John Byrne of BusinessWeek: We Must Succeed Online

I had lunch today with John Byrne, executive editor of BusinessWeek and EIC of BusinessWeek.com–an event, in itself, not worthy of a blog post, although it was pleasant and John is great company. However, he said something that has stuck with me.

We were talking about his new job as EIC of BW’s online efforts. In the jungle of the Internet, BW is a big cat. But even a big cat sometimes must struggle to survive in the jungle. The complication of his job–the bewildering number of directions he could take the brand, alone–is intimidating. He’s intense, and up for it:

“We have got to get this [Web site, online efforts, etc] right–we absolutely have to. If we don’t, our brand is exposed, and that’s not acceptable.”

Lessons to publishers:

1. A failure to beat or at least match the competition with online offerings on both the reader and client side will expose the other parts of your business to attack from rivals. Marketers today want integrated packages. Many readers want a 360 degree brand experience. If you can’t deliver on some parts of either of those desires, your rivals will eat you alive.

2. Every major brand should have an editor like Byrne. He’s BW.com’s brand champion. I could barely keep track of all the content partnerships, schemes, deals, ploys, and strategies that he went through in our brief lunch. This guy is creating out of nothing extreme, scalable value for his company. There are online editors who manage content and keep the camel train moving, and there are guys like John–guys who drive new product development, understand that good relationships are at the core of all important strategic partnerships (and works on those relationships), and have an eye on the horizon, looking for new ways to expand the brand and create value.