The New Hoovers: You Say Workflow, I Say Lifeflow
B2C publishers can — and should — keep learning from the lessons of B2B publishers. Today’s small case history. Hoovers, a top B2B research tool, just relaunched its site. The overriding idea: embed itself into the workflow of its customers, integrating contacts/address books, adding top web-mining and categorization tools and bringing more of its diverse offerings into a single, more agile (for future development) platform.
All good lessons for news publishers to think about and act. It’s a simple calculus: what B2B and Trade publishers aim to do in getting into the workflow of their readers, consumer publishers should aim to do with their readers’ lifeflow. Don’t make me a click off to another site, or my contacts, or Facebook, or a movie listings site or, or, or — bring it all together. That’s tough development, but it’s the clear route to making your site one of the handful customers visit each time, and that means greater time-on-site and engagement.