If you love the media you’ve gotta love Mag Nation. I mean it’s great to see this business thrive at a time when hardcopy publishers are busy picking the fluff out their navels while circulations dive.
I love to flick through the magazines there but I also love it for something else. The internet. Not free internet access but for its blog. It’s one of the best pieces of company story telling in Australia and worth holding up as a case study to all other company bloggers.
A year ago when the blog started it was clear that it was going to be a good read. The company’s second entry was “Getting the strategy completely wrong” describing how it turned out the business wasn’t about magazines but its urban savvy customers.
It’s evolved now to catalogue favourite magazines, comment on the future of magazines, recruit staff and a confessional for each time they’ve buggered it up. It’s also a place for the bosses in this small entrepreneurial company to connect and talk to their customers – just like sales staff do in store.
It’s a space where it can ask for help from customers, tell them about the sales rollercoaster and expose itself for not being an expert in everything. For instance, it asked for help on why more and more people were entering its shopping cart but didn’t actually purchase.
It’s a daring policy and let’s face it at odds with the culture of most companies where the idea is to project the image of being omniscient experts rather than exposing your vulnerabilities and admit that you need help.
Oh yeah, and I need help with some ideas. What would you like me to write about?