Living Digital: India's first interactive magazine

Living Digital (LD), the digital lifestyle magazine from

CyberMedia has become the first publication in the country to go completely

interactive over SMS. Readers of LD can now interact directly with writers over

SMS, with their queries and are assured a response in less than 48 working

hours. Readers can also see buying advice on digital products over SMS from LD.

LD was relaunched this April in a larger size with more pages

and increased its circulation by more than 60 percent. Talking about the

interactivity initiative, Pradeep Gupta, CMD, CyberMedia commented, "Today's

digital generation lives in a completely interactive world, with all information

being instantly available at their finger tips. We have taken this metaphor to

new levels by integrating a print magazine and SMS. All that a reader has to now

do is send an SMS to 6767-LD, that is 676753."

For each story in LD, a reader can directly interact with the

respective author by sending an SMS with a unique code. Each LD author has an

application on his desktop, which allows him to directly revert to the reader's

query, which goes back to the originating cell phone.

The objective of this level of interaction is to give each

reader a higher level of engagement and connect closely with the LD brand. LD

also uses the same SMS response method for the exciting contests that are

carried in every issue.

Said Shyam Malhotra, Editor-in-Chief, LD, "LD has

traditionally been a strong source of buying and usage advice to its readers. We

have taken that one order or magnitude further and directly linked the reader

with the author using the most obvious mode of communication today-the cell

phone. In the next stage we will build this interactive response to

advertisements also by next month."

DQC NEWS BUREAU