Imagine a magazine with 100% influence on purchase decisions. If the magazine recommends buying a certain product, every single reader will buy it. In this case, the magazine could charge a huge amount for advertisements.

Of course, that’s not realistic, but illustrates an often overlooked point: influence improves conversion rates. And higher conversion rates mean you can charge more for your ads. Influence also improves the impact of brand-building ads, again meaning higher rates.

The influence a magazine has over its readers is very difficult to measure, which is probably why it’s overlooked. Determining how to increase influence is an urgent matter for editors and publishers who need to turn around declining ad revenues.

To give one example of how to build influence, UK-based graphic design magazine Grafik has introduced an awards ceremony. The intention is to position itself as a credible leader of good taste in design, and to become the place for reputable design brands to be seen.

Maybe 2010 will be the year when publishers really seek to increase their influence over readers: establishing and reinforcing expert credibility will be key.

I liked this ad from agency Rapier UK, which appeared in Marketing magazine (25th Nov 2009). It’s quite a long amount of copy to read, but it’s well-written and makes a clever point. The start of the piece is especially good at drawing in the reader.

The PDF version of the Rapier UK ad is here.

This video claims that there are now over 1 trillion webpages in existance. That’s 1,000,000,000,000 pages, and growing every day.

I think we’re reaching the point of information overload. I follow a few websites, maybe 5 or 10 in detail. I follow about 150 people on Twitter, but that’s all I can cope with. (For why that is, read up on the Dunbar Number) I add RSS feeds to my Net News Wire, but I never get round to reading them. There’s just too much information. Or, to be more exact, there is too much data.

Let’s consider a few of the issues that this raises, and then figure out what the bottom line is.

Signal vs noise – what’s actually important?
Of all the pages you read in a day, and all the links you follow, how much is actually useful to you? 25% if you’re lucky, I’d say. This means that if you could figure out what’s actually worth reading, you could save 75% of your time, or follow four times as many sources, just more selectively.

Short attention span
Because there’s so much stuff to plough through, to make sure you don’t think you’re missing out, you can’t really give anything your full consideration. You skim, and don’t have time to think about the implications of what you’re reading.

Fads – flavour of the month is now flavour of the hour
Think of the viral videos, quirky links etc that are so beloved of marketers. You look at them, and then you see a new link to the next great thing on Twitter, and you’re off again. Fads are so short-lived now – micro-fads you might say – that to monetise anything like this you’re going to have to do it quickly!

Poor quality traffic
When you visit a viral link on a page, do you hang around on that site? Mostly not. Do you even register what that site even is? Mostly not. Could you tell someone else two minutes later which site you went to? I doubt it. So the viral link that gets all the attention for an hour or a day has a very hard job of doing anything other than racking up a bandwidth bill.

How much information can people consume?
It would be interesting to know how much information a human being can actually store and process in a meaningful sense. From an evolutionary perspective, are we able to cope with the world that we are creating?

Who really cares?
You read all this stuff on the web, follow all these links, desperate not to miss out, but do you really care? I mean, really care? If you missed a couple of days, or a week, would your world stop? If everyone’s obsessed with the notion that Rupert Murdoch’s paywall will fail, is that an argument that people don’t actually care all that much about what they read?

BOTTOM LINES: Attention and engagement
Marketers such as Seth Godin, who I greatly admire, have been claiming for years that attention is now a very scarce commodity. It’s true, but people don’t believe it. My examples above show that we don’t really have an attention span any more. We have so much to pay attention to that we pay attention to nothing.

As media owners, writers and publishers, this is bad news. If people don’t pay attention, they won’t become engaged in your content. And it’s engagement that keeps people coming back for more. Engagement keeps people on your site, not a competitor’s. Engagement makes people trust you, follow your recommendations (which may be via your ecommerce site or affiliate link), and notice your ads.

In online media it’s not the person with the most content that wins, it’s the person who can most effectively hold the attention of readers and engage them in the brand.

I intend to write more on the strategies that publishers can use to gain attention and increase engagement. Can we measure these things, and can we move them in the right direction for our brand?

Here’s an interesting article on PR Week, where the editor discusses the balance between the print magazine and the website.

Essentially, they’re shortening the news section in the print magazine, turning it into more of a round-up, and putting more news on the website. The print magazine has had the opinion/editorial section increased.

I think this is a move in the right direction: choosing the destination of print vs online for where the content works best.

You might remember some time ago I wrote about an offer from Autosport magazine that I received by email, where I got a free trial issue of the magazine, and then six issues for £1 total, before reverting to a standard-priced subscription.

Well, I’ve now had two issues of the magazine and they are very good indeed. I will be keeping my subscription going.

Conclusion: if your magazine is exceptional, then a targeted free-issue offer is likely to work well.

You probably think of the text and images that go into your magazine, or onto your website, as “content”. As a publisher, you might think you’re selling “content”. But content is a dirty word, and here’s why:

Imagine two articles on Formula 1 motor racing. One is written by Murray Walker, a commentating legend who did his first racing commentary in 1948, and has met, interviewed and personally known almost every great driver and champion in the sport. The other article is by an anonymous hack, cobbling together wire copy without personal insight and probably without personal interest in the sport. These are both “content”. But which would you rather read?

The problem with thinking in terms of “content” is that content is a commodity. Everybody has “content”. Publishers would do better to think of themselves as providing Branded Information. Maybe that’s the brand of the magazine, or the brand of the contributor.

Two main ways of providing branded information spring to mind. Either look at the message, or look at how it is delivered.

A distinctive message: The Economist doesn’t provide “content”, it provides analysis and comment which you know will be rooted in facts, statistics and quality writing. It’s distinctive. It’s not a commodity. It’s Branded Information.

A distinctive delivery: Jim Cramer, of CNBC’s financial show Mad Money, gained a big reputation for his presentation style: shouting, ranting and being larger than life. In his case the quality of the information he presented was arguably sometimes lacking (especially with the benefit of hindsight), but he didn’t just provide facts and comment, he entertained the audience. It’s distinctive. It’s not a commodity. It’s Branded Information.

It’s a waste of time to develop commodity content, because it fetches commodity prices. And on the web, the commodity price of content is almost zero. But as the Financial Times has shown, both online and in print, people will pay good money for Branded Information.