As I’ve been walking you through the many terrific things about Kim Gjerstad’s presentation on MailPoet at WordCamp Europe 2013, I’ve also been watching business change and business process. This morning a couple of poetic items crossed swords in my inbox.
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One was literally about business change in poetry and e-books, and the other came from Kim Gjerstad, sharing a little trick that MailPoet’s been using to gather better statistics than the WordPress repository makes available to plug-in publishers.
With eBooks representing perhaps the last bastion of media publishing business change, the last bastion of eBook publishing has been poetry. Poetry? Who cares?
Put thee aside thine prejudice; I’ll tell you who cares. Poets.
As resistant as players in the media business have been to business change, poetry authors have had a reason for their resistance to the digitization of their works that no-one else could claim: poetry has never looked right on e-readers, presented in e-books. And poetry isn’t only about the content, but its presentation. Hello, musicians? No disrespect intended.
MailPoet—more a formatting and mail delivery tool that a WordPress plugin—has figured out a way to get better statistics, and it’s pretty clever. Kim Gjerstad has shared with me that MailPoet uses a special page, exactly one time for each user. That page has a “welcome video” for the first-time MailPoet user, and while Gjerstad and his MailPoet teammates want users to watch the video there’s an even better reason for it being there; MailPoet has published the video at Vimeo, and because there’s almost no chance it will be viewed under any circumstances other than the ones MailPoet has created the difference between that video’s play count and MailPoet’s statistics in the WordPress repository show the guys at MailPoet the difference between new users and upgrades.
Necessity truly is the mother of invention. It’s been almost two years since I told you it was time to start producing video for your website. MailPoet gets it; their video not only helps with promotion and customer service, but it serves back-room business purposes, too.
And yeah, just as with eBooks and poetry this is a formatting thing; had MailPoet posted that video somewhere else, or used it for other purposes, this business process wouldn’t work. Were it possible Kim Gjerstad would have just moved MailPoet’s Marketing to 361 Degrees.
You’ve got a handle on all of this media/video/poetry/business process stuff, right? Not so much?
