Now there is a service especially for producing and distributing magazines called MagCloud.

The magazines are printed on a “80# matte text stock that is FSC-certified and 50% recycled — 10% post consumer waste and 40% pre-consumer waste.” You supply an 8.5″x11″ original and they trim it down to a final size of 8.25″x10.75″. You can have any number of pages between 4 and 60 (and it must be a multiple of 4).

Here is an example magazine put together by the University of Arizona’s Dream|Reality Print Project:

All you need to do is upload a formatted PDF. MagCloud charge 20 cents a page and then you can put your own markup – they sell directly to your audience and mail it to them and send you your markup directly. Too easy!

Unfortunately, they have yet to work out a subscription service but they are working on it!

~ Benjamin Franklin

Don’t understimate knowledge, it’s one of the most important sources of power.

(Image Source: Dannyman)

~ Unknown

It’s very easy to dismiss something because we tried it and it have the result we wanted. This happens a lot in marketing. Say it’s letter dropping – isn’t it easy to letter drop 50 or 100 letters and when nothing comes of it, just write it off?

Often things don’t work not because the idea was bad but because the execution was poor and the effort was half hearted. And you’ll find in marketing, the main source of success comes from consistency.

I like this quote because it’s a reminder that often its just some extra committed work that can really make the difference between having a superb result or none at all.

What I particularly liked is that they have created social media guidelines that are easy to understand and balance responsibility with acceptance of the use of these new channels.

He says that staff should apply four standards when using social media:

do not mix professional and personal in ways likely to bring [the company] into disrepute
do not undermine your effectiveness at work
do not imply [the company's] endorsement on personal views
do not disclose confidential information obtained at work

I’ve removed the reference to the ABC as I think these four standards would make a good starting point for a policy document for employee use of social media.

And this wasn’t the only thing that the broadcaster had to say which was interesting.

Next week the ABC will also launch the first in a series of widgets, called My ABC Widget, which will allow people to add ABC content to their own websites, blogs and other online spaces… By giving individuals the ability to add ABC news stories to their life on the web, we improve the ease with which they can access our content – it’s another example of providing content to audiences in a format they want.

Can’t wait to see what widgets they’ll be offering!

Source: ABC’s Mark Scott outlines digital media plan

~ George Bernard Shaw

I remember a famous film maker saying that everyone had ten bad films in them so that the best thing for a beginning film maker to do was to make as many films so as to get those bad films out and sooner start making good ones.

Don’t take “failures” too heart, even the most successful people have them – it’s the attitude they have to failures that make them great. They learn from them and move on.

I found particularly useful a list of 10 conversations for companies to monitor and I’ve added some of my own thoughts.

It’s very easy with current technology to set up automatic alerts to track mentions of your company’s brand name, website and key personnel (for example set up a Google Alert) – but the paper suggests this is not enough, you need to be looking for particular conversations and you should be treating different types of conversations differently. Some of these conversations may never even mention your brand (at least at first).

1. The Point of Need: If you can meet people at their point of need, you are not interrupting or pitching, you are helping and responding to an expressed need

This is often why Google Adwords is so successful with certain search keywords. People are looking to solve a problem at that particular point in time so they are far more receptive to advertisements that fit exactly with their need.

2. The Influencer: Listen to the industry influencers and strong online voices

It’s important in any market to know who are the main influencers – getting an endorsement can mean instant sales success for your product or service. If you want to influence yourself, look to see what they are doing (and also what they are not doing for better or for worse). Model and differentiate.

But it goes further than just how you can influence. Keeping tabs on the main influencers is a simple way of keeping up to date with the key information and trends in your industry. Just remember to allow yourself to think for yourself and express your own individuality.

3. The Crowd: Monitor and participate in the broader industry conversation to identify which related topics garner the most attention and engagement

Don’t just look to the influencers and don’t underestimate the influence of a crowd. Quite often you’ll find that crowds behave differently to influencers – they have different experiences, comfort zones and sometimes, different problems. Influencers are usually early adopters who pick up trends that crowds may never accept and can tire of them long before they even become popular. Remember who your target market is and listen to them, try to understand them.

4. The Competitors: Listen to conversations about your competitors brand, including all conversation types

You’ll compete better if you understand your competition. What are their strengths? What are their weaknesses? How does this create threats and opportunities for your company/product/service? You can also look to see if you can insert your product/service as an alternative.

5. The Crisis: Catch issues before they go viral or mainstream, when possible

“Forewarned is forearmed” as the saying goes. Don’t think you can just ignore issues and they’ll go away. The internet has ruined many a brand when problems go viral. Take control of the issue while you can.

6. The Campaign Effect: Measure the conversation effect caused by your social media (or other) campaign

Look for ways of measuring conversations – count the number of blog posts but also look at it qualitatively – is what you’ve seeded being picked up in a meaningful way. Look at how different campaigns get picked up – what works? What barely gets a murmur?

7. The Inquiry/Question: Answering questions online is an opportunity to gain valuable insight and also promote your strengths, product benefits, customer service, personality, etc. (and you are not pitching, you are answering a question)

Provide a face in the community. Not only does it get people at their point of need (see #1) but web services like Yahoo Answers get significant amounts of traffic and often rate on the front page of Google for searches for solutions to particular problems. By answering one person’s question, you can efficiently answer for many more readers searching for that answer.

8. The Customer Problem: Listen for known or potential customer issues so you can respond prior to “the complaint”

It may not be that someone is directly complaining about your product, but they may raise an issue or just be talking about your type of product/service in general. Catch it before it escalates. Also see it as valuable feedback and act on it.

9. The Compliment: Say thank you and show genuine appreciation of compliments; these online references and testimonials can prove valuable

By saying thanks, you give the person complimenting even more reason to go out and recommend your product/service again. Remember to collect them (asking permission of course) – social proof (that is proof that people’s peers like and use something) is one of the big factors in persuading potential buyers.

10. The Complaint: Listen for posts complaining about your company, product, service or staff and then respond quickly and transparently

There are few products/services in this world that are perfect. Don’t take a complaint (however badly it’s worded) personally. Don’t attempt to blame the complainer. Get a response up there quickly and be honest. If they are being truely unreasonable then don’t stoop to their level and be similarly rude – if you keep your calm and attempt to genuinely help, onlookers will see who the troublemaker is. On no account ever, ever, ever enter into a flame war, you’ll alienate readers and it’s too easy for such a conversation to be picked up by a blog and then spread as news.

Even though it was a year ago, these trends show no sign of waning.

From the Summit, he sumed up what he sees as the Trends That Will Help Define the Future of PR and Marketing and identifies three main trends:

The Attention Crash
People have access to increasing amounts of information with only a finite amounts of time – not even including any increases in work and stress levels, it’s clear to see that Attention is a commodity that will only become more precious. Time is not free. Marketing needs to be able to

“break through the clutter and ’stick’… keep things short, simple and visual.”

A secondary industry that is already developing due to information overload is that of discerning gatekeepers whom Rubel calls “curators”. They sort the wheat from the chaff (i.e., like services like Digg). There’s another level of curators who go further and deliver it to us as bread (i.e., the NY Times or Wikipedia – they summarise all the information into something easy to consume and digest).

Social Networks Become “Like Air”

Basically, online social networking is not as new as many marketers would have us believe:

It’s simply a digital, global and scalable manifestation of our desire to communicate with other humans. The technology makes it easy for like-minded individuals to connect and collaborate around the topics they care about. This can range from personal to professional interests. A lot of it revolves around social causes…

Social networking software facilitates things that people want to do in areas they care about.

Brand marketers that may be tempted to build their own social networks need to consider that there may not be room in people’s lives for more than one or two. They will need to plug into the social “air” supply that the large networks are building across the Web so that consumers can stay connected to their existing networks.

Remember that the Attention Crash will mean that a whole lot of noise also comes from social networks and people are likely to ignore or abandon those networks that aren’t fulfilling their needs as they just add to the Information Clutter.

Google: The Reputation Engine

We should already be aware of the importance of search (and Google’s importance in search). Well that’s only going to grow as the Attention deficit increases (why take the time to do more than a Google search if you get good results?). Search is no longer search, it’s media (and indeed, Google is already a leading publisher of media with its acquisitions of YouTube and Blogger)

The search engine algorithms are only going to get better at determining what is quality content and this will reinforce the trust people already have in search engines.

Communicators will need to know how to create and earn content that is not only findable, but worthy of discussion so that it earns and maintains visibility in Google – which often makes judgments based on quality.

No arguments here! Often in internet marketing, there’s a lot of talk about how to game the system, how to easily acquire higher rankings quickly. While I’m all for optimisation and marketing strategies – in the end, your website needs to have real value on it or you’re working on borrowed time. Google will catch up and deliver its dreaded Google slap. Your content needs to contribute to the conversation.

What can you do?

It’s often said that the only thing you can predict is change, but Charlene Li (Rubel’s co-panellist at the Summit) has a few tips in her post The future of social networks: Social networks will be like air:

So what is a social network, marketer, or developer to do? Here are my recommendations:

• Create linkages between services based on individually-controlled identity federation
• Compete on creating the most compelling social experience, not social graph lock-in
• Develop social applications that have meaning
• Integrate social networks into existing activities
• Design business models that reflect the value created by people’s social network

I’m amazed at the number of social networking services that have popped up that appear merely to try and get a particular demographic into a (their) social network without offering that demographic anything that’s really useful. Determine your target audience’s needs and mindset – look at what they are currently doing and see how you can create a service that can facilitate them doing it better. Don’t expect them to suddenly want to do something new because it’s got the “social networking” label attached to it.