#magazinescanada

I spent my day yesterday at the Magazines Canada Business of Digital event held at the Ivey School for Leadership.

May I interject that the venue was inside The Exchange Tower (TSX) in downtown Toronto. The lobby is mesmerizing--brightly lit ticker boards running along the glass and marble walls, it felt like the matrix. I must have stood there for 10 minutes watching with my mouth hanging open before realizing I was doing it.

Magazines Canada put together a group of speakers--Mike Wall (comScore), Martin White (Online Magazine Marketing), Kim Pittaway, Ryan Trotman (Rogers Publishing), Martin Wong (SmarttNet) and Charles Lim (Spafax/Sparksheet).

http://www.magazinescanada.ca/development/digital_faculty

Each speaker prepared good information on his or her particular topic.

For me, the stats on the growth in digital media are the most interesting. Mike Wall shared one that showed an 18% increase in smartphone usage from 2011 to 2012.

That means 54% of Canadians who have mobile phones have smartphones. I’m assuming next year we’ll see that number grow again, and that, of course, means opportunity.

Those 2012 growth percentages do not take into account the expected saturation of the more affordable iPad mini, and couldn’t obviously account for the other smart devices that have yet to come to market. Growth is a certainty.

That said, listen to this.

Ryan Trotman shared that in June 2011, http://www.chatelaine.com/ was accessed by 186 devices and had 50,000 mobile visitors. By June 2012, those numbers grew to 525 devices and 115,000 mobile visitors.

525 different devices! The thought of them all certainly brings accessibility and mobile enabled websites to mind, does it not? That's what Rogers Publishing thought too, and now chatelaine.com has been rebuilt as responsive. With the site's redesign, the advertising has been somewhat unconventionally mixed with the content. Which isn't to say it doesn't look great--across every device.

Measuring and seeing the opportunity is one thing, but inventing and applying creative, captivating strategies to a publishing business is another.

Everyone in the room agreed that publishers aren’t just publishing printed magazines anymore; publishers are further developing reputable brands through content delivery on a variety of platforms. 

Establishing cohesion between all of a brands platforms and marketing efforts is an essential part of the overall strategy if you expect to garner any success finding, and keeping, your audience.

Kim Pittaway had a selection of successful social media campaigns and results used to drive traffic across various platforms and grow the readership/viewership of a particular magazine title.

The examples she chose to present were very well thought out and executed to maximize SEO across several different social media platforms in a single campaign. The results were measurable and pretty astounding.

In particular, the Style at Home magazine campaign for their #brimfield Antique Show partnership used video, livestream, photos and a contest to promote the event across Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Ustream, YouTube plus their own blogs and websites to generate 4,200,000 impressions in 5 days. Fantastic!

I love inspiring stories like this one--really gets the creative pistons firing.

And to share even more love, may I just say that @smarttmartin is quite comical to watch giggling like a schoolgirl when explaining the ins and outs of SEO and Google bombs. Of course, he used the Rick Santorum example.

http://searchengineland.com/should-rick-santorums-google-problem-be-fixed-93570

Hee hee.

Have you ever had to take the best work-related advice you could give, and narrow it down to five bullet points?

That’s exactly what I had to do in my latest speaking engagement at MagNet, Canada’s Magazine Conference.

With the influx of digital, and not everyone in publishing understanding what to do with it, or how to integrate, or not to integrate, or otherwise handle it, my talk focused on a mission statement I wrote a couple of years ago for the Production department I worked within:

Production is involved in the manufacturing of print and digital publications, from front end to delivery, collaboratively with all internal departments and outside vendors, manufacturers and suppliers.

I wrote it this way to cover any and all of the platforms a publisher wishes to attach their production department to:

Printed magazines

Digital editions

E-pubs

Blogs

Apps

Social Media

The key point of the talk, aptly titled "5 Essential Production Techniques You Need to Start Using" was how – despite the ongoing technology changes and challenges within publishing – the underlying responsibilities and objectives of product producers remains the same. After all, we are still manufacturing products.

Production departments are essentially the rock. Any publisher will tell you that. In fact, I had a publisher tell me once "if I can hear you laughing, I know I have nothing to worry about".

(NB: I have a loud, cackling laugh that travels upwards, and downwards, three floors). 

Departmental objectives are still, regardless of platform:

Efficiency

Cost-savings

Reliability

Process

Flexibility

Service

Knowledge

Quality

So how do you take all that, narrow down how to do it and how to manage it to “5 Essential Techniques”?

Like this:

Build a smart workflow

Automate pain points

Use technology

Share resources

Re-discover your staff

Simple, huh? Maybe, but I managed to spend a full 90 minutes talking about it, and could have kept going. Mainly because there is so much to talk about, and those points apply so differently to each publishing business.

If you are interested in the slides from the session, you can find them here:

http://www.magazinescanada.ca/magnet/pr2

You will also find a summary sheet prepared by my co-host Jen Blais with a few suggestions for resources.

The Magazine Production course is part of the Web and Magazine Publishing Certificate, but you don't need to be in the program to take it.

This is a course that is constantly being updated due to changes in technology and magazine publishers' requirements. I also take student feedback very seriously.

The Spring semester curriculum will have a nice balance between digital and print, providing basics for both as well as a few hands-on assignments.

Students will:

• have access to the digital edition of the Magazines Canada Production Handbook throughout the course (a million thanks to Magazines Canada for this privilege). The handbook covers project management, asset & content management, and has a section on printing. Not to mention that the various sections are written by a cast of seasoned publishing industry veterans.

• learn about digital publishing in many formats including websites, blogs, apps, and digital magazines (static and rich media)

• discuss current technology and events as they pertain to publishing and magazines

• visit a printing facility and have a guided plant tour

• come away with an understanding of how print and digital workflows can be integrated

Course registration is now open for the Spring/Summer term - Tuesday evenings beginning on May 1st.

On March 1st I attended the annual State of the Magazine Nation event hosted by Magazines Canada. This year's theme focused on how the printed page is changing, a tongue in cheek and rather obvious topic about how magazine publishers are having to reevaluate their businesses and consider how they might publish their content across multiple platforms.

The featured speakers were:

Lynn Chambers from newly named TC Media (formerly Transcontinental Media), who is the Group Publisher of Elle Canada, Canadian Living, More, and Juice, a new publication recently launched in partnership with Loblaws.

Shelagh Stoneham, the Vice President & General Manager, Brands & Marketing Communications at Rogers Communications Inc. Shelagh's specialties are corporate brand strategy and marketing communications, including mass advertising, social media, search, direct, customer base and retail programs.

Jeanniey Mullen who is the Global Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Zinio, the digital newsstand and publishing media marketplace.

The speakers were interesting, each of the publishing companies shared stories and real experiences relevant to changing and restructuring their products to incorporate new technology and bring their content to their readership in multiple formats as well as sharing some successful and creative digital executions in partnership with their advertisers.

However, the highlight of the event was not what I heard from the speakers. It was a conversation I had with a dyed in the wool web dev colleague of mine that I dragged along. As the speakers, especially Jeanniey from Zinio, presented, he had a hard time wrapping his head around why on earth one might have any interest in reading a digital edition of a magazine, regardless of the bells and whistles you could wrap around and through it.

He then made a very astute connection (in my opinion) between what the magazines were attempting to do in their digital publications with what Google is already doing on the web, so why wouldn't you just surf the internet?

What interested me about his viewpoint was his trust in the brand he (and the majority of us) use daily, Google. At that moment it occurred to me that we as magazines, who spend all our energy becoming trusted brands, are no longer just competing with each other, but also with Google for brand loyalty.

And not just within Google, meaning search engine optimization and how the majority of publishers have little hope in ever having their content rise to the top without the search criteria including the actual name of our publications, but with Google directly, seeing as they are essentially an aggregator, much like a magazine, who is obviously as my friend has just demonstrated, trusted.

I was quick to point out that Google also returns crap, and began explaining what we as publishers have to offer is a trusted, targeted voice, and a place, whether printed or in a digital format, where our readers can come to get information they can relate to, specifically selected just for them, to use and enjoy in a safe, protected environment. He wasn't buying it.

The next day I offered him my iPad, and an assortment of digital magazine examples for him to peruse at his leisure. This time, he was buying it, and did experience the solitary, focused, uninterrupted environment a digital magazine can provide, similar to that of a print magazine, but only partially. The digital edition I gave him was so large, and so full of enhanced, rich media that he began squirming, looking at his watch, and finally decided he didn't have enough time in his day to devote to it. He quit halfway through.

Our ongoing conversation continues, and at this point we both agree that digital publication formats are not where they should be to be successful. Some hinder the reader's enjoyment with over-complicated features, too much content, difficult navigation, or poor quality text and images.

We also agree that there is room in publishing for both websites and digital editions of magazines and each serves a purpose.

But what's clear is that we as an industry have not found the right formula for a digital publication.