In the last article, we looked at the rapid changes that have occurred in the communications landscape. As an important reminder, the goal of bringing Print + eMedia into your company's marketing program and/or offering it as a service to your customers is to address the Dynamic Audience Migration issue, in which the target consumers are regularly moving between new and old media channels. Since it is dynamic, identifying those changes has been elusive. However, there is a whole new set of analytical tools and services that have come to the market to help you gain some understanding of where your target customers are today, and maybe... even tomorrow as well.

For those of you who were around in the 1980s and 1990s, you may remember the significant changes our industry underwent as we adopted electronic workflows; i.e., DTP, CTP, etc. Many of the same lessons learned back then have relevance to the changes we are seeing today and can be used to help you focus on making the necessary changes to your business processes. As you review these new requirements, you will probably find, in the words of Yogi Berra, "This is like déjà vu all over again."

During that period of change, we saw the real benefits and influence of the digital communication changes driven by the initial adoption and implementation of Internet-enabled solutions. We also saw many failures during the dot com period as well, so we may want to make sure we are a bit more reflective and selective in how we prepare to use the rapidly developing display and social media channels as we change or build the systems to support our new media channel mix.