Print Presence, Web Presence, Omnipresence

How to Use Your Own Media to Turn Your Association into a Successful Brand

by Raphael Badagliacca
Copyright, 2004

Nytimes.com is my homepage.

Maybe that’s because my first real job was in the newsroom of the New York Times when I was still an undergraduate at Columbia University. During my college years, I benefited from three simultaneous educations: Columbia; New York City; the New York Times. Making the New York Times my home page may just be my way of assuring myself that you can go home, again, and again, and again. This is the feeling you want your website to inspire in your members.

It’s the same feeling that you have always wanted your print vehicles to inspire. You are their association; they are your members; you bring them their publication. If you do it right, your issues have their issues covered.

By unifying your approach to these two powerful media – print presence and web presence – using each to promote and extend the other – wisely using the advantages that each has to offer – you can achieve omnipresence for the audience that you want to reach, which is the goal of all branding.

In this article, we are going to explore the interplay between your web presence and your print presence. In order to do it in a meaningful way, we are also going to look at fundamental differences between for-profit and not-for-profit publishing in any medium, highlighting certain advantages that belong to the not-for-profit publisher. We’re also going to examine what the not-for-profit publisher can learn from the web presence of for-profit publishers.

Timeliness

In the last year or so, I have noticed that breaking stories appearing on the NY Times website not only have dates, but times. It is now 9:45 AM EST, and I have just read an article about the Afghan elections posted seven minutes ago. This kind of timeliness makes me reflect on past arguments between media alternatives about something as fundamental as reporting the news.

Before the internet, print media, like the NY Times, used to envy the immediacy with which broadcast media could break a story. Television news could pre-empt scheduled programming with a sound bite and sometimes actual video. If the story was big enough, it would take the place of the scheduled program. In fact, television audiences,

subliminal media experts, would gauge the importance of the news by how willing the network was to disregard its scheduled programming, including commercials. This underlines the uneasy relationship between traditional broadcast media and its audience, which is truly uncontrolled. Audience and network constantly send each other signals by the choices they make about what they value and who they are.

While television could deliver with immediacy, typical stories lacked depth. Time constraints would not allow broadcast news to produce anything like what you could find in the newspaper – a major story, surrounded by sidebars – with jumps to other pages including similar stories, related stories, and the same story viewed from several angles. In print terms, at most what you got from television was a headline, a lead, and an image.

Web presence adds immediacy to the depth achieved naturally by print publications.

For associations, here is the guideline: Use your website to deliver as much meaningful news in as timely a fashion as you can. If your publication is monthly, report daily when there is a critical issue facing your industry. Use your publication to train your readers to seek timely information from your website when there is a timely matter at hand. Create a department of your magazine with a title like, “Web Matters” which reports on the type of activity that appears on your website and sends your readers in that direction.

Authority

Even at the height of the broadcast debate, topics for the nightly news were always set by the front page of the newspaper. This reality was inescapable if you just read the headlines and watched the news. Back then, it was doubly apparent to me. Each day, at around 4PM, the chief editors of the major news desks (Foreign; National; Metro; Culture; and sometimes Sports) met in a centrally located glass-enclosed office on the newsroom floor, each armed with his best news stories, to lobby for positioning on the front page. Each day they reached a consensus, and that consensus was reflected not only in the paper the next morning, but in that night’s news broadcast.

As an association, you are an authority. An author lurks in the word authority. To author is still largely a print concept; documents establish authority. An association with publications has more authority than one that has none. Print still sets the agenda, but web presence can extend that agenda with images, slide shows, video, and timely reporting, which can make you omnipresent, first and always there in the experience of your audience.

Use your website to publicize your magazine. Act as if you have visitors every day who have never heard of your publication, but are excellent prospects as either members of your association or advertisers.

End your print articles with the web address on your site that will tell the rest of the story, with more immediacy than your monthly publication can manage. If you have more stories than you have room for in your magazine, put the overflow on your website, if these stories contribute to the depth of your coverage.

Branding

Associations have more experience in this area than for-profit publishers. Your publication has always just been one of the things you do to get across who you are. Imagine the New York Times with a yearly trade show for its readers. The point is that as an association, your relationship with your members is your capital. Your publication is only one of the ways you relate. Your website is another. Making them work together will help advance your brand, which increases your authority and brings you new members. Whatever you may call it, advancing your brand is what you are doing.

It’s a much riskier proposition for a not-for-profit publisher to put content on the web. Until the web, the for-profit publisher may have been tempted to identify entirely with the content of the print vehicle. How could he justify giving that content away for nothing? Wouldn’t he jeopardize subscription income? How would advertisers react? Suppose there was a shift in advertising presence from print to web? Would advertising income drastically reduce? Many of these questions will not have definitive answers for years to come, but they are not questions that need concern the not-for-profit publisher.

By contrast, the not-for-profit publisher, with a controlled circulation, is free to publish everything and more on the website. There’s no reason why every article of every issue ought not to be available. Surround the printed word with images, video, whatever makes the act of reading a more complete experience. Enlist everything you have in advancing your authority. Create omnipresence in the area of your expertise.

Make a Present of the Past

Bring your print archives alive by enlisting an effective internal search engine. The most effective engines rate and sort all the results that come to the screen by percentage. The nearest match has the highest percentage. It’s a great convenience if the engine also marks the search word with color or boldness in the results, so the user doesn’t have to search the search results to find the word.

Having a long and rich past will give your print publication more authority, and make your web presence more complete.

For-profit publishers often charge for an article older than a certain number of days. Whether you charge or not is really up to how you are handling the economics of your site. In any case, you should capture the name and e-mail address of every person who searches your archive. This can become a member benefit. If past articles from your print publication are valuable, you may not only generate income, but create new members out of this feature.

Clearly, this is another way that web presence can extend the influence of your print publication, by making its past and present entirely available.

Reach Out

Send out regular e-mails to your membership sponsored by advertisers. Promote your print publication in these e-mails. Combine your offerings to print advertisers so web opportunities increase print advertising dollars. Create meaningful distinctions among the members of your community so that certain e-mails go to certain groups. Personalization is one of the major advantages of web presence, and something that your print publication cannot achieve, but based on the personal preferences and concerns of your members and other readers you can make each person aware of the sections of the upcoming issue that will be of interest. In the same e-mail you can publicize the extension of the subject treated in the print publication as it appears on the website. One click away you will find these updated treatments of the subject, these videos, this new calendar, etc., etc.

Think of your publication as a highly defined snapshot of the communications you have to offer, and your website as a constantly changing, organic body of information out of which this snapshot springs every month.

Get Personal

Not so long ago, predictions of the technological future always seemed to agree on two “distant” developments – personal telephone numbers and personal newspapers. Cell phones have completely fulfilled the first prediction. Web presence gives you the opportunity to get even more personal than the personal newspaper because communications can be two-way.

Before the web, the ability to have a two-way relationship based on continuous input with any remote group, members or readers, could be no more than an attractive notion.
By using your website to capture the personal preferences and concerns of the individuals who make up your audience, you can effectively lay the groundwork for data exchange that will achieve your most meaningful goals – membership retention and readership attention.

Feedback can be accomplished through surveys, chat rooms, on-line forums, behind-the-scenes analysis of navigation and click-throughs, and by offering a choice of priorities wherever possible that will inform not only what kind of information and services you make available, but even the strategies on which you run your organization. There’s no reason why you can’t use these web tools to set guidelines for the direction of your print publication, as well.

When individuals feel that their personal needs are being addressed by your content selections, whether in e-mails, password-protected sections of your site, stories on your home page or within the pages of your print publication, you moved closer to omnipresence, establishing your brand and building loyalty to it.

The more aware your members of the relationship between the information they give you and the payoff they see in terms of personalized content, the more they will feel part of partnership, the more interested they will be in keeping the give-and-take going.

Advertising

If your association values the non-dues revenue potential of the advertising opportunity in its printed publication, then your website design shouldn’t forget that there is yet another audience involved -- potential advertisers. Make it easy for an advertiser to find your rate card, demographic information, and anything else that will help the selection of your publication for the placement of an ad. If it’s good looking, show off your magazine with full-color images of the covers.

Try not to separate your publication from your journals. Even though such a separation may exist in your editorial department – between printed publications that include advertising and those that do not – your potential advertisers or their agencies may not understand this. They will click on the “publications” choice on your website and find only scholarly journals, concluding that you do not have a magazine with advertising, because you have put it in a different part of your site, enforcing a distinction the potential advertiser would never consider.

Some associations put the name of their magazine on the menu choice. If the potential advertiser comes to your site and does not already know the name of your magazine, he may leave without ever finding it. This problem is compounded when you also have a choice marked “publications” under which only scholarly journals can be found.

Return on Investment

Web ventures of all kinds tend to be on the defensive these days when the question of ROI comes up. Here again, as an association the idea of selling ancillary items is not foreign. Consider your web presence as a combined marketing and distribution medium for these items, including publishing products, like back copies and reprints.

Consider that the content on your website, if managed correctly, should foster the placement of ads in your print publication. Use the web presence to give your advertisers more exposure than they had ever dreamed of as long as they maintain a firm commitment to advertise in your print vehicle.

Give your readers a deeper experience than they can get from the print pages that establish your authority. Build new members, your core activity. Advance your brand. The return on investment will come.

Raphael Badagliacca, who often judges Web sites for communications awards competitions, is president of SpaceMaster, Inc., an ad sales management software firm based in Glen Ridge, NJ, and the founder of the Institute for Advanced Media Thinking. You can reach him by phone at (973) 429-1155 or via e-mail at raphael@spacemaster.com.