Tuesday, March 28, 2023

23 - 008 Marketing DMB Publishing - Shorthand

For some time I have realised that I am failing to market DMB Publishing effectively. But in truth I don’t want to spend any money or time on doing this marketing. I would much prefer spending that time on researching and writing new books and blogs.

Then it suddenly came to me. When I was running ZigZag Digital Associates (2018) with George Szubinski (Deceased April 2020 – Covid 19) he was always experimenting with different new website generators. I had been nagging him to write his own autobiography because from the stories, many over a pint or Indian meal, he had told me he had an amazing childhood and the mystery of never knowing any details of his real father. In fact he was sure that his surname name,Szubinski, was invented by his mother to gain entry to the United Kingdom as a refuge of the holocaust in Poland. Anyway. As usual George could not write it in Microsoft Word like anyone else would but he decided to use a new website generator called Shorthand. At the same time he wrote a memorial site in Shorthand to his son James who had died in a terrible home accident in 2007. Something which haunted George for the rest of his life where to tried to manage his grief by looking to keep all the digital memories of James active on the internet for friends and family to access.

With George so gifted as a fast learning programmer he soon produced two excellent “stories” using Shorthand. When first shown to me I could not help but be impressed by the output from Shorthand whilst accepting that his autobiography only amounted to a few pages. It was after George’s death in 2020 when I was trying to draw together all his digital work that I realised that Shorthand had ceased trading and the site although maintained “frozen” could no longer be updated.

So today (20/03/23) I decided to see what had happened to Shorthand. To my surprise although the original site was still frozen they had undergone a reincarnation with a new site and business model. Essentially you are now allowed three stories for free on their Shorthand site under the so called “freemium” pricing strategy approach used these days as a way of getting software established in the marketplace.

See off we go on some DMB Publishing free marketing. Whilst it is taking me some time to learn how to generate my own “story” site, mainly due to the unfamiliar AX (User Iinterface), after about 4 hours I have a basic crude prototype published and running on the internet. To me this is indicative of Shorthand being a good solution. Sometimes, particularly with some of the so called open system applications, I can have achieved nothing in the way of a deliverable after many days experimenting.

So the task is now to work it up progressively to be something exciting to market DMB Publishing.

Background to Shorthand.

Shorthand was created in Brisbane, Australia but it is now truly global. It has offices in Brisbane, London, New York, Seattle, Fukuoka, Sydney and others. With amazing set of customers many major world organisations as well as significant brands. From BBC, Dow Jones, Tripadvisor, UK Parliament, Save the Children, unicef, Honda, Penguin  etc etc   

Some useful links below :- 

 

The sales site for Shorthand

www.shorthand.com

The brilliant Honda use of Shorthand

https://www.honda.co.uk/engineroom/cars/civic-the-iconic-hatchback/

DMB Publishing use of Shorthand (under development)

https://preview.shorthand.com/1wS5wLPjYe3Dekxh

To access my Dashboard Control

app.shorthand.com

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