Before the ubiquitous take-up of broadband and social media platforms, we didn’t have to think too hard about the business we were in. If you were a high street bookseller, you existed to sell books to your local community. Your USP was your location. If you were a B2B publisher, you were in the business of providing niche information that attracted advertising. Your USP was your content. It was all so simple. Do we honestly believe that such reasons-for-being will stand the test of time in the coming few years?
The harsh reality is that there is a completely new way of doing business and the companies that ‘get it’ are the ones with no baggage – in other words the pure-play online businesses. How can your local bookshop compete with Amazon? How can a controlled-circulation print title compete with an online-only title that personalises the content? The simple answer is they can’t and they shouldn’t try. What such businesses can do is re-evaluate their USPs and redefine them in the context of the world’s most efficient and richest communication channel. Your local bookshop will thrive if it treats Amazon as one of its wholesalers and redefines itself as an events business – arranging signing sessions and readings and author- or genre-led events. Your controlled-circulation title is serving a number of discrete niches in one publication. Online, these niches can be distinguished and targeted to provide the source of lucrative lead-generation income – unachievable in print.
The 21st-century reality is that any business that is looking to grow and prosper needs to recognise that it is in the relationship-building business. A bookseller’s assets are the relationships with authors’ publishers and personal service for the local community – not its books. A business publisher’s assets are its profiled readers and its position as the trusted intermediary between buyer and seller – not its content. The implications behind such re-positioning go far beyond building a new website. It digs deep into your working processes and the mind-sets of your employees.
Embracing change
The employees in a bookshop are there to help a customer find a book and recommend a new one. They need to be book lovers and empathise with readers. Employees in a B2B publisher should understand the needs of both readers and suppliers. The sales person should be interested in the content, as much as the editor should be interested in its commercial value. This means your employees need to talk with each other and collaborate over how best to serve your audience. Too often the bookshop employee is seen as an extension of the cash till and an employee in a publisher a silo-operative who might not even be in the same building as colleagues in other departments.
In a world of mass production, the assembly line process supported by waterfall project management is designed to keep people in specialist units that do not naturally collaborate and develop together. Flexible working, hot-desking and agile project management and development are all processes that support engagement that translates into customer-focussed products and services. In the world of publishing, there are businesses emerging that are demonstrably changing and responding to the biggest shift in communication – online social networking.
The Guardian contrasts starkly with the Times’ approach to content and its creation. It’s worth quoting in full the Guardian’s ten principles of “mutualisation” published earlier this year:
1. It encourages participation. It invites and / or allows a response.
2. It is not an inert, “us” to “them”, form of publishing.
3. It encourages others to initiate debate, publish material or make suggestions. We can follow, as well as lead. We can involve others in the pre-publication processes.
4. It helps form [also: enable / nurture] communities of joint interest around subjects, issues or individuals.
5. It is open to the web and is part of it. It links to, and collaborates with, other material (including services) on the web.
6. It aggregates and / or curates the work of others.
7. It recognises that journalists are not the only voices of authority, expertise and interest.
8. It aspires to achieve, and reflect, diversity as well as promoting shared values.
9. It recognises that publishing can be the beginning of the journalistic process rather than the end.
10. It is transparent and open to challenge – including correction, clarification and addition.
Compare this with a statement taken from the website of a B2B publisher:
“Our magazine reports on whatever our highly skilled team of journalists and Advisory Board think will be of interest to our readers.”
Which do you find the most scary?
