International Print Day: Making Print Go Viral

Are you ready for International Print Day? Started for the first time last year, this International Print Day aims to create a global 24-hour phenomenon in which social media highlights the creativity, importance, and power of print and paper. During the inaugural celebration last year, 8,683 Tweets were delivered to 23,023,968 timelines with 1,271 contributors. That’s a lot of print related information shared around the world!

Deborah Corn, Intergalactic Ambassador to The Printerverse at PrintMediaCentr.com, is the driving force behind International Print Day. We chatted about this year’s efforts and what we hope printers will gain from participating in the movement.

PIA: We love this year’s theme for International Print Day. How did #PrintNow come about, and how do you think this idea relates to the current state of the industry?

Deborah: Our 2015 theme was crowd sourced during our weekly #PrintChat and Jonathan McGrew (@JEMcGrew) submitted #PrintNOW. To me, #PrintNOW embodies the current state of the industry and all of the amazing advances to marketing and communication we are creating and implementing. Equally, #PrintNOW can be used as a call to action. Luckily the chatters agreed and, voilà, our theme was born!

PIA: A strong call to action is definitely important in a movement such as this.

International Print Day intertwines a lot with social media. How important is it for printers to embrace social media marketing in their business plans?

Deborah: Communication professionals must understand how to communicate with customers and prospects how and where they want to communicate. I am Gen-X, so maybe I will have some tolerance when I visit a printer’s site that doesn’t use social, but I am thinking “old;” I am thinking “not up on technology;” and I am thinking “how can they help me with my marketing when they don’t embrace some major channels on the multi-channel highway?”