We’re More About Resources than Releases
Welcome to our new site. If you’ve gotten to the “Our Talent” section, I hope you are as impressed as I was at the mix of capabilities we have here. Before accusing me of being an egomaniac (because mine is one of the heads hanging on this page), take me out of this space for a second. Once you do that, you’ll see a collection of faces lit up by brains uncorrupted by old-school marketing. That’s a school plastered with boilerplate press releases and filled with old textbooks with chapters on reader service numbers. This crew represents a new class of marketing professionals dedicated to providing a direct conduit into client markets. In fact, these folks are more consultants than marketers. They built their expertise from years of immersion in many of the industries Goldstein represents. And though it pains me to say it, they are also becoming invaluable assets to the various trade magazines serving their clients’ markets.
You can put me back into the picture now because that’s the world Joel recruited me from. As a career B2B magazine editor managing a strong but skeletal staff, I relied on people like my new colleagues at Goldstein to contribute media-ready content to fill my pages. Speaking as someone who used to know the luxury of managing a real multi-editor staff, let me tell you how refreshing it is to be offered a story by seasoned professionals like these and feeling excited about budgeting room for it in your next issue rather than feeling obligated to use it because you have a hole to fill. The ability to provide that service both to editors and to our clients represents the new world of B2B communications – and it’s why my face is now on this page.
Let me be clear: I am not disparaging my colleagues in B2B media. In fact they are heroes to their companies and do amazing work with the resources at their disposal. In fact some of the best writing available to any reader – not just business people – is done in B2B magazines. Nobody knows their markets better, and nobody can cover them deeper or with a better sense of the “so what?” all readers demand. Those editors are not only reporters for their fields, but they are valuable resources for the mainstream media who are constantly looking for fresh angles to fill their ever-hungry readers. B2B editors and writers are the first to report on safety problems in their industries that will lead to broader social issues, on supply chain infrastructure problems that are destined to affect world commerce, on hazardous waste dumped into our ecosystem that can poison local populations – I could keep going, but you get my point.
Many in the B2B space deserve Pulitzer-Prize-caliber recognition for the resources they invest and the resources they are. If you want to know what’s going on in the world before the world knows it, they’re usually the first ones to learn it. And although I’m no longer in those trenches, I count myself lucky to continue working with my friends in B2B media, offering them insights from Goldstein’s many contacts in the industries they serve. We welcome you and them to our new portal to that universe.
Written by Tom Andel:
Goldstein Group agency account manager and content creator who writes with an editor’s mind, a writer’s soul and our clients’ best interests at heart.
