Thursday, June 11, 2009

eMartketing Thoughts: 5. Store Once, Render Many

Context is the metadata, bibliographic information, marketing materials that helps everyone find content and of course value it. A significant amount of the Context can be derived direct from the content itself and what we once thought of as content can now be used to promote, sample and validate before you buy.

Today publishers should be storing everything once and render many times. The rendering should be as much as possible dynamic and avoid holding multiple versions and formats in many digital folders and even databases. We should be creating context directly from content avoiding further duplication and effort. Publishers should ask themselves how many times they hold the same context information, which is the authoritative source and who and how it can be changed? We all saw the rise of the ‘book in hand systems’ in wholesalers who couldn’t trust the data feeds. We can now surely do it better.

Delivering emarketing marketing becomes so much simpler when the widget, the digital review copy, the digital catalogue, the online rendition are basically the same file or files seen through different viewers. Mass marketing and direct marketing materials are the same but again viewed through a different viewer by different people. Bibliographic feeds are no longer dry bits and bytes, but now are whatever is appropriate and in many cases can be cut from the content itself. Finally, we now see the emergence of the digital emarketing container which not only reshapes what we distribute but who distributes it and when.

eMarketing today is not just about creating many experiments, social sites, direct campaigns, viral marketing but all these and above all serving the existing channel and enriching their opportunity to sell more physical and of course digital works.

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