Below is a discussion on the crisis of typos in publishing.
Enjoy!
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Analytics' Role in Preventing Crises
In previous posts I have discussed the importance of a company’s willingness to engage in some sort of two-way communication with its customers, in addition to its other publics, in order to better understand potential problems and to deal with crisis in an actionable way.
This morning I came across an article about a way that HarperCollins is using a new technology to improve the way it understand and communicate with customers. This analytics technology, provided by Coremetrics Analytics, is sure to be a major element in HarperCollins’ push towards digitalization. Analytics is a fairly new way of gathering complete and accurate information about a company’s clientele and applying it in order to tailor messages specifically to appropriate audiences and market more efficiently.
HarperCollins’ Senior Vice President of Global Author Services, Carolyn Pittis, seemed very enthusiastic about the prospect of analytics streamlining the company’s push towards full digitalization of its content.
“With Coremetrics' help, we have now upgraded our ability to see consumer interactions with our global websites in new more actionable ways. This ensures we can provide the best available engagement information and context to our publishing groups and to the authors they serve.”
In class, one of our main focuses has been on assessing a company’s prospective landscape in a way that can actively work to prevent crisis. It seems that HarperCollins is making strides towards this objective by employing this new technology to better understand the needs of their customer base and using that information to formulate a more effective communication plan.
This morning I came across an article about a way that HarperCollins is using a new technology to improve the way it understand and communicate with customers. This analytics technology, provided by Coremetrics Analytics, is sure to be a major element in HarperCollins’ push towards digitalization. Analytics is a fairly new way of gathering complete and accurate information about a company’s clientele and applying it in order to tailor messages specifically to appropriate audiences and market more efficiently.
HarperCollins’ Senior Vice President of Global Author Services, Carolyn Pittis, seemed very enthusiastic about the prospect of analytics streamlining the company’s push towards full digitalization of its content.
“With Coremetrics' help, we have now upgraded our ability to see consumer interactions with our global websites in new more actionable ways. This ensures we can provide the best available engagement information and context to our publishing groups and to the authors they serve.”
In class, one of our main focuses has been on assessing a company’s prospective landscape in a way that can actively work to prevent crisis. It seems that HarperCollins is making strides towards this objective by employing this new technology to better understand the needs of their customer base and using that information to formulate a more effective communication plan.
Monday, March 1, 2010
Avoiding disaster: a new look at minimizing the risk of crises
When most of us think of crisis in the publishing field we immediately think of the impending financial doom caused by the transition to newer forms of electronic media such as the Internet, television and even e-books. In fact, in a quick Google search for the phrase “crisis in publishing,” the results list dozens of sites dedicated to extolling the massive financial holes in which many major publishers, including Harper Collins, finds themselves.
But under the standard definition of crisis (being a low probability, high risk unpredictable event), I cannot label these financial quandaries as crises. When Harper Collins announced a wage freeze in 2008, it was not the result of a crisis, but the result of necessary contraction due to trend-changes in the technology of the field. The collapse in book sales was, in fact, a high-probability event (I use the term event only to conform to the definition, because ‘event’ implies a one-time occurrence). It makes perfect sense given the approach of a wave of new technologies that are slowly making the entire print industry obsolete. The impending demise of publishing was hardly unpredictable.
But one article published in New York Magazine highlights Harper Collin’s interesting new approach to dealing with the decline of the book publishing industry that reforms the business structure of acquisitions rather than the technology.
According to the article, a small division of the large New York-based publisher is focusing on convincing authors to forgoes the traditional blockbuster advances in return for the guarantee to half of the book’s profits.
While this is probably not the saving grace for the publishing industry, it is an excellent example of how Harper Collins is changing in order to reassess and minimize risks. For instance, by avoiding the enormous up-front cost of title acquisition, the publisher essentially insures itself against legitimate crises. Under this model Harper Collins might not face astronomical losses if an author is involved in a scandal shortly after a book’s release. It might even profit.
Although it has not yet reflected reform in the company’s communication during a crisis, this business model acts as a preventative measure, mitigating the damage that most any stakeholder would endure as a result of a crisis.
But under the standard definition of crisis (being a low probability, high risk unpredictable event), I cannot label these financial quandaries as crises. When Harper Collins announced a wage freeze in 2008, it was not the result of a crisis, but the result of necessary contraction due to trend-changes in the technology of the field. The collapse in book sales was, in fact, a high-probability event (I use the term event only to conform to the definition, because ‘event’ implies a one-time occurrence). It makes perfect sense given the approach of a wave of new technologies that are slowly making the entire print industry obsolete. The impending demise of publishing was hardly unpredictable.
But one article published in New York Magazine highlights Harper Collin’s interesting new approach to dealing with the decline of the book publishing industry that reforms the business structure of acquisitions rather than the technology.
According to the article, a small division of the large New York-based publisher is focusing on convincing authors to forgoes the traditional blockbuster advances in return for the guarantee to half of the book’s profits.
While this is probably not the saving grace for the publishing industry, it is an excellent example of how Harper Collins is changing in order to reassess and minimize risks. For instance, by avoiding the enormous up-front cost of title acquisition, the publisher essentially insures itself against legitimate crises. Under this model Harper Collins might not face astronomical losses if an author is involved in a scandal shortly after a book’s release. It might even profit.
Although it has not yet reflected reform in the company’s communication during a crisis, this business model acts as a preventative measure, mitigating the damage that most any stakeholder would endure as a result of a crisis.
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