What activities do local publishers outsource? (Plus, Answer Our Publisher Outsourcing Poll!)

Hiring can be hard and time-consuming not to mention expensive, what can you outsource?

Outsourcing has become an ever more prominent part of doing business and it's accelerating with the spread of web-based services which enable us to do more with less. Peter Drucker, the management guru who spent nearly 70 years observing, informing and shaping the field of management has much to say on the topic including one of my favorite business quotes:

"In the Next Society's corporation, top management will be the company. Everything else can be outsourced."

Peter went on to write, "Focus on your organization's values, mission, and vision, and consider outsourcing everything else."

For most publishers outsourcing things like printing and web-hosting are old hat, few have printing presses or servers in their back office. But, the opportunities now extend much further, especially as the skillset required to stay at the forefront of local media is becoming more diverse. Today a local media company needs to be able to:

• Produce a quality publication (if print)
• Engage an audience around relevant local content, produced regularly
• Manage a thriving email marketing practice
• Cultivate community contributors (and user generate content)
• Manage social media and stay current on changes at Facebook, Twitter etc
• Stay current on evolving SEO trends
• Demonstrate community alignment (organizations, city council, schools, businesses, readers)
• Deliver timely news or information through multiple channels (even for non-news publications)
• Sell meaningful solutions to local businesses (if you don't understand the items above delivering a meaningful solution is a challenge)
• Manage coordinated cross-media campaigns
• Train, manage and retrain your staff (and yourself)
• and more we're probably missing (not to mention those invented in the coming weeks and months)

The notion of maintaining a skillset inhouse to compete and thrive across all of these areas is perhaps a combination of cocky, naive and foolish. Media, like medicine, is advancing at a quickening pace and while the fundamentals remain unchanged the execution is evolving rapidly which means both inaction and poor action are both incredibly expensive and detrimental unless they can be done in a controlled way.

On the plus side, a strong local brand has an unparalleled opportunity to deliver value to their community and local businesses with small but consistent emphasis on embracing new approaches. With that, we'd love to know what activities you outsource, would like to outsource, etc.

Here are two more Peter Drucker quotes as quoted at The Happy Manager,

• “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” 
• “It takes far less energy to move from first-rate performance to excellence than it does to move from incompetence to mediocrity.”

Looking for help, want to outsource important but underserved activities? Check out Locable's new Publisher Concierge service to learn more.