If you’re not careful, efficiency could kill your business.

That was the destination on a little mental raft trip I took on the stream of consciousness last week. I was waiting for an airport shuttle at the Hilton Tokyo Bay in Japan and happened upon this spectacular holiday model train display.

The next thing I noticed was the advertising – sponsor logos were slathered on every element of the display – trains, bridges, even hot air balloons “floating” above the scene. I suppose that recognition could have inspired several reactions, but mine was “I can’t believe any of those companies would get any decent return on investment for this display.”

Then I wondered what conditioned me to think that.

I looked more closely and found that the display was an annual tradition at the hotel, and this year was a benefit for children’s charities supporting young people affected by the devastating earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan earlier this year. So return on advertising investment wasn’t the primary objective of participating businesses.

But the charitable contributions weren’t the only positive impact of these businesses supporting this display. Presumably, some of the people who designed, built and sold the trains and scenery in the display got paid. As did the salespeople who solicited the businesses’ participation. That meant more income for those workers – income that not only helped support their families, but also provided income for the people whose products and services those families paid for.

It’s Econ 101: Each amount of money spent in an economy creates several times its value as it circulates. That’s why an increase in spending by one person or one business can reverberate in creating a bit of additional income for many. And it’s also why a reduction in spending can reverberate and cut incomes for many, as well.

But it’s also a lesson lost on managers and consultants who look only at the first level – the immediate impact of spending, forgetting the reverberation, forgetting the second- and third-level of spending that an initial investment can enable.

How does this affect the publishing industry, you might ask?

Improvements in advertising tracking metrics have made it possible for advertisers to determine the return on investment for individual ad placements with greater precision than ever before. That’s driven many ad managers and agencies to radically change the media and publications in which the advertise, to chase the best ROI performance.

And traditional, ad-supported publications, such as newspapers, have suffered as a result.

But first-level ROI doesn’t measure the full impact of an ad. An “efficient” decision to maximize ad spending by looking at immediate ROI can leave an advertiser at risk in the long term if it ignores important second- and third-level affects of that ad spending.

Buy your ads too efficiently, and you could end up on nothing but robot-produced websites that slap a bunch of keywords onto a webpage, leaving readers no place to click but your ad. While you might end up with a slew of new visitors initially, those ads won’t help you much when interest in the niche you market to dries up because the websites that cultivated that community went under for lack of ad revenue. But that’s what you can get when managers and consultants understand math only in terms of simple, linear algebra and not in terms of more complex, multi-variable calculus.

Some advertisers recognize this risk, thank goodness. The first major advertiser we signed on our violin website told us that they didn’t care about click-through rates, after I tried to tell them about our metrics. They told me that they simply wanted to ensure that our site stayed online and grew, helping to cultivate interest in the violin. After all, if there’s no new generation of violinists and violin fans, their business is doomed.

They didn’t care most about the first-level ROI – how many leads we could generate from an ad on our site. They cared more about the second-level ROI – how much we as a publication could help grow their customer base by getting people interested in the violin.

Obviously, if we generated no ad clicks for the advertiser, they would begin to question whether we were doing enough to cultivate the type of community they wanted to support, so we can’t completely forget first-level ROI. But ever since then, I’ve made it a point not to sell potential advertisers on clicks, but on the community benefits of supporting our publication, and how that support makes its way around to increasing the market potential for their business or organization.

This logic works applies to publishers, as well as to advertisers. If I had to rely on the ROI from a single news article to justify spending the money to hire someone to write it (or even to give myself that assignment), I’d never have any original content on my website. I have yet to run a blog post that paid for itself solely from the ad revenue generated on that page within even a month of its publication.

And yet, without content, I’d have no revenue at all. To budget effectively, I can’t look only at revenue from a single article’s URL. I have to consider how much traffic that article brings to the website, if it keeps existing readers on the site longer and if it encourages readers to return at some point in the future. In other words, I need to consider second- and third-level effects of publishing the story or adding the content when deciding where to spend my editorial budget.

I also need to look beyond my publication when thinking about spending, as well. As a publisher, I need to consider how my spending is helping to stimulate the community I’m covering. Am I contributing to worthy causes? Am I helping keep my money in the community by making my necessary purchases with people in the community, wherever possible? Or am I missing opportunities to help cultivate the economic health of the community I’m relying on for my business to survive? If that’s not part of your business calculus, you’re thinking too simplistically for your long-term business health.

Ultimately, I was glad that all those businesses in Japan were able to look far enough ahead to recognize the value in sponsoring a lovely holiday display. And I was ashamed that I’d forgotten that lesson for a moment. As I dropped a few thousand yen in the collection box, I wished that more businesses would think about the impact of their business decisions upon the health of their communities.

Especially advertisers and publishers.

We’ve talked at length about finding new sources of revenue as the news industry moves from a monopoly-driven market to a more competitive one. (And that’s the real change that’s happening in our industry – not a switch from print to online.) But all the newly self-appointed publishers online will find themselves in the same vulnerable position as their print predecessors if they don’t adopt different attitudes about management even as they work to find new customers for their publications.

It’s human nature to pattern your behavior after role models, and for many of us in journalism, our role models were the managers we followed coming up through the ranks of the business. But while there remain important lessons to be learned from our predecessors (treat people well, be honest, order pizza for the staff on election night), print news managers did some things that online managers must work hard to avoid, too.

Here are five lessons I’d like to offer online news managers, so that their publications don’t one day end up unable to compete with whatever new competition awaits them.

Don’t make the syndication mistake

Print newspapers helped do themselves in by trading locally produced, staff-written content for less expensive content from national syndicates. While that might have save money in the short term (no benefits to pay, less salary and wage expense), syndicated content helped make many newspapers look the same as their counterparts in every other community across the country.

That’s no big deal when newspapers were publishing in individual, independent markets. But once the Internet fused the publishing marketplace, syndication-driven newspapers had too little unique, original content to distinguish themselves. Really, who’s going to read some op-ed columnist or the AP report on last night’s game on your website versus the hundreds of other sites offering the same, exact articles? We found that answer – no one.

Creating original content remains relatively expensive, at least up front. And the Internet has made syndication easier and cheaper than ever. (Hello, YouTube embeds!) But publications need unique, original content to attract the audience that attracts advertisers. You’ve got to offer something that no one else does. (And simply offering a different mix of the same content available elsewhere isn’t good enough.)

Ultimately, what I’m saying is: I wouldn’t bet my future on a business model built on aggregating content equally available to other publishers. It didn’t help the newspaper industry and it won’t help sustain the online news industry, either.

This does not mean that you shouldn’t look for and publish content from outside sources. I remain a huge fan of well-modeled user generated content. But that content needs to be original and unique to your site.

I fear that the deals many news organizations are cutting with non-profit reporting efforts are exposing them to the same syndication problems the industry’s had in the past. I think it’s great that we’re finding new publishing models, but news sites using reporting from outside organizations must take care to ensure the content they publish is unique. Don’t just accept a non-profit’s report that it’s offering around. Work with them to tailor a unique report that will appear only on your website, instead.

Find your niche and work it

If your niche is your local community, then be that local community in your publication. Focus on local coverage and find local advertisers. If you’re working a topical niche, remain focused on that topic.

Don’t succumb to the temptation to broaden your focus when you become successful and start wondering how to make even more money by “scaling up” your business. Look, if you want to start an additional site with a different focus, go for it. Just staff it and run it the way you did your original site. But leave the first site (and its team) to keep doing what made that site a success.

Find your voice and keep it

Voice is the complement to focus. Don’t water it down when you enjoy initial success and become tempted to “broaden” your market. I’m not suggesting that a site’s voice shouldn’t mature or change over time. But I believe that the newspaper industry injured itself with bland writing and the “view from nowhere” voice that Jay Rosen’s so thoroughly attacked in his criticism.

An original voice is part of the package that you can present to distinguish your website as a unique destination online. Voice isn’t a bad thing, despite what I hear from so many news veterans. It’s authentic and transparent in letting your readers know who you are, where you come from and what you stand for. In a competitive publishing market, readers want, need and deserve that information from you. Give it to them.

Many journalists have delightful voices – we’re storytelling pros, after all. Most new publishers will struggle to establish their publication’s voice. But don’t be afraid to try. Find your voice and speak with it.

Spend more time with sources and readers than with other journalists

It’s so tempting when you’re starting out to seek support from other journalists, especially if you’re starting a one-person publication and missing newsroom camaraderie. But don’t get stuck spending so much time at conferences and yes, even reading journalism websites (sigh… pause for a moment to note the irony…) that you forget your real purpose in publishing – to serve the needs of the community you cover.

That requires spending almost all your work time with them, not with colleagues in the publishing industry. For example, I almost never go to journalism industry conferences anymore. That’s because I spend my time and travel budget instead to attend conferences for the industries I cover. That’s a better use of my time and money than chatting up old friends in journalism. (Don’t take this to an extreme and cut yourself off from your profession – ongoing education is important. And please keep reading OJR! But don’t spend so much time “in school,” if you will, that you forget to go to work.)

Spend more time with your staff than with outsiders and consultants

Same principal, but in a different direction. Newspaper managers I worked for drove me nuts when they turned to outside consultants to make decisions about things I was working on without ever asking my thoughts on the topic. I know several people in this industry who felt the same way, and decided to address their frustrations – and cash in – simply by quitting, and becoming consultants. But as you need to know your community as a publisher, you need to know your staff, too. Turn to outsiders only when you are certain that your staff not only can’t address a problem, but recognizes this and wants the help even more than you do.

Don’t fall into bad habits of spending your time and communication with people like you – other journalists and managers. You can’t represent and give voice to a community you don’t know. And you can’t lead and inspire a team you ignore. Engage. Be original. Be authentic. Give yourself a better chance to succeed by working to avoid the mistake of managers past.