Business Media

We came across a post by Rory Brown, the former managing director at Incisive Media‘s interactive marketing division, on his site today. It offers some interesting thoughts for 2009.

Citing Rory’s post, he has outlined four tips:

1. Niche is the word. A lot of the successful media brands of the past 100 years have started off as niche vertical properties which really speak to the daily needs of their audiences. Over time as their industries have expanded these titles have become horizontals and have lost that cutting edge and relevance to their readers.

2. Media brands have to truly embrace community and offer a focal point for interested parties to gather, communicate, purchase, learn and share. This doesn’t mean adding a forum or social network to the side of an existing brand but rather re-engineering so that news distribution is no longer your central function.

3. Building tools, widgets, data and workflow products into your offering is key & adds value and relevance to your brand.

4. Provide a lot of value for free. I believe that the freemium model will really come to the fore but only for media owners who understand a multi-platform and digitally networked world.

It’s certainly interesting times as corporate publishers struggle to make the shift. And opportune times for start-up publishers too – particularly if they invest in creating a strong and trusted, new media brand.

You can read more on Rory’s blog here.

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This entry was posted on January 13, 2009 at 1:40 pm and is filed under News, Profiles.

Tags: business media, Business media predications, Rory Brown