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?

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.

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….

Stories that have caught my eye this week:

Content marketing grows and grows

With good reason, I’m seeing more and more discussion and focus on content marketing. Successful Search Engine Marketing is dependent on quality content and it’s no wonder that most marketing teams are embracing this. It’s great news if your core business is in content creation – for publishers and media businesses this is tremendous opportunity. This post is packed with tools to aid content marketing, while this post of SEO statistics features the impact of content marketing as number 1.

A (new-ish) role for books

While I’m not sure this is a new role, this article on the benefits of being a published author for your online profile and potential as a speaker, blogger or expert is a reminder of the potential here. Given the ability to self-publish at the click of a button, anyone wanting to be an expert in a niche should consider writing about it in this way. Adding ‘author’ to your personal credentials is well worth considering if you haven’t already.

Digital change, data and government

An article on the Guardian site about the potential cost savings to be had by government in embracing data caught my eye. I think government could be much smarter here, and I think we should overcome big brother fears when it comes to these opportunities.

Twitter as the newsroom of the future

Mark Little from Storyful is quoted in this article as saying that journalists ‘need to stop seeing themselves as gatekeepers of information and start to look at journalism as a collaboration effort involving all kinds of different sources.’ The article discusses Twitter as a newsroom and speaks to exactly how social media is changing the news industry.

Minority (reality?) report 

We already have gesture controlled gaming in our homes, but I picked up this feature on software that potentially brings gesture control to your mac or PC with 3D interaction. Touch screen technology is now ubiquitous but perhaps it won’t belong before we’re moving and shaping our hands in front of the screen all day, just like the film Minority Report.

Platform is a step-by-step guide to building your online profile through your blog and social media presence. If you aspire to this goal then Platform is a straightforward book full of tips and ideas that I would thoroughly recommend. The book is in 5 parts, with a total of 60 chapters, making it easy to read from start to finish or to dip in and dip out as you require.

Author Michael Hyatt has himself built a significant online platform. His blog gets many hundred thousand visitors and he has an equally sizeable presence on Twitter. As the former CEO, now Chairman, of US publishers Thomas Nelson you could argue that his role has been a big help in building scale, but equally it is perhaps his approach and motivation that has driven the success in his career and his profile online.

The book is part motivational, and Hyatt also focuses on the need for quality product. Some readers might not connect with this, wondering what the ‘product’ is that they need to focus on – but I think he’s right to highlight this. A bedrock of success for anyone looking to build a platform is going to be the clarity of the message they want to communicate.

The easily accessible nature of the book extends beyond the short chapters to checklists and tips that are easy to take away. One criticism might be that a lot of the content is repurposed from blog posts already available on his site, but I was very happy to pay for the book and it will remain on my Kindle with sections I’ve highlighted to go back to again.

This is definitely a book I’d recommend to an aspiring author who recognised the need to build an online profile to drive sales. All in all a big thumbs up.

The publishing industry was taken by surprised yesterday when Waterstones announced an unlikely business partnership with Amazon for the sale of Kindle devices and ebooks through in-store wifi. The predominant view, which I share, is sceptical of this deal for Waterstones but it will be interesting to understand better as more details emerge. The announcement is well covered on Digital Book World who ask the question ‘Is Waterstones Mortgaging Its Digital Future With Amazon Deal?‘.

This is one of a couple of deals I’ve heard of recently that made me think. Faber announced a partnership with Mumsnet which I thought was a smart move. It allows them to tap into the strong Mumsnet community and offer writing courses to a market you wouldn’t otherwise associated with the Faber brand. Also in something close to home for my business Future Publishing and Anova Books announced a tie-up around the new craft magazine Mollie Makes. This is another deal that sounds good on paper and we’ll wait to see the fruits of this.

Success in business partnership can certainly be challenging. Foremost, there’s the commercial challenge of sharing in financial performance and once a partner is involved this inevitably has an impact. You need to be able to agree goals and approach and this can be difficult as partners will have a different focus or culture, there’s the question of who owns the customer relationship, is the partnership equal and much more to overcome.

Nonetheless, what I like about Faber/Mumsnet and possibly Amazon/Waterstones (although the jury is out on the deal for Waterstones) is that these have been driven, you assume, by people putting the customer first to build the opportunity. Once you do that, it makes it easier to agree on the difficult terms that always need tackling and you can focus on growth and opportunity that make the time and investment well worthwhile.

Something that i’ve found difficult to understand is how some businesses and consumers feel about Amazon. It seems that for many, there’s nothing they’d rather do than berate Amazon for destroying high street brands, not giving others a chance, being too ruthless, too big or not playing by some sort of set of rules.
As a publisher, Amazon is hugely important to me. A massive customer that I spend a large amount of time and effort thinking about. It’s also a customer that helps me more than any other. It gives me tools to sell more books, reports at a very detailed level and i can always check sales rankings, stock positions and more. In truth, I feel more in control and closer to my end customer through Amazon than I do through any other sales relationship.
As a consumer, I am an Amazon shopper. I know they will be competitive on price, have a wide range, availability and they do a reasonable job of targeting me based on my interests. But the truth is that i’m not that loyal. It wouldn’t take much for me to go elsewhere if another brand could give me the same level of confidence and offer something different, better and more compelling.
I think there are a host of ways to do this. Better targeting, better loyalty rewards, more tailored offers, better understanding of my interests, true multi-channel with my local high street to name a few.
Amazon has a huge market share, particularly in books and fast growing in many other categories, but that’s no reason for others to give up or to simply default to negative comments about the Amazon business model. It presents a challenge, that should be exciting and force creative and lateral thinking. A challenge that can be met online where the speed of growth and change is fast and a new idea can develop quickly. I hope in 2012 that more people begin to take that on.

Amazon yesterday removed the buy link from the Kindle app on IOS devices.

This is in compliance with the Apple terms that are forcing app developers to pay 30% to Apple and not circumvent this by making the purchase elsewhere. Whatever your view on this, and personally I think this power battle playing out is fascinating, it’s interesting to note how many people don’t understand what is going on.

At the time of writing, the UK app store had 44 comments, mostly one star, chastising Amazon for removing the link. A couple of people had reviewed with an explanation but nonetheless, this version is firmly a one star.

What’s interesting to me here is that there are those of us who follow this news who were well aware of the issue and it coming to ahead, but the majority of consumers simply have no idea what is playing out here. At the end of the day, it’s that consumer experience that is key and now Amazon have the challenge of working it out around the Apple terms.

Ding ding. Round 2.