I’ve been discussing it a lot these last months: 2007 has rung the wake-up call for a lot of brands eventually grasping the new reality of their relationships with their consumers and setting new ways to connect with them – or rather in most cases trying to adopt their consumers’ online behaviors to reach them. Telecom, Automotive, Finance, Health, FMCG were all industries to be -partly- awaken.

The publishing industry is not to be forgotten. Traditionally slow to move ahead and find its online business model, the publishing industry is still facing its greatest challenge. Sure Content is still King. Internet is the number 1 destination to get daily information, way ahead of the daily print newspapers. No surprise really that year after year prints revenue have been declining in favor of online ones. Online revenues coming from their own publishing platforms have now reached 7% of their advertising revenue, at least in the USA. But, here’s the new Queen: Contact. And with her comes her impact: this growth is slowly beginning to go down (shown by this year decline compared to 2006). The King’s realm is now much more wider thanks to his new Queen: social media platforms are attracting one of the major traditional ad revenue source, the classified ads. Real-estate, automotive and recruitment industries are massively investing social networks, drifting away from less interactive platforms.

The wake up call for the publishing industry in no different than for the others. Digitization of their content is not any longer limited to their own www platform. Publishing companies have now to integrate and play with the whole digital palette: rss feeds, mobile content, columnists blogs, videos, interactive features (reader comments, booking services), etc. etc. See for inspiration this month initiative by ELLE Belgium.

It took 12 years to the New York Times to switch its “All the News That’s Fit to Print” tagline to ” All the News That’s Fit to Click.” According to Murray Gaylord, vice president marketing NYTimes.com, their objective was ‘to let readers know it has features beyond what they find in the paper.’ Hmm, yeah. My guess is their readers know better already