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

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