Recapping Social Print Experiment 2010

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

Related posts:

1. Social Print Experiment, 2011
2. Social Print Experiment – Video, Week 2
3. Social Print Experiment – Episode 4
4. The Social Print Experiment Open House
5. Social Print Experiment – Video, Week 1