Greg Krehbiel on Publishing and Online Marketing

Netflix has the right idea. With my Netflix subscription I can watch movies on my TV, on my PC, on a mobile device — wherever I want. I have purchased the rights to watch the shows, and I should be able to do that where it’s convenient for me.

Customers to subscription products want the same thing. They don’t want to have to buy one version for their PC, another for their iPad and another for their smartphone. They want to buy once and read anywhere.

Amazon is moving in the right direction with Kindle. If you buy a book on Kindle, you can install the Kindle reader on your PC (or smartphone, or iPad) and read it there. It’s a good idea and a good service.

What Amazon is missing is that this has to include print as well.

People have been saying “print is dead” for a long time, but print is far from dead. People like ink on paper. It’s convenient in ways that an electronic device never will be. And subscribers to a print magazine or newsletter also want to be able to read their issues anywhere. They’re not interested in technological excuses, and they’re certainly not interested in power grabs and jockeying for power between Apple, Amazon and the publishers.

Customers are asking “Why can’t I get my subscription on the iPad / Kindle / Nook?” And so far the answers are pretty dreadful.

Until very recently, Amazon and Apple simply didn’t understand the periodical publishing industry. They seemed to think they could treat magazines the same way they treated music or books, and they thought controlling the customer relationship was important to their business model and to the user experience. But there are signs they’re waking up to the reality of subscription publishing, and that is necessarily going to mean sharing customer data with the publisher.

Apple and Amazon want publishers to think of sales on their platforms as incremental sales — like magazine sales at a newsstand. The publisher doesn’t know who bought the magazine at the airport, why do they have to know who bought the magazine on the iPad?

It’s a flawed analogy.

If I have a print subscription to a magazine, and I forget to bring my print copy with me to the airport, I expect to have to purchase another print copy at the newsstand.

But if I own a print subscription to a magazine, I expect to be able to access the digital version online for free.

Well, actually I don’t, because I know that the publisher incurs costs in converting the magazine for digital delivery. But the average customer does expect this. The customer expects to be able to take his laptop / iPad / smartphone to the airport and read his subscription on the device.

In order to do this, the device needs to authenticate the subscriber, which means it has to have access to the publisher’s subscription database. So when Apple and Amazon try to own the customer relationship, they’re actually undermining the value of their own devices and services.

Right now, publishers are still print-centric because most of the money is in print publishing. This means that publishers create products for print and then “convert” them for digital delivery. When the customers scream for access on their iPads, the publisher has to (1) convert the print-centric format into some weird proprietary format specific to the device, and then (2) pay some sort of fee to the platform.

The customer expects to get this for nothing, because he sees it as his subscription, and he thinks digits are free anyway. “All you have to do is send the files to my device. Easy!”

Of course it’s not that easy, and this is the problem publishers and digital platform owners need to address. Here’s one way to do it.

Products need to be designed for digital in such a way that they can be easily converted to print. That is, digital first, then print-centric features are added later.

This means there has to be a standard digital format. We can’t have ePub and HTML5 and PDF and any other crazy thing that some new reader or tablet comes up with. There has to be one format. I know that’s been the dream of the publishing world for more than a decade, and that it’s not likely to happen. But it has to happen.

Pricing needs to be based on access to the digital product with other delivery options as an extra cost. The pricing structure has to be (1) pay for the content, (2) pay for extra delivery options.

Since Amazon and Apple and Kobo and B&N and everybody else want to take their cut, this might make for some complicated revenue models, but I can imagine a three-fold pricing structure.

• Digital access on the publisher’s website for $X.
• Universal digital access (adding iPad, Kindle, Nook, etc.) for $X +.
• “Read anywhere” access, including print delivery, for $X ++.

Customers get the idea that printing and mailing cost extra. In fact, that’s part of the problem. Customer think they’re saving the publisher money by abandoning print to get digital delivery. In some cases that’s true, but often it’s not. The cost of converting the files to the appropriate digital format and then paying the platform for delivery far overshadows the cost of paper and a stamp.

Nevertheless, it’s an easy sell to ask people to pay for printing and mailing, so do it. Design the price of the product around digital delivery and pass along the additional costs of printing and mailing.

One last thing. Just as this model requires a single standard for digital files, it will also require a standard for customer data on the back end. Apple and the fulfillment houses and Amazon and publisher software vendors are going to need to agree to a standard and stick with it.

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Apple is absolutely right to try to make iTunes as easy as possible, and they are right to protect their customers’ privacy by not sending along customer data to every vendor.

However, publishers really do need subscriber data. It’s not an evil plot, and it’s not only to do cross-sells and upsells.

Publishers also have to worry about the needs of their customers, and one thing customers want is the ability to access their publications on multiple platforms. They can’t do that if they don’t have the customer data!

For example, let’s say Joe has a Jan. to Dec. print subscription to Krehbiel Weekly. In May, Joe decides that he wants to get access his subscription on his iPad. How is that going to work if the publisher doesn’t know that Joe has an iPad subscription? Joe would have to buy a second, May to April, subscription, which would totally confuse and frustrate him.

Joe is wondering, “Why can’t I get my subscription on my iPad?” The publisher’s response is, “Because Apple won’t share your information with us.”

In trying to be helpful to their customers, Apple is creating a problem for subscribers.

Apple does allow the customer to voluntarily submit his information to the publisher. According to this article (try to look past the annoying headline), about 50% of users actually do that.

Apple needs to back down on this. It’s all well and good to protect customer information when it’s in the customer’s interest, but when it comes to subscriptions, it’s not.

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The standard, old-school model for publishing is that the experts pick which stories are the most important — that is, which get top billing, which get more coverage, which get larger headlines, which get images, etc.

To some extent, the socialization of the web is wearing away at that. Now we care a little less what the editors think is important and care a little more what our friends / colleagues think is important.

Of course there will always be editors, and they will always have an important role to play. But (and this is nothing new) website designers need to accommodate a world in which the home page is not the main visitor entry point, and the users want to decide how they see and arrange your material.

An obvious example of this concept is the Facebook box that many sites are adding. It’s a neat feature. It allows you to see what articles on the site your Facebook friends have commented on or recommended. I look at it frequently.

But it’s usually way down on the right side of the page, below the ads. I think it makes sense to give the user an option to have that feature (or something like it) higher up on the page. Maybe even as his custom entry page.

There are some sites that I don’t want to spend much time on, and all I really want to know is what my friends are looking at. I would rather see the Facebook box first.

Also, I’m not Facebook friends with very many of my professional colleagues. And I don’t really want to be, because I don’t think they need to know about my personal life. This is a weakness with Facebook, in my opinion. There’s a need to have different online personnas for different situations.

I’m not just Greg. I’m Greg the publishing professional, Greg the husband and father, Greg the homebrewer, Greg the neighbor, Greg with certain crazy political views, and so on. I don’t play Mafia Wars any more, but if I did, that would be a completely different set of “friends.”

And if I did play Mafia Wars, I wouldn’t really care what Washington Post articles they’re reading. I want a different group of friends’ opinions about different sites.

If I’m on minonline.com, I want to know what my publishing colleagues are thinking, and if I’m on beeradvocate.com I want to know what my homebrewing friends are reading. The Facebook box isn’t adequate for that.

This is a complicated challenge for the web designer, but I think it’s where we need to go. I have a different set of interests and a different set of peers / friends on different sites. The site design needs to allow me to see the content based on those choices.

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A while ago I came up with a way that Google could get on the right side of the copyright issue. See How google can be the good guy for publishers.

At the time I had regular calls with some Google Adwords reps, and when I shared my idea they told me “Google doesn’t want to be the web’s policeman.”

It was obvious that my suggestion was butting up against some internal Google mantra.

But the real world has a way of messing with mantras. Now Google has become the copyright cop on Youtube. See Google to sentence YouTube violators to ‘copyright school’

Google’s goal is to organize all the world’s information. You can’t do that without taking copyright into account.

Google is successful because of other people’s content. They have a moral obligation to use that content properly, and in the context of their operations, that does mean becoming the web’s policeman, at least to some extent, and at least as far as copyright violation is concerned.

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Who wants a paper store receipt? What are you going to do with the thing? It’s a bother to collect them, and they always fade after a couple months anyway. Are you going to scan them, or what?

The store should do that for you.

Most stores try to get you to sign up with them anyway, right — to get discounts and whatnot. This would be an added benefit of having an account with the store. They would automatically send your receipt to the email address on file.

This way the store collects your email address and you get copies of all your store receipts. Seems like a fair trade to me.

So then, taking this a step further, wherever you have your email (e.g., Google) could provide a service that sorts your receipts by company and by type.

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I just got a long and complicated email from The New York Times about their new pay model for digital subscriptions. I think it’s a dumb model (more on that later, perhaps), but what immediately strikes me about it is how the people at the NYT think everything is about them.

Today marks a significant transition for The New York Times as we introduce digital subscriptions. It’s an important step that we hope you will see as an investment in The Times, …

What? Why do I want to invest in the NYT?

Will I get a dividend?

This reminds me of the signs I see on the D.C. metro encouraging people to use dollar coins. The “benefit” is that they last longer and save the country money.

Huh? What do I care about that? I care if it’s convenient to use, if it’s less of a load in my pocket, if vending machines take them, if I’ll mistake them for quarters, etc.

This is basic marketing stuff. When you’re trying to sell somebody, you tell them how your product benefits them, not some weird pitch about how you’re investing in their business or helping them to save money.

I can understand the Treasury Department getting that wrong. But for heaven’s sake, you’d think the NYT would have a better copywriter.

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Here’s a good article about some of the dangers of technologies that try to choose what content you’re going to see online.

The Danger Of Personalization: A Lesson From TED

Personalized content is a great thing, so long as you know that it’s been personalized, you know that what you’re looking at is an unrepresentative sample, and you have a way to free yourself from the bias of your own opinions.

I’m sure you’ve heard the old joke about the political liberal who couldn’t believe that Reagan had won, since “none of his friends voted for him.”

I heard something similar at the office lunch table. Somebody read a story claiming that on any given Sunday, X percent of the country goes to church. One of my co-workers said, “That can’t be. None of my friends go to church.”

There’s way too much information out there, and we need the ability to cull through it and find the stuff that’s relevant to us. But we also need to know when that’s happening. If search engines started showing us the results we’re likely to click on, we’d dig ourselves into a dangerous spiral of bias.

As far as web design is concerned, a box that says, “Based on your past choices, you might like these articles …” seems to cut the right balance. It’s nice to have content selected for me, but I need to know what’s going on.

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The link below is PG-13, so if you get offended by scatological jokes and such, give it a pass. But it actually makes some really good points about store design issues, required fields, and some of the silly things people try to put their customers through.

How to make your shopping cart suck less

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I’m reading What Would Google Do? Generally speaking, and to over-simplify, it’s about the new relationship between producers and consumers, and how consumers are in charge. Companies that allow their customers, clients and partners to do what they want to do will succeed. And if at all possible, companies should strive to make their products free.

It’s a good perspective and I agree with a lot of it, although sometimes I think this approach is overblown.

Anyway, it’s all well and good thinking about these things in terms of internet content and services, but it’s another thing to apply these concepts to something tangible. Like beer.

So I tried, and this is what I came up with.

An old-school approach to brewing would be to pick a demographic, try to find out what kind of beer they like, brew something like that, and then get your marketing team to convince your chosen demographic that this is really the beer for them.

There’s nothing wrong with that approach, except that people’s tastes vary considerably. Just go the local mega-beer store and look at all the styles and varieties of beer that are available.

The WWGD approach might ask how you can put the customer in charge of the brewing process?

So what would that mean? To oversimplify things, imagine that beer can be …

+ more or less malty,
+ more or less bitter, and
+ have more or less hop aroma

Now imagine that the customer is at a tap with three dials, one for each characteristic, and he can dial it up or down to suit his tastes.

Then, when he picks his perfect blend, he can order a case made to his own specifications.

That seems like step 1. But there’s more to “putting the customer in charge” than just allowing the customer to define the product. The customer also needs to be able to mix your product with other things.

A snakebite is a mixture of beer and cider, and there are various kinds of shandies and other drinks out there that mix beer with ginger ale or what have you.

The next step would be allowing people to share their particular recipes and discuss / review them, or bring their own mash-up with them to the bar.

(Re-posted from here.)

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This morning I had to get the emissions inspected on one of our vehicles, so I was in the car listening to morning radio, which usually goes something like this — The host picks a juicy morsel out the news, possibly adds something salacious, and then tosses it out to the hungry masses who wants to have their say.

(People with a neighborhood pub or coffee shop, where they can jaw with their friends, probably don’t need that kind of outlet.)

Anyway, the topic of the day was Juan Williams’ comment that Sarah Palin is not up to snuff with Obama on an intellectual level.

To which, it seems, several obvious responses come to mind.

1. Palin can seem rather ditsy at times,
2. But there’s no question she communicates well with a large segment of the population,
3. Who says Obama is so smart?,
4. But he does speak well and has that professorial manner about him, and
5. Is Williams simply trying to mend fences with the left?

Everything on the radio this morning focused on points 2 and 3, with a large emphasis on the claim that Obama blithers when he doesn’t have a teleprompter. (Does he? I haven’t paid attention.)

In other words, the morning listeners to WMAL were only getting a slice of the story.

Later in the morning I sat down with my Nook and started in one of Wodehouse’s Psmith novels, which began with a soliloquy on journalism in New York City, and that got me thinking.

What niche is not being fulfilled in the news publishing world today?

The answer, I believe, is a review of the daily buzz that covers all the angles on every story — briefly — with links to more if you want to dig.

That would be worth dialing up on the metro every morning.

It would have to be non-partisan, by which I mean that it would have to have partisans from all possible sides.

I think that would be a good daily read, so long as it’s short, and so long as it can balance the talking points of the various factions.

(Ignore this — JJCKCYP2GEJ3)

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