Small media companies need flexible, cost-effective tools that can be ramped up quickly and with little technical expertise. Actually, large media companies want those things as well, but the enterprise requirements of companies with 50 or 100 publications put them in another league.

Here at eMedia Vitals, we run our business almost exclusively using "cloud-based applications". That's the fancy way of saying that the applications we use are on the Internet and we pay for them by the month.

Dear Santa,

My hours and salary have been cut, my workload increased, and my publisher has assigned me to cover several events over the next few months. All I want this holiday season are tools to streamline my duties and get the job(s) done. The items on this wish list would be very helpful—and they're all under $300:

Performing a mailing list inventory is not an easy task but it has many benefits and should be undertaken once every few years.  Among the benefits:

Email subscriber lists are cherished resources that, unfortunately, are usually hammered into inconsequence by eMedia companies. There are many causes of list fatigue, including a lack of intradepartmental coordination. As disparate divisions use the same list for their own needs, the result is a flood of email washing over subscribers, hurting open rates, click throughs, conversions and publisher reputations.

If you publish a newspaper or magazine, you are likely bombarded with requests to “use more social media”. Deciding what to focus on can make you insane. The best advice I can give is to make a plan and start trying different tools. 

Make a plan

Write a simple plan for your social media efforts so that everybody is working from the same assumptions. The plan should address the following questions:

It’s a given that you need a mobile version of your website in order to deliver a good user experience on a mobile phone.  But does the content itself need to be tweaked as well? You bet it does.

Assuming you have a mobile version of your site, can’t you just strip out the graphics, images, pdfs and flash and call it a day?  If you want to make your content useful on a mobile device, you’ll need to do more.

Here are 5 factors to consider for publishing to mobile platforms:

Jim Spanfeller's article on Paid Content about online pricing discipline, advertising vs. direct response, and the evils of ad networks is a good read, but I think it misses the mark.  Here's a telling quote:

If you’re in magazine, newspaper or online media ad sales, then this scenario should seem familiar: It’s Friday morning and in comes an RFP from an ad agency, saying your publication/site is being considered for an online campaign. “OK,” you think, “this Friday is starting off good.” Then you get to the part where the RFP is due back by the following Monday. “Mother f#$%er!!!”

Retaining existing customers should be a key goal of any company’s marketing strategy these days.  It’s all too easy to get complacent once you’ve sent a new customer your standard suite of follow-up emails and received a few checks from them.  Most companies put so much effort into customer (or audience) acquisition that retention measures, especially customer service, get mostly ignored by senior management.