2010 will be a year to quickly identify what your key proposition is and if you are delivering it efficiently.
Efficiently delivering your product will mean it is built to be Small, Simple and easily Shared. These pillars can form a foundation to re-evaluate what you are trying to achieve and what the future holds for your product and business.
Small: Look at the most high profile web business of the year, Twitter, it sets out to do one thing well: it broadcasts small messages accross multimple platforms. It doesn’t try to over complicate its proposition and becuase of that it has been massively sucessful in growing an engaged audience.
The publishing industry should look at web businesses like Twitter for operational inspriation and slim down their offering so it is focused, reliably delivered and offers users multiple touch points, which they control. Concentrate on your core verticlals and break them out into separate websites if nessessary.
Simple: The more complicated you make your product the less likely an audience are to identify with it. They are also not likely to return regularly if they dont know what they are going to get.
Look for ways to slim down and lose sections that you don’t maintain regularly. This will make your product simple to maintain from an editorial point of view and simple to access from an audience point of view. The time saved by this simplification will free up your editorial team to focus on delivering your audience what they actually want, more regularly.
Shared: This is possibly the most difficult to implement but also the most important in order to build an audience that are engaged with your product and actively want to engage in helping you grow your audience.
Facebook Connect and Twitter API integrations are going to be massive in 2010. They will help grow an engaged audience for your content and strengthen your brand.
Being “Small” and “Simple” does not mean you will dumb down and lose out. It will mean that you are refined and easy for your audience to identify with. This will strengthen your brand and grow your audience.
This simplification isn’t easyily attainable and carries a new set of challenges, it does however allow you to try out new ideas and find a clear path down which you can grow your product, audience and business over the next decade.
