In the past couple of weeks, I’ve encouraged associations to take heed from successful business-to-business publishers and “surround” their members with products and services that uncover and meet needs their members may not even know they have.
I’ve also written about successful and less-successful trade magazine strategies. Publishers clinging to print and defending it at all costs can miss the opportunity to shift content strategies while the resources are available to make a healthy transition.
For associations, these are two angles on a single message. Good trade (B2B) publishers are both competitors to and models for next-generation association publishers. Less successful trade publishers show the risks inherent in waiting to make a change.
Every association should have a multi-platform, member-supported content game plan in place today. Like budgets, plans change, but we need the plan first. Otherwise, we’ll continue to evolve the current models in an unplanned and incremental fashion. That’s a high-risk tactic.
