Building an online extension of your business/personal brand is extremely vital to extending your reach, and continuing to progress/stay relevant as a business in a world where “online” is not just the future… It is now.

Building Your Brand Online Series Intro from Infoswell Media on Vimeo.

The online world is constantly evolving and in so doing it continues to provide unique opportunities and tools for businesses (large or small), magazines, and publishers to build an online presence that extends their reach, and company brand in new and exciting ways.

This series will discuss a few of those tools and how you can leverage them to build your online brand. This first of which is Interactive Design.

Interactive Design

Building your brand online really means that you are extending your current brand into the online space. So it would follow that the importance of a website should be at the top of our list, and not just “a website” for the sake of having one, but one that really represents your brand, and allows your customers/users to connect with you. Think of it it as a conversation with your users, this will help you to define what you are trying to communicate with those who are visiting your site.

Once you have figured out what you want to communicate, look for innovative, user friendly ways build that interaction. A couple of things to include are:

• A simple contact form so that the user can easily send you a message from the site.
• An opportunity for your customers to send feedback and suggestions.(This can be implemented in the contact form mentioned above.)
• A company blog where you talk about company news, success stories for the company and those who use the product, and allow the customers/users to interact.

Now that you have some communication techniques in mind, pair them with a visually appealing, easy to use website interface that is in line with the overall brand.

“It is so crucial to remember that how your website looks, and interacts with those who use it says a lot about about your brand and your commitment to increasing it’s value. Your website deserves the same commitment that you dedicate to your product or service.”

A well built website is the foundational key to building a successful online brand. It becomes a platform to launch so many other useful elements of your online brand. In the next article we will discuss Social Media, and how to build solid, authentic interaction with your customers.

At Infoswell it is our goal to empower publishers, and magazines to build, maintain, and cultivate successful online brands and communities as well as help generate online revenue opportunities. In doing this we are always reading, searching and digging for resources, and opportunities to share that help the pursuit of the above mentioned goals.

With that we came across a great article about marketing content by Joe Pulizzi , It is broken down into 10 steps (5 of which we have included here.) and is a great resource.

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One of the reasons I love my job is the different kinds of people I have the opportunity to interact with. Over the past year, I’ve met with entrepreneurs, thought leaders, agency executives, top marketers, social media gurus, publishing veterans, authors and others – all with particular insights and challenges about how to sell more, do more and be more.

If 2008 was the year social media went mainstream, 2009 should be the year of content marketing, the corporation as media company, the brand as publisher and broadcaster. Why? Because every one of those incredibly intelligent people I met with, in some way or another, told me that the difference for brands who make it versus those that don’t will be relevance. How can we, as brands, be relevant to our customers? How can we create and develop real relationships with them? How do we engage?

As my friend and colleague Kirk Cheyfitz has said over and over – brands can do only two things to create the goal of 100% engagement – we can inform our customers – or give them a good time.

To help, I’ve put together 10 tactics that I believe you need to seriously consider NOW as part of your 2009 content plan (not in any particular order).

1. Tell the Story Differently through Different Media – It’s frustrating to watch the sheer number of marketers tell a great story, but repurpose that story the same way in all their media. Ian Alexander over at Eat Media constantly harps (and rightfully so) on the concept that the story you tell in print versus mobile versus website versus video must be told in a very different manner. Seems obvious, but it’s not done. Most commonly, this mistake is made from taking a print custom program and just putting it online. Do you engage with content in the same way in print as you do the web? Most likely, you don’t. Do not expect more of your customers than yourself.
2. Raid Traditional Media Outlets – As traditional media continues to lay off the best journalists in the world and layoffs and bankruptcies abound, your opportunity to acquire talent has never been greater. Of course, I’m biased a bit that I believe most marketers should outsource their content and find great providers through our service, but this opportunity is too good to be true. First, the talent is available now. Second, expert journalists are very open to working with corporations today. Third, you need great content to survive as a marketer. To do this, you need talent that understands how to tell a story. Go get that talent today while there is still time (and before they all start up their own content marketing businesses).
3. Why Partner with Media Companies, Just Buy Them – Granted, this is for the larger marketers among us, but a great strategy nonetheless. Paul Conley just posted an excellent read on the shape of the media industry, and his #1 prediction was that content marketers may start to buy b-to-b media companies. I’ve agreed with this strategy ever since I was at Penton (when I thought Penton should be purchased by eBay Business – and still think it’s a great idea for both). Remember, a media company is all about connecting buyers and sellers. Corporations need to do that as well, they only want to limit the number of sellers (to one).
4. Time to Start Using Twitter – I will agree with you…I thought Twitter was stupid when I first tried it. Now, it is an indispensable tool, where I’ve increased my network, formed partnerships, and led to new business opportunities. To understand the true power you need to use a tool like TweetDeck, which is the ultimately reputation management tool if you can’t afford a real reputation management tool. And if you are distributing relevant content, try sending your RSS feeds through Twitter by using TwitterFeed.
5. Get Serious about a Content Audit – In all honesty, this is a huge task and very challenging to look for all the pieces of content in an organization from the inside.  If you are serious about performing a content audit, look to an outside expert to execute it.  For example, they will look at all your forms of communication and the information you are sending out in order to make recommendations on how to create and fine tune a consistent and relevant message to your customers and prospects.  This includes all the content you have on the web and what’s circulating around your company.  Just think about your website…is it consistent?  Does it communicate your vision? If you are serious, we have a number of providers in the Junta42 Match system.The results of the content audit will help define the purpose, context, types, topics, voice and style for your content marketing plan.  With this information, you’ll have a good handle on where you are currently, and where you need to be in relation to your customers. Hat’s off to Kristina Halvorson at Brain Traffic for showing me the light on content strategy.

For the remaining 5 steps please visit the original article

The Magazine Innovation Summit 2009 is happening October 14-15 in New York. This conference is a must for those seeking to learn about innovation and ideation in the magazine/publishing industry.  Here is a statement from their “about page”

The Magazine Innovation Summit is the world’s first magazine industry conference devoted exclusively to innovation in the publishing space. The event will feature speakers, panelists and case studies addressing technological, operational and creative change in the business. It will focus on understanding and harnessing the power of disruptive technologies and transformative business.

The summit features some amazing speakers including;

REED HASTINGS
Founder, Chairman and CEO – Netflix

ANDY SAREYAN
Chief Brand Officer and Executive Vice President, Meredith National Media Group
President, Better Homes & Gardens

KRISTIANA HELMICK
Senior Manager
Amazon.com

FABIO FREYRE
Vice President, Advertising
Facebook

These are just a few of the many thought leaders in the magazine/publishing industry that will be speaking at the conference.

You can follow the summit on twitter for updates here, and to get more info about the conference check out the Innovation Summit 09 site here.

I recently came across a very helpful review of “Cracking Drupal” by Chris Shattuck. Here at Infoswell we are constantly building Drupal sites and communities for our publishers, so having access to good Drupal resources is a must. I have included an excerpt from the article and recommend that you visit Chris’s site and read the review in it’s entirety.

It recently came to my attention that there are some gaps in my conceptualization of Drupal security. I was fortunate enough to have this pointed out to me by the Drupal Security Team, and not by a DOS, CSFR, SQL injection or XSS attack. After publicly bemoaning the mild lashing I received, four members of the Drupal community suggested I read Cracking Drupal. One of them even sent me a copy. No other book was even mentioned, which says to me that – considering how recently it was released – the book fills a void of knowledge that was seriously aching for coverage, and fills it well.

Over years of developing, I’ve become familiar with the various vulnerabilities that make their way into code, but I’ve never felt like I could build a complete defense. My knowledge has been piecemeal, drawing from documentation, books, interesting conversations and other people’s code. In my case, Cracking Drupal did a fantastic job of gluing these pieces together into a comprehensive frame of mind.

What becomes clear very quickly in Cracking Drupal is that Drupal is quite a wily beast that gives developers real incentive to learn security. There are few functions in Drupal whose exclusive purpose is security, and Greg makes it clear that learning how to secure your site has definite side benefits: “When developers learn and use the API, they are not only safer but more effective and more efficient.” When you learn how to use different aspects of the Drupal API (forms, translations, helper functions, theming) you gain bits of security as a bonus. If you set out to learn Drupal security, you’ll come out the other end with a pretty solid grasp of Drupal APIs. Either way, it’s a win.

Read the review in its entirety here.

We would love to hear your thoughts on the book, as well as what Druapl books and resources you have found helpful.

SearchWiki allows users to rank and edit their Google search results.  This is a game changer for magazine publishers as we look to social media and experiences to drive new interest to our digital brands.  The future implications of how this tool could be integrated into the overall search experience as well as social media aspects and tremendous.

Google Inc. Thursday began allowing users to re-rank and edit their search results through a new set of personalization features the company hopes will make its dominant search engine more useful. – Wall Street Journal

Google:

How to use SearchWiki

Here’s how you can rank, remove, add, and comment on search results:

• Like a certain search result?Click to move it to the top of the page. This result will appear at the top whenever you do the same search in the future. We’ll add this marker next to it so you’ll recognize it later.
• Don’t like a result?Click to remove it, and it’ll remain hidden whenever you do the same search in the future.

With the announcement this week that PC Magazine will go all digital, it’s beginning to sink in to magazine publishers that their brand may indeed be stronger long term in digital formats than in just print.

Today, the PCMag Digital Network, with over seven million unique monthly visitors, reaches in excess of 10 times the circulation of the print publication. – Press Release PCMAG Digital Network

At Infoswell, our philosophy is that the print edition has strategic advantages for a magazine publication.  But most publishers aren’t using the print magazine edition in a manner that leverages their full cross media capabilities.  As more and more magazine publishers choose to place web, video, and digital edition channels above their print editions, we expect to dramatically increase the custom publisher roadmaps performed by our company for the 2009 year.

Understanding that the revenue model and advertiser must have a seat at the table, and that readers are as interested as community as they are content, we will continue to help publishers find the right mix of digital offerings.

As a magazine publisher, you are always seeking new stories that interest your readers.  There is an excitement that captures the scoop or the analysis of something special to your niche readership.

But there is a problem.  Even at your best, you realize that you are only covering a small percentage of the whole news associated with your niche.

Major cable news networks have already launched their own “you report” type of video reporting by their viewers.  Citizens are now bringing the front edge of news to the news media’s attention.  A new community funded reporting site is also launching (http://spot.us – launching this week according to Publishing 2.0) that will foster more of a journalistic approach to these hidden stories.

As a publisher, this should make you think more about how you involve your readership in the news and media process.  Social media for magazine publishers presents an opportunity to handle brand extension in a way the newspaper industry failed.

You are in the business of publishing media around the concept of a magazine.  The print magazine is only the periodic element citing the latest news in a packaged and polished presentation.  There is much more to your brand than just the print magazine.  Please don’t picture your business, your industry, or your own publication as being in the business of printing a magazine.

Scott Karp makes this great point with an emphasis on the newspaper business in his post on monetizing the internet.  [Well Done Again Scott!]

The magazine publishing business stands right behind the daily newsprint media in terms of volitility of digital change.  We let newspaper publishers take a bullet so that we might learn how to get our business model straight before it’s our turn to shine.

The environmental aspects of the publishing business have never been so prominent.  In addition the the economic need for cost reduction and waste reduction in the magazine publishing industry it’s also a major consumer factor today.

I recently asked a major magazine distributor agent about their disposal process for unsold newsstand copies.  While I was glad to learn that the copies not donated were indeed sent for recycling, the agent advised that she takes just about as many copies off the shelf as she is putting up in some stores.  This also cites the need for better logistics and distribution controls.  I know we could be smarter about putting magazines in the hands of the targeted readers.

Large distribution companies don’t always have the ability to control local and non-corporate strategic retail points of purchase or distribution.

Green magazine publishing should be looked at from many different angles.  The online media capabilities of a magazine present dozens of methods to publishers to extend their brand digitally and support green publishing.

When 30% of your readers prefer digital editions for either digital delivery preference or environmental reasons, publishers can’t afford to ignore this segment.

There’s not one single checklist and the custom green media package is different for each magazine brand.  This month, Folio magazine is coming out with their own Green issue.  This issue is sure to encourage magazine publishers to look at their business and take action to develop a brand extension strategy and consider other green publishing initiatives.

Magazine CMS (Content Management Systems) for magazine publisher websites is becoming more complex in terms of requirements for the publication online needs. The new social readership aspects of confirming the niche ownership online has become a top priority.

Open source cms software for publishers has another advantage over commercial cms in this area. First, we find that open source publisher cms tools often contain the tags, social widget, and community collaboration features ahead of when these features surface in traditional enterprise web publishing systems.

Magazine CMS Software - Open Source

Drupal is one example of a CMS that has allowed us to create very complex and custom feature sets for clients. The Drupal CMS provides us many opportunities to design a magazine website with both the style, function, and social features to support the readership, circulation development, and advertiser features requested.

While there are many other cms comparison factors we use to select a specific CMS tool for a magazine publisher’s website we have found that most of the open source cms tools now perform better than traditional commercial packages that often we harder to manage.

The good new for publishers is that they can use open source with a higher capability index and we can easily demonstrate that those that claim a higher cost of ownership for open source are not accurate or not familiar with the latest magazine cms software tools.

The strong growth of unique U.S. visitors to magazine websites is further confirmation that the magazine website is among the strongest growth and advertising vehicles available.  The recent report by the Magazine Publishers of America was featured on Yahoo Finance in August 2008.

We gain new publisher clients that want to use innovative web technology without the high costs associated with proprietary CMS and older web publishing systems.” – David Blankenship, Infoswell Media

An integrated digital edition and publication web site a critical part of the modern publisher’s media offering.

Magazine Web Site Design Business on the Rise

The magazine website design division business continues to rise based on strong traffic to magazine publisher websites.

As advertisers are offered new digital advertising options from their publishers, they continue to invest in this channel and the direct and trackable results.

The continued increase has made many magazine publsihers realize that a web re-design is well worth the investment.