Lessons Learned: March 10th –Print vs Online.





In the fall, major media followed the story of Computerworld no longer offering a print version and moving all to online. Recently Newsday started charging for content see http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10173378-93.html?tag=mncol. Major daily newspapers like the Seattle paper and San Francisco Chronicle are looking at publishing electronic versions only.
Just last week, I got my first notification that an HR publication Workplace magazine (a Canadian print pub) was going all digital. In a recent survey from HR Marketer, with nearly 600 HR marketing participants, it was confirmed that only 26% of the people who used print were planning on using it again this year and of people who did not use print last year, only 7.69% were intending to. In addition, no one (0%) of these survey respondents indicated that print was a must have with only 8% indicating it was important, and a whopping 60% said it was not important at all. We have been monitoring about five HR print pubs and on average they are down between 45% and 70% on number of pages about 50% year over year. That’s ugly. With a new publication or newspaper laying off / shutting down or declaring bankruptcy each and every day, it is clear the old print model is just not working.

So will a digital only version of print products really work? Not in their current model. Lots of great editors, deadlines weeks in advance of publication, etc., limited content … NOT IN TODAY’S WORLD. People want content and commentary on demand. They want it now. Not according to an editorial calendar but based on current market conditions with multiple viewpoints. In today’s social networking world you have to let the audience participate and give people a reason to keep coming back to the site. Letting them participate in finding peers, adding blogs or files, commenting and attending webcasts are all very important to a digital strategy. Simply selling banners and buttons is not going to cut it. So for those of you in marketing beware of what you are actually buying. Make sure it is a cost per thousand impressions, not a fee per month for placement. At HR.com we used to be not competitive for many of the large RFP’s and media buys as we did not have a print product. Right now I’m very happy we don’t have that huge printing and distribution cost every month.

Lesson learned. Don’t take an old product and simply ”webize it.“ Look at your whole model. I think this applies to many of the people in the license software model that have not migrated to the SaaS Model.