Four digital strategies to pursue in 2012

Calus Enevoldsen reporting:
t’s that time of the year. The time for top ten lists and predictions about the future. I’ll settle for four digital tips to help guide publishers’ digital strategies for 2012. One for each category: Revenue, Content, Design and Platform.
Revenue: Get serious about e-commerce
I’ve been advocating for quite some time that publishers should get serious about e-commerce, and with the rise of tablets, the opportunity is just getting bigger and bigger. E-commerce on mobile devices alone will top $6 billion in 2011 and is expected to reach $31 billion in 2016.
In particular, tablet owners seem excited about shopping directly from their devices. Even better, they want to shop from within publications. In “The Magazine Mobile Reader” report released by MPA a couple of months ago, 59% of respondents said they would like to buy directly from adverts in digital magazines and 79% said they want to be able to purchase products and services directly from editorial features.
eMediaVitals’ Rob O’Regan sees three ways for publishers to pursue e-commerce:

1. Sell your own stuff
2. Sell other brands’ stuff
3. Recommend other brands’ stuff

Whatever the path, it’s time to take advantage of the relationship publishers have with readers and start selling.
Content: Figure out social reading
Here’s a quote you should pay attention to:

“Every industry, every type of business we think about needs to be fundamentally reinvented in the face of social. Social isn’t a type of layer you slap on after the fact—it needs to be part of the product at the point of inception.”

Not surprisingly, it came from Flipboard cofounder Evan Doll in a recent interview with Fast Company.
There are different ways to attack social (read more about Kobo’s approach here), but with Facebook’s recent introduction of its “Read. Watch. Listen.” concept, there’s a new play for publishers. Using Facebook’s Open Graph, launch partners such as Washington Post, The Daily and Wall Street Journal have created news apps that reside within Facebook. When users read articles, they are automatically shared with friends using ‘frictionless sharing’...
http://cenevoldsen.com/2011/12/18/four-digital-strategies-publishers-should-pursue-in-2012/