:[By Dorian BenkoilIt’s been a couple of days. Enough time to think, but the ideas are still fresh. Here are my takeaways:
— Content is Queen. Or King. Or maybe the Jack of Hearts. But it’s not the Joker that some would make it out to be. Because if you get the content right — whether it’s Sex in the City or WSJ.com — people will pay handily to get it. (If making good content were easy, the standouts wouldn’t stand out so much. I heard at least three people in the last two days say they couldn’t write to save their lives.) BUT you also have to have the distribution, display, packaging and marketing right. You have to fire on all cylinders. Good content in a vacuum is like the proverbial tree falling in the forest with no-one there. Which leads me to:
— Be very tuned in to your audience — surprising that, for example, what works on a consumer site does not work on a high-tech site like the one geared to SQL database geeks. That though we’re all human, behaviors diverge depending on the type of content. What works for Motley Fool — flashy graphics, color — did NOT work for the SQL guys. Which leads me to:
— But it’s OK to keep it simple, and “boring” as long as it works. If it clicks, it sticks. Which leads me to:
— Google as God (or Microsoft). It’s Coke. You can’t run your restaurant w/out it. I raised at least one eyebrow to hear the head of BeerNet say he changed wording of his columns — using common search terms to get a better ranking. So, we’re writing for search engines, instead of readers and users?
— There were more companies in the audience I had not heard of than had; entrepreneurialism is back. Yee haw.
— Integrate with the offline world:
– Take cancellations on the phone, and have your phone agents try to address whatever the issue it is, point to benefits of continuing, or if necessary bribe would-be cancellations with gifts or premiums. (At what point though, does the value of keeping customers get outweighed by the cost of pissing them off? I almost hate one ISP for giving me a hard time, and continuing to bill me, three times.)
– If someone wants what you’ve got in print, let them have it that way — they’ll pay. If they want to talk to a human being, let them.
– Phone people for high-end subscriptions. Online alone won’t persuade all your best prospects to to subscribe.
— Blogs Blogs Blogs. Podcasts?
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