Electronic Packaging Prep

A growing number of online packaging-oriented forums and resources can help printers' "prepress" routines along.

By Terri McConnell

One morning several years ago, I logged on to my computer to check my e-mail and found nearly a dozen messages from an address I didn't recognize. I opened the first one a little hesitantly, having just recovered from a particularly nasty e-mail-borne virus. Two lines into the message, I knew I had been infected again—this time with a bug known as a "listserv," and it has changed my quiet, coffee-assisted, o'dark thirty routine forever.

For those of you lucky enough to still have immunity against information overload, a listserv is a peer-to-peer exchange of information on a specific topic that takes place via e-mail, rather than through a Web site bulletin board or a live chat room.

It works like this. First you post an e-mail to the forum address. The e-mail is received at a Web site where it is processed, archived, and immediately rebroadcast to all the members on the list. Members read your e-mail, post a reply or a rebuttal addressed to the forum, and the cycle starts again.

According to Dave Mainwaring, who moderates several of the printing industry's most highly subscribed forums, "In the case of our CTPP forum, which has thousands of members, we send out about 9 million messages a month. That means a member can receive 35 to 75 e-mails per day about computer-to-plate technology." People who can't handle dozens of messages crammed in their mailboxes can elect to receive the messages in a condensed "digest" or "index" form. No matter how it's delivered, the information—which ranges from advice about working around a software bug, to competitive equipment analyses, to debates about best business practices—can be absolutely invaluable.

The CTPP forum, along with 13 other printing and publishing forums, is hosted on printplanet.com, by Digital Art Exchange, Inc. (DAX), a Boston-based Internet and application service provider for the graphic communications industry. "DAX pays a lot of attention to privacy issues," says Mainwaring. "We restrict the forums to people working in the printing industry. And we don't sell, rent, or release any information about our members, so there's no spam."

The Flexpack forum is one of the newest on printplanet.com. Dedicated specifically to issues around package printing, the forum still has under 500 members. Mainwaring says he's waiting for some "drum-beaters to get things going." While DAX continues to invest in printing forums, printplanet.com has grown to include other resources like event calendars, and the company has plans to expand the Web site to offer more e-community activities, Mainwaring adds.

Sometimes it takes a village

An e-community is an environment within the massive cyber world where one has a sense of familiarity. It's just like your own brick-and-mortar neighborhood: you know who lives up and down each street, and you know exactly which way to go to get to the grocery store.

Says Jen McCann, editor of packagingbusiness.com, one of the first packaging industry e-communities, "The biggest thing our Web site offers is a context for bringing everything together. There's a lot out there [on the Internet], and if you are not an experienced Web user, it can be extremely difficult to find what you need."

The site's very extensive links directory (over 1,500 entries), makes it an ideal place to launch a packaging business research project, says McCann. "If you're looking for a specific substrate, designer, or machinery provider, you can start here instead of at a major search engine like Yahoo. We'll at least point you in the right direction."

Packagingbusiness.com was officially launched in 1998. It's the child of Polysort, Inc., a company that created a similar "vertical portal" for the plastics industry back in 1995—eons ago in cyber light-years. According to Donna Shelley, PB's marketing director, "Packaging and converting companies are still emerging as far as getting into the online thing. We've tried to make it easier for them by giving them a sense of community on the Web site. Through our classifieds, help wanted ads, and discussion groups, we provide avenues to connect companies with each other that they don't have outside of trade shows and industry association meetings."

Who lives in this community? According to Shelley, 50 percent of them are top level managers of packaging companies with the title of CEO, president, or owner. Another 23.5 percent have other managerial titles. Other heavy users of the site are technical people (engineers) who are most often represented in discussion groups. Says Shelley, "They're the ones talking to each other on a daily basis."

And talking they are. By January of this year, packagingbusiness.com was recording 23,000 "user sessions" per month. Those are the true measure of the times people visit the site—not to be confused with "hits," which are essentially mouse clicks and can grossly exaggerate the site's traffic.

According to McCann, Polysort is planning to add an e-commerce center to the site in the near future. "We've specifically targeted material procurement, as our research demonstrated that was the biggest, most crucial piece of pie." McCann is quick to point out that Polysort follows an "exchange site" business model, not an auction model where the intention is to drive prices down. "We use a two-way, sealed bid negotiation platform that encourages a win-win situation rather than a buyer-beat-up-the-seller situation."

Polysort also provides turnkey site development services for packaging companies that want to improve or expand their presence on the Web. Says McCann, "A client comes to us when they're not happy with their existing site's lead generation or general traffic, and we can almost always present a solution that can improve those numbers." She cites some stellar performance marks for womeninpackaging.org, and from other clients who have gone from zero Web site lead generation to hundreds of leads per month.

McCann says the cost to play can be $5-10K, and beyond that, a company should expect to pay at least $250/month for site maintenance. Project fees for a custom-developed e-commerce site can reach $30K.