Can Flipboard Revolutionize The Publishing Business?

It just might be the coolest app in a world where cool shows up every minute. It’s so cool that I’ve had conversations lately in which seasoned professionals actually have hypothesized that Flipboard could be the basis for a huge digital content traffic spike, and a platform from which new content can grow. Can it revolutionize the publishing business? It doesn’t need to. Newspapers and magazines will take care of themselves (see my last blog post). And there’s never a silver bullet for a business that has been so radically changed, anyway. Yet, Flipboard is going to be a positive development for print. And here’s why:

Numbers: The last reliable report I heard regarding Flipboard numbers was in mid-December. At that time it was roughly 15 million. It shows the kind of exponential growth that will put it on a track to be a force for tablet devices. Yes, it’s loaded with cool factor. But this cool factor seems to have connected with an insane amount of people who are very thirsty for content. Engagement with the app has increased 10 fold: Users are set to flip more than four billion pages this month, up from the iPad’s monthly average of 650 million.

The Print Mix: Opinion, discovery and photos. Remember photos? Remember news photos? Well, they’re back. Flipboard is a master mix of everything that has been lost in the transition from print to digital. It has shaken the obsession that aggregators have had with blogs that lack expertise and replaced it with an uncanny knack for finding the best-of-the-best by surveying the quirky, newly legit and old establishment of content. And it has great photos!

Business Model: Flipboard is showing every sign of working with publishers to get good content to a tablet audience instead of making readers jump through hoops. Although it started with USA Today, it has had no problem incorporating local content. It has had no problem bringing international content in, as well. It has shown every sign of taking the best from newspapers and magazines to come up with a best-of-breed consumer product. The business model is open, so far.

Bottom line, Flipboard is creating excitement around content, and I can’t remember anything doing that in a long time. Print-to-digital has been a rough run for publishing. I expect digital-to-tablet to be a lot smoother!

From the desk of...

Sellers --

We had a great 2012. How great? I always measure sales team performance against the marketplace. I remember a lot of years in this business when everybody was a genius and everyone was successful mostly because it was hard not to be successful. There was just so much business to be had. But in 2012, it seems like accounts found more reasons to hang on to their money than to spend it. But we gave them reasons. The Internet and its audience gave them reasons. That added up to a great year.

Now we have a very similar playing field. Just because the clock is a week and a few days different than when you last seriously considered generating business, it doesn’t mean the world has changed. It would be nice if it did. But this year will continue to challenge any sales team because budgets are too tight, brand marketers' attitudes are too cautious, and consumer spending hasn’t dramatically recovered enough to change any of those things.

Yet, we need to grow the business. This can, and will, happen. Let’s approach this from a basic “get, keep, and grow” philosophy. “Get” is our business development effort. We will get more new business this year if we present the right advantages to our clients. Start as we always do with our audience. They are engaged, considering purchases, and still finding new ways to interact online. Continue with our ever-expanding ability to target key sections of that audience. You’ll end with an economically efficient way to advertise. Marketers must advertise. They can cut back for a while, but they can’t quit. That’s the basic internet “get” strategy for this year.

Then there are the clients we have already recently attracted. Maybe some of them are considering an even tighter budget for 2010; maybe some of them are on the fence about proportioning their budgets. We need to keep them through a consistent addition of targeting depth and technology. We need to continually show them new advertising technology and execution options. Enhanced targeting? Real-time bidding? These are some of the approaches that can keep a client interested in exploring a bigger budget.

The “keep” element of “get, keep, grow” is really close to a holding pattern. I’d say under 10 percent of our clients fit there. The “grow” strategy is our most important. We need to get into our best clients and find ways to get them to use more properties, consider bigger audience segments, test more products and in short, spend more money. I have rarely seen any client spend more money on Internet marketing and come away dissatisfied. Challenge them to grow. Challenge them to look at the audience that goes unaddressed.

A lot of sales has to do with attitude. Not a false aggression, but an attitude of confidence. Anyone that intelligently sells a quality internet product should have that confidence this year. It might not be a new year in terms of economic conditions. But it is a new start for a confident approach.