Month: September 2006

College magazines: What’s the point?

Food for thought for college magazine editors comes by way of Rob Westervelt’s UBrander blog. He urges us to think of our magazines in terms of return on investment and suggests a businesslike approach to definine our magazines’ overarching objectives:

If you don’t have a brand objective for your magazine, here’s how to craft one:

Example:
Our objective is to brand [YOUR SCHOOL] as [INSERT SCHOOL’S DESIRED BRAND POSITIONING IN ITS CATEGORY] so that [YOUR SCHOOL] becomes the first place [YOUR AUDIENCE] sends its students and dollars.

Once you’ve established your objective, write out your methodology for accomplishing the objective (i.e. how you’re going to do it). Remember, magazines are about readers, so write articles that connect your brand with the things your readers care about.

Good advice that should also translate to alumni magazines — and to hybrid college/alumni magazines, like the one our university publishes. Many college magazine editors have never had to think in terms of ROI. But it’s a practice worth adopting. So is Rob’s brand objective exercise.

Dude, you’re getting a battery recall: consumer advocacy in cyberspace

Bloggers and cyberjournalists are getting some credit for keeping the pressure on Dell to recall batteries that had the potential to catch fire.

This Business Week article traces how the blogosphere became a consumer advocacy network over several weeks this summer. It began on June 21, when the Inquirer, “a British ‘tabloid-style’ news site for techies, published a series of shocking photographs showing a Dell notebook computer in flames at a tech conference in Japan. The photos and an account of the incident came from ‘Gaston,’ the pseudonum of a loyal Inquirer reader who did not want to be identified because he’s in the computer business.”

The story grew legs and ran all over cyberspace.

“Industry analysts were soon e-mailing their take to mainstream reporters and investors,” Business Week reports. Soon, “Gadget news blogs like Gizmodo and Engadget spat out facts and rumors with equal zeal. They were relentless advocates for the consumer, too. On July 31, Engadget posted photos of a Dell notebook that had caught fire in Singapore. Its comment: ‘We’ll keep posting these until we see a recall or a solution, so please, Dell, treat ’em right.'”

The cybermedia didn’t merely expose the dangers of computers catching fire. They kept the heat on the manufacturers to do something about it and helped the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) conduct an investigation into the burning batteries.

Link via BuzzMachine.