Web Strategist Lab

Do you know what it costs to start a national magaizne these days? Multiple million at the very least, depending on whether or not Tina Brown or Jann Wenner is on the board.  Where does that money go? Not to writers or designers (they account a tiny fraction of the cost). Maybe a little to the sales team (gotta get all that ad revenue), but that stuff can’t account for half the cost of a magazine.

I bring this up because I’m getting sick of Fast Company. Not the web site, but the magazine. What once was a glorious beacon to those work 2.0′ers who understood the weight of Tom Peter’s “The Work Matters” manifesto, one that discussed new models in working, new ideas in getting things done, and trying to cross-pollenate ideas from one industry to the other is now In Style for the laptop-and-business-class set.

Recent covers: McGee, director of Terminator. Sure, he’s got an interesting history but… shouldn’t that be on movie magazine? Skater/surfer kid Shawn White? The current issue some cleavage-bearing woman with hair bigger than Montana. Skin on the cover of Fast Company? This is the same magazine (technically) who’s August 1997 cover was simply “Brand You,” a model just getting traction (And note that the magazine really fell down hard when it stopped putting just typography on the cover and started finding pretty people for the cover… Ning anyone?).

Ask any pro in the publication world and you’ll hear the same thing over and over again: in order to cover the sunk costs of starting up and the hard costs of printing and delivering a magazine, a magazine must sell X number of copies to justify the real engine: subscribers. A magazine doesn’t make money because you buy it, it makes money because it call sell your eyeballs to someone else.

Thus, magazines are a numbers game. If you can’t keep your circulation above certain point, it almost makes more sense to mail all the subscribers a booklet of ads.

But why buy a magaine? Is it for the ads? (Maybe it is for Vogue, but not why I used to buy Wired, Spin, Business Week, Fast Company, The Industry Standard or the Red Herring.) No.

It’s the content, stupid.

You build a customer base by having good ideas, well written and well-presented. That creates fans, increases the circulation base to justify ads. (I swear, the ad model makes as much sense as owning a grocery store not to sell produce put to collect coupons.)

But everyone seems hell-bent on skipping steps 1-5 that they make nothing but crap magazines.

So here’s the solution.

Web-based magazine (duh!).  But it’s more than that. It’s turning the model around.  Instead of building a print magazine that makes money and you build a seperate website to remind people how much they love the printed magazine, make the web site first.  Create great content. Open submissions to anyone. The crowd picks the best articles (and helps copy-edit it), adds great comments and you pick the best stuff (and the comments), package it up with ads (yes, you have to re-write the ad contract to say you are buying web ads, and that the paper ads come free) and ship it to newstands and people who are willing to buy a paper-based subscription.

How does that work? Well, everyone gets the content for free (plus ads). But in the process, everyone helps build the magazine. Crowd sourcing determines the best ideas (you know, the ones that would sell best on a newstand). You only pay for stories that make it to press. Ad buyers will pay a higher web rate knowing that their ads are also in the print peice. 

The best part is this: if you want it on the newstand or a subscription, each issue is $30. An annual subscription is $200. No one would buy it?  Wait. Who buys magazines on a newstand? People in airports waiting to fly business-class. People who can afford it. People who don’t have time to read a whole community site. People who buy subscriptions to summerized business books. Execs who have more money than time. If it’s an amazing magazine that’s built a reputation for bringing new ideas to light first in a well-managed forum (and that’s exactly what the website would be), they’ll pay for it.

The best part? Costs are like nothing. Server space and a couple of drupal managers and a team of copy-editors and designers with an editorial lead. You pay per word relative to the sales, so if no one buys the first few issues, you don’t pay the writers much. But if sales go crazy, writers get paid big bucks, thus drawing more people and ideas out of the woodwork. Print costs are unit-based just like writing, and you can even say that the first year the magazine will be web-only just to get things going.

It’s already been said: Journalism isn’t dead, newspaper are. The model must change.

A month ago, I started a section of this website called “Give It Away” (it’s in the category list somewhere).  The fact that I haven’t posted to it as much as I would like doesn’t dampen by excitement about it.

Which is why seeing this is so cool: http://stealourideas.tumblr.com/

Help!

I’ve been mulling and talking internally (quietly) for a while about this idea I think could be a killer. But I’m not getting the interest I was expecting. So I haven’t started to try and sell it up the chain until I get more people on my level enthused about it.

So I’m looking for help on trying to find a way to pitch this project.  Allow me to explain:

We are a staid, structured web site.  I have spent two years trying to integrate social media tools into the site: load your own photos, comments on most pages, contests, games, etc. My feeling is that it doesn’t take because people don’t really think about us when it comes to web 2.0 type-stuff. We are a reference site: when you want to learn about events or to look up alums, we are your site.  Otherwise, there’s no reason to visit for any length of time.

So my solution is that instead of trying to push this rock up a hill, we change the rules: we make a seperate site that is 100% web 2.0 (details: i’m thinking drupal for a Fast Company-based thing), that doesn’t have to worry about being the “main site,” it can be a seperate thing. In fact, I’m recommending that this rogue site have no connection to our “main site.”

The site would be about agregating content form all over, regardless of the politics (in our position, we have to be very sensitive to our place on campus), regardless of source, to have controversial conversations, to be more anonymous, to be more of itself.

Push back comes in the form of “Why wouldn’t we want ‘credit’ for building this site?” and “Why does it have to be unconnected to the main site?” And I’m just having a heck of a time convincing people that this makes sense.  I’m guessing it’s because I’m too close to things that I’m not shaping the message properly, so I’m looking for ideas.  Even ideas about other sites/companies who have been able to make seperate fan sites like this would be helpful.

So I’m asking.  Help?

http://www.mohawkpaper.com/

I thought we’d all learned our lessosn in 2001: cool/sweet/hot/attractive flash interfaces are not with the money spent on them.  You know who this impresses? People who don’t buy paper.

This isn’t a technical failure as much as it is a marketing one. 

Let’s start by trying to look at paper. Well, if I don’t already know the name of the type of paper, you’re starting at a loss.  Let’s click on the “Paper Selection Process” and I can select the shade, grade, finish, weight of the paper.  But then things get weird. It starts to put crosses into boxes for “Windpower” without me asking for it. Does that mean you are elminating Windpower from my options or that you only have Windpower? And what the hell is Windpower, anyway?  Once you’ve blindly selected some things that sound good, you are presented with a grid of… something.  Paper types? Brands? Clicking on them shows me 50-word desciptions of the paper (note to masochist copy-writers: try and explain the differences between two papers with words that anyone can understand. Can’t be done). No way for me to buy paper, even if I liked what I see… except I have nothing to see.  No paper samples or pictures. The only image is the cover of a brochure which is clickable but doesn’t actually do anything when clicked. One of them says “Null” at the top so… maybe they don’t make that paper anymore? Then why display it?

Flash windows on top of flash windows make reading things or moving around impossible. More than once I landed on… a vast field of gray with nothing on it. Which was fine because this was the fifth browser window Mohawk opened for me in five minutes and I’m thrilled to get rid of it, too.

I’m lost.  Let’s start over.

Paper selection, try some things, click on the “Find Paper” button I didn’t see before. Now I get “results” but I’m not sure what results you were giving me before. I see six different Cool White opens of paper.  If I put my cursor over one of the options, I get a  .5″x.5″ square of scanned paper to show me what this paper looks like. It was scanned with the contrast turned up high so I can see how much texture the paper has, but in so doing, I wouldn’t want to buy this paper. I have no idea what these papers actually look , but what does it matter when they are all Cool White? 

(Note: An email sent one week ago to info@mohawkpaper.com asking if a certain brand itpaper was still made there got no responce. Don’t bother publishing your email address if you aren’t going to bother answering emails.)

This is a site that’s supposed to market “superior runability” to printers. Well, they get sample books and order through local distributors, so they don’t actually need this web site.  Congrats! You’ve built a website for people who don’t need a website.

What should Mohawk have done? Well, pick an audience, for one. Let’s say you want to focus on selling your slightly-cooler-than-your-standard-copy-paper (why? Well, because its impossible to compete against all the other paper companies on the basis that your white copy paper isn’t exactly the same as everyone else’s copy paper, so you might as well differentiate your products). Who’s gonna buy it? Well, lots of people. People who want to print their letters and correspondence on paper that’s cooler than “Parchment White” but isn’t covered with ladybugs and sunflowers (see: scrapbooks stores).

Who is that, you ask? How about people who are looking for a job and would like to stand out? Hmm… does that sound like a market to serve? Can you already picture the ads where you help someone pick a superior paper with some clout and style, making them stand out from the pack of resume jockeys who all went to Staples for Parchment White?  If you can’t you should get out of the marketing game.

Congrats! You’ve just created a new market segment and are currently the only people talking to them: start printing your money.

Building a site with too much money to the wrong audience was a lesson I thought we all learned years ago.  I guess the paper industry hasn’t been keeping up.

Alumni Travel is a subset of the travel business that deals primarily with groups of people from the same collegic background.

I wish I knew how alumni travel started. Like the first guy to eat an oyster, it doesn’t seem obvious: why would 10-50 people from the same school (different backgrounds, different ages, different travel wants, etc) get lumped together. Often alumni travel groups get lumped in with other alumni groups (competing schools) or just non-alumni travellers. That trip you took to Paris through a travel agency had a bunch of Gophers or Sooners or Ducks along for the ride. They didnt know each other from Adam and aside from where they bought their ticket, you wouldn’t have any clue they were alumni travellers.

Travel companies build trips. They say, “We’re going from Chicago to Europe. We’ll put together airfare, a tour bus, hotels at each stop, a few meals, and the occasional feature, package it up with a little overhead to pay for the tour manager and a little on the top for the company and sell them to whomever.” Travel agents around the world try and sell that trip to people who come up and say, “Do you have a trip from Chicago to Europe where the details are handled for me? Yes? Do you have a brochure I can look at? Great, sold.”

Alumni associations are acting like travel agents in this instance. They send brochures (taken from the travel company with an alumni association logo slapped on) to alumni who have stated a preference for European travel and hope to sign them up in a bundle. The price is usually the same as registering through a travel agent, though an alumni travel agent will have a more limited number of trips to sell than a travel agent.

The value to the alumni association is that they get a percentage of the sale, and if enough travel pakages are sold, free trips are thrown in. Commonly, these free trips are given to management or university faculty and staff the alumni association is trying to curry favor with. The person taking the free trip is to act as an alumni travel liason, helping the alumni travellers however they can, and bringing issues up to the tour manager. The make sure that the alumni needs are met. While this seems like extra value that the alumni association is providing the alumni travellers, the tour managers usually do the heavy lifting: the alumni tour helper-person is there to make the alumni traveller feel good.

So how in the world does an alumni association sell a trip?  The cost is the same but the selection is less. Alumni associations add some value in sending an extra person, but that seems negligible.  The reason why alumni travel in these groups thorugh alumni associations is because of the connection they feel to the university. Alumni feel that no matter when you graduated, you went through the same things as every other graduate, and thus you have a common groud. On a more base level, it helps travellers feel like they won’t be travelling with the riff-raff, that these are people who went to the same school, thus have similar beliefs, though in practice, this isn’t at all the case.

So how does an alumni travel program grow? Here’s what I would propose:

1) The Web 2.0 Fairy Dust: Social Network. Some white label social network will be fine (Ning, etc), so long as it can be admin-ed by a 10-year-old and has the ability to add events. Nothing fancy, nothing crazy, no need to connect it to Facebook or authenticate it to your alumni database. It has to be a stand-along site, with a seperate domain and seperate name. Yes, stick the alumni association logo all over it to show it’s a legit site, but don’t feel like it has to have the exact same look and feel (trust me, this is a plus: alumni associations have to build sites that are all things to all people, making them examples of decision-by-compromise —  a stand-alone site will be able to specialize and focus). Let travellers set up their own regsitration and look around.

2) Don’t Be Lazy. Alumni travel departments are spread thin, so they slap logos on other people’s brochures and copy the text to the web sites.  If they get the time, they add postage stamp-sized photos. They do a great job making Paris, Istanbul, Dubai and London look like Akron. It’s a miracle someone plunks down $3,000 for these trips with this kind of info. Every trip needs to be re-written. Take the text and re-write it to focus on what the alumni will get. Focus on the destination, yes, but what the alumni will experience and with whom (basic differentiation). Trips are spent trapped in boats and busses with strangers — make alumni feel like these are people they’d want to be trapped with.

3) Get Social. Add upcoming trips as events.  The site should allow people to express interest in the trip, ask for a brochure, as well as show who else is interested in the trip (popular trips breed interest). Encourage previous travellers to upload photos and tell their stories (10% discount for the best photo every month or a free t-shirt or a free poster-print of the photo). You want the crappy snap-shots someone took with their $150 2-megapixel Panascony camera becaus eit looks more real. You want people who talk about the funny stories of travelling (even if, and especially if they are bad stories: travel is about the experience) and what they did.  Not just a paragraph of “I loved it. I would do it again and again. It was better than Cats.” You need real stories. Print out business cards with the URL and remind travellers to stop by the computer in the hotel lobby to post their day’s experiences.  The system should encourge them to send their diaries and photos to friends and families through the system. Encourage them to get together and talk about the trip ad which trip they want to go on next. Let them be advisors to future travellers on what to expect, what to pack and when to do.  Let new prospective travellers ask questions.

4) Document Like A Freakin’ Pro. For most trips, the alumni travel department shouldn’t give trips away to staff and faculty, they should go to professional photgraphers, journalists, journellers, poets, artists, writers and reporters. What you want isn’t a fleshed-out itinerary of stops and sights, but a capturing of the feeling of the new. When you are thinking about spending $4,000 (per person) on a trip to the Middle East, wouldn’t you like to read about the person before who stood in the footsteps of Jesus and Mohammad? The photo of local kids playing? The poem about the Mona Lisa? The stories of the travellers themselves, why they chose to travel to Italy/Panama/Moscow/Antactica? The pictures of travellers on a Japanese bullet train or seeing the remains of the Berlin Wall for the first time? The movie of a walkthrough of Notre Dame with a voiceover that’s a little more than “This church is pretty?”

Travel is about experience. If your prospective traveller can’t put themselves in the picture orthe story or the movie, they aren’t pulling out their checkbooks. If they don’t feel emotion about the re-telling of how the last time a traveller was in this place, they were wearing camo and carrying a gun. If you can’t document the trips for sale to the next people, you are commoditized to the point of non-existance. Even if your next trip is to Norway and you have no Nroway pictures and stories, people visiting your site will see the experiences of past travellers and be able to extrapolate.

5) Tell a Friend Program. If one traveller comes back and tells their friends, and one of them books with you, there needs to be an incentive. It doesn’t matter what, but the first traveller has to know that their story is wanted and that it helps the organization and the business and that it is appreciated. If a discount is applied, let them apply it to the trip they make with that friend. Share share share.

Okay, so in the midst of my Seth Godification (I think I’ve read 4 or 5 of his books this week), I’ve realized that if I want to really get where I want to get and be who I want to be, I can’t wait for someone to swing by with the big Ed McMahon-Sized check and a job offer to be a web strategist.  I gotta be it and just do it.

So I am going to kick-start off a series of posts (I hope — blogs are the refuge of the “good idea without follow-through” crowd sometimes) where I take a project, program, site, business or model and say what I would do with it.  Is this back-seat strategizing? Yes. But the point is that the best solutions don’t come from one source (i.e. “Let’s sprinkle a little Web 2.0 dust on it!” or “Let’s make it open source!”), but from a system change. One change works because it is supposed by other changes.

My first one is something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently: alumni travel, which is actually a bit more interesting that it’s title suggests.