Custom Media Day Play by Play

Yesterday, the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and Custom Content Council (CCC) hosted Content Media Day, an event for those looking to monetize marketing and create quality custom content. Our very own Custom Media Sales Director Eric Gervase attended the event and provided us with a play-by-play of the day. Click below to follow the trail of breadcrumbs Eric left behind, and maybe learn something new about custom content:

 

Can’t click the image? Click here for the link.

Face Off Between Google+ and Facebook?

Ok, before you get too tired of Google+ conversations, have you considered how you want to use it for your social brand?

In your evaluations of Google+, you might question what it can offer your brand. It’s no secret that as of right now, Google+ is openly denying or removing business profile pages. In what is obviously a direct contrast to that, Facebook is pushing the advantage and teaching businesses how to use Facebook pages to build a brand.

However, Google+ could be an opportunity for people within your company to use updates and sharing to generate conversation about your brand in a new and relatively untapped environment. For instance, you can host a hangout with some of your biggest fans and your company leaders to expand your influence. Having these conversations outside the shadow of your brand name or page might lend them more authenticity.

There are opportunities in social media to get creative in connecting with your audience and establishing a presence for those who are interested in your content. Just to give you an idea of what some publishers are doing on Facebook, check out NailPro magazine and Connections magazine’s Facebook pages. Take a look, then let us know how you think Google+ and Facebook can best be used for your brand.

Condé Nast: Soon to Offer Omniture Analytics

The digital publishing newswires lit with exclamations over Condé Nast’s recent declaration of intent to provide their clients with metrics about how their digital editions are stacking up. Every article I read on the matter (such as this one) talked about how they’d use Omniture analytics to reveal distribution methods, levels of exposure and audience engagement with digital magazines.

Good news Nxtbook clients: we’ve been providing these details for years.  Being able to make good business decisions depends on having solid metricson which to stand. Condé Nast has accurately pointed out that this applies not only to measuring audience enthusiasm for your content, but also to show advertisers the kind of readers they can sell to.

(If you’re looking for further clarification of the value of advertising in digital editions, be sure to download the Case for Interactive Magazines which goes into this in-depth.)

For instance, as was mentioned in their press release, Condé Nast discovered readers’ consumption of their content was “very different from the consumer’s fragmented and short-duration on websites.” This is valuable information for an advertiser who is debating between buying a website banner and a quarter-page ad in a digital edition.

While Condé Nast is slated to reveal their metrics in the fall, here is some of the metrics Nxtbook Media clients enjoy now:

• page views per book
• most popular pages, and most popular books
• video views (and how they compare historically)
• views per device
• referrers and traffic sources
• entry and exit pages
• ad impressions and clicks per sponsorship location
• time spent per book
• number of times a link was clicked per book

And best of all, you choose how often you are updated regarding these metrics. Don’t wait: discover your audience today.

Well, That’s a Plus

Last week, Joy offered some tips on what Google+ might or might not mean for your digital magazine readership. I’m still waiting to form my typical strong opinion about the service (my two week vacation kept me from jumping on this particular bandwagon as quickly as I normally do!), though my gut kind of agrees with this post where the author speculates that most of us are not that concerned with over-communication.

That said, I decided to dig into our analytics to see what is happening to readership via Google+. Thus far, the answer is not much, though we’ve yet to integrate it into the Nxtbook toolbar. In fact, of the two million Nxtbook readers in the past 30 days, only 23 of them came from Google+ (compared to thousands from Facebook & Twitter). 

Keep in mind, we’re at the very very beginning of this thing, so this isn’t meant to knock Google+ at all. In fact, I do think it will be a valuable tool for publishers. However, it will be most meaningful for those who’ve learned to sell engagement. It’s not a tool to triple page views, but perhaps a unique solution for those willing to strengthen the bonds with their biggest fans.

The Next Big Thing?

So despite rumors about the Galaxy being huge and the Playbook being big, nothing yet seems to be taking a serious chunk out of the iPad’s mojo from a sales perspective. The next contender to give it a shot? Get your Christmas list in shape for Amazon’s forthcoming tablet projects.

This report seems to show that Amazon might have a decent shot at cutting into the iPad’s marketshare and for all of the reasons the writer suggests, I tend to agree. 

Such rumors and speculation don’t qualify the forthcoming Amazon tablets for a place in our 2011 eReader Guide, but if you haven’t read it, yet, it’s a great way to know what matters now.

Last Chance for the Live Event

At 2:00 EDT on Thursday, July 21 Folio: is hosting a webinar entitled "Case Studies in Custom Publishing."

Why should you attend? Because if you’re in the content publishing business, you need to find ways to get your material ahead of the rest. Custom publishing helps you offer new services to your audience to generate buzz, offer an immersive user experience, and to help you leap past your competition. It gives you the ability to marry your company’s marketing and distribution goals with new services created to wow and inform your target audience. With "Case Studies in Custom Publishing" you’ll have the opportunity to learn from other businesses who have successfully used custom projects and to ask the speakers any questions you may have. Of course, you can ask the Nxtbook Creative Services Team for their technical and creative expertise before, during, and after the event.

Click here to register.

Success Team Workshops: A Must for Clients

As a service to our clients, the Nxtbook Success Team hosts monthly webinars geared toward helping clients tackle tasks associated with publishing. Today’s "Success Team Workshop," as Success Manager Todd Reinhart calls it, focused on building circulation and featured Success Managers Todd Reinhart and Adam Grim, Project Manager Angela Bauman, and Director of Email Campaigns Mallory Weiss.

Though I probably should have been live-blogging the material, here are a few snippets of the conversation clients in attendance heard:

"40-50% of visits to your digital edition is going to come from your email campaign." – Angela

"[Email] reaches your busy readers who don’t have time to search for you." – Mallory

"Some say social media is the panacea that is going to save our industry," while others say there’s no way to measure ROI. – Adam

"[Website promotion] enhances your digital publication’s opinion in the eyes of search engines." – Angela

When considering email, consider all elements: subject line, branding, consistency, text v. image, free marketing tools from Nxtbook, tying into social media. – Mallory

"AddToAny found that 88.9% of link sharing is done through social media." – Adam

And those are just some highlights. If you’re a Nxtbook Media client and you want to participate in the Nxtbook Success Team workshop, look for the next webinar’s information in the Nxt-Steps newsletter. Of course, if you have a "Best Practice" you want to share with the Success Team to be featured on a webinar, or if you have a request for a webinar topic, contact your Success Team.

Throwback: 5 Case Studies of Old

The Background: Some time ago, the Gilbane Group released a report seeking to discern the potential power of digital magazines to meet advertisers’ and readers’ needs. In an independent study completed by the research group, publishers were interviewed at length to determine what challenges they hoped digital editions would solve, and what results they saw.

The Foreground: Fast forward to now, and we discover publishers entering this space have many of the same challenges, and the same concerns. To help address this, we have updated the report into one succinct document containing 5 case studies illuminating how publishers tackle industry challenges such as:

• combining text, images, animation, audio and video into a single, media-rich offering with value-add for advertisers
• battling production and distribution costs
• easily reaching an international, professional audience
• having a competitive advantage in attracting readers and advertisers
• increasing engagement with content without losing readers

If you find yourself facing some of these same challenges, click here to download 5 case studies for free.

Publishers Talk Tech

Recently, Folio: released an article entitled "Top Tech" in which interviewed publishing executives discussed which technologies had the biggest impact on their companies in the past year. Among those mentioned (some more than once) were the following:

• Lead behavior tracking and data
• Social networking
• Mobile apps
• Omniture analytics
• Relevant content delivery based on behavior

Much of the conversation seemed to involve reacting to user behavior, either in tracking readers’ interaction with content or in discerning how audiences preferred to receive content. Data is an intrinsically valuable resource which publishers have always craved, and today’s technology allows them access to this intelligence. Recognizing this value, Nxtbook Media has many of these features already built into the interface or has the ability to add them with the publisher’s request. To position your content on the cutting edge and to gain the abilities publishing executives are calling the most impactful in their business, consider which technologies you would like inherent in your digital edition interface.

Sole Sponsorships for Increased Revenue

Advertising and sponsorships in a digital edition is one of the primary ways our clients turn digital editions into a profitable venture. One client, UBM Medica took this a concept a step further and created a stunning, revenue-generating digital edition.

The concept was simple: they created a digital edition with a single sponsor, Siemens. All of the text, videos, and advertisements within the edition were focused on the sponsor; however, the quality of the content made the edition a knowledgeable resource, rather than straight promotional material. What’s more, the edition is optimized so it looks great on the screen and has the feel of a cutting-edge document. And I have to admit, though I have limited interest in medical technology, I was captivated by the animation of the ad on page 16 and ended up watching the entire message.

At the completion of the project, Siemens had a valuable resource to offer readers in the medical field that also served as a promotional product. UBM Medica had a new form of revenue generation. It’s a simple concept with serious return.

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