Recently I asked the question: will content marketing kill trade publications? Gordon Plutsky seems to answer in the affirmative, contending that marketers need to set up their own content distribution channels, bypassing the trade media. Ted Bahr, on the other hand, not only won’t concede the death of trade magazines but isn’t willing even to give up on print versions of them.
Personally, I believe that trade pubs can continue to play an important role in the distribution of industry-specific, niche content to focused groups of readers due to several advantages they have over other channels. Mind you, I’ve never worked for a trade publisher and am not telling them how to run their businesses, these are just observations based on nearly 20 years of media buying and 25 years of business experience.
Conversation Aggregation. Publishers no longer have a monopoly on content creation, but they can potentially create integrations with bloggers, Twitter feeds, YouTube videos, LinkedIn groups and other places where their industry is being discussed and provide a centralized portal for vendor, user and independently created material. They need to go beyond content aggregation to conversation aggregation, facilitating not only publishing but also interactivity.