Publishing 2.0

How do you make a small fortune in publishing? Start with a large one.

That joke used to have more truth to it than presently. Now anyone with an email account and a broadband connection can write her own magazine (blogs), make his own films (YouTube), or have a radio show (Podcast) for low to no cost. But the increased availability of resources and the explosion of platforms have also led to confusion. For much of the twentieth century, business publishing amounted to brochures given out at trade shows or white papers presented at conferences. Books were something business people wrote in retirement. Nowadays, the competition for eyes and ears is fierce. Most businesses look at their presence online as a kind of storefront or a "brochure on the web." A better approach is to think about your presence on the web and business publishing as an interconnected media empire.

There is another critical difference between Publishing 1.0, the age of paper and cellulose, and Publishing 2.0, our current Internet age. One of the biggest nuts for any marketing professional to crack is tracking response. You printed and mailed 100,000 fliers, but how many people actually looked at theirs? In a Publishing 1.0 world, tracking response and the quality of that response was difficult and expensive. In a Publishing 2.0 world, you can now track far more closely that response at a much lower cost: how many times viewers came to the site, which pages they lingered on and for how long, which products they ordered and how closely related was that order to where they lingered on the site. In a 2.0 world, you can watch consumer behavior and response at a much closer level.

Fun with Wikipedia

Check out this article on the history of printing in the Wikipedia.

Think about it; It took 3200 years for humans to advance from the use of Cuneiform, where letters are cut into clay tablets with a stylus, to the invention of woodblock printing, where images are carved in relief. Another 840 years would pass before the use of movable type by the Chinese and Koreans. The mechanical printing press took almost 400 years more. The next advance in publishing took another 357 years. In all, the average time to innovation from the ancient world to the development of mass market publishing, which I count as the invention of the rotary press, was 807 years. By comparison time to innovation in the twentieth century took approximately 11 years on average. If we look at publishing in the internet age we would see an even faster rate of change—in some cases with only months between new innovations. What are you doing to keep up?