Joshua Macht and Eric Hellweg of Harvard Business Review about lessons the publication has learned with its digital operation.
Macht and Hellweg write, “Let me give you one example. Early on, we would sign up subscribers to the magazine from our website, but we found that many of the customers who came to us from the web were disappointed with their subscriptions. That’s because early on our website and the magazine were totally separate entities with very different voices. Once we united the web and print organisation and redesigned both print and web to harmonise better, we saw better results. Today, the website is our top source of new customers. But that took us a few years to figure out.
“In many ways, the audience had been taken for granted at HBR. We probably had a ‘if we publish it, they will come’ mentality for years. On the web of course, where the options are limitless, the old model just didn’t hold up.
“Of course, we still work hard to provide the right publishing environment for our authors. But we’re equally concerned with respecting our reader’s valuable time. Early on, we set out to engage readers in a conversation online—not unlike the idea of participant centered learning, which is the bedrock of the business school case method that had been pioneered at HBS.
“To engage someone online takes a totally different set of publishing muscles. It also requires a constant balancing act between serving up what we know will get clicks versus what we think is important for the audience to know.”
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