A month in and a million sold later, many have called the Apple iPad a “savior” to publishers, giving them a silver bullet lifeline to prevent them from going out of business. Its large, bright screen, familiar interface and snappy gestural interface are excellent tools for providing rich new experiences and to get away from traditional navigational paradigms. As some 50+ million iPhone/iPod touch users can attest, the iPhone OS truly represents new thinking from the ground up and naturally, the best apps are those that embrace the new.

So if that’s the case, can traditional publishers take advantage of this platform and resurrect their industry? At first glance, there are some media players that get it — ABC’s iPad app, along with a handful of others take advantage of the new format. But others, notably Time Magazine, get it so, so wrong. Here’s why.

Revenue model is outdated. Time Magazine is a newsweekly that has existed for decades. You can subscribe to the print version for about $20/year, but the digital versions of the same content vary tremendously. You can subscribe to the Amazon Kindle version for $2.99 per issue, but if you want the iPad version, you’ll have to cough up $4.99 per issue each week, or about $250/year for ostensibly the same content. Why would anyone pay up to 10x as much just to have it in digital format? Almost as bad is the Wall Street Journal. You can subscribe to the full online + print version for less money ($16.41/month) than the iPad-only version ($17.99/month). Again, why would anyone pay more for the same content in that is accessible from only one medium?

User experience. Again, Time hasn’t figured out how digitally savvy customers want to consumer their content. In order to purchase the Time iPad app, one must do so each and every week, purchasing a new, separate app each time. After a year, your iPad will have 50 icons of nothing but Time magazine issues cluttering up your screen. It’s a very odd and unusual way of increasing mindshare. It will more likely annoy users and get people to stop purchasing future apps.

So what to do? Here are a few considerations when trying to stake a claim in the still nascent world of mobile applications.

• Cut the cord. Don’t try to replicate an old business model in a new environment. People have very different expectations of what constitutes a successful user experience. Simply taking essentially a PDF and putting it onto an iPad does not equate to something new. People on mobile devices consume content differently and thus, your content needs to be appropriately created and presented to reflect this. A great example is The Elements, a whole new way to explore the periodic table. The creators threw out old textbook notions of what it ought to look like and generated arguably the most engaging learning application for the iPad.
• Think value before revenue. Before you charge a penny for your app, consider what consumers can already get for free. Unless your offering is a) substantially better in quality, b) more timely or c) a whole new way to enjoy it, then chances are, you’re just replicating the past. Think hard about creating something that can only be experienced on that particular device.
• Change the cycle. We live in a new era where news breaks and it’s old after a day. Week-old news can seem antiquated, especially in this era. Get your news out the door fast. Yes, as 48 Hour magazine has shown, it can be done.
• Be smart with location. The beauty of mobile devices is their ubiquity. With that, you can deliver highly relevant and contextualized content that simply isn’t possible with other devices. Show that you deliver value and consumers will reward you.

I’m very excited and curious to see which companies are willing to bite the bullet and plunge head first into the new game where the rules are still being formed. Better to try hard and fail fast and get back up, than fail slowly and never recover.

There’s nothing new about syndication. It’s been around for decades, notably in newsmedia and TV. Then the web came around and RSS made it really easy to syndicate just about any piece of content you could think of. But what about syndicating experiences? Is that something that can be done?

Yesterday, Facebook announced that it would open up its status stream to developers. This has a number of implications for how we experience brands. It means we can experience Facebook in ways that Facebook didn’t originally intend but more importantly, it cedes control of the consumption of content from facebook.com to myriad other sites. It’s sort of like RSS for Facebook updates.While many will say this is a move to better compete with Twitter and it’s very extensible API, this is a win for developers who want to take advantage of the rich data available through Facebook. While this approach has already been somewhat legitimized by RSS years ago with everything now becoming available in feed-form, with Facebook we’re now talking about protected content. How much of this protected content that gets included in the stream isn’t clear.

For a while, I’ve been advocating that e-business is about engaging with customers wherever they live. Facebook knows that it doesn’t want to be a destination, it wants to be a service — a service that can live everywhere, and one that follows customers wherever they wish to spend time. This is an example of “social functionality” as described in Jeremiah Owyang’s “The Future of the Social Web.”

Facebook may end up losing ad revenue because their content is being consumed outside of the site, and presumably with or without ads. But to me, the benefits could outweigh any drawbacks. Benefits include:

• Scale: Opening up the stream gives Facebook content an infinite number of venues to come to life in without having to build the infrastructure; you rely on others to build it.
• Ubiquity: You’ll now be able to get Facebook streams anywhere there’s an internet connection and a screen.
• Extensibility: Developers can slice/dice the content in ways that were not previously available.

(We’re also going to have a whole set of new metrics too, but let’s save that for another post.)

I’ll be keeping my eye out on how creative developers get with the Facebook stream. Something tells me we may be learning more about our friends in ways we hadn’t previously imagined.

From anecdote to information. Most people are reasonable people, but sometimes customers feel screwed over by customer service. They get poorly treated and when escalated, are not listened to and then roundly insulted. We all hear the PR nightmares that you think are one-offs but for every one you hear about, there are probably countless others that go unheard, masking the size of the overall problem. With tools like blogs, forums and Twitter, customers now have platforms to voice their opinions. And likewise, companies now have more means to get a pulse on their customers’ sentiments. Using social listening tools, there are now ways to systematically aggregate the anecdotal stories into a more balanced, complete picture of what’s going on. This is useful to both marketers and operations staff who can now get very quick feedback. Eventually, this can feed into a CRM program so the sales & marketing gurus can be satisfied.

Hearing vs Listening. Once companies have the ability to listen, they now need the ability to act on what they’re hearing. Acting on what you’re hearing is listening. Of course, the hard part is whether or not organizations can re-align themselves around this new reality. This means ensuring employee’s roles are matched up to customer needs and they’re given the ability to make decisions that solve customer problems. Too often, an issue needs to be escalated to senior management in order to get something done. This causes frustration for customers and front-line staff alike who don’t feel empowered to make a difference.

Nip it in the bud. Quite often, what usually begins as a small issue like a billing error or incorrect product, ends up bubbling up into a huge issue and angry phone calls (recall Vincent Ferrari’s AOL customer service disaster). If companies spent time in the social space, they would find no shortage of customers complaining. Rather than see it as a problem, I see it as an opportunity to be proactive and a reason to reach out to customers. Why not let employees engage with these customers and try to solve things directly instead of pushing them to a random, faceless 800-number or knowledgebase? Equipping employees with the tools to search out these issues and deal with them quickly and efficiently will exceed customers’ expectations and engenders a lot of good will. I recently issued a minor gripe about a piece of software — only to have the developer reach out within hours to assure me a fix was on the way. That kind of outreach changed my view of the company and has now made me a loyal customer.

A few simple strategies can help make a big qualitative difference to how customers perceive your company. And in the world of marketing, perception is reality.

A while ago, I said that there are no such thing as social media experts. We are all students writing the curriculum for other students. This might be an exaggeration, but it’s pretty clear that this is a new world and the rules are being frequently written and re-written. Just as the initial dotcom explosion changed things a dozen years ago, businesses and people alike, need to brace for impact and learn to embrace change.