(If you’d rather listen to me explain this, I did a LinkedIn video on this topic.) Let’s say I have a service on the Fair Labor Standards Act. It covers the whole Act, but the subscribers are always calling and asking the editors questions about chapter 4, which covers whether an employee is exempt or…
I enjoy podcasts, but one of my frustrations is that I’m usually listening to a podcast at a time when I can’t (or can’t easily) take notes — despite the fact that I always carry a little notebook in my pocket. I usually listen while I’m running, walking, or driving, and it’s not easy to…
(I wrote this in April of 2016, but it’s still an important message.) This article — Publishers: Weigh The Risks Of Platform Content Distribution — makes a lot of good points about the dangers publishers face when they put their content on a platform. Unfortunately, it starts off with a very common but fundamentally misleading…
A few years ago a publishing colleague asked about some of the simple subscription management plugins that work with WordPress. The question took me back to the days when I was first learning how incredibly complicated circulation systems can get, which also reminded me of the early days of iPad. When Apple first got into…
Sellers of Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) promise their software will gather data from various applications, and assemble it into a single-source-of-truth “golden record” for each customer. It’s a lovely vision, but rarely achieved. And that’s perfectly okay. The trick is to press on anyway. Let’s use this common CDP use case to illustrate the complexity:…
Pick-up artists claim to use psychological tricks to manipulate women into close encounters. The story is that if you follow a certain procedure, or method, you’ll play off instincts and hidden desires and such that women aren’t consciously aware of. I don’t know how much of that is true, but I’m pretty sure most people…
My wife and I recently switched our long-standing newspaper subscription to the digital edition (i.e., an e-newspaper). We both bring a tablet to the breakfast table. Here are some of our observations after a few weeks of daily reading. The biggest change is that we can both have the entire paper, rather than one of…
Our ability to collect and use data about our customers is skyrocketing, but consumer expectations can seem contradictory. How can we craft a data strategy that’s beneficial to our brands and to our customers? Read on to find out. On the one hand, many consumers don’t want websites to collect their data. On the other,…
Once a month I’ll be sending out a 4-page letter (in the mail) about publishing technology, with a focus on customer data. I’m sending an actual letter because everyone’s in-box is so crowded, and everyone’s mailbox is (relatively) empty. If you’re in publishing and are interested in technology issues, please send me your name and…
I know that sounds crazy, but it’s true. If a person doesn’t want to get your email, you don’t want to send it to them. It’s as simple as that. When a person gets an unwanted email, they have four main choices. Ignore it. Delete it. Unsubscribe. Mark it as spam. Three of those choices…
If it’s not ink on a page, it’s not a magazine. Some people get bent out of shape when I say this. They assume I’m being a Luddite, or expressing a dislike of digital publications. Neither is true, as I’ll demonstrate. In the same way that a magazine is ink on paper, a news app…
I get this question pretty frequently. If you’re one of those shoppers (like me) who looks at the price first, investigating Customer Data Platforms is going to frustrate you. The best answer to “how much does a CDP cost?” is “it depends.” But don’t worry. I will give you some general ideas. The pricing question…
You can read below, or watch this short video. The quote in the headline is an overly harsh standard I read in an online forum one day. It goes too far because there are some kinds of science that can never become engineering. Like social science. I mean … God forbid that social science becomes…
At the recent Renewd Summit, I had the pleasure of leading a roundtable discussion on the customer journey and engagement. The two sessions with fellow publishing professionals helped me to clarify some ideas on how to engage web visitors. Here are some of my takeaways from those discussions. Many customer engagement efforts start with trying…
If you want to know how your customers are interacting with your brand, should you use Google Analytics, or do you need a Customer Data Platform? Or maybe you need both. But how do you know, and when do you use which? This article should help you answer that question. The quick answer is that…