Earth to Esquire: Get Real

Last year it was an e-ink electronic display on the cover; this year, it’s 3D special effects—if you have a webcam handy, anyway.

As I learned this morning from Mashable, Esquire magazine’s December issue will feature something called augmented reality (AR). The way it works, as I understand it, is that you can hold the cover [...]

Eight Resources for Building Your Expertise in Social Media and Business

Social media means business

So now that we’re over our passing fears that social media are just a big productivity drain, how do businesses actually use things like Twitter and Facebook? For people in B2B media, this isn’t an idle question. Our readers and advertisers are increasingly engaging with each other via social media. Whether [...]

How to Save Your Business by Wasting Time: Social Media and B2B

A story in the Los Angeles Times business section this morning is a useful corrective to much-publicized news yesterday of a new business study blaming social media for lost productivity. The study, conducted by Morse, an IT firm based in the U.K., claims to have shown “that use of Twitter and other social networks by [...]

Can Printcasting Print-on-Demand Work for B2B?

One of the memes at work in the new-media transformation involves the way print can play an ongoing role in the increasingly digital world of publishing. Last week I covered two options, print-on-demand from Magcloud, and digital editions that try to recreate the print experience. Both of these efforts have been marketed heavily to traditional [...]

In Search of Print-to-Online Success Stories

Photo by Net_Efekt

Tuesday’s post on Advanstar’s decision to take Aftermarket Business magazine online-only was one instance of a critical question for B2B publishers today: how to move successfully from print to online.

This is the question UK-based B2B blogger and consultant Rory Brown asked last week. One problem, he notes, “is that there are hardly [...]

Expanding Choice with Print-On-Demand

It is, or should be, a basic new-media mantra that people want content when they want it, where they want it, and how they want it. The rise of new media does not mean that print is dead. Rather, it means that print is just one of many ways people will choose to get information, [...]

Will Digital-Only Save Your Magazine?

Where's the Logo? The Aftermarket brand is downplayed on its Web page

Yesterday the wires buzzed briefly with the news that Advanstar will be converting one of its print titles, Aftermarket Business, into a digital-only format. Is this a brilliant leap into the new-media world, or a stop-gap attempt at survival?

I’ll admit I’m not [...]