29/03/07

Reaching Readers Online :: Follow Up

It’s been a couple of weeks since the Bookseller’s Reaching Readers Online seminar. It was interesting, and I’ll be posting more about it soon - hopefully with a checklist of things that I think publishers should be doing with the web.

I’ve had a load of feedback from people who were there - unfortunately it wasn’t recorded for the podcasting - which has been great: thanks. However I do just want to dwell on one thing that I said which, judging on the feedback, may have been taken out of context (perhaps with a bit of wishful thinking attached).

When I said that the most effective thing you could do would be to hire a talented, enthusiastic and dedicated member of staff to take responsibility for content, I didn’t mean just do that and nothing else. Sorry - but as I hope I also said, there isn’t a silver bullet for making it work on the web - and getting the alchemy right will be a load of hard work beyond getting some cheap new blood in!

I meant: when you have everything else in place (i.e. technology, data, sales channel, customer propositions, customers - a winning web site in other words) and your site / strategy is demonstrating success and is therefore ready to grow, this is the point where you need to get someone in who will deliever on the potential you have. If you already have them there, then think about getting them involved in refining the strategy you’re developing. But just hoping that building the site means it will work is a guaranteed way to kill it - and all of the preceding hard work.

The last 10% is always the hardest bit to deliver - and it’s the publisher’s job. Most of the time it - and by it I mean the collection, creation, collation and posting of new content, and communication of your messages to your audiences - gets shunted from department to department until it languishes in isolation, quarantine, and then obscurity. Of course a marketing director doesn’t have time to do that - but they should have the time to take responsibility for it.

If you have everything I’ve mentioned above sorted - and in which case congratulations - then the irony is that you probably already have a great team and management who understands the value of everything we talked about on the day. If you don’t, then just finding out where to hire a graduate for £12k isn’t your biggest problem.

And if you are a graduate looking to get into publishing, then if I were you I would start (if not already) honing your web skills for exactly this. The future is yours, and before very long, it won’t be £12K that you’re earning…

Posted by Peter Collingridge in Apt Studio work, Bookseller, Publishing, Web.