I guess we have all been interested in understanding how useful print media is these days – now that “bingo cards ” are effectively gone and so much seems to focus around the internet media and website traffic. Certainly I have been interested to understand this in terms of developing the effectiveness of our press release programs and of our advice to clients regarding their advertising. So I thought you may be interested in the following note which I made for myself, based on recent conversations with respected industrial publishers:
“Interaction between printed and web based media i.e. where a publisher runs both a printed and an online publication with the same title – a “twinned” publication , is a much neglected but very important area, although with little in the way of quantitative evidence. However recent anecdotal information based on publishers reported statistics suggest that in this situation the issue of the printed journal can give rise to as much as a third of the web traffic to it’s twin online site and so by extension, for a third of the enquiries. This is an important consideration since it suggests that a “twinned” printed journal can be as successful at generating interest as it’s twin website alone, ( if one allows for direct phone calls and website visits together with the 1/3rd traffic generated through the publishers sister site).”I am encouraged therefore to believe that our efforts in printed media continue to be as worthwhile as they are in the internet media and am pleased to have found some external evidence to throw light on the real world process involved.
