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Association Publishing Meets Car Talk Publishing ‘mechanics’ go under the hood to diagnose the rattles and groans
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ne of my favorite Saturday morning rituals is listening to NPR’s “Car Talk” on my way to exercise class, as “Click and Clack” dispense humorous advice to callers trying to diagnose tricky car troubles. Just like car owners, publishing professionals face rattles and groans of their own, so we thought, “Why not host our own version of the show?” At ASAE’s Annual Meeting in Dallas last August, Stratton presented “Under the Hood: Car Talk Takes on Association Publishing.” The lively, interactive session featured our own panel of publishing and media Start your own subscription. Visit www.strattonpublishing.com to sign up to receive Stratton’s Smart Publishing. Or contact Josephine Rossi at jrossi@stratton
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Publishing Stratton’s Smart Publishing is designed to provide publishers, editors, marketers, and other business professionals with strategies to meet today’s print and electronic media challenges. The publication is free. Publisher: Debra J. Stratton dstratton@strattonpublishing.com Contributing Editors: Angela Brady, Lia Dangelico, Josephine Rossi, Christine Umbrell Design: Janelle Welch Stratton Headquarters 5285 Shawnee Road, Suite 510 Alexandria, VA 22312-2334 Phone: 703.914.9200 Fax: 703.914.6777 pubpros@strattonpublishing.com www.strattonpublishing.com Angerosa Research Foundation info@angerosaresearch.org www.angerosaresearch.org © Copyright 2012, Stratton Publishing & Marketing Inc.
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Summer 2002
mechanics, who addressed some tricky questions and dispensed some solid advice. The fodder was plentiful— from digital publishing and social media strategies to revenue generation, staff management, and content curation. Our association publishing master mechanics included Maggie McGary, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association; Gary Rubin, Society for Human Resource Management; Wendy Mann, National Telecommunications Cooperative Association; and Andrew Moore, Nxtbook. Here’s a look at some of the choice nuggets doled out to the overflow crowd at the event:
Social Media: How do you get started and develop a strategy? How do you manage staff? How do you evaluate ROI or ROE (engagement) in terms senior staff/CEOs will understand? Car Talk Takeaways: • Social media must be part of your association’s communication mix and plan if your want to remain relevant and appeal to the next generation of members. • Staff social media operations with experienced professionals; it’s not a job for your summer intern. • Establish goals and measure ROI on website traffic increases and conversion on traffic referred from social sites, such as new member recruitment, sponsor leads and conversions, increases in event attendance, expanded readership of digital publications, etc. • Cultivate the online community: As younger members have less time/resources to devote to traditional volunteering/face-to-face meetings, leverage online communities and influence to expand your organization’s brand. • Invest in and budget for social media if you want results. Forprofit companies are devoting more and more resources to social media. Check out social
media monitoring software (Radian 6), social media management software (Sprout Social), white label online community platforms (Jive), and social customer-relationship management (CRM). Make sure the technology is used effectively. One example: Lots of associations are investing in white-label social platforms but not devoting any staff resources to those online communities.
Digital Publishing: How can you build digital engagement and drive more revenues to digital? What’s a good print/digital advertising model? How do you get traditional ad sales staff to understand how to position and sell the benefits of digital? Car Talk Takeaways: • To build value and engagement, add enhancements to editorial content like videos, audio, reader polls, and more. The American Society for Industrial Security (asisonline.org) and the American Physical Therapy Association (apta.org) are two organizations that have effectively developed interactive digital publications. • Spend some time strategizing before you go digital. Determine your goals and a strategy to maximize the platform for users, advertisers, and others. • Dig into your data; metrics tell a story. Use that information to make refinements to your plan and tweak efforts to better align with member needs.
• Leverage the technology without a lot of added cost. Post videos taken with your iPhone/ Droid and ask authors/members to post, too. Ask authors to post their LinkedIn profiles next to their articles. • Digital publishing is exploding: More than 5 million digital editions are produced now. While a native app is part of the mix, it’s not the end-all. To maximize your audience, you also need a good web app and a good digital edition solution, which can account for more than 80 percent of the total audience. • Tablets continue to flood the market, improve their browsers and processing power, and allow mobile browser apps to perform like a native app. The cloud will continue to grow, too, and it’s where readers will store their mobile digital editions in the future—not in libraries on their 32GB hard drive.
Staffing/Organization: How can you develop content strategy across the organization and keep up with the need for fresh content? How do you manage expanding workload and shrinking staff resources? How do you handle the challenge of staff who are more technically savvy than leadership and impatient at slow movement? Car Talk Takeaways: • Engage other departments in your quest to identify content opportunities to repurpose See STRATTON REPORT, page 6
Trivia Answers from the front page: 1. 4 pounds, 10 ounces 2. Japan. 3. Living room 4. Facebook.