More RIM Next Year?

Whether you sit in the camp calling for RIM’s termination, or you’ve adopted a "wait-and-see" attitude, or your thumbs have been just waiting for moment when RIM makes a comeback to produce the next generation of phone, you will probably be interested to know RIM has a new mobile operating system slated to be released in a month. This article gives a brief rundown on what is known as the BlackBerry 10.

Giving Back 2012

It starts with an email circulated around the office: which nonprofit do you want to support?

At Nxtbook Media there’s a committee whose focus is to provide opportunities to raise funds for local nonprofit organizations. And as giving starts at home, this committee focuses on getting Nxtbook Media members involved.

Around this time of year an email goes out asking Nxtbookers which organizations they want to support. For 2012 three organizations were chosen: Make a Wish Foundation, Water Street Mission, American Diabetes Association.

Throughout the rest of the year, employees created and executed different ways to raise money for these organizations. Every month held at least one new and creative means of raising money. Just a few of the activities include:

Water Wars – lose a friendly card game and be doused with water in front of the company!
Kick-B-Cause – local businesses pay to compete in a kickball tournament.
Silent Auction – local businesses donate materials to our silent (and to our separate, very vocal) auctions and the items are auctioned.
Cook-off – Employees flex their cooking muscles while others pay to sample and vote for the best dishes.

After a year of events, Nxtbook Media raised over $11,000 for the three local charities. This is on top of the other ways our company and employees support other charitable endeavors, including United Way, Salvation Army, and the American Cancer Society.

When you consider the past year, you can look back on the new product release, the new hires added to the team, or the advancements we’ve made as a company. But one of the real focuses of the year, especially of the committee involved in raising funds for nonprofits, is our continuous look to giving back to the community in tangible and creative ways. Congratulations to everyone who participated this year in big and small ways to make our efforts a huge success!

Christmas Catalogs are Coming to Town

By the panicked look in late shoppers’ eyes it’s clear this year’s Christmas shopping season is coming to a close. But holiday catalogs are still sparking new gift ideas for those still on the lookout.

Take this catalog by the HSLDA. The inviting catalog cover is animated with festive icons and lazily drifting snow. It adds an air of joyful celebration to an otherwise immobile cover.

Magazines are welcoming the festive spirit as well, like Connections, with gently falling snow and an animated holiday message from a sponsor.

Share some holiday cheer with your winter issues and give readers a heartwarming reason to check out your content today.

We Live in a Multi-Screen World

There’s a lot of articles out there trying to sum up what the reading experience is like for the everyday person out there: reading on a computer screen, reading on an eReader, reading a native app, reading a web app, reading on a phone, reading on a tablet, and so on.

Any time you’d like a discussion about what the different reading experiences are like or how you can best strategize for the screen, drop me a line. But I just read this paragraph from the Economist Group which struck me as particularly well said:

“We live in a multi-screen world — not a digital world, but a multi-screen world,” Blunden told Fahle. “People will use apps for a very lean-back, rich experience where they consume lots of content in one sitting. But people will use browsers in a lean-forward ‘I’m searching for something specific’ mode or in a social context where news is shared through Facebook or Twitter.” — click here to read the article.

We live in a multi-screen world. My advice is to pick which screens are most important to you – and we can help you strategize which fits your business model the best – and design, market and promote according to that.

Why YouTube’s Next How-To Guru is a Thing

There’s an easy explanation why YouTube’s How-To Guru is a successful contest, or why Howcast.com works. It is simply this: people use and enjoy video for learning.

While viral videos and entertainment might be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of YouTube, there’s substantial value to be found in using videos as a means to educate your readers. Imagine posting how-to videos that feature using your products? Or what about educational sound-bites explaining lesser details in an article?

Consider that if someone is interested in your brand, they may go to YouTube or your content to learn as much as they can on their own. Short, informative videos will help visitors get to know you and your brand before they decide whether or not to commit to a subscription or purchase.

Need help with that? Nxtbook Media makes it easy for publishers to add their own videos to their pages. Or, if a publisher needs assistance making a video, we have videographers at the ready.

You Don’t Know What You’re Doing, Do You?

Not you, specifically, but all of us in general. This very interesting survey from the Alliance for Audited Media looks at how publishers are looking at a lot of things, but the one that interested me most was the idea of whether or not you’re focused on native apps or the browser. For business pubs, you split right down the middle, with a healthy chunk unsure of what to focus on.

For what’s perhaps most telling is that when similar questions were asked a year ago, the figures skewed far more native. All of which goes to say we think the tide has turned, as it should. 

Jimineezer Lewis and the Three Conference Rooms

"… the times have changed. Whether it was the threat of a bitter winter, an economy struggling to right itself, or maybe something as simple as indigestion, there was no denying it: the company, under the ever controlling watch of Jimineezer Lewis, had seen happier times."

So begins the tale of Jimineezer Lewis, the man in charge of Nxtbook Media in this harrowing tale of digital editions of the past, present, and future. Join us on this, frankly, hilarious journey, a story following a miserly businessman and his confrontation with three conference rooms.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

 

 

And from all of us at Nxtbook Media, we wish you a great holiday season.

Advantages of Digital Delivery During the Holidays

One of the greatest advantages of digital has to be the delivery. If you have a holiday publication, and you want to make sure your audience gets it, digital has to be the answer for you.

Digital delivery means:

• it doesn’t get lost in the mail or on the coffee table amidst the Christmas cards and holiday greetings
• it is delivered on time, no matter how many letters to Santa get sent out this year
• upon delivery, it can dance, sparkle, play music, or otherwise be animated to grab your audience’s attention
• it can in turn digitally deliver readers to your website with live links to your product pages or social media site or home page

Digital delivery means your holiday card, gift catalog, or wintry issue gets delivered on time, to the right mailing address, without bent corners or scuff marks.

Want to truly knock your digital content out of the park? Add some wintry animation like this interactive snow animation or a simple snow globe animation.

Responsive Design: Should I Scrap The Magazine For A Website?

Over the past month we at Nxtbook Media have been talking to our clients a lot about responsive design. We’ve held webinars, made client calls, and even blogged about it once or twice. In our discussions, some great questions have been asked, and I’d like to address one of them here:

Keeping content digital makes sense. But, should we scrap the digital magazine portion and just turn our content into a responsive design website?

I’d argue no. Here are 3 reasons right off the cuff:

1. A magazine represents a compilation of content which an editor selects for readers to read during that life cycle, be it a month, quarter, week, or daily. There is a defined start and finish offset by covers, and a progression to the reading process stretching from the far left to the far right. A website is less like a compilation of content and more like an entire library. A reader can start reading wherever he or she comes in, and then is left to decide where to go from there. Sometimes leaving the content is easier than trying to figure out where to go next.

2. Your magazine gets pushed to readers’ inboxes as often as it’s published. This gives readers an automatic reminder of your content’s existence. The email prompts readers to re-enter your content and flip through this edition’s articles. Pushing readers to your content is built into the model of digital publishing. With websites, there’s more work involved to promote your updated content. You have to entice readers to find you again and again, and work to keep enough content fresh on your website to make their return to your site worthwhile.

3. Advertising in digital magazines – especially magazines in our new responsive design platform – is far more engaging in a digital magazine than on a website. Over the past year you’ve probably read articles about "banner blindness" and about whether or not your advertisements are appearing on the screen as visitors look over your site. In our responsive design platform, you can remove the need for banners or remove the dependency on click-throughs altogether, depending on which ad template you prefer.

By all means, embrace responsive design. It’s a great way to make sure beyond a doubt that your content is reflowed in a way that makes sense for the reader’s device. But keep capitalizing on your magazine’s following by continuing to deliver your content in a way your readers are familiar with and enjoy. Leverage the responsive design technology for your magazine to satisfy both your readers and your advertisers. See an example of a responsive design magazine by clicking here.

What Readers Say They Want

Interesting report published by the Economist about how people like to consume content. Long-time readers know such studies tend to exhaust me as there is ample data we can use that show actual usage stats, but I digress. What is most interesting is the strong preference for people to get their news via the browser, rather than the app. As wifi becomes more prevalent, expect that stat to only grow.

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