The notion of ‘push’ is when you push your content towards an audience who may or may not be aware of its existence. In a ‘pull’ environment the consumer pulls their content towards themselves because they are interested in it.
To enable push to work well, you may have to advertise your product or offer incentives through competitions or prizes, enter into joint ventures with partners, create an email list. For pull to work well you may want to syndicate your content, create a community, build a platform that supports API’s. Social media sites are a kind of combination of the two ideas – you are putting out personal data for people to view, but at the same time by joining your network and looking at your twitter feed your friends can pull that content to themselves.
I think its quite difficult for a publishing business to get its head round pull, as publishing feels much more like a push business to me. I often think of the trouble the established music industry has had with the possibilities that the online world has offered. An interview with Doug Morris in Wired magazine talks around the issues that Universal are facing….
Morris was as myopic as anyone. Today, when he complains about how digital music created a completely new way of doing business, he actually sounds angry. “This business had been the same for 25 years,” he says. “The hardest thing was to get something that somebody wanted to buy — to make a product that anybody liked.”
And that’s what Morris, and everyone else, continued to focus on. “The record labels had an opportunity to create a digital ecosystem and infrastructure to sell music online, but they kept looking at the small picture instead of the big one,” Cohen says. “They wouldn’t let go of CDs.” It was a serious blunder, considering that MP3s clearly had the potential to break the major labels’ lock on distribution channels.
Its probably still not clear what the best strategies are, but certainly there is a lot of discussion on the web at the moment. Dion Heathcliffe’s latest post on his socialcomputingmagazine blog inspired me to put this post together in the first place. Ten Aspects of Web 2.0 Strategy That Every CTO and CIO Should Know. It comes complete with one of his colourful infographics. Which you can click on to enlarge.
Its great that there are solutions out there and by building content management systems that support open standards for data on the web. We can easily give people the opportunity to pull our content towards them. As reported in the nytimes ‘Bits’ blog, API technology is a challenge but also full of possibilities.
‘Earlier this month, Mashery helped MTV.com publish its A.P.I., which allows any Web developer – say, someone building a shrine to Led Zeppelin – to ingest and display all the relevant videos from the voluminous MTV music video archive.
The irony of MTV Networks, a division of the legally assertive media-giant Viacom, opening up its vaults was not lost on Mr. Michels.
“The people who used to say protect, protect, protect are changing their tune,” he said. “This is a means of putting simple rules on how content is distributed. You can get content out there in a rational and controlled matter. That is the bigger story of the Internet right now.”
In conclusion I’ll end with a link to Tools of Change for Publishing by O’Reilly which is provocatively titled “CEOs Must Have API Literacy” , a quote which pulls from exact editions blog post by Adam Hodgkin
Why does it matter whether your CEO knows what an API is? It matters because publishers (and newspaper owners, TV networks, film studios, content makers of all shapes) are not going to allow Google (YouTube, he she or ItTube, or anybody else) to manage and define the API which has access to their content. Having, or buying into, allying with the API’s which manage and accesses your content may be the key decision for media companies in the next decade. Either your CEO knows what an API is, and can find out how, in strategic terms, to negotiate Google’s, Amazon’s, Facebook’s and Apple’s, or he/she needs to be a media genius who does it by gut instinct (Rupert Murdoch is the only one of those that I can think of and he is the wrong side of 70). The heads of Random House, Conde Nast, Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette and Pearson really ought to have an intuition about the way their business can develop an API to the servers which are hosting all their content. I wonder if any of them do?