, of goals, of distractions… and let’s face it, some of these folks are drowning in these streams. They might be trapped in currents that inundate, disorient, and keep the safety of land at a distance. Let’s take a look at a few of these streams, and consider what this means to how you serve your various audiences.

• The Stream of Morning Routine
  
  Perhaps the most overlooked stream of the day… it is astounding what people accomplish simply to get out the door in the morning. It’s an easy place to start, when considering why your customers are distracted well before they even consider your products, and how it might meet their needs.

  A typical morning consists of rituals memorized over a lifetime: bathroom, shave, shower, iron, get dressed, drink coffee, pack bag, do dishes, make bed, grab umbrella, eat breakfast, and maybe get the kids up, ready, and out too.

• The Stream of Getting Places
  
  Here is another stream that most are confronted with before they even set foot in their workplace. The lucky ones have a short commute, or perhaps none at all; but for most, it is a rushed battle of changing lanes, grabbing seats, passing through crowds, paying tolls, and hoping that the weather cooperates and accidents are absent. 1,000 things can delay travel in a given morning, each adding a sense of frustration.

• The Stream of Work
  
  Wahoo! We made it to the work day. It would be nice to think that your potential audiences and customers get to their job, and focus immediately on their biggest needs - needs that you are providing solutions for. But often, that’s not the case… they have a wide range of responsibilities to simply "keep the lights on," manage others, go through routine administration, follow set processes and navigate political arenas. And this is simply what is waiting on their desk the moment they arrive - let alone the many interactions that pop up during the day and new fires they need to put out.

• The Stream of Communication & Connection
  
  This could be an overflowing email inbox, line of customers, or schedule of meetings. Some are essential, and some grease the wheels to get things done. Others clog the filters we put in place to manage the ever increasing mass of communication headed our way.

  This can include interpersonal connection, such as an office chat, smoke break, lunch, and those that aren’t face-to-face such as phone, email, text messaging, social networks, and other online tools. I’ve watched so many friends and colleagues discover social media tools, and am hearing that they are becoming inundated with these streams as well. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day.

• The Stream of Information
  
  Your audience has access to more business data than ever before, from within their business and external research and data as well. This includes fun things such as reports, metrics, spreadsheets, documents, files, powerpoints and so many other tools that are supposed to create flow, but often create piles.

• The Stream of News
  
  This is another Wahoo! moment, as we consider things from the perspective of publishing, media, and journalism - such as providing B2B industry information. This is the moment in a potential customers’ day where they look up and look out, to get a pulse on news and trends in their industry, and look for opportunities and potential solutions to their problems.

  This includes online resources, trade journals, magazines, newspapers, workshops, webinars, events and so many other avenues. For many, there are multiple sources of industry-specific information, plus the stream of broader news and financial information providers. For all the innovation in this area, the stream seems to have gotten wider and flow more quickly - making it more difficult for an individual information provider to reach customers.

• The Streams Inside Our Heads
  
  Each of the people you are trying to connect with for your business has a constant set of streams flowing through their heads: streams of needs, of goals, of hopes, and of worries. There is so much you don’t see by just glancing over at a colleague doing their job… a million professional and personal things can occupy their mental energy on a given day, and often it happens concurrent to whatever else they are working on. This has a significant affect on productivity and on focus.

So what’s the point of all of this - of identifying streams that occupy the lives of those you serve, and those you hope to serve? Perhaps it is simply to understand that your customers live in a world of distraction, a world of rushing, a world of worries and hopes, of little surprises and little disappointments. A world where people focus on the most immediate things, often at the cost of long term goals. A world they try to make sense of, but have trouble finding any notion of control and understanding. A world where they look for accomplishment and success, but often find frayed edges and circular efforts.

This is the world you serve. The world that publishers, media companies, journalists, and bloggers contend with while they try to grab the attention of their markets, and get them to focus. And let’s not forget, your competitors are doing the same thing.

As I think about all this, these are the lesson’s I am left with…. because of all of this clutter that surrounds the lives of your target audience:

• This is why great design is important.
• Why product development is such a nuanced and critical art.

• Why usability testing is so essential to understand customers in context.
• Why research should be constant - to understand the quickly changing needs of those you need in order to grow your business.
• Why new technology is so important - because you are not the only ones trying to learn how to best leverage it.
• Why providing a variety of solutions is so critical - to serve different learning styles and different needs in unique ways.

• Why innovation is so important.

And this is why B2B information, publishing and media are so important - to help those we serve cut through the clutter, and swim in these streams more easily. To enable them to solve problems and move past barriers.

The remaining question is simple: How will you stand out and grab the attention of potential customers- not by getting in the way, but by surprising them with your usefulness. How will you make this day easier for those you serve, and filled with more smiles?

The chart above tells quite a story: it shows the growth of Betsy Bird’s blog on School Library Journal’s website.

So today I want to explain who Betsy is, how she does what she does, what it has brought her, and some tips to creating a successful blog.

The Making of a Blogger

Betsy is a librarian in New York City. She has a full time job, is married, and to my knowledge, cannot bend space and time to create the 25 hour day. So how does she do it?

She started out by posting book reviews on Amazon.com (Top 50 Reviewer with 1,500+ reviews so far.) From there she started a blog on her own, launched her career as a librarian, came over to School Library Journal, and most recently, landed a book deal.

Her focus is always Children’s Literature, or Kid Lit, as she calls it.

Some months (like April), she had 60 updates to her blog. I asked how she managed her time, and she described that her writing time was in the hours after dinner and before bed. It seemed oddly normal, considering her output.

After reviewing her blog and chatting with Betsy, below are some tips creating a great blog. These are things that worked for Betsy in some way or another - and I have seen them work for others too.

How to Become a SuperStar Blogger

• Connect With Your Audience Often
  

  In order for readers to feel a connection with you, and for your blog to turn into a community of like-minded folks, you should consider how often you are reaching out to them. At its most basic level, this translates to how frequently you update your blog. While some bloggers update everyday - or multiple times a day - that is not necessary for all bloggers.

  The key is to set some kind of schedule and expectation with your readership. Even if you can only update once a week, ensure you keep to that schedule, and that you have a high quality blog post that your readers will love.

  If you can update more frequently - put yourself on a schedule: Mondays and Thursdays. This will help you as much as it helps readers.

  Check out some of Betsy’s 60 blog entries from April to get a sense of how she reached out to her audience in a single month.

• Create Content Types
  

  The more you define the “types” of content you are creating, the easier it will be for you to manage your weekly blog output. For instance, Betsy has several recurring types of posts:

  • Book reviews
    
  • FuseNews - a recap of industry news
  • Interviews
    

  • Video Sunday
    

  • Publication previews
    

  • Holidays & events
  • Press releases
    

  • Special events - such as her “Top 100 Picture Books of All Time Ranking”
  • Blog tours
    

• Involve Your Readers
  

  To engage your readership, don’t just ask “what do you think” at the end of an entry, give them something to react to that engages their passion for the topic you blog about.

  Betsy did this by creating a “Top 100 Picture Books of All Time Ranking.” Her audience voted in March, and throughout April and May, she has been releasing the 100 results in groups of five for 100-25, and then individually thereafter. For each book, she gives audience comments, detailed description and opinion, and lots of photos, videos and fan art.

  This is a great way to create excitement during a slow news time, and create series that you can go back to again and again.

• Leverage the Network Effect
  

  When Betsy got into blogging, she knew that no blogger exists as an island. She looked for ways to tap into existing networks, and recommends that new bloggers do the same. For other children’s literature bloggers like herself, she noted that you should go to the KidLitosphere group on Yahoo Group and introduce yourself.

  I was recently speaking with a friend who was feeling a bit lonely as she tried to get her blog off the ground. When we started discussing how she can tap into existing networks that are filled with people who are passionate about the topic she writes about - the pressure of reinventing the wheel was lifted. Blogging should be a communal experience.
• Have a Hook
  

  Betsy used to have a recurring feature was called “Hot Men of Children’s Literature.” It got people’s attention, and was a fun way for people to debate the sillier side of their industry. She has stopped doing this feature, but people still bring it up - it was a memorable way for her to stand out from the crowd.

  Becoming part of a community is inherently about identity. When I see Facebook groups that have a lot of members, invariably, they have names like “Yeah, I’m a Trekkie - What’s it To You?” - as opposed to just “Star Trek Fan Club.” Something as simple as a recurring series of blog posts with a silly name can go a long way to building a devoted readership to your blog.

• Have an Opinion
  

  People have no trouble finding news and information online, or even opinion, for that matter. But it is rare to find a unique voice that speaks to their passion for the topic they care most about. Don’t be afraid to share your personality and offer commentary. Blogging is like a filter - make sure yours accurately represents you.

  Betsy does this in many ways, and you can see it most often in her lengthy book reviews. Some of them are thousands of words in length - as she discusses all aspects of the book at hand.

• Look Around
  

  Be sure to visit other bloggers and see what they are doing. To get ideas for your blog - you should look to bloggers in other industries. Often, things that work for one industry can easily translate to your own.

  When I speak to successful bloggers, they explain how some of their biggest successes were inspired by something that was new to their industry - but tried and true in another. When looking for ideas, look outside your own niche.

• Just Show Up
  

  Betsy gets involved. She shows up every day to her blog, to other blogs, to industry events, etc. This is her passion, which makes it seem less like work, and more like hanging out with your friends and talking about the thing you care most about.

  I realize that people are apprehensive with putting themselves “out there” too much on the web. But think about offline communities you may be involved with - those who show up see more of the benefit than those who just pop in every so often. When you don’t show up - you miss opportunities that others will gladly enjoy.

The Secret to a Great Blog: Ambition & Ability

This week’s New Yorker has an amazing article by Malcolm Gladwell where he explores how underdogs can increase their chances of winning.

The overall point that he makes is that:

“David can beat Goliath by substituting effort for ability.”

Why do I bring this up in an article about blogging? Because you often see a blend of two things in successful bloggers: a combination of ability and ambition.

I highly recommend that you read Mr. Gladwell’s article - much of it is a metaphor for how the web is reshaping media, advertising, and consumer behavior.