I joined over 50 of my colleagues and peers for the annual F+W Media business innovation summit last week. The meeting was in Fort Collins, Colorado, which allowed us to spend some more time with new colleagues from Interweave who joined the F+W Media Group last year.

I can only assume that other publishing and media companies have similar events? If they don’t, they should. Over two days we were taken through presentations on key areas of our business dispersed with break-out and discussion sessions. The summit was insightful, rewarding and practical and it really was a great (and smart) group of people to spend a few days with.

The meeting was opened by our CEO, David Nussbaum, who reflected on the changes in our business over the last 5 years. It’s amazing to consider how far we’ve come in that time. From essentially a print based publishing business as we were then, to a digitally led media business with new revenue lines, initiatives, products and audiences to sell to.

Above and beyond the presentation content, though, I was struch by how much the attendees wanted to contribute and help colleagues and peers. We’re a 500+ employee business and so sharing, learning and collaborating in this way is hugely valuable to all. I feel very lucky that we have this breadth of experience to draw on for our UK operation.

I came away with 100+ ideas for the F+W Media International business. From big strategic launch opportunities to tactical and specific improvements we can make to our day to day business. I know my team here are waiting on the to-do list from me and I’m looking forward to putting changes in place as a direct result.

Innovation is alive and well at F+W Media.

Does your company have a similar event? If so, what format does it take and does it work for you?

Global ecommerce on Stitch Craft Create

Visits from outside the UK make up 18% of the ecommerce traffic to Stitch Craft Create but convert to purchase at less than 25% of the site average. There’s clearly an opportunity for us to do a better job of looking after our international customers.

This infographic from econsultancy was a helpful reminder of the potential scale of international ecommerce business. I thought it interesting that the UK ecommerce market was only 1/3 the size of that in the US, given the population difference is 1/5.  It demonstrates that the UK consumer is well tuned to shopping online. Also, the relative size and spend of the Australian customer base was notable, we know that there is a thriving craft market in Australia so this was another pointer of opportunity.

To take advantage of these potential customers, we’ve made some simple changes to our ecommerce sites. The first is to show prices in local currency. Through a simple dropdown selection in the top right navigation you can choose to display prices in GBP, AUD, EUR, NCD and USD – so picking off the Australiasian, European and US customers as targets. All prices convert to local currency, although at the moment the final check-out is still in GBP – this total value is confirmed on checkout.

The second is to improve our international shipping rates, a change that will go live in the next few days. Through a new carrier relationship, and a little subsidy, we’ve reduced basic shipping to these markets from the equivalent cost of £12 to £4. A huge difference and I hope the big driver in improving conversion. Customers can elect for a more premium (tracked) route for £10. Meanwhile, to incentivise bigger baskets, global shipping on orders over £50 is free.

It’s going to be interesting to see how our global ecommerce conversion rates improve with these improved services. In addition, our soon to be relaunched download store will obviously have no shipping barriers from wherever you are in the world and I hope we will be able to drive more revenue to that as a result of pricing in local currency.

Stitch Craft Create digital magazines

We hit another milestone at F+W Media International this week with the launch of our first digital magazine in the IOS app store. We’d already planned for some time to do a print bookazine and this is about to go on sale in a WHSmith near you. The print magazine builds on continued originally published in the US, we’ve taken that and made a few changes for the UK to publish ourselves.

We don’t have big aspirations to be print magazine publishers, but providing the numbers work it’d be great to keep publishing the occasional bookazine/special edition in this way. What’ll be really interesting to see is how this helps build our brand, profile and audience. Both the print and digital version promote our Stitch Craft Create business, our books and our authors.

The digital magazines (there are two, a preview and a paid £3.99 magazine) is a really interesting test and it’ll be fascinating to see the downloads and in-app purchase stats come together. If we can make this work, I’d love to see us doing a digital magazine with more frequency. Watch this space!

It’s great to have added a new channel, or two, to our business and to be reaching our audience in new ways. Also great to see us building our Stitch Craft Create brand further on the physical and digital newstand. The process of creating this has given the team new skills, and next time we’ll be a little faster and be able to add more features into the content.

Following the vertical publishing theme last time, I thought I’d explore this a bit more. In particular to consider how we’ve broken out our vertical market of craft into one of the fast developing businesses we’re running today.

I’m happy to admit to something of a mistake I made back in 2009 when we originally launched our consumer and eCommerce businesses. At the time I was new to both publishing and craft (I’m still learning a lot about both). I assumed that craft was our niche, and that’s where we should focus. It felt like a category with opportunity, scope for growth and it was clearly a strength of our publishing list. Much of that was true, and we have enjoyed good growth on the back of the general explosion of interest in craft.

Craft may be described as a niche vertical, but it’s a large market. Reports size the arts and crafts market in the UK between £1.5bn/£2bn and almost everyone has crafted at some level, or has a relative or friend that does. When you think about it, craft is hardly a niche at all. It’s ubiquitous, whether it’s embedded in your family through an ardent crafter, out of necessity to repair the odd button or something to entertain your children on rainy weekends.

So, back to my mistake. I thought we needed to build an online monster in craft. An exhaustive all encompassing giant shopping offer that covered all categories and where you could get every product you needed. What I’ve learnt is that this was probably not the best strategy. We could do it better.

This was spurred by a couple of recent posts on Futurebook about vertical publishing and discoverability.

I was reflecting on the changes we’ve made at F&W Media International to focus on our vertical markets. While we had a leg up into consumer marketing through our (now closed) book club businesses, we’ve done a tremendous amount in recent years to really tie together our publishing and consumer businesses. The changes we’ve made as publishers are extensive and far reaching, but if I had to focus on three key areas it would be these:

Audience development
We’ve made audience development, and specifically email name capture, a company wide goal. A small part of this is having an Audience Development Manager position (replacing what we used to call publicity). The bigger part is making it part of our every-day conversation. Each new proposal, new potential partner or new project is viewed with audience development in mind.

SEO and web analytics
We’ve had company wide training on SEO, and at least half our staff can more than competently complete keyword analysis and have an understanding of its importance. Sure we review sales data and Nielsen, but we use web analytics and keyword analysis in the content decision making process. We apply a vigorous SEO process to our online content to drive traffic and audience growth.

Consumer marketing for everyone
Marketing is a company wide responsibility and not a department. Our marketers do great work and run specific campaigns, but an important part of their role is to conduct the wider orchestra. Our editorial and content teams, marketing and audience development work together daily. Our editors write blogs and post online, they encourage and support authors to do the same and they manage social media content.

Maybe all publishers are doing this, but I would group these and our other changes into an overall theme of not thinking as publishers. Certainly what we see is that these changes and more are contributing to our flourishing and fast growing craft business, Stitch Craft Create.

The search for the Holy Grail
So what is the Holy Grail? Much of what we’ve done so far has been about building an audience to sell stuff we have already created, whether it’s books or other products. Now, we’re generating enough data and insight to actually define new products. In part we can ask our customers what they want, but more valuable is that we can see how they behave. We can review the performance of online content, search results, conversion rates and behaviour and use this to identify gaps and opportunities. We can take that data and make, or find, new products that we know we have an audience for.

It’s hugely exciting and has tremendous potential, but the best bit is that we’ve really only scratched the surface.

The advice for publishers on Futurebook is spot on: Get vertical and get going.

Today was something of a watershed moment as we enrolled our first students through an extension of our business, The Creative University.

For some time we’ve been looking at online education as an opportunity to expand. It’s a natural extension of the content we create for other elements of our business. With this as another string to our bow alongside print, ebooks and eCommerce we are able to offer more to our authors, contributors and (now) tutors.

It’s also another way for us to deliver on our promise to inspire the creative lives of our customers.

It’s no secret that many crafters are interested in turning their hobby into a second, and sometimes primary, income. The growth of Etsy, Folksy, NotontheHighStreet and even the more commercial such as Fab.com all indicate the extent of demand for more artisan and unique products. At the same time, the squeeze on salaries and increases in cost of living are encouraging more people to seek out new income streams.

Put together, we felt we could help serve those customers that were thinking of making this leap with some practical advice and help. Our courses aim to do just that and cover a range of topics from Social Media Marketing (starting today) through to Writing and blogging. Our next course starts in February and is entitled ‘From Passion to Profit: Start your business in 6 weeks or less’ – Courses last 6 weeks, cost just £99.99 and the tutors are absolute leaders in the relevant fields. Discounts are available by becoming a Stitch Craft Create member – you can find out more details at The Creative University site.

An exciting day for us and the team and a huge credit to those that have worked to get this business live and successfully deliver our first students. Most of all, I hope an exciting day for those registering and hoping to start a business from their passion. If that’s you, then good luck!

I’m attending Digital Book World in New York this week. It’s an event run by my company, F+W Media, although I am not involved in the organisation or programming. Which allows me to say what a great job my F+W colleagues are doing.

This is the fourth annual conference and we were reminded by David Nussbaum, CEO of F+W Media, that the first Digital Book World coincided with the launch of the ipad – which I remember being live streamed at the conference in 2010. This year we were told by James McQuivey of Forrester that Apple have sold 120m ipads worldwide, closing in on the population of Japan (127m) if you wanted to rank it in that way. That statistic is as good as any to highlight the changing face of publishing and really what Digital Book World is all about.

I have a mountain of notes from the first day, another credit to the quality of speakers and dialogue, but looking through these there was one thing that stood out as a consistent message, and this was the need to be authentic.

Teddy Goff, Digital Director for the Obama campaign talked about how they set out to honour the relationship with followers and that before any fundraising promotion, request to vote or policy announcement the priority was to ensure they gave the best experience. He also highlighted how they used the web and social media to reach deeper into the campaign, including an initiative to let a group of $3/$5 donors have lunch with Obama.

In a panel on global export markets, we were told about the importance of contextualised meta data, which meant making sure that the details of an individual book are written in a sensitive way for the local market. Similarly the need to price-to-market was discussed in relation to markets where the pricing levels are significantly lower than the US dollar.

In a session on Innovation in Publishing, we were told to seek out customer ‘points of pain’ and then work out ways to solve them. For me this was all about building a genuine understanding of the audience and meeting their needs. In the same session, we had examples of products that had been created to meet those ‘pain point’ needs – allowing the companies to build stronger relationships with customers and creating revenue opportunity.

Dominique Raccah from Sourcebooks had introduced herself in the innovation panel as someone from what ‘used to be a book publishing company’. Whatever the future of a publishing company is, the lesson from Digital Book World day one is that it needs to have a deep understanding of it’s customer, to use that understanding to create relevant product and then to interact with the customer in a genuine and authentic way.

On to day two….

It’s been a little while since I blogged, but I didn’t want to miss the chance to celebrate some of the things that have been going on recently at my company, F+W Media International

Our business is all about serving niche communities, and our focus is on craft and the creative arts. Earlier this year, we defined our ‘why?’ as ‘Inspiring your creative life’ and this is our goal and the mantra by which we want to move forward by.

We want to be a source of inspiration, and we want to support our customers when they are being creative, crafting and making. We took some big steps forward towards doing this recently with some new projects and launches:

Stitch Craft Create (@craftcreateUK) is our new online content and community brand for the community we call the ‘lifestyle maker and baker’, it’s multi-craft and for all skill levels and packed full of projects, advice, ideas and more. From January next year, our existing RUCraft shop will rebrand to be the Stitch Craft Create shop.

Stitch Craft Create Business (@SCCBiz) is a partner brand to Stitch Craft Create and will serve crafters and creatives who are looking to turn their hobby into an income. With advice, ebooks and education initiatives, this is a great place for aspiring craft and creative arts entrepreneurs.

The Creative University (@CreativeUni) is our home for online education. Initially with courses from Stitch Craft Create Business but we have plans to develop much more in future. The Creative University will provide webinars and online courses to suit different skills levels, time frames and budgets. We’re hugely excited about this initiative and breaking into this market.

I Love Cross Stitch and The Pink Whisk Shop are two new eCommerce stores. We were serving all our customers today within one store at RUCraft and wanted to better look after our Cross Stitch and Cake Decorating customers. With exclusive products and a more targeted offer, we’re delighted to be live with both of these sites.

I’m very proud of the talented and passionate team that have made all of these new launches possible and I’m really excited to be improving our ability to serve our communities and Inspire Creative Lives. Please go check them all out!

A recent scenario was causing me to reflect on how I can better help up and coming talent develop into managers with confidence who are able to take ownership of projects and challenges and become leaders in the business.

I wondered if there was a business that could help with what I needed and so I spent a bit of time searching. I found a whole bunch of companies that offered training of various types. In-house, out of house, one day, two days, residential, different subjects and themes with varying levels of qualification. But I didn’t find what I was looking for.

What I wanted was this:

• Something to suit a host of different levels, from the new manager to the experienced
• Something that was appropriate to my sector and business
• Something that covered multiple management skills: Time management, negotiation, presentations, managing staff, difficult scenarios. All the things you might capture under the banner of soft skills
• Something that I could encourage my staff to take in online, in their own time whether at work or at home
• Something that didn’t require us to commit a full day, or even a half day of time
• Something that would cover key topics in short, digestible chunks, that could be returned to again and bookmarked
• Something that did all this with a trusted source that I believed would give good advice
• Something for managers in the UK that felt relevant to the UK
• Something that was free

I’d expected to find it, I’d expected to find the business that was changing the world of training, approaching it from a different perspective, using free as a marketing tool, taking advantage of video, YouTube and social media and challenging the established training model. But I didn’t.

Maybe this business is out there and I simply didn’t find it, but maybe not. If you exist and are reading this, please step forward – @Jawoollam is the best way to contact me. If it doesn’t exist, it should.