Internet Surpasses Trade Mags and Sales People?

Published Jun 06, 2010 00:00 AM
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A trade magazine industry organization finds that the Internet has surpassed print trade magazines in effectiveness over the last few years. The study, from the Canadian Business Press [link no longer available], provides numerous tables and comparisons tracking trends over the past 15 years.

  • Over the past 15 years, the number of people reporting specialized business publications as very useful has held steady at about 2/3rds
  • In the last 6 years, the number of people reporting the Internet as very useful surged from 53% to 76%
  • The rise of the Internet rose across all business categories including the one security systems most likely falls under - "resources and construction" where the number rose from 59% to 85%

Role of Sales People

At the same time, people reporting salespeople being very useful has continued to sink. Not even half of respondents found salespeople to be very useful in both the computer and "resources and construction" industry.

In May 2010, we examined and discussed challenges for the future of trade magazines.

In our experience interacting with trade magazines (both online and off), we have been disapointed. When we launched in 2008, we thought that references and links in print magazines or magazine websites would provide a large boost. However, despite numerous writeups and links to us, traffic was poor (with 10 click throughs per mention being a lot). In speaking with other industry people, this seems to be the case for many.

We suspect that the role and impact of trade magazines in our industry is minimal and far surpassed in importance from direct connections between manufacturers, dealers, integrators and end users.

In the past two years, growth of the Internet for video surveillance information has been modest with the rise of LinkedIn groups being the most important advance.