Push or Pull?

By Yvonne Buma on 10 December 2009

Last week I attented the annual congress of the Customer Media Council. All speakers but one were talking about how we should move from print media to digital media. How we should do it and what the benefits would be. And as you can imagine the benefits would be enormous. If…. we would have a good content strategy. Firms like Albert Heijn are trying to move totally away from print.

Well, it got me thinking. To be honest, I do not believe going digital is always the right strategy. Companies make magazines for their relations and their employees. I don’t believe these will ever (or should ever) be replaced by digital means. You don’t get the magazine because you are so interested in what the company has to tell you. You would probably never go online to search for this kind of information. The magazine is pushed to you. But… once you get a good looking magazine you will browse through it. And if the content interests you, you will start reading it. Then you are pulled into the magazine en the content the company provides you. And this might even push you to the website and other digital content. (Even ebooks can’t do that for you as a company)

The online content might be great. But…. It is pull content. I will have to know what I am looking for and then I can pull it out. But first of all I have to be interested and know I might find the information on your website. O.k. I may find it because I follow someone’s tweets and they call my attention to your content (this was a big topic to) or you as a company get active in some community and push people to your content that way.

But let’s be honest, this will never replace the push capacity of a well made magazine that is sent to you as customer or other relation of the company. So: however interesting and effective new media may be, lets not forget the virtues of old media…

Oh yes, the only speaker not talking about the benefits of twittering etc was the president of the BNO (designers guild). He had a great speech about the importance of visual design. This was convincing and interesting.

tagged with: print, media

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