mBossed

m-Bossed.com is a blog dedicated to finding, researching, evaluating, and reporting, on the most critical changes for print media. In a short 25 years since the introduction of the Macintosh computer, print media and its supporting industries have downsized, upsized, and evolved. The evolution will continue as the eyes on print are blurred and segmented by an offline/online combination that includes social media.

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Best Of

photo credit: Snap®

Best by Page Views

QR Codes Apple's iPad is not an eBook reader iPhone Apps for Salesmen and Road Warriors Top 10 Print Blogs Future of Print: The QR Code 411

Author's Pick

Social Media with Kodak's 4 E's The Business of Free: The Free Generation Future of Print: Cloud Computing Manufacturing's New Frontier Social Media = New Buried Treasure VDP lessons from mine. Magazine.

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In Search of IT

The last day of EFI's Connect user conference ended with a panel discussion directed by the company's CEO, Guy Gecht. The panel was assembled to answer questions on the current, and more importantly the future, level of optimism for the printing industry. The panel was comprised of Tim Fischer of NAPL, Jack Kenny of Label and Narrow Web magazine, and Cary Sherburne of WhatTheyThink. On the topic of pessimism, the panelists seem to be gushing with depressed statistics and anecdotes about the industry. Tim Fischer spoke of a period in the industry he referred to as the fourth "Great Divide", a fast paced change period based on electronic communication. With 20% of the industry typically representing market leaders and 10% destined for failure, Tim implied that a large portion of the rest of the industry would suffer if they do not change their business models. Cary enforced this theme by stating economic research data collected by WhatTheyThink which indicates a further contraction of the industry. Shipments down to 58 billion from 87.5 billion that will be produced by 40% fewer establishments. "Reactive and inactive printers have to worry," said Jack Kenny which seems to sum up the general outlook. As for glimpses of bright spots, the panelists had less to say. Packaging, printed electronics, a re-focused media mix, social media, lean manufacturing, integrated manufacturing, and continuous improvement were mentioned as ways to grow profits. Companies not already focused on process improvements and aspects of lean manufacturing, I am afraid, are on the slippery slope to join Tim's 10% of the industry. Market leaders, no doubt, will also continue to seek out emerging niche segments of the industry that provide higher profitability like packaging and printed electronics. If recent history offers a guide, however, then printers who exploit technology to create new business models will win the game. After all, the printing industry is rapidly being driven by its symbiotic relationship with all things digital. If you are not sure what these pictures represent for the printing industry, find out now.

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Web-to-Print in the Real World: A discussion with Andrew Simmons - Part 2

The following is part two of the conversation with Andrew Simmons of the Social Print Experiment and Printelope about starting a Web-to-Print business. Ryan: Considering more printers are getting into the W2P market on a daily basis, what is your competitive advantages or differentiators? Andrew: W2P is just a tool, a means to get a job plugged into your workflow maybe a little faster. Building a library of their projects and making it easier to order locks them in a little bit more. But it still boils down to customer service and the skill of the digital press operator. It doesn't matter how well your W2P system works if you can't color match to a proof or communicate with the customer as to why their work isn't being done correctly or in a timely manner. Yet, we run into it every day when we go to meet with customers getting work done elsewhere. Customer service is king. Ryan: What is the plan for competing with the established W2P sites such as Vistaprint, Printing for Less, etc? Andrew: No interest in competing with them. Business cards for $9 has no profit model for us. But ask us to print on plastic, and we can do what they can't. We're also being selective in who we do work for. We don't want to chase payment. We don't want to be priced down, and if it means we do less work, at least it will be at a higher profit margin. Think about the numbers. If I sold $500K in printing with a 10% profit margin vs $150K with a 35% profit margin, look how much less work I had to do to make the same amount of money. We want to partner with the right companies. Ryan: Are you expecting a huge amount of Printelope's traffic to come via social media outlets? If so, which platforms are you most focused on and why? Andrew: Social media is really about building the brand, and not so much about trying to sell through it. We drive a lot of eyeballs to our SPE site through Twitter but it doesn't translate at this point into hard sales. The two platforms I'm working with are Twitter and LinkedIn. I'm not much into Facebook, it so far has not been a success for us yet. Ryan: Do you think the concept and business plan can be carried exclusively through social media marketing? Andrew: No. The social media is part of our toolbox, but it's not going to replace the feet on the street; the conversations in real-time with potential customers/partners. I spend as much time cold calling as I do building our social media presence. Ryan: After four months since going live what have been the biggest challenges and successes? Andrew: The biggest challenge is keeping our sanity in that tiny 300 foot production space we have. There are three of us there sometimes, and we're tripping over each other trying to produce work. (We've actually been looking to make a move to a slightly larger place in the next 60 days). The other challenge is time. To create the video we do on the experiment takes about 12 hours of work, piecing everything together. Add to that a few hours each night for the social media strategy; a few hours for cold calling and appointments; and pretty soon you're running out of time. We need more people to help out, but we can't make that leap to our first full-time employee until the work starts piling up. For the success, it's seeing all of this data we are collecting on every experiment we're doing within the SPE. Finding the right customers, and which ones to avoid like the plague; what social media strategies are working, and which ones just suck; and of course, meeting customers and working with them to solve a problem that their own original printer never saw (or thought to discuss with them). They're baby steps, but at the end of the Experiment, hopefully the data can help other printers in the same dilemma that we started out with. Ryan: Any final thoughts? Andrew: I hope that other printers will look to our site as a resource for what works, and what doesn't (or maybe what we should do different), and can apply these same principles to their own business. It doesn't have to be a replicated idea, like purchasing the same press as we have - any press will do, just some do things better. I've spoken to a great many printers who love this concept and share it with their friends, and I would encourage the so that we can build an even bigger group of people who can help us all to figure it out through consensus, and use it to profit from their own implementation of it, as we do.

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Web-to-Print in the Real World: A discussion with Andrew Simmons

The following is a conversation with Andrew Simmons of the Social Print Experiment and Printelope about starting a Web-to-Print business. Ryan: How did you come up with the name Printelope for your Web-to-Print storefront? Andrew: Printelope is two works shoved together - Print, and Envelope. We originally thought we would print a lot of envelopes with the MGI DP60 press, since doing envelopes on the press is highly profitable, and easy. Ryan: Why did you limit your product mix to static cling, envelopes, and letter head, for the site? Andrew: I don't want to fight in the trenches for the 13x19 work, the same stuff that every HP, Nexpress and Xerox digital printer sells. Those price points are very competitive, and there are a lot of printers treading water, selling cheap enough to get the work but not enough to make money. We choose to print what others can't, which drives our profit margin up. Ryan: Will you continue to add more items to the site? Andrew: We're adding more envelopes, more specialty stocks, but none of the common items. Business cards? No interest. Tabloid prints on 60# offset. No thanks. But plastics, mylars, static cling, envelopes - I want to print it all, at a fair but profitable price. Ryan: Is this your first W2P site build? Andrew: In this project, yes. I actually built a simple web2print system with a vendor for a business card site for a hospital 9 years ago. It was on the PageDNA platform, before they were PageDNA, and it was like an "Ah ha" moment when I realized that the people I was talking to today were the same ones from 9 years ago. They even remembered my support name at the time, which was a reference to my height - sixfoot8inches. Incidentally, that same system is still in use today by that same hospital. Ryan: Do you lean more toward perfecting and building out one site or having multiple storefronts? Andrew: Perfecting a site is what I like to do, since once I have the site done I can clone them and the just customize the options for it. PageDNA makes it very easy to do, and I could have 20-30 stores almost overnight once I perfect the first store. Ryan: How crucial, in your opinion, is customer service from your W2P vendor in determining the level of success and time frame for launching a site? What other criteria did you use for narrowing down your selection to PageDNA? Andrew: Customer service is very important to the success of a site. The intricacies of a system take some time to learn, and even with as much time as I've put in to it, I still find that I can't remember where to find something. PageDNA also has a great professional services offering at a small cost, which I would recommend to anyone going down this route. I was able to build my initial site without much help, but I already had a feel for the system since I had worked with something similar 9 years ago. The other criteria for the selection really had came down to a gut feeling, and whether or not they would be around to support me in the future. There are a TON of web2print solutions out there, and many with not a large customer base, which would be the bread and butter of their own survival. One company I had included in the criteria had changed hands, was regrouping, and basically said they couldn't operate as an ASP model. If I had selected them and then 6 months down the road they closed, what happens to my work? Whether you build a web2print site a la carte or use a packaged system, I really think it takes about three months to get it built and tuned.

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Print Blogs Leaving an Imprint #FollowFriday

A lot of people treat social media outlets like the little brother they had growing up - cool until you want to ditch him for something else. Literally thousands of Facebook pages, Twitter profiles, and blogs, are created then vanish within a few short months. At least one print vendor and several print providers have added to these lost pages. One blog just resurfaced last week after a year long hiatus! To celebrate the print providers that have stayed the course, here are some blogs that are entertaining and informative.

Hotcards.com @hotcards Anne Stewart manages to always find interesting information to share in a witty, conversational writing style.

Copy Craft Printers @copycraft Things are always done a little differently in Texas. Copy Craft continues this tradition by posting useful how-to type information such as their HD Prepress File Preparation series in an typical sea of bland blogs (not this list of course).

PacBlue Printing @pacblueprinting Across the border, this digital printer uses their blog to play a game of 'What is it?' from their image scans. It's kind of addicting in a Tetris kind of way.

Design to Print @dtpxpress A gallery of interesting wide format work to spark the creative juices.

Know of other interesting print provider blogs? Leave them in the comment section!

photo credit: OliBac

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More, more, more. Giving away the sell.

After reading the last few posts by Andrew over at the SocialPrintExperiment, I pondered these questions. What do you think?

Would the print industry, as compared to others, be at the top of the list in terms of instant or negotiated discounting?

What is the line between negotiating, haggling, begging, and stealing?

How is the client/vendor role different in other cultures? India is just one example where price negotiation and discounting is considered standard practice.

Watch this video from ScofieldEdit. Does it look familiar?

SocialPrintExperiment: There's a Fungus Among Us, Just Throw it in Please

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Pricing Bias

Odds are you will not see many Louis Vuitton bags at Walmart unless they are of the New York city street vendor variety. Both companies can thrive because they serve completely different markets. After all, the person willing to spend over $1,000 on a handbag is probably not interested in walking the aisles of the high volume, low price retail king. The discrepancy lies in the pricing bias - intentionally setting price points to attract a particular buyer demographic. The same pricing bias can be found in every consumer market. I will gladly pay $7 for a burrito from Chipotle over the $1.99 Taco Bell burrito supreme. Leaving the perceived nutritional benefits aside (although Chipotle does use naturally raised meat products), I will pay three times the price solely because of the customer experience. Chipotle exudes an upbeat energy from the fast, courteous service to their clean counter tops. Whether you like it or not, your product pricing largely drives many of your business decisions resulting in a predilection toward a particular type of client. Market leaders, however, usually set a pricing point within consumers' reach of the competition while still offering superior products or services. As above, most consumers would not have much of a purchasing pain threshold from a $2 to $7  burrito. A lot of consumers will likewise pay $1000 for an Apple Macbook over a cheaper PC because of the perceived benefits: function, design, capabilities, or the reality-distortion-cool-factor. For printers, being a low price leader may not always be the right solution. The supporting services such as on-time delivery, quick turnaround, design capabilities, paper selection, finishing techniques, or other, could be the differentiators for changing your pricing bias. Offering the right products to the right customers at the right price does not have to be as elusive as finding Louis Vuitton toting Walmart shoppers.

photo credit: AchimH

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Making Happiness

photo credit: lilit

The resource rich Norwegians, tree hugging Danish, and forward designing Swedes, all have a few things in common. They are geographically referred to as Nordic countries but, more importantly, are also overflowing with a bunch of happy people. The World Database of Happiness says so. Each score above 7.5 on a 10 point scale which implies they have stable governments, economies, and social structures. Togo, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe, unfortunately, rank at the bottom of rankings, all of which score lower than both Iraq and Afghanistan. Life here is a constant struggle for survival. Happiness, as it turns out, does not like hardship. Happiness needs more than economic prosperity to thrive. Surprisingly, trust has a high correlation with how happy we feel. Trust is really just a learned behavioral expectation of security and dependence - reliability in someone or something. In our everyday routines we place an enormous amount of trust in ourselves, other people, companies, and government. We trust the bus driver to get us to and from safely. We trust the cook not to spit in our food. We trust UPS to deliver our packages on time. We trust the government to offer protection and security. Companies too, who create a circle of trust, provide a better path toward customer happiness. Harley Davidson, Apple, Google, Johnson and Johnson, Amazon, and Coca-Cola, are just a few companies that have built their businesses on a level of trust and have, in turn, benefited financially.

Hundreds of thousands of users trust both Apple's and Amazon's online stores to store purchase information for one-click ordering.

Tylenol is the pain reliever of choice whose trust only strengthened from prompt, comprehensive safety recalls by Johnson and Johnson.

Harley Davidson is able to mightily outsell the competition because bikers trust they will deliver a quality bike and membership to an elite club.

What are you doing to build customer trust that affects loyalty and happiness?

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Espresso's New Brew?

The Espresso was designed to be the book dispenser at every corner shop as ATMs are to money. On Demand Books, the concepts creator, can now seriously pursue world domination after partnering with Xerox on a hardware redesign. The Espresso Book Makers (EBM) will now be powered by the Xerox 4112 to print, bind, and trim, a finish book while you wait (about four minutes). Each EBM is connected to On Demand Book's proprietary EspressNet software to retrieve book titles to print. The EBM, if given the chance, could brew many more flavors. Beyond publishing existing copyrighted works, the machine could become an integral cog in the Printernet. Combined with an easy to use online or kiosk style interface, anyone could purchase their own user generated content off the Internet. Printing blogs, Twitter streams, Facebook updates, could be one flavor. Printing personal news booklets from RSS feeds, web clippings, or Read it Later and Evernote type functionality could be another flavor. Using four color print would expand the possibilities to photo books, calendars, scrapbooks, et al. Connecting the EBM to the massive amount of user generated content on the Web, might be the fastest route to making it as ubiquitous and useful as the ATM.

photo by: LoopZilla

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5 Ways to Stay Social

5 Ways to Stay Social

Clearly define goals before starting. Managing customer experiences, building a loyal community, sharing valuable information, extending customer value, conducting market research, or a combination?

Identify a cross functional team based upon the goals. Ideally you will want to have tech enthusiasts, educators, information mavens, marketers, management, etc.

Assign one person as the chief of social media. The ring leader. The linchpin. The one who rallies all of the troops to keep the conversations moving.

Listen before you start.

Never stop trying or learning.

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Vanishing Act

Now you see it, Now you don't

Entertainers like David Copperfield and Chris Angel are hugely successful. With a slight of hand or misdirection, they create a controlled environment of alternate realities. The staple of any magician's repertoire is the vanishing act - impossibly turning solid objects into ether. Almost any physical object can vanish in the blink of an eye, including the Statue of Liberty. Businesses on social media platforms, such as blogs and Twitter, are performing their own vanishing acts. After starting good intentions and ambitious goals, reality sets in. Social media, done well, requires a clearly defined direction and lots of time. By design, anyone can create a profile and join social media sites for free. An easy barrier to entry might explain why only 7 to 10 million blogs are active at any point according to research by blog search engine Technorati. To add further insult to injury Technorati's CEO, Richard Jalichandra, stated in a New York Times article that a paltry 50,000 to 100,000 garner most of the attention.

95% of Blogs Abandoned - New York Times

Recent research into Twitter shows the same bleak results. According to post at the Harvard Business Review blog, the average number of lifetime tweets per user is 1! Twitter must be one heck of a boring place, right? On the contrary, the reality is Twitter has a very active user group. Based upon their research and my own experience, Twitter is made up of a small percentage of prolific tweeters and a tremendous amount of people standing around with their hands in their pockets. Nielson Media confirmed this trend by finding up to 60% of users quit after a month leaving behind idle accounts.

Twitter Addicts

Social media requires a lot of sweat, blood, and maybe tears, and a little luck. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses run out of luck before realizing the true costs of developing their social outposts.

photo by: eschipul

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Vegas Events during EFI Connect

Dennis Miller, April 16-18th at 8pm

45th Annual Academy of Country Music Awards, April 18th at 5pm

Brooks & Dunn, April 19th at 7pm

Professional Bull Riders (PBR) World Cup, April 16-18th time TBA

Cirque du Soliel's newest show Viva Elvis, April 16th-20th at 7pm

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Connect 2010: Must Attend Sessions

After rubbing the sleep, or lack thereof, from your eyes each morning it's time to hit the informative sessions to load up on tips, advice, tricks, and know-how. Making list of sessions to attend is highly dependent upon your mix of EFI software and hardware. All sessions are geared toward individual product lines with the exception of the Business Optimization series. Here are my bets for getting your money's worth. (Session Schedule)

Session

Speaker

Business Optimization Vital Few Metrics Analysis — Best Practices for Current and Future Leaders Tim Fischer, NAPL How PrintFlow Changed My Company: Customers Share their Stories Udi Arieli Logic In the Driver’s Seat Victoria Stillson Ride with Style Carl Malikowski Monarch Turn Your MIS into a Workflow Machine (Planner) Mike Wells Pre-Press Integration to your Monarch System Pam DeWitt Crystal Reports 1 & 2 Paul Evenson Pace Web-to-Print in EFI Pace Dave Arnold The Power of the EFI Pace API Jon Minion EFI Pace Reporting for Business Owners Dave Arnold PSI What’s New in v2010.1 and Beyond Tammy Wiggins PSI Assistant Product Manager for a Day David Magaw PrintSmith Large and Superwide-format Dave Silva Ecommerce with PrintSmith Site Dave Silva Credit Card Processing

Ron Teller

Web-to-Print XMPie VDP: How to Build Templates and Load into Digital StoreFront Randy Wiley Digital StoreFront in the EFI Integrated Workflow Randy Wiley Fiery Fiery Web to Print Workflow Charlotte Tueckmantel & Mark Ford Variable Data Printing for Graphic Arts Applications Sharon Henley Fiery Experts Panel Mixed Jetrion Digital Label Track (multi day session) Sean Skelly Rastek What is an EFI Rastek wide-format printer and how can it positively affect your bottom line? Darrell Etter Vutek Driving the Analog to Digital Transition Mike Wozny Upselling to Superwide Mike Wozny

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Social Media + Print = Printernet

Links coming soon.

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EFI Connect 2010: All Cards on the Table

image by lucy boynton

EFI Connect April 18th - 21st

EFI's is putting all of their cards on the table for this year's Connect user group conference in Las Vegas. They have anted up with better sessions, prices, speakers, and entertainment, at a seasonably better time of the year. Who wants to be in Vegas in the dead of summer after all?

Connect 2010 Highlights

Video Contest (entry window has expired)

First Day Auction

Conference Pricing Promotions

Keynote Speakers: Robert Tapella, CEO of the Government Printing Office, and Joan Davidson, Group President of Sheridan Publications

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Socially Awkward to Savvy

photo by: cambodia4kidsorg

Social media is cultivating a logical yet awkward trend. The social media sphere is largely being filled by marketers and public relations people. Seemingly logical from a professional and business point of view, those involved in marketing or PR departments may not be the best or first choice for leading social media efforts. Heresy, I know. Just like a teenager trying to grow out of acne, marketers are in an awkward evolutionary period. Many are still grappling with the transition from traditional marketing methods and media to new ones. Broadcast versus subscription. TV, Radio, and Publications versus online media. Old habits do, indeed, die hard. Certainly marketing departments could guide the efforts like a ballast in a ship, but there are probably better options to power it forward. Find these personas in or outside of the marketing folks and your social media efforts will be the better for it!

Best 10 Personas for Social Media

Information Mavens

Teacher/Mentor

The Listener

Connector/Networker/Community Builder/Socialista

Subject Matter Experts

The Greeter

The Doer

The Diffuser

Tech Enthusiast

Brand Evangelist

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The Big Ear: Google Alerts

Social Media's Million Voices & the Big Ear | The Big Ear: Twitter

The Big Ear: Review Site

Big Ear - developing a keen awareness of your business by listening to social media and online customer thought streams

Let the all searching eye of Google do your listening by finding your name and products as they are mentioned online. Google Alerts allows you to setup Google searches that can be sent as a news feed to Google Reader or to e-mailed to any address. SocialMention has a similar feature worth setting up too.

Alerts for Listening

Company names

Products and brand names

Public facing company employees

Industry at large such as "printing industry" or "beverage industry"

Technology at large such as "QR codes" or "bottle design"

Shoutback: What other alerts have you set up?