Why “New Media” Sometimes Fails Horribly

The company I work for has been around for over thirty years. Sure, they’re not dinosaurs, but they also weren’t exactly founded in the internet age.

The company itself has, at least in my opinion, progressed very nicely in terms of embracing the internet revolution. Being a publisher, they were quick to see and take advantage of electronic communications. Not only do we send the majority of our newsletters via email, but we also are much more successful with our digital marketing campaigns than we are with our direct mail ones.

But while the company has progressed with the times, our customer base has lagged behind a bit. Of course, I can’t really blame them: We have several nonagenerians (yes, I had to look up that word) in our ranks, and the fact that they are even using computers is quite impressive.

Last year, we started a free e-letter. It is written in a narrative format that makes it really perfect for a podcast, so for the past few months we had someone create 10 minute podcasts from each issue, and notified our over 100,000 subscribers of this service.

And each issue, we received about five listens.

What went wrong? We definitely marketed the heck out of the thing, mentioning it in almost every issue, and making clear links to it on the website. We hired a skilled artist to record the podcast, so they sounded good. Lastly, the material really did make a great podcast.

The problem was that we were forcing some of the newest of new media on our subscribers who were just getting the hang of email.

We’ll be revisiting the podcast in about six months, in the hopes that as our business continues to grow, our subscriber demographics will as well.