No matter what industry you work in--it could be advertising or the chemical business or life insurance--there is now a steady stream of "daily briefings" that you can receive electronically to stay in touch with your professional world.
This is one of those subtle but very powerful trends that is having dramatic impact. In this case, the implications for how business-to-business marketers reach their targets is what it's all about. But it's also indicative of a major realignment in media delivery.
First, think about what this mean for B2B marketers. It poses amazing opportunity. Instead of being confined to reaching a target group in an occasional print publication or a once-a-year trade show, B2B marketers now have a regular channel they can latch onto. It might be as basic as buying media space in the various electronic newsletters that go to a group of key decision-makers. But it can go well beyond that.
Smart marketers can integrate daily briefings into their own social media platforms, using those platforms to highlight pinpoint insights that you can almost always mine from these vehicles. The trick is to move fast and to move constantly. Daily briefings regularly spot relevant trends that are often interesting, but also have a very short half-life. This is one of the by-products of the 24-hour Internet information cycle. But instead of whining about how complex and chaotic this makes things, the opportunistic marketer should exploit it.
Second, consider how this symbolizes the shift in media delivery. We hear about this on a much higher level with the discussions surrounding the decline of print publications, especially newspapers. But it's in this professional world where the changes are moving very rapidly and where we might just see major upheavals relatively quickly.
It's hard to imagine, for example, how traditional trade publications can survive much longer in print. Who is going to pay for these subscriptions? And the younger the pool of trade readers gets, the more rapidly this decline will take place.
Nonetheless, trades need information and steady insight. They can't function without it. It will be interesting to watch this trend over the coming months and years, as one industry after another transforms. Maybe we should pay less attention to the high visibility innovations like the iPad, and more attention to the micro trends emerging inside industry.
Let's stay tuned.
Yeah, I think it's hard to see how traditional trade publications can survive much longer in print.
Daniel Ferris
Posted by: DRTV | March 14, 2010 at 01:39 AM