(Boca Raton, FL) “The only way to be successful in the print marketplace,” said Phil Kearney, CMO for Men.Com, “is to test, refine, develop and learn from the web experience.
“Men.Com has just launched a completely revised, updated, re-designed website that reflects what we've learned over the past 6 months and incorporates elements that are being tested to determine their compatibility with a print version of Men.Com.”
The Internet has, indeed, become a launching platform for magazines. The economies of electronic publishing and ease of making changes to content to test and verify editorial elements can only be done in the electronic version of a magazine because the time and cost of changing print publications is prohibitive.
Men.Com the Magazine is being developed through the website to provide invaluable research and validation prior to publishing. Other publications have begun their lives on the Internet or have used the Internet to exhaustively test and refine their editorial product - Radar magazine launched the gossip portion of the publication on the website before the first copy was ever printed. The bi-monthly magazine used the website to keep Radar magazine visible and generated `buzz' with breaking news and gossip.
Shock magazine, from Hachette Filipacchi, is another example of using the Internet as a test-bed. The first issue isn't scheduled to hit the stands until sometime in May, but the website will be up and running in late March.
“Our experience with what readers want,” Kearney said, “is reflected in the totally re-worked design, content, navigation and inter-activity of our new Men.Com site. What we're learning here is directly applicable to Men.Com the Magazine.”
“Visitors to the website provide invaluable feedback,” Kearney says. “Emails, surveys and blogs give Men.Com contemporary feedback - almost instantaneously - about different editorial elements. We don't have to guess what the reader wants - they tell us! In the world of print, this process is cumbersome and there is a significant lag-time between the accumulation of the data and the implementation of results. On the Men.Com website, we can make changes instantly and frequently. In the world of print, that's just not possible.”
Group2, LLC, a media management consultancy, is developing and producing the website.
