Recapping Social Print Experiment 2010

by Andrew Simmons on February 20, 2011

I’ve been writing this article for a few days now, as a recap to the 2010 Social Print Experiment. It’s the final chapter in this 12 month experiment.

The Social Print Experiment was designed to run as a 12-month experiment, to see whether or not you could take a digital press and build a business around it by using Twitter and Facebook social media tools. Initially, the SPE started off slow and our initial sales were nothing to be thrilled about. We located our business next door to a commercial printing company with no real digital print equipment, and they became one of our customers as a matter of convenience. It was a very small space, only slightly larger than the press itself, and meeting with customers who came in to see our operation found it to be somewhat claustrophobic.

So, the first lesson would be that even if you COULD put your digital press in a closet, no one wants to WORK out of a closet. We moved about three months later.

Second lesson here is hire a bindery guy as soon as possible. You may be saving money by doing it yourself, but at the end of the day, is the savings worth it? You might pay your bindery guy $10 an hour for finishing and trafficking your work to tradeshops (remember, all we pretty much had was a digital press) but how much is your own time worth? You can’t grow business significantly being a courier.

Which brings us to sales and the social media stream.

Relying simply on Twitter, Facebook and MailChimp marketing is okay as a supplement to a larger sales initiative, but it cannot be your sole source of business. Feet on the street is still a very strong method to bring sales in.

Second, selling to print brokers sucks, and I can’t imagine how anyone makes a real living at it. One printer I spoke to relies almost entirely on print brokers and sales reps from other companies bringing him work, and he seems to “fire” one broker a week the second time they ask for something below his cost. (The first time they ask, he tries to educate them on what it costs to produce something, and it often falls on deaf ears.) I’m sure there are fair print brokers out there, but it’s like finding a needle in a haystack.

Third, managing your social media stream, even through automation, is nearly a full time job. You need to be able to respond to the Tweets that flow throughout the day with meaningful information, not just re-posting from an RSS feed. I spent a lot of time on Twitter and LinkedIn, but not much on Facebook. Which translates to not as much time in front of prospects in the flesh, and you need that extra “touch” with prospects since not everyone is completely comfortable conducting business through email and tweets.

Last, in order to have any chance of meaningful business from your social media stream, you have to have qualified followers, just as you would have to have qualified prospects in the physical world. If all of your followers are asking you to join their Mafia family or download their real estate e-book, you aren’t likely to get much business from them. I still prune our Twitter list regularly to weed out non-prospects. The number of followers we have now is around 7,200 people, and I limit our following of users to about 5% more than are following us.

One tool that I use a lot to help find prospects is TweetAdder, an essential tool for building a quality following. The cost of the software is very low at $55 and I run it to build my following. I then use other tools for pruning the list, and ultimately going through it manually to make sure I eliminate spammers and scammers. This helps create a decent list of prospects. I’ve also discovered that I can pick off about 20% of my competitors qualified prospects from their own Twitter list, but that’s a different subject for another time.

The web SaaS services we used were instrumental in growing our business. The web-to-print software from PageDNA is the best, and we were able to use it for several months on a trial to make sure it would meet our needs. During our trial, we took advantage of webinars, sales training sessions, and their help desk extensively, even before committing to the purchase. We looked at the Fortune 500 companies who use it for their projects and felt very comfortable using it. After all, if Google doesn’t seem to feel the need to reinvent their web-to-print service, why should we? The monthly cost for the service was negligible, too.

We also used Inp02 from Dynagram, and it’s imposition tools really automated our work. Ken could sit down and build the projects for the day quickly and without error. It’s a PDF based workflow, easy to learn, well worth the money.

Our online software tools from Outright, Shoeboxed and MailChimp were all good, although Outright never built the plugin they promised that would have let you see all of our metrics without having full access to our accounting. We used Shoeboxed to scan and archive all of our receipts, and all of our receipts were imported to Outright automatically. Outright is free through the end of the year, and then in 2012 they are going to a subscription model of $9.95 per month.

We were also very pleased with the MGI digital press. We measured the cost of the press on so many metrics, and having a press with no service plan and a pay as you go click plan, was instrumental in our success. It also allowed us to sell printed products that exceeded the 13×19 box other digital presses have to work within. The only press that might have been in a similar size format competition with us would be the Xeikon press, and it was significantly more expensive than the MGI press.

Shooting video of the project was very time consuming, and after a few videos I was too burned out to produce any more of them. Even today I shudder to think of creating a simple YouTube video. Every video I created took a minimum of 12 hours to build and edit, hours which were spent after the family went to bed.

Still, we made some money at the Social Print Experiment. We didn’t break even if you factor in our salaries of what we should have been paid, but we paid our rent, our press payment, paper and consumables. We made a little cash, but not the income that I’m accustomed to making (remember, I’m feeding six kids…). Luckily, I have a small software company that provides a passive income and that allowed me to survive this last year.

I met many people both in person and through Twitter. I was stopped constantly at GraphExpo last year by people who recognized me from even the few videos we made, and I’ve had many interesting conversations with people by email. Michael Josefowicz with his Tough Love for Xerox (@ToughLoveforX) and Ryan McAbee (@mbossed) both impressed me, and I enjoyed talking with them about what we were doing. Michael had some great ideas that would have worked for us if we had more time to implement them, but again, this was just supposed to be a 12-month experiment. Another good follow is Jason Pinto (@jasonpinto) and his focus on QR codes. Do you have your QR code yet?

In December I flew to the Cartes show in Paris, France, for a taste of what the future holds for the print industry. After seeing the new MGI JETcard digital inkjet press, I am convinced that the future of print is inkjet AND it’s just around the corner. (It certainly is a lot closer than in 1996 when I bought my first digital press and thought digital was going to overtake traditional print back then. Instead, it took a crippling economy to make that realization happen.) We’ve seen some of the digital inkjet technology evolving but the real show will be at DRUPA just over a year from now.

So, we had planned to continue running the Experiment for another year, a Social Print Experiment 2.0 if you will, but things are changing.

Having worked with the MGI equipment this past year, I find that I want to sell the equipment, plus other finishing equipment, catering to the digital print market. I’m exploring ways to do that. It’s also in my blood; I’ve been selling equipment since 2000 after leaving the realm of being a digital print company on the bleeding bloody edge of technology. I also spent 10 years working for IKON, Kodak and Ricoh, so I have a well rounded background to pursue it.

Ken wants to continue to run Printelope, the printing company that was the Social Print Experiment experimental company; and the vertical market website zedcardsplus.com that was also part of the Social Print Experiment.

Our third partner, Bob Lambie, has decided to pursue building a comprehensive digital print workflow platform on the cloud.

With that, we’re all on different paths, and an end to the Social Print Experiment.

This past year has been an incredible learning experience, and supports that you can create a business from scratch using just social media, but the growth in it will be slow. If you want exponential growth, you need a combination of sales effort; social media brand building; and an investment in the right equipment and people.

One company that I encountered this last year is doing just that with an HP Indigo 5500; the MGI JETvarnish; the MGI DF360 Finisher; and other digital finishing equipment. They call themselves ClearStory. I met them through a small consulting gig where they needed help with their social media directives. Today, they are completing a nearly 10,000 square foot buildout of their production facility and when they launch this spring, their vision will bring digital print and design to the consumer level unlike that of a traditional print company. It’s an exciting direction they are going after, and it would be interesting to write their story 12 months from now to see how they fared in their startup mode.

So with this report, I’m signing off and looking forward to the future. Thank you for the encouragement, comments and critiques; it’s been fun! You can still reach me here at the SPE email address for the foreseeable future; the website will remain fixed here for quite some time. Keep in touch!

Best regards,
Andrew

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Social Print Experiment, 2011

by Andrew Simmons on December 8, 2010

As we roll into 2011, we started brainstorming about what the Social Print Experiment should look like next year. Personally, we’ve had a lot of doing it, of trying to make it profitable, but we’re wondering what other printing companies are doing to either cope or grow. In that vein, we’d like to start writing about you, and then tracking your initiatives (if you have any) from time to time.

One of our first companies we’ll be writing about is ClearStory, a digital photo book company opening in early 2011. They came to us about six months ago and asked us to help build out their production facility. Their startup has an interesting twist to it, and we’ll share with you where they’re going with it.

If you would like to become one of our subject matters, please drop us a line. You don’t have to share every secret with us, just the key points regarding your business and how you’ve approached things.

We’ll also start reviewing equipment and share pricing where we can with you. I have great proposals from around the country for production print equipment and accessories, right down to click costs. We’ll continue to source those out and analyze the proposals, with the idea that you’re better informed when it comes to negotiating a new lease or purchase.

Of course, we’ll still continue to track our printing experiment and provide periodic updates, but the focus is YOU for 2011!

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A Trip to Paris – Cartes

by Andrew Simmons on December 7, 2010

In our continuing quest for digital press technology, I ventured to Paris this week to attend the Cartes show. It’s the largest tradeshow devoted to card manufacturing – printing, encoding, tracking, packing – with showspace approximately 3 times larger than GraphExpo. I’m here through Thursday, but already I’m excited about the possibilities that this show has for us, and for digital printers overall.

The market is not in credit card print production. That market seems to be dominated by four companies now. It also has razor thin margins. The real money seems to be in producing cards for the gift card, loyalty and identification card markets. Gift cards are a $30 billion dollar industry, annually, and it doesn’t seem to be letting up.

There were very few digital press companies at the show. No Kodak, HP or Xerox presence. KBA was showing their press, a 52UV that looked impressive, but it only prints static sheets, not variable. More interesting, and the reason that I came in particularly, was to see the new JetCard press from MGI. This is the company that has the toner-based press we use, the Meteor DP60, which let’s you print to plastic as easily as paper, and steps outside the 13×19 box most other toner-based presses sit in.

MGI’s development of the JetCard seems to be a very well thought out design. It is an inkjet-based press, printing up to 6 colors in a single pass, including CMYK, spot UV or flood coat, and blacklight security ink. It can also have the option of a Pantone spot color with the 6th head.

The significance of this machine is that it replaces five pieces of equipment and four personnel, bringing plastic card print production into a very focused production cost in a tenth of the space needed today. The entire machine occupies perhaps 75 square feet, at 25 feet long and maybe 3 feet deep. All the functions of producing a plastic card inline.

Blanks enter the machine, get pre-coated prior to printing, and then pass through the print engine. The reason for the print coating is that you can then use any plastic you want, rather than pre-treated, which holds a significant savings in the production model. During the printing phase, a small optical camera checks the print using a tiny 2D barcode printed on the card. At the output side of the press, cards are quality control checked with bad ones ejecting out the side; and neatly stacked face down, ready to be printed on the backside if needed.

Cards can be magstripe, RFID, or just have a security coat printed on them. The output is nothing less than spectacular, with an apparent resolution of about 175 line screen quality. Type at 3pt in size is clearly legible, although I needed a loupe to read it.

Print speed is 8000 cards an hour, single sided, complete. That means printed, coated, encoded, and since they are already cut, there is no post-print finishing needed. Cost is in the mid-six figures (Euro) depending on configuration. A Fiery RIP is used for the front end, which means it is ready to print variable data on the fly.

Cost per card looks to be about 1.6 cents each, ink costs only. As with all MGI products, there is no click charge associated with the printing. Considering that the current cost to print plastic cards (and not all in one process) is around 12 cents each, it holds a remarkable profit margin. Of course, you still need to figure in labor and overhead costs, and apply an amortization cost to it as well, but those costs still keep this as a high-profit margin area of the print business.

Although the press was not initially designed for this, it does print on coated card stock as well. Again, quality was very high, and as an all-in-one digital card printer, it is the first of it’s kind in the world. MGI says now that they have conquered printing to plastic with a digital inkjet press, a bigger size digital inkjet press may very well be in their plans for DRUPA 2012. At this point, it is only speculation, but with MGI holding patents for the only digital spot UV coater (also using inkjet technology) and now the JetCard, it is more likely than not that MGI will continue to grow in the digital print market.

I’m bringing back from the show a limited number of samples; if you’re interested in seeing them, drop me a line and I’ll ship some out to you.

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Graph Expo Wrap Up

by Andrew Simmons on October 22, 2010

Attending Graph Expo was great, although not seeing Heidelberg there in their traditional spot made for a different show. It seems that digital printing has moved to the front of the bus, and the booths at the back of the hall will end up being the traditional press manufacturers. Quite a change from years past!

There were some real gems that we would like to get our hands on in the future. Already, we are making plans for Social Print Experiment 2.0 (2011) and I am hopeful that some of these things will end up on our floor as part of it.

The first piece of equipment was from New Bind America. Called the Adventure, this machine binds books up to 2″ thick with PUR or EVA glue; spines up to 17″ long; and handles approximately 200 books an hour. It’s priced at around $50,000 and is purchased direct from New Bind America. It would be the perfect fit for our shop for short-run digital publishing or photo book production.

On a higher end, Unibind had an automated book production machine that could handle up to 400 books an hour. It was slick, highly automated, and could almost run in a lights-out manufacturing facility. List price is around $325,000. There are none installed in the US yet, but I bet that will change this year.

Speaking of books, I came across a book printing company this evening with a unique website. The company is called Corley Printing Company in St. Louis, MO. Their website reads like a book (literally) and even has some company videos worth taking a look at. I like it!

The French company MGI was showing their JetVarnish again this year, with a new larger format size of 20″ by 40″ for finishing. When you look at the way spot UV coating is done today – highly inefficient and costly to produce just one piece – it’s a wonder there aren’t more coating companies jumping into the technology. Flood UV coating equipment has become the norm for digital printers to purchase, and with the prices dropping considerably (TEC Lighting showed a new model for around $10,000) you would think coating companies would be looking for something to make them more competitive or sustainable in their vertical market.

In a seminar I attended the tail end of, Frank Romano spoke about digital UV coating being one of the things printers should look at, and I understand why. With profit margins being where printing was 10 years ago, it doesn’t take many months to pay off your spot UV coater investment. The MGI JetVarnish is currently the only digital spot UV coater on the market, with a minimum sheet run of just one. It also coats both digital and commercial offset printing, so it’s not limited to a particular format. We’ll be able to offer a more in-depth review of the MGI JetVarnish in the near future, as the one at the show was sold to a new startup digital printing company in San Diego.

I also saw the new Kodak Nexpress with it’s longer sheet size for book publishers. The sheet length can be run up to 26″ long using a roll-fed feeder or with a new feeder table being released in a few months. Pricewise, it’s still a considerable investment at around $700K, but it does show that digital print manufacturers are considering the longer sheet size as being important. The only press able to print longer than the 26″ sheet size (flat sheets) is the MGI DP60 Meteor – they run up to 47″ long.

With just a few additions we could add on-demand book publishing to the things we do with the Social Print Experiment, and for not a lot of money out of pocket. We’ll be meeting in the next few weeks to determine if we can go that route, and to further refine our plans for SPE 2.0.

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Fall Update

October 1, 2010

Tweet We haven’t posted much on the site in the past 45 days, but we have steadily been working at the Social Print Experiment. Our vertical site, Zedcardsplus.com has been growing in daily business, and it seems like we’ve latched on to a steady income from printing. It’s still not much to sustain us for [...]

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Summer Update

August 17, 2010

Tweet It seems like things have slowed down a bit for the summer vacation season. That’s not so bad, as it has allowed us to work on some of the other initiatives we have going. We launched a new vertical website called ZedCardsPlus.com, using SiteGrinder for the design and PageDNA for the back-end web-to-print solution. [...]

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The Social Print Experiment Open House

July 21, 2010

Tweet We had an open house a few weeks ago, and while the turnout wasn’t real big, the people that came were genuinely interested in what we were doing. So, quality over quantity, I guess. It’s probably also a good thing, since the newer bigger space is already pretty tight with the TEC Lighting UV [...]

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Ten Cent Color Update

June 24, 2010

Tweet After a few weeks of running the promotion for 10 Cent Color, we’ve decided to kill it. It’s too much of a distraction to what we are doing, trying to sell a premium product price on one side of the fence, and a loss-leader on the other side. The bottom feeders that have come [...]

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New Space, Moved In…

June 16, 2010

Tweet We’re moved into our new space, and the press is once again installed and up and running. The new digs look nice, less industrial than our last space but more spacious – we can walk back and forth without bumping into each other. And finally, we can get back to the business of selling, [...]

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Open House & Seminars

June 8, 2010

Tweet Now that we’re moving into our new space (this week!), we thought it might be fun to do an open house, invite a few friends, and bring in some of the people who’s equipment we’ve been using in our Social Print Experiment. Since we don’t know all of you personally, we’d like to extend [...]

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