For years now, I have been asked the question about how online media and advertising will negatively affect publishing. Well, in my opinion, the opposite is true. Of course, magazines have been hosting websites and posting both content and advertising there for well over a decade.
But currently, the web connection for the Business-to-Business publishing world has gone well beyond just websites and e-newsletters. Our content is now leveraged over all forms of social media. Using Hydraulics & Pneumatics as an example, our editors Alan Hitchcox and Mary Gannon as well as myself use our blogs as a means for communicating with our reader audience. In addition Mary and I use Twitter and LinkedIn to communicate with dedicated user groups.
In every case, we can use, refer to, and link to the same great fluid power content that is found in our monthly magazine and Fluid Power Handbook & Directory. By the way, our 2012-13 Fluid Power Handbook & Directory is available for the first time ever in January as a digital edition and was e-mailed to our digital readers and accessed from our website as well.
Social media offers us, and anyone else, the opportunity to use and reuse the ideas and solutions found in our magazine by simply forwarding links to our website, digital issues, or e-newsletters. In the past, the lawyers said a reader really needed a formal permission to reuse or pass along our content to an audience of any number. Today, you can use Twitter to refer hundreds and maybe thousands of readers instantly.
