Micro-sites

Media and marketing strategies are like a jigsaw puzzle – for the picture to be complete you need all the right pieces to fit together. But, for a lot of retail brands hoping to create customer loyalty and up-selling opportunities, there’s an important piece of the puzzle that’s missing.

They need a marketing vehicle that connects their e-commerce web sites, social media pages, blogs, premium clubs, and traditional advertising.

I am talking about a digital brand magazine packed with entertaining lifestyle content that attracts customer attention, associates the brand with the satisfaction of customer interests, and leads loyal customers to more purchases.

Here are three companies using variations on this concept to influence customers:

• A flip book from New Era Caps
• A microsite Sherwin Williams Paints
• A flip book from grocery chain Hannaford

Custom brand content can be packaged in digital magazines, custom apps, print magazines, microsites, and a variety of other formats. It’s all custom media and it helps your brand to become the best source of information on the lifestyle interests of your best customers and prospects.

Is it just me, or is anyone else noticing that more and more people are talking about redesigning their organization’s website using Drupal? DCP is currently working on three website redesign proposals for organizations that know they want to shift to Drupal.

I did some quick internet research and came across several interesting articles that explain 1) who is using Drupal?, 2) why are people moving to Drupal?, and 3) what is Drupal?

Take a look….

Who is Using Drupal?

Click here for a summary of over 70 well-known brands and not-for-profit organizations currently using Drupal. They fall in the following categories: Corporate, Entertainment, News, Academia, Government, Non-Profit.

Some of the impressive names include: Mattel, Zappos, Nokia, ABC, Virgin Radio, Duke University, Rutgers University, InfoWorld, Fast Company, Oxfam International, Amnesty International, and last but not least, Whitehouse.gov.

Click here for Drupal Usage Statistics from Builtwith.com. This article states, “We know of 9,390 websites using this within the top million sites on the internet and an additional extended total of 54,175 websites that are using Drupal." The CMS Distribution of the top web technologies shows that Drupal has 41% of the market share which is by far the most.

Why are People Using Drupal?

In this recent article, Big Drupal: Ten Trends for the Enterprise, Jeff Walpole says,

“Of particular note this year is the adoption of Drupal as the platform of choice for large established organizations in the publishing, media, entertainment and government spaces. To me, the embracing of Drupal by large organizations defines the point at which a technology "has arrived" on the scene and is likely to be taken seriously. It is also a good sign that it will stick around as an important technology with an installed base for a while to come.

Why is this all happening now? It is likely a combination of many things: maturity of the product itself, size of the installed base, growth in community popularity and participation, and lack of affordable alternatives for comparable web 2.0 functionality. I actually prefer to view it more as the maturity of Drupal as a platform through which the Drupal technology community is pushing Drupal forward - potentially straight into enterprise software territory. Here is my "top ten style" list of the technology trends I see fueling this growth."

What is Drupal?

From Drupal’s official website, you’ll learn that, “Drupal is a free, open-source software package that allows an individual, a community of users, or an enterprise to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Hundreds of thousands of people and organizations are using Drupal to power an endless variety of web sites.”

Go to the Drupal site to find out details about the built-in functionality available with Drupal, as well as the thousands of freely available add-on modules.

 

What’s the Best Solution?

There are many options for presenting magazine-style content online. How do you know which approach is ideal for your publication? You can start by answering three simple questions.

1. Is your online magazine an extension of a print publication?
2. Do you want to optimize your online magazine for web viewing?
3. Will you update your online magazine content regularly?

First, what are the different solutions?

If we put online magazines on a continuum with print-centric solutions (PDF/Digital Magazine) on the left to web-centric solutions (full featured website) on the right, magazine microsites would fall in the middle. Below are explanations of each.

PDFs are the simplest online versions of a print magazine. You just post the PDF file of your magazine online and allow people to view it. But it’s not very compelling for readers because:

• Large files are often blocked by firewalls and slow to download
• Readers don’t want to download big files onto their computer
• Reader experience is cumbersome—you have to read pages sequentially
• No interactive content

This option is also limiting for publishers—you can’t add rich media or new content, you can’t track viewer activity, and search engine optimization (SEO) is limited. This solution is quickly becoming obsolete.

Digital Magazines (flip books) are high-quality online replicas of print publications that offer value-added functionality such as interactive media and live links. There’s no file downloading and it’s easier for readers to navigate with a flexible control strip and search functionality. Advertisers like this approach because they can replicate print advertisements online and embed active links to their website. However, people find these solutions hard to read because they’re based on PDFs that were designed for print viewing, not for the Web. Reading requires a lot of zooming in and zooming out. And publishers can’t add new content. Digital magazines are a lively way to view a static print magazine online.

Online Magazine Microsites are HTML-based solutions that take advantage of the design and interactive possibilities of the Web. Based on a print publication or an online-only magazine, it’s a dynamic gathering place where readers peruse your magazine content, view rich media (videos, podcasts, slideshows), and link to your social media sites. Online magazines replicate the magazine-reading experience with a flag treatment, Table of Contents, feature stories, and departments. By mixing custom designed feature articles with various article templates, you don’t have to design every page from scratch. Instead, you upload content as often as you want using a simple Content Management System (CMS). Readers prefer this solution because articles are easy to consume and graphically compelling, content is updated regularly, plus navigation is highly intuitive.

Websites can be used to house online magazine content for organizations’ whose primary business is magazine publishing. For these companies, the main website is an extension of the magazine. For organizations that do more than magazine publishing, articles posted on the primary site get lost unless they’re packaged in a magazine microsite.

What are the ideal scenarios for each solution?
Getting back to the original questions….

1. Is your online magazine an extension of a print publication?
2. Do you want to optimize your online magazine for web viewing?
3. Will you update your online magazine content regularly?

If your online magazine is based on a print publication you can consider all options. But if you’re creating a web-only magazine it makes sense to focus solely on web-centric solutions. Why create a print-centric publication to be viewed online? Why invest in designing each and every page of your publication from scratch when it’s never going to print? There are much more efficient ways to do this. If you plan to update your content regularly, PDF/Digital Magazines are not a viable solution—an online magazine or website is the way to go.

The ideal scenarios for each solution are:

PDF/Digital Magazines
You have a print issue and have already invested in the design of each page. Repurpose it. Don't want to add any extra content; just want to replicate your print piece. Great for magazines with ads—publishers can sell online ad space in addition to print.

Online Magazine Microsites
You want to extend your magazine's brand online and give your magazine lovers a solution optimized for the Web. Regularly post fresh content to keep your audience engaged. Make your magazine a two-way conversation with your audience through article commenting.

Websites
Your company is all about your online magazine. Readers don’t distinguish between your magazine’s brand and your organization’s brand.

Saw an interesting factoid this morning that I thought was worth sharing.

According to this article (from foliomag.com) titled How Much is a Magazine's Content Worth?, Guy LeCharles Gonzalez notes that of the 133 million blogs tracked by Technorati in 2008 only 7.4 million of them (that's 5.5%) had been updated in the previous 120 days. 

As in four months. 

I think by any measure, it's fair to say that a blog which hasn't been updated in four months is no longer a blog that has any meaningful presence on the web.

Allowing for the fact that some, perhaps many, of those blogs may be similar to the one I launched ten months ago (The Offel Family blog) -- in other words, launched as a purely personal endeavor and of virtually no interest to anyone except my mom -- there is no doubt that many of them were launched by organizations seeking to engage in a dialog with their customers.  Yet now almost 95% of them are floating like virtual ghosttowns on the ethersphere.

Gonzalez goes on to make a number of salient points about traditional publishers using the web to propagate content.  But the phenomena of abandoned blogs got me thinking about the broader question of valuing content on the web and making the commitment to invest in "doing content right."

As we have started to do more and more interactive work for clients, including developing online magazine microsites, we are finding ourselves at the receiving end of a blank stare when we pose the question,"How much are you budgeting for ongoing content development?"

If you’ve ever viewed a digital magazine, I’ll bet you have a strong opinion to contribute to the ongoing digital magazine debate. Some people love the ingenious page-turning software, while some people are offended by the difficulty of reading such small type. Others prefer the basic PDF solution, mainly because it’s practically free. But as we all have more experience with digital magazines, many of us are coming to the realization that what’s ideal for print is not ideal for the Web.

As Publishing Executive E-Media Strategist Eric Shanfelt stated in his recent article, Why Digital Magazines Don’t Have to Suck, “Ultimately we need to come to terms with the fact that Online is not print.”

In this insightful article, Shanfelt reacts to his media executive friend’s proclamation, “Digital magazines suck. They’re not print, and they’re not Web. It seems like a lazy way to get online instead of investing in a really good Web site.” I agree with Shanfelt’s assessment that the ideal digital magazine is easy to read on a computer screen and uses interactivity (i.e. video, audio, animation, etc.) to provide a rich, in-depth experience.

If time and budget were a non-issue, we would all create custom magazine Web sites. But that’s not reality, and that’s why DCP offers digital magazine solutions for every budget. We’re hoping that over time more organizations will decide, like UC Hastings College of the Law recently did, to invest in interactive magazine Web sites. What they’ll create is not just a digital replica of their print publication, but a lively meeting place for their most loyal audience.