Yes, there is a future for the content industry in media and enterprise markets, and the Software and Information Industry Association Content Division has been charting it for several years now at its Information Industry Summit events in New York City. This year's IIS is drawing more than 300 executives from leading content and technology companies, a good crowd in the middle of a dismal economy. No surprise, given the star-studded line-up of speakers that was assembled by the Content Division this year. You might say that these people are documenting a future that people have been talking about for many years and that finally arrived - a future in which the Web dominates the dialog on profits and products on a daily basis, even as high-value premium products punch through to define new opportunities for value in enterprise and media publishing. Key to that trend is the rise of technology companies that are driving change in major publishing organizations, which enable publishers to define new relationships with their clients. Are all of these publishers ready for this ever-present "future?" Let's see what these experts have to say. I will be posting on our events blog throughout the day and linking the posts to this entry. You may also find my conference Twitter messages (and retweets) here.
iPhones rocked, Google shocked and social media was no longer mocked as publishers and technology companies flocked to online content business models;
Bing had a fling and even Windows 7 would sing as Kindle took wing, but proprietary platforms are no longer king;
Those in the cloud were quite proud of profits that wowed enterprise and media markets and vowed that all content would thrive in its shroud;
Enterprise vendors clung to tight margins and hung on to hopes of new profits among rescaled businesses flung across a changing world;
Twitter got the Web a-flitter about real-time chitter-chat, making news publishers bitter about the new heavy hitter;
Murdoch howled about profits fouled by search engines that prowled for news, while AP scowled at content reuses that tempted its members to throw in the towel;
Smart phones got fast and netbooks now cast a shadow over the last bits of old-school computing;
Save the best for last! It's Wave, the rave of brave trend-setters, promising an enclave that will repave the road to the Web's future;
Feel like you need a suture or two? Don't worry. The couture of content will change soon enough. The future is bright - for those who are tough.
Everyone at Shore Communications wishes you a great holiday season and a fantastic 2010. Enjoy what is important, and let's build the future of content together next year! I hope that you enjoy the following year-end video.
I had the pleasure to hear two presentations recently by executives from the American Institute of Physics, the first by AIP Executive Director and CEO Fred Dylla at the recent ALPSP International Conference in Oxford, UK. Fred's presentation was an eloquent evaluation of the past, present and future of the scholarly publishing industry, in which he noted that indexing of scholarly content could be traced back to at least the 11th century. As much as we see scholarly publishing in many ways through the lens of print-oriented technologies, in fact scholarly debates preceded the widespread use of print publishing, and will outlast print as those debates move into new media. I really appreciated Dylla's far-sighted view of the industry, as well as the very immediate and concrete steps that AIP is undertaking to transform its place in that industry.
The more here-and-now aspects of AIP's efforts to advance scholarly publishing were outlined in greater detail by Tim Ingoldsby, AIP's Director of Strategic Initiatives and Publisher Relations, at the recent Fall Meeting of ASIDIC, as a part of a panel that I was moderating on social media. Tim's presentation focused on the details of the new AIP UniPHY online service, which uses a powerful combination of content sources and features to power this new online community used to locate and build relationships with experts in physics and related sciences. In many ways AIP Uniphy is leveraging key leading practices that can help scholarly publishers define highly effective models for their content and the community that creates and consumes it.
In short, UniPHY enables professionals to explore the topical and personal relationships that bind together experts through scholarly publishing and other channels of communication such as conferences. Organizations needing to locate experts in a particular field are limited in many fields to online search engines, social networking services and subscription database services to filter through who is working on a specific topic, or, alternatively, call upon consultants and peer contacts to make recommendations. Being able to find experts efficiently and to understand their relationships to one another is a critical factor for many organizations trying to come up with timely innovations for their products, services and research efforts, so AIP is addressing a key "pain point" in their marketplace.
AIP UniPHY is a free online service that enables registrants to search for scientists who have published materials via AIP on topics that have been mapped to AIP's very detailed PACS topic categorization scheme. Using semantic analysis and visualization technologies from Collexis, similar to those used in the Collexis BiomedExperts portal, the result is a detailed map of content produced by specific authors on very specific topics and of the people and places who are related to those authors. The very well-designed interface includes "six-degrees"-style mapping of relationships found through the analysis of people's publishing, as well as the ability for registrants to build out their own profiles for professional networking (a la LinkedIn) and to understand which people in their professional networks are involved in specific lines of research.
The beauty of combining scholarly publishing, a strong topic index and powerful semantic analysis of both content and expert relationships is that you wind up having a portal that is already very attractive to people who may be interested in interacting with one another in an online community. The use of Collexis technology to process AIP's content through their PACS categorization provides day-one content organization that can help people to see the value of using the service in a more social fashion. The more than 180,000 scientists who contribute content to AIP publications and events get tools on AIP UniPHY that help them to understand better who is doing what with whom and where, as well as tools that help them to keep track of closer relationships in their own networks more effectively. This provides a strong motivation for AIP members and publishers to register for the service, and will attract other people who are not publishers but who are seeking the expertise of people who publish to participate as members also.
I was struck in general by the receptivity that society publishers at the ALPSP conference had to social media and very pleased to see that AIP was advancing into a platform that is a fine demonstration of what scholarly publishers can do to build a new core to their ongoing value propositions. The "how" and the "how much" of paying for scholarly publications is still up for grabs in many ways, but the plain picture is that scholarly publishers need new revenue streams and value points other than simply providing paid access to easily reproduced content. AIP UniPHY sidesteps the entire Open Access/traditional payment model question (it presents only abstracts of premium content) and instead provides a potentially vibrant online community environment that will be very hard for others to duplicate with technology alone.
Once professionals have a commitment to a publishing platform that draws then together with other professionals that are important to their work and their lives, they will tend to stick with such a platform indefinitely. Clearly printed scholarly journals and their electronic derivatives are waning as a center of commitment at a community level, even if they are acknowledged as necessary to one's work and career. By focusing on the benefits of membership in an online community - and, after all, managing communities is what professional societies do best - AIP is setting the stage for future premium products that add value to that community of experts and expert-seekers in ways that will provide better value points for all concerned.
Most importantly, this model is highly reproducible; any publishing sector that has a detailed categorization scheme and lots of community-generated content at its disposal - in this instance, high-value scholarly content generated by a scientific community - can provide a platform that locks in reader interest and participation and that puts their premium content and services in their most valuable light. Society publishers need not be the only ones benefiting from this approach, but since they work on a "membership has its privileges" basis anyway, being able to highlight the benefits of being accessible in powerful ways via a platform such as AIP UniPHY certainly highlights the benefits of society publishing and membership clearly.
As Fred Dylla pointed out in his talk, there is a long history to learned profesionals and scholars sharing their knowledge and a potentially exciting future for societies that can move toward new models of publishing to support those experts. Here's hoping for all who are concerned about the future of scholarly publishing that AIP UniPHY can serve as an important model for drawing together experts effectively in ways that will create both highly valued content and effective research.
With many forecasts beginning to predict a bottom of sorts in the ad-supported content market, can an ad recovery be too far behind? It's a question that is probably harder to answer than ever, given the rise of social media tools as an increasingly important platform for marketing influence and insight. Yes, we're bound to see increases in ad spending as the economy improves, but while the ads were away, companies have been learning how to listen to their clients more effectively through public social media channels and their own online forums and customer support platforms to influence markets cost-effectively. One of the leaders in helping organizations to listen and to respond to their markets effectively is Lithium Technologies, which provides both community forum tools and social media monitoring tools that integrate with popular CRM platforms such as Salesforce.com. To some, tools such as Lithium may seem like stuff down in the bowels of product management efforts rather than marketing efforts. But in fact, it turns out that investments in social media gathering and monitoring are having measurable effects on marketing efforts.
As noted in a recent Lithium white paper, a Harvard business review study recorded a 56 percent increase in sales for an online auction site for people participating in the site's online community features. Similar results were seen at one Lithium customer, which reported $41 million dollars in increased sales from their online community members along with $8 million in reduced support costs. In other words, companies are learning that customers generating millions of page views on their own Web sites and social media portals learning from other customers and their own staffs are becoming powerful channels for revenue generation and brand management, as well as reducing support overhead. Of equal importance, though, is the ability of tools such as Lithium's "Social CRM" suite to monitor feedback and discussions in forums and social media outlets that can be channels to support staff and sales and marketing teams in ways that enable them to respond to market opportunties and threats expressed in social media even as they are emerging online.
With capabilities such as these, advertising becomes less of a critical tool to formulate messages that can be spread widely and effectively to the most important and influential market participants. Instead of focusing on "spinning" markets through ad campaigns, engaging markets through social media tools and empowering clients to have influence over their peer purchasers can enable companies to empower peers and product specialists whose influence can be more direct and immediate on sales processes than ads placed in online content of general interest. Why bother paying a prominent media figure like a sports hero, for example, to get people charged up about a new product or service via ads when influential peers whose opinions are trusted by others can do it for you for free?
So while advertising will play an important role in marketing for some time, the nature of how influence is spread through markets has changed fundamentally via social media, helping people to gravitate towards content generated by the markets themselves and by companies and organizations able to communicate effectively with markets on a peer level. To put it another way, when your clients and prospects generate more content and more engaging content than traditional publishers, you're going to put your marketing monies down on the content that produces most cost-effectively. I believe that we're just at the very early days of publishers beginning to understand the likely impact of social media on their own organizations - even as their clients are already well down the path of exploiting it directly for their own purposes. So much for intellectual property rights when you can have intellectual influence rights.
About a year ago I had the opportunity to look at Viralheat, a media monitoring service that at the time was focused on real-time analysis of trends in online video services such as Hulu. Viralheat was good stuff and ahead of its time in many ways, though positioned as a high-end service aimed at a fairly narrow audience. It was interesting, then, to see recently the evolution of Viralheat into a more broadly based real-time trend monitoring service that covers a wide array of social media outlets and regularly updated Web sites and that can be yours to use for as little as $10 a month.
Viralheat allows you to choose key words and phrases and to track key statistics on how frequently they are popping up as fresh mentions in today's real-time publishing environments. You can get summary stats for cross-site mentions or drill down into trends found in specific online services. Viralheat's graphs are highly reminiscent of those found in Google Analytics - a possible exit strategy in the making? - and the interface as a whole has matured into a very well-designed tool that groups information into very easy-to-digest summary of key metions of terms. I like especially the three-tab summaries that form the body of Viralheat's content, which aggregate mentions in separate tabs for messages, websites and videos. This really helps you to get a sense of these three very distinct types of influence and to be able to use Viralheat as a high-power aggregation service that can trump many other online aggregation tools for ease of monitoring.
While many of the summary statistics are basically just tallies and percentages, one key tool in Viralheat is a color-coded summary of positive, neutral and negative sentiment discovered for a chosen term. In a screen grab provided by Viralheat this statistic revealed that although the new Bing search engine from Microsoft had strong mentions in social media, videos and Web sites over a recent week, more than 86 percent of these mentions were rated with neutral sentiment - in other words, most people weren't waxing strongly about the new service but were instead just spreading the word about it. This type of take can help to separate perceived buzz from mere volume quite rapidly.
Taken in sum with the other statistics Viralheat is offering a strong basic workbench of media analytics that almost anyone can afford to use to understand how their products, services and brands are resonating moment-by-moment through the countless number of online media outlets that are the front lines to true market influence. It was only a year or so ago that such types of services were used mostly by major ad agencies, corporations and PR firms to track the performance of trends in online media services. Now, thanks to highly scalable cloud computing services, good and essential monitoring can be used by any size organization to understand trends over an even wider range of services than those used by traditional monitoring services.
Most importantly, by covering the waterfront of the most popular message-oriented online social media services, Viralheat can tap into trends in the highly distributed world of social media publishing in which many trends take form and influence opinions well before they are packaged in traditional media outlets. If you've been thinking that you need to be able to monitor social media more effectively for your organization but you don't know where to begin, you list of excuses has become much shorter.
As people in the U.S. and get ready for the holiday weekend, I hope that you have a chance to enjoy friends and family and to celebrate the role that content has played in making our world a better place. Below is a video capturing my relfections on the role that social media played in events in our nation more than two hundred years ago that still ring true today. Have a great holiday!
In the beginning, there was the CPM - that enduring measurement of how many thousands of people were exposed to an advertisement as a benchmark for gauging its value. But with the rise of online advertising, CPM impression measurements began to compete with metrics such as Cost Per Click, the number of people who actually used a link on an ad to visit an advertiser's Web site. Here at last was a metric that proved that online advertising really worked - even though relatively few people actually clicked on these ads.
CPMs were great for advertisers, in that they could be assured that their money spent on ads had a measurable result that they could use to negotiate ad rates that corresponded with revenues in some meaningful way. CPMs still figured in to ad budgets, but it was hard to gauge the real effect of online ad impressions compared to leadgen-like CPC results (cut to frowns on faces of ad agency teams everywhere).
Enter the Online Publishers Association, which has released a new research study conducted by comScore of how consumers respond to online display advertising from 80 major brand campaigns running on 200 major media sites. The study measured the behavior of consumers after having been exposed to online display ads when searching for a brand trademark, traffic improvements on their Web sites and the amount of ecommerce. An OPA slide deck available at Silicon Valley Insider depcits some of the key stats from this study.
The results of the study are quite rosy: about 18 percent of the surveyed consumers searched on the advertised brand within a month period, 29 percent visited the Web sites for those brands, they spent 55 percent more time on pages at that site, clicked on 51 percent more pages and spent more on ecommerce options when available. The overall ecommerce increase was about 7 percent, spanning sectors such as autos and finance as well as others, but when looking at consumer packaged goods the uptick in ecommerce attributed to display ads was 14 percent, with consumer electronics increasing 22 percent (Cue broad smiles at ad agencies everywhere).
Clearly this is good news for media companies looking to transition from print revenues gained from impression-based brand advertising to online markets, as well as for advertisers (and, of course, for comScore, which can sell more research of this kind). Advertising benefits from "hang time" with eyeballs, not always correlating to those nifty eye-movement-scanning human factors tests which imply that nobody's paying attention to ads. The peripheral vision of humans picks up and processes far more than we may imagine, it would seem. The problem, though, is that it's not only ads in major media outlets that are claiming a benefit from this effect - and the comScore research is not the only game in town.
It turns out that Google has also been looking at the value of ad impressions relating to its own content and advertising. As related in B-to-B Online by Sam Sebastian, director of local and B2B markets at Google, a study for General Electric conducted by Enquiro, a B2B search engine marketing firm, revealed that contextual text-based ads appearing in search results also had a positive effect on brand recall. In other words, there is more than one way to skin the brand cat - and many outlets for advertisers to consider.
Moreover, as Google's own research indicated, 64 percent of C-level executives from Forbes 500 companies surveyed in their own research were using search at least six times a day themselves to locate business information. So not only is the potential for commerce to be gained from ad impressions not the exclusive domain of traditional media outlets, but it appears that many of the prime decision-makers with budgets are turning to search engines first oftentimes to get the impressions of products and services that they need. The presumption that print is a medium for the elites that many brands seek out as opinion-makers is still valid, but breaking down rapidly.
While the Google and Enquiro research doesn't refute the comScore study, it's a reminder that there are many contexts that advertisers need to think about how to convey brand value - including social media outlets and other venues beyond search engines and publishers' portals. All of this research seems to point out that advertising for brand value still matters in online outlets, even though its payback is challenged by new methodologies. Social media in particular offers a very high ratio on payback in brand investment, even though it does not provide in many instances the mass-scale impact that traditional advertising campaigns deliver.
One interesting example of the power of social media for brand marketers told by David Binkowski, Director of Word of Mouth Marketing at MS&L Worldwide, at a recent meeting of the Social Media Club in New York City, underscored the point that return on investment can still be very different in online venues even when brand impressions count. Binkowski relayed how the manufacturers of the heartburn medication Prilosec had spent big on an advertising campaign to give away tickets for a Super Bowl game one year, but then tried using social media and other Web outlets the next year for their ticket giveaway, spending about one tenth as much in the process. Interestingly, the net results from these two campaigns were about the same. So while everyone can feel good about impression-based advertising working in both traditional and new online outlets, advertising alone is no longer the only game in town for contextualizing brands online.
The good news in all of this, though, is that brands can survive and thrive online when they are using the right tools and putting down their chips appropriately. Traditional media is certainly a big part of that mix, but it's not the only game in town any more. A good page of search results that solves a very focused problem for someone can be a valuable opportunity for a brand to claim some space as a part of that solution. This has to temper enthusiasm for the OPA study somewhat as a tool to increase CPMs based on the value of impressions, but the ability of services such as comScore to quantify ROI on impression-based online advertising may help to give ad agencies a boost in their efforts to benefit more broadly from the switch to digital outlets for marketing.
The ROI value of social media as a tool for brand building is powerful in theory, but the metrics on its performance are still a work in progress and not yet accepted widely in marketing circles. This can be expected to change fairly rapidly, as underscored by a presentation by Josh Chasin, Chief Research Officer for comScore, at that same Social Media Club meeting. With services such as comScore beginning to put the finger on the pulse of cross-platform consumer behavior, marketers are entering a period in which the mysteries of unlocking ROI from online promotions and advertising are unfolding rapidly. Any way you look at it, there's a lot more "stickiness" for brands online than we may have thought previously - and a lot more reasons for marketers to push the limits of what can be done with brand marketing in online environments that much harder.
Hats off to Jim Fowler, who has to be one of the gutsiest startup CEOs out there. Taking on the heart of the business information industry with his Jigsaw collaborative community that collects business contact and company information is one thing: personally announcing the launch of their new Open Data Initiative in a YouTube video shot on some of the more funky streets of San Francisco is quite another. It sets the scene for a very interesting move into promoting the use of Jigsaw as a service that can enable people to get high-quality contact data by giving people free access to company information.
Jigsaw has built up a base of about 450,000 people who give and take business contact information and challenge one another's submissions via the Jigsaw portal. Think of Jigsaw as Wikipedia for business contacts with far better rules and to boot a premium content model. It's a "give-to-get" model that allows people to earn credits towards getting business contact information for free if they provide enough quality information themselves but which will also charge people to see contact information if they have maxed out their quota for free contact views. On the back end of this database Jigsaw has built a tidy little business selling the information collected via their portals to enterprises and other services that need up-to-date contact and company information in their internal databases and sales automation services.
It's a good business, but the hard part has been scaling the online community to the point where Jigsaw becomes a must-visit destination that will enable them to build up information beyond the 2 million businesses and 8 million contacts already tracked in their database. Making the basic company name and address information available for free - it comes along anyway on the business contact information that people input on Jigsaw - creates a powerful endorsement for membership in Jigsaw that's likely to push its positioning as a default destination for inputting business contact information. In doing so Jigsaw may have taken a huge step forward in accelerating the growth of their database, helped along by the many key sales automation platforms that are already positioned to use content from the Open Data Initiative.
Company information is available for free elsewhere online, of course, through services such as Hoover's, ECNext's Manta portal and Zoominfo, so to some degree Jigsaw's Open Data Initiative is playing catch-up with the online positioning of other business information services. However, with the Open Data Initiative Jigsaw is making this information available in bulk form as well. That's a huge step forward in neutralizing some of the power of other services that have been building their bread and butter on filtered company lists -and a strong incentive to make Jigsaw a default plan "B" feed for company information, if not their plan "A". Major business information services, please take note: those low margins on your list services just got a bit of a challenge.
What's most interesting about the Jigsaw Open Data Initiative is its potential to increase the likelihood that Jigsaw can become a more timely source of updates for accurate business contact information both from online sources and from the many enterprise services through which Jigsaw information can be consumed, and, in theory, updated. The opportunity to make desktop and mobile sales automation and email services input points for real-time business contact updates works already in a limited fashion for services like Plaxo, but with a more serious footprint in the love-to-update-those-contacts culture of today's mobile sales forces Jigsaw may have found the accelerator that they've been looking for as they've continued to refine their offerings.
In the meantime traditional business information providers continue to be challenged on all sides by nimble competitors such as Jigsaw who are willing to view their audience as knowledgeable participants in the gathering of business information. Enterprises still move cautiously towards these new services, but as they discover that interactivity with users enables them to get more accurate content more quickly there is a tipping point approaching rapidly beyond which the Dun & Bradstreets of the world must worry mightily about the ability of their organizations and their business models to survive. There is still a powerful marketplace for quality business information, but Jigsaw challenges traditional suppliers to consider how the real-time collection capabilities of today's publishing-enabled audiences can accelerate the value of those services rapidly.
Yahoo joined the list of online companies reporting rosy quarterly earnings, with earnings stronger than anticipated and profits nearly tripling based in part on earnings from new Chinese acquisitions. In the meantime Valleywag notes that Amazon's 1Q sales were up 37 percent over last year's 1Q results and earnings up 29 percent. Meanwhile Google reported revenues up 42 percent over last year's 1Q and net income was up 31 pcercent, powered in large part by continuing strength in U.S. markets and rising strength in overseas operations.
For those who invested in the future of publishing and ecommerce, the payoff has been handsome indeed. For some the growth of Web services in overseas markets in which they invested heavily is a key factor but in the instance of Amazon it's a combination of people who have time and money to shop online and less of a motive given high gasoline prices to sally forth to the mall. In both of these instances there's the continuing emergence of self-service for goods and content. the tendency for people to what what they want where they want it and to favor those who are best at doing this. "Find a need and fill it" was the succinct definition of marketing given to me years ago, one that online services have done well indeed.
In the meantime over at the Web 2.0 conference there are the usual nods of the head towards Tim O'Reilly and other gurus of social media, but at least according to one report the conference is as revealing for its emerging political correctness as it is for a meaningful exchange of ideas. As now-traditional online properties come up rosy in earnings, is Silicon Valley getting bored with social media's long-term promise but short-term question marks? Perhaps so, given a toughening economy and a lack of fully effective monetization tools: just as the dot-com crash came before contextual ads made monetizing search and non-mainstream media profitable, we're sure to see a short-term fall-off in new social media investments as quick exits begin to seem less likely and the over-saturation of the market with publishing tools fragments opportunities for both marketers and publishers alike to reach scale effectively. This, too, is reminiscent of earlier dot-com days, when many publishers adopted a "wait and see" attitude - and eventually lost major market share and brand value.
What's likely to light up the charts over the next few months for new investments is "social knowledge," a loose label that combines the ability of analytics software and aggregation services to divine patterns from social media and online expert services such as WikiAnswers that build repositories of how-tos from topic experts. Whatever the particular play, being able to get more definitive insights from social media seems to be where the money is being spent.
Missing in this mix so far is a huge push by traditional publishers to counter these trends. Most social media investments by major publishers are still largely incremental, moving at a pace that's not likely to lead to strong offsetting revenues any time soon. For enterprise-oriented publishers this is probably not a major concern right away, as traditional publishing methods for scientific papers, while under great scrutiny, are not likely to hit a breaking point this year due to social media. But we're starting to see more signs of services such as content federation and software as a service creating new competitors for enterprise publishers that are going to be worrisome as service renewals begin to come up against budgets in any long-term economic slowdown. Toss in a slow start to developing social media services and we could be in a relatively brief period in which traditional database services have an opportunity to catch a new uptick in their value proposition.
This all adds up to a pattern that is clear and unmistakable: good content will find good markets, but building good brands for good content requires more new contexts than ever before. The biggest mistake that dot-com naysayers made was disputing the value of those "eyeballs" in the long run. Those fettered to quarterly returns may have felt differently about that in the short run, but once effective monetization and contextualization tools took off, the revenues and the profits followed surely. Monetizing contexts will continue to be a hot spot, and those with the tools to monetize them - not necessarily synonymous with those who own the content being contextualized - are going to do just fine for years to come. More to the point, social media is drawing us to a time when microcontexualization will increase the value of these types of venues for monetization, enabling higher-value transactions to be monetized more effectively than ever before.
So yes, it's a gloomy time for the global economy as a whole, especially for those services that depend on people walking through a doorway that might cost a fiver or so just to get there. Great for the carriage trade, but not so good for mass market sales. This will put more pressure on social media services to provide not just interesting chats but interesting opportunities to survive and thrive - as I am outlining in Content Nation. It may turn out that the greatest motivating factor for social media will be not Silicon Valley greed but worldwide need to build a more effective economy. Anyhow, congratulations around to all those who enjoyed glowing earnings reports, let's not forget that it was less then a decade ago when your revenues were mere blips on the corporate charts.
I was a bit nonplused to read an article in ZDNet today about InsideView's newly launched SalesView platform that just didn't seem to "get" what business information services are all about - much less what they are now starting to accomplish within some of the leading sales force automation platforms. Kind of strange, given the power found in the particular application that InsideView has launched.
InsideView has dubbed the mapping of business contact relationships to filtered content from Web harvesting and premium content sources inside collaborative software as "socialprise," a good label that describes how business information is gaining value in key contexts through aggregation and value-add services.
SalesView accomplishes this with content from the Web, from social networking services such as LinkedIn and Facebook and, at premium levels, major subscription databases such as Hoover's, D&B, Jigsaw and Reuters. Similar in general concept to Dow Jones's new Generate acquisition but more oriented towards existing Sales Force Automation platforms, SalesView filters incoming content to determine if it represents actionable triggers in a sales and marketing relationship with existing and potential clients and partners and maps it to relationships harvested from personal networks from both online services and SFA services.
The headline in the ZDNet article asks, "SalesView from InsideView: feature or product?" Apparently they weren't too tied in to how different the mission of most SFA platform providers is compared to most business information providers today. The data that most companies load from their internal databases or third party service into a sales force automation platform is just a starting point for people trying to figure out what they should be concentrating on in their sales, business development and marketing efforts.
Think of SFA contact records as the file cards onto which much be attached the prioritization of these targets and the intelligence that can help people understand who's really ready to move on business today. SFA tools don't provide those kinds of capabilities at all. It takes rich content, filtered through tools that will tell a person who's likely to be in a place where a call would be productive, to tell someone whether it's worth using that contact information in the SFA tool. Yes, from a platform standpoint this may look like a "feature," but if it's a feature that drives the key activities needed to generate revenues, then what's really important, the content "feature" or the software "product"?
SalesView takes a different approach from Generate's G2 platform, focusing more on aggregating a wider potential array of sources and social networks into a number of popular SFA platforms, as opposed to G2's focus on its own standalone application and enterprise API. Both approaches have their advantages, but the SalesView platform is nice in that it offers people hooks into a number of the business information services that they're already probably using to manage business social networks and to acquire information about businesses - all filtered through their sales trigger analysis software.
Generate may have gone down the road further in terms of building its own high-quality company and person information from Web-harvested sources, but SalesView enables people to leverage their own personal networking content very effectively for those who are already making use of social media services, while still being able to leverage intelligence from both online sources and subscription databases very effectively. For those companies that fit this usage profile, it looks to be that SalesView can give them a very cost-effective leg up on integrated real-time business intelligence that can yield greatly enhanced productivity. Sure sounds like a content product to me.
The Marriott Camelback Inn in Scottsdale, Arizona has been the site of the Buying and Selling eContent conference for nine years, now, usually a most beautiful spot that lets your cares melt away so that you can focus on good people, good food, a bit of sun and great presentations. But Camelback was not its usual self this year, stuck in the middle of a major construction project that had the revitalized conference halls in good shape but much of the rest of the facility in turmoil. Rumor had it that Bill Marriott himself showed up over the weekend and flipped his lid when he found out how messed up and behind schedule the project hd become.
This turmoil seemed to reflect the unsettled nature of this year's Buying and Selling eContent conference, an event that brought together some very good speakers overall but which had some crashing lows to go along with its resounding highs. Attendance was off from last year's healthy showing but still had a good collection of both content vendors, technologists and institutional content buyers. Some of the presentations were downright brilliant and spot on: Y.S. Chi, Vice-Chair of Elsevier, gave a fantastic assessment of the content industry, underscoring his belief that the content industry was going to have to move towards providing experiences and not just content.
I had to smile at Y.S.' use of experience as a focus for content's value, having made experiences part of our definition of content five years ago: "Information and experiences created by individuals, institutions and technology to benefit audiences in venues that they value." I posted it on Wikipedia not long thereafter and there it remains in somewhat modified form (my thanks to Wikipedians who helped me to refine it). Y.S. demonstrated briefly what appeared to be a bog-standard MediaWiki platform that Elsevier is using to enable qualified medical practitioners to develop a medical knowledge base - an important step forward for Elsevier to compete with other scientific publishers experimenting with social media and one which I am sure will not be their last foray into social media as they begin to focus on building knowledge community experiences from the expertise available in their client base.
But this was counterbalanced by Andrew Keene, the self-professed "Anti-Christ of Silicon Valley" whose keynote rant on the "Cult of the Amateur" repeated his performance of vivisecting social media at the SIIA Information Industry Summit earlier this year. On Content Nation I go into this presentation in more detail, but the nut of his argument - or shtick, as the case may be - is that people creating social media are a bunch of monkeys typing on PCs who should step aside to let the established media be the professionals in charge of content creation and curation. I imagine that the doctors contributing to Elsevier's wiki project would take exception to that label - as would many professionals of significant insight who contribute to social media publications globally.
The thing of it is, though, is that there were more than a few people at the conference who were glad to side with Keene's point of view. Certainly there is a need for professional content creators and curators but overall we should be glad that so much additional value is being created through social media. If there was anything that I found to be particularly disappointing and disturbing at the conference it was the number of people who were not only invested in traditional content buying and selling models but who were on some levels downright hostile to emerging and highly valuable concepts such as social media. I was very pleased with the presenters in my own panel who tried to explain how Jigsaw, ECNext's Manta and the Near-Time social media platform were creating mission-critical business information, but for some reason their leading-edge efforts seemed to be greeted with some skepticism.
The low point for this "rear guard" action, though, was the Special Libraries Association-sponsored panel, in which Janice Lachance, CEO of the SLA , led a well-presented but utterly stale list of complaints about content vendors that could have been written from ten-year-old slide decks. I know Janice, and she's a wonderful person who has great insights, as do the people who presented: I expected far better. I think, though, that it's really not a matter of personalities or presentations but more a core factor with which SLA members need to wrestle.
Having come through many years of upheaval, in which more than a few SLA members have seen their careers shuffled from one part of their organizations to another, it seems that too often SLA members have been disconnected from much of the "experience"-oriented generation of content in their organizations that drives much of the value of content for their patrons. If they allow themselves to focus too much on licensing agreements their careers are going to be tied ever more more closely to their vendors, whose main revenues continue to come through licensing content. As long as there's content to license then they have a job, might be one argument, which tends to chain their organizations to ever-weakening vendor business models.
I don't think that this unfortunate symbiosis really has to be the full truth of the matter, and I know that for many progressive SLA members it is far from the truth. Certainly Bill Noorlander's panel on win/win relationships helped to show some shadowy outlines of more progressive thinking. But the vendor "dance" on licensing has been stalemated for far too long, a stalemate that's been dragging down both the vendors themselves as they drown in complex licensing deals that slow down and reduce sales and service, but as well their clients as they try to justify pricing schemes that seem to have little bearing on the ROI required by the line managers who need to justify content acquisition costs in their budgets.
Put simply, it's time to get the lawyers and the fiefdom-builders out of the way and to come up with a new and more highly automated regimen for content licensing that will meet the increasingly "just-in-time"demands of institutional content buyers. The manufacturing industry came up with computer protocols that helped to automate materials acquisition from suppliers nearly two decades ago: why has it taken the publishing industry so long to invest in similar techniques for enterprises? Perhaps increased competition from new sources of valuable content will stimulate their thinking. In the meantime I think that it falls upon the SLA to become far more visionary and to start participating in the development of standards for automated licensing already being developed commercially to help their institutions to use premium content far more cost-effectively as they adapt to the ROI requirements of institutions trying to survive in a real-time economy.
Stephen E. Arnold gave a well-polished and insightful presentation on the state of the search industry's place in the content game as old models for charging for content come up against the ability of search engines such as Google creating ever more sophisticated ways to aggregate and organize content. As Steve pointed out the enterprise search engine market is booming but failing to pull together all of the content resources that their clients need to create the most valuable and comprehensive content collections that their clients need. At one surveyed institution two thirds of users were dissatisfied with their search engines. Steve sees federated content services as one key solution to this problem, but in the broader picture with a new global audience for content growing up around devices such as mobile phones and an ever-wider array of publishing services from technology providers it's not clear that solving the role of search engines in their marketing is going to be that much of a solution for any content provider. There are far too many things in motion to which publishers simply haven't reacted.
I don't mean to short-change the other good panels that the conference had, which all provided some great examples of how best practices are being applied today for content, but I was not taking my usual by-the-blow notes in the middle of launching Content Nation, so some of my recollections are now sketchy. Suffice it to say that most presenters provided some good examples of how content value is being created more from value-add services such as better content organization. Collexis, for example, demonstrated powerful new ways in which content categorization can be used to discover people's expertise in highly specific areas that help to accelerate research in medical and research fields. I think that Collexis CMO Darrell Gunter's best example of this capability's power was when one scientist discovered something that he never knew - the fellow in the office next to him was working in the same area in a key line of research!
Mike Orren, President of Pegasus News, uses user-contributed content and networking to enable marketers to target offers that have a more than 60 percent response rate and zero opt-outs in some instances, driven by very careful matching of opportunities to audiences based on content analysis. And Cengage Gale demoed an online book club that helps people to drive book downloads and sales based on building communities of book enthusiasts.
But whatever the particular focus of the conference's presentations, the same theme seemed to pop up again and again: the increasing polarization of publishing inside and outside the enterprise based on the rise of social media. There are some publishers such as Karen Christensen's Berkshire Publishing Group that try to balance both very traditional forms of publishing while exploring the development innovative social media outlets. But for many publishers the need to balance traditional revenue streams while investing in social media technologies, which push their business model ever further away from their core expertise, is proving to be quite challenging.
Social media's rise seems to be just as challenging to content experts in enterprises, who see the rise of social media content uncurated by information professionals as a challenge that stretches their expertise that much further from being interfaces to licensed content providers. Jeff Cutler, now an independent consultant, pointed out in comments how the rapid rise of Answers.com's WikiAnswers online Q&A community is one example of how social media is creating powerful "social knowledge," aggregations of expertise that are increasingly competitive with traditional sources and likely to eclipse them in time. Steve Arnold pointed out how Google's Knol project, meant to assemble reference articles on key topics, is as much about creating definitive topic mapping from social media to empower its search engine as it s about attracting people to social media itself. Any way you look at it, the elephant in the room was Content Nation - the ability of millions of people to influence others through highly scalable online publishing.
Social media is more than just a generational divide: it's a cultural divide as well. While I might be a bit greyer than the average Twitterer, somehow I was one of those willing to cross the divide and to agree that social media has become the emerging center of publishing, much as the Web itself became that center several years ago prior to many publishers being willing to accept that fact. But unlike their initial transition to the Web, social media challenges both publishers and institutions to come up not only with new skills but entirely new inventories: you can adapt news, book, magazine and even audio and video content to the Web but there's nothing in most publishers' quivers that can be repackaged into social media.
Social media certainly helps to enhance the value of many publications and in many instances can create premium content to drive very valuable new content products and services. But in most instances what we're seeing is the rise of a new parallel content industry whose rise in a medium now familiar in some ways to most publishers has caught them yet again by surprise. The divides created by social media are far more profound in many ways than the divides created by the Web. Most people of an employable age have an email account, perhaps even a few. But there are few in senior positions in the publishing industry today who have a Facebook account or even seem to want to have one - while younger people may not even see an email account until they get their first job.
One familiar and vocal person at the conference tried to downplay social media as "nothing new." And she was right, of course: social media has been with us for thousands of years. But the scale of social media's influence creates a social divide that seems to be leaving many publishing experts flat-footed in their responses to the marketplace. That's a problem that future iterations of this conference will have to address more fundamentally. The events industry, the social knowledge industry, the technology industry and the media industry are merging in ways that are helping to create a new real-time knowledge economy that cannot be responded to easily by many.
I am hoping that the next iteration of this conference will bring back both some more healthy crowds and more of a focus on the value propositions that people are seeking in the content marketplace. From buyers, I hope to hear more about how they are creating value from content in their enterprises and what they need to do to achieve ROI from internal and external content. From sellers, I hope to hear more about how they are leaving old licensing models behind to find new ways to respond to the real-time needs of their marketplaces. And from the Information Today, Inc. staff I hope that we get a return to a commitment to the thoughtful assembly of topics and presentations that drive people to more provocative thinking about the future of the content industry. Let's hope that both Bill Marriott and conference attendees will return to Camelback next year to find both a familiar place and a place transformed by a new outlook on its mission.
Read/Write Web notes a hue and cry rising up from bloggers who are concerned about their content being appropriated by aggregation services such as Shyfter that take blog feeds and develop ad-based services using their content without bloggers' approval. Bloggers are apparently concerned that aggregation services are stripping off revenues from their ad-supported services. I suppose that there's more than one publisher chuckling on the sidelines of this affair as bloggers by the bucketful begin to discover an uncomfortable fact - if you decide to be a publisher via social media there's no magic spell that removes one from the problems that all publishers have. Commoditization, unfair use and redistribution of content without verifying a publisher's rights in a new context - these are common complaints in the publishing industry as a whole. This is, unfortunately, where many social media platform providers have fallen short.
Quick to create new features to embed content and to distribute it, many social media platforms have fallen short in their ability to help people monetize their content effectively. Yes, we've had contextual ads on blogs for years, but in essence contextual ads are telling bloggers and other social media creators using them that there's enough demand to sustain their publication on mass media ads. Unfortunately this is rarely the case - the supply of social media content is vastly greater than the demand for media-scaled ads and programs such as AdSense, while beneficial, will not pay huge dividends for most bloggers. It takes blogs with large, media-scaled audiences such as TechCrunch to sustain business with the existing advertising tools. The irony here is that as some social media properties have grown to such proportions they are recognizing that they really have the same problems as any other mass media-oriented property. Aggregation without licensing for commercial purposes draws off a blogger's revenues as much as it does a major newspaper's revenues. In Content Nation the problems of traditional publishers have become the problems of social media publishers, and vice versa.
Companies such as Newstex help bloggers to benefit from companies who want to play by copyright rules and license social media content, but in general there is little to be found in most standard weblogging packages that help a publisher to capitalize on the value of their content in contexts other than their native Web site. Some of the solution is better standard features for bloggers - technology such as Attributor can enable a publisher to track content usage more easily and relicensing services such as Copyright Clearance Center's RightsLink and iCopyright can help companies to manage content relicensing opportunities more effectively. And on Near-Time, the platform that we use for Content Nation, there is the capability to define subscription access to content, a "gated community" that sets a bar for both content access and creation as desired. These types of tools are the basic "block and tackle" for any online publisher today, whether in social media or mainstream media, to ensure that they understand who is using their content and making it easy to establish good commercial relationships with those valuing content to make money through content aggregation or reuse.
Unfortunately the technology for social media ads and licensing is really only addressing one part of extracting value from social media. Individuals such as myself build value for focused audiences that gets converted into marketable value other ways - through consulting engagements, through the sale of research and other services that we provide. Other people look for more broad social transactions, building a reputation and relationships that can be converted into personal or professional brand value on any number of conversational and tribal levels. Be it positioning yourself for your next job or promotion, fostering a willingness to participate in events and projects, giving or receiving endorsements or just being tapped into the things that you really love, social media creates value in ways that advertising and licensing don't begin to encompass.
What's really needed to help make social media more successful are better tools to extract value out of social relationships when one's content travels into contexts away from their own home base for their social media. For example, when my blog is picked up in a feed reader, I'd sure like it if there were an easier way for me to embed offers from other people in my social networks that were valuable to them as well as to me. Some of these might be monetizable, others more purely social, but it's the weak point for most ad networks - they assume that transactions have to be based on mass marketing rather than personal marketing. This is one of the reasons why marketing events, services and publications via Facebook is becoming increasingly popular - the groups and people who congregate there are explicitly opting in to relationship networks, making marketing on any level far more effective when done as a member of the community.
So my condolences to bloggers who are burning out as their dreams of big-media glory come face to face with the true nature of electronic content. If you came to glory because you were glad to have free distribution and never demanded any better of your social media platform providers, then shame on you. But as important as it is to have better tools for commercialization through aggregation and reuse it's more important to think about the basics of how to create value in social media.
TechCrunch notes along with others the possible bidding war brewing between Google and Microsoft to acquire social bookmarking service Digg, which sounds probable given the relentless march for each of these companies to build market share. I wonder whether the prices will really accelerate that much off of last year's earlier possible bids for Digg, though, given the soft ad economy and the stabilization of Digg's audience. Mind you I am sure that either Google or Microsoft would love to have 20 million monthly visitors but the real issue is how one of these majors can recover from the flattened prospects of a Facebook deal in a down economy.
With Facebook seeming more interested in improving their platform as of late than cashing in their chips perhaps to some degree both Google and Microsoft have been played off against one another by Facebook via their high asking price to keep either of them from getting stronger through another social media property acquisition. Certainly the stock buzz has been off of both of these properties since the Facebook deal went cold, so perhaps with quarterly earnings calls looming around the corner both Google and Microsoft are eager to have at least some social media story to tell.
Google's Orkut platform was always an also-ran in traffic and is suffering from declining traffic, in part perhaps due to losses to new local-market social media platforms in India and other regional markets, so it's about time for Google to pony up for a bona fide social media community. From the Microsoft side its ad deal with Digg would go away in all likelihood with a Google acquisition so a Microsoft deal would help to shore up momentum for its still-young ad network, but with only a tiny finger into social media via MSNBC.com's Newsvine property it has a lot of catching up to do as well
On balance, though, Google's needs would seem to make this deal a "must do" at this point to ensure that it can get some flesh-and-blood "wisdom of the crowds" that's been managed largely through their search algorithms to date. Search is still an important tool, but as the word "curate" begins to trip off more and more tongues this year Google needs to step up its ability to curate content with a human eye as well as through machine intelligence. While its audience doesnt' stretch down deeply into specialty topics Digg's ability to lend weight to what really interests people on the most popular topics for a younger audience that starts and ends their day with social media is an important factor for Google to address. Combine that with the potential to marry Google search algorithms with Digg's increasingly sophisticated curation of bookmarked articles a and there could be some very interesting news products in the offing.
The other factor that Google seems to need to address through such an acquisition is a cultural issue. Google's presence to the world is friendly oftentimes but not very conversational. A brand like Digg is by its very essence a conversational brand, one that creates most of its value through people interacting as a group. Google needs that more open approach to brand building in its DNA more deeply. It's good to at listening to geeks and getting a bit better at listening to real-world people, but folks in the Web 2.0 world like Kevin Rose who are just far more accessible can become effective bridges to that more open collaborative culture. Microsoft could certainly benefit in similar ways, but the cultural divide between most of the Web 2.0 world and the corporate culture of Microsoft would seem to be a pretty wide gap to fill in.
This could be just one more social media deal that goes sour after the earnings calls but somehow this one has a heft to it that may lead it to completion. The prices being bandied about are far less steep than Facebook's earlier numbers - USD 200 million or so - and as fine a job as Digg has done with refining its platform it's not clear that it can go much further as a standalone product. Social bookmarking is still an important social media capability, but the future probably belongs to those services which can blend generic platforms such as Digg with services that can use that technology to build enthusiast communities that may carry a publisher's brand or a product brand. We'll see where this goes but hopefully one of these players finally gets off the dime and starts embracing social media communities more fully in an open Web environment.
When Jim Hirshfeld rang a few days ago to chat about his move back into the content business he BTWed that there was a neat session being held by the originators of the groundbreaking 1999 book The Cluetrain Manifesto to start a new conversation on the future of online content and its role in markets and society as a whole. The book rocked my world, and I've been babbling about markets as conversations ever since. After much of the USD 20 billion being pumped into the early online economy wound up in the bit bucket a lot of those early lessons in online content were derided by the media "experts," but nevertheless there were key concepts from Cluetrain and other ground-breaking thought leaders that are still the foundation of online publishing.
Doc Searls kicked off things with a chat about the early environment on the Web, when tools like the Pointcast screen saver were chewing up bandwidth in search of passice audiences, Cluetrain suggested to the world, "We are human beings - and our reach exceeds your grasp. Deal with it." The places in Silicon Valley where the "cluetrains" showed up every day but where there was never a delivery inspired Searls, Chris Locke and David Weinberger to pop out their ideas about the significance of online marketing when traditionalists in technology and media weren't - dare I say it - "getting it." The Wall Street Journal picked up on the online posts, a book deal followed and they've been collecting royalities ever since.
Ten years later, what's the significance of all this? I'll be posting item on Content Nation throughout the session and help you through the answers. Will post links here as things progress.
Major book pubishers have not been known in years past for their innovation in adapting to online audiences, but after years of investing modestly in the future of online content many print publishers are stepping up their efforts to capture a new generation of audiences who grew up with online content as a given. Elsevier is one major scientific publisher that seems to have picked up their pace of online innovation significantly as of late, Their announcement last week of 10 major reference works being made available online this year was trumped today by the announcement of a new Wiki-based platform that will enable practicing physicians to update evidence-based medical information online. In both instances Elsevier is betting that some titles will do best as online-only reference materials.
Having seen a major response to its making chapters of its Major Reference Works availableonline Elsevier is indicating that two reference titles - the Encyclopedia ofNeuroscience and the second edition of Encyclopedia of Ocean Science - are to become online-only references. Elsevier indicates that other reference titles will be available in print for some period of time, but clearly the trend is to move towards online access that's likely to move people into recurring revenues rather than chancing the publication of expensive reference materials. Knovel showed the way years ago to Sci-Tech publishers with its Knovel Library of online reference content, but now the major scientific publishers are beginning to see that electronic additions are going to become the core of their revenues moving forward it's not just a game for aggressive startups.
Today's announcement of WiserWiki underscores not only the awareness that Sci-Tech publishers have for the value of online reference but also how best to make use of social media technologies to make it valuable to specific audiences. WiserWiki is seeded with The Textbook of Primary Care Medicine, a reference book covering problems, conditions and diseases encountered in the practices of primary care physicians. No longer in print, what better way to keep this grass-roots information about the real world of medicine than to let the physicians encountering these phenomena to update it themselves? This is a great online product strategy, combining authoritative content from peer professionals as a core that can help to build an online community rapidly. Just as Wikipedia did not spring from thin air - it took more than 100,000 articles from an earlier project to get it going - Wikis built for specialized online communities will work best when there's a core of content to help people feel that they don't have to wait for their contributions to be part of something that has collective merit.
Print titles are going to be with us for quite some time to come, but as printing, shipping and stocking expenses fall prey to rising energy and raw materials prices the need for better margins with less risk is pushing book publishers of reference materials inexorably towards "digital native" audiences who have become used to search engines as primary tools for accessing reference content. Obviously other types of titles benefit from this move but for reference works the move is essential if publishers are to keep these products growing and profitable. In the end scientific publishers have much to gain from tranforming their business from one of delivering tomes to delivering content in higly valuable contexts that can drive scientific research and applications forward more rapidly.
The buzz is increasing on a potential acquisition of the Plaxo contacts-oriented social networking service by Facebook, as noted by VentureBeat and others, and there are good reasons to think that this would be a good marriage if one can overlook the personality conflicts in the potential deal. Plaxo's new Pulse social networking service is going strong and helping to extend the value of its core contacts synchronization service, but ultimately Pulse is yet another social media login to maintain with features and functionality not terribly different from Facebook itself. At the same time Facebook is becoming an increasingly popular spot for professionals to congregate for networking of both a personal and professional nature, but it lacks gravitas for people trying to keep abreast of changes in people's professional profiles. Backing in Plaxo data and desktop synchronization capabilities into Facebook's infrastructure may offer an interesting marriage of capabilities that may give Facebook a more competitive posture with professionals as LinkedIn continues to gain mojo as a "social inbox" for the professional set.
Rumor squashers are quick to point out historical conflicts between management in these two companies that might squelch such a deal before it's out of the blocks. But with investors from Sequoia who have fingers in both LinkedIn and Plaxo perhaps there's reason to think that there's a priority being placed on getting Plaxo's potential up to speed as soon as possible in comparison to other assets in their portfolio. With reasonably healthy growth there's not an immediate need for Plaxo to pull the string on a deal just yet, but knowing that venture capital may be harder to come by for subsequent funding rounds in 2008 this might be a good point for Plaxo to exit into the hands of a player such as Facebook as it continues to attract professionals rapidly into its multi-faceted social networking portal. Expect an increasing round of high-profile deals for companies such as Plaxo as social media plays begin to consolidate to grow more effectively in a market that is scrambling for revenue-generating capabilities in a softening economy.
In short, Knol will enable people to create encyclopedia-like articles on various topics which can be rated by their readers and have both in-article links to other sources on the Web and automatically generated links to related Knol content. Unlike Wikipedia, there's one author per article, but multiple authors can create articles on the same topic, creating a free-market effect as to who is the leading expert on the topic. Articles will be equipped with Google ads, revenues from which will be shared with the author.
This is quite different in many important aspects from Jimmy Wales' Wikipedia, which in addition to attributing authors only in the history trail on collaboratively edited articles also maintains an ad-free environment for their content. While there are more than passing similarities to Wikipedia in Knol's overall design, the system doesn't seem likely to yield similar results. Knol's emphasis on single authorship without editing means that any particular subject is going to gain popularity based on a particular person's outlook, which may be good one day and quite out of date the next.
So while Knol may help people to get a leg up on what leading experts think about a particular subject - and mind you, that might be great for consultants like us folks at Shore - it's at the mercy of the editing priorities of whomever is maintaining their articles. For fast-changing topics this means that it may take a little bit more work for a reader to figure out who's really at the top of their game on a particular topic - and who's off on holiday for a while. Wikipedia needs constant monitoring to keep powerful people and organizations from trying to add spin to their articles, but at least there's highly active editing of one reasonably definitive version of the facts on a given topic.
While the comparison to Wikipedia is inevitable I see this in many ways as much a play for a wider variety of reference portals. Certainly About.com's docent system has resulted in topic experts who have financial motivations to maintain reference topics well on a wide variety of subjects, and in many ways Knol seems to be aimed at providing more efficient ways for subject matter experts to compete with one another in ways that generate revenues more efficiently than About.com. Knol puts more of an onus on an individual author to keep their information up to date, as others could come up with fresher content first, providing a framework that will help them to focus on content while leaving usability, design and monetization concerns to other. As Google's OpenSocial initiative gains steam one can imagine a person's Knol pages as reference content that can travel with them throughout related social media sites.
This free-market approach to knowledge is intriguing but it highlights a major problem that Google faces. As more and more high-quality user-generated content comes online, many people are finding answers to their questions from leading experts in social media venues that are precluding the need to reference a search engine for answers. As it is, so many topic-oriented searches display Wikipedia articles as the definitive source that in some ways Google has become the default front end for Wikipedia lookups as much as an index of the Web in general, reducing overall ad engagement on Google search results pages - and, in time, fewer searches generated on Google. Fewer searches means less available inventory for Google ads - so keeping more people engaged in Google inventory of some kind becomes an increasingly important goal for Google. So as much as this is a very interesting and useful approach to knowledge development it's overshadowed by commercial considerations that may or may not result in knowledge that people really trust. Collaborative editing has its limits for generating quality reference content, but at some point one's own version of a topic needs to stand up to the challenge of other knowledgeable people.
There are many different ways that Knol could evolve out before it launches, but the key factor would seem to be to provide people with a way to aggregate knowledge effectively. As much as one individual's view of a topic can be useful collaborative editing offers the most certain way to gain insights that are going to provide people with the deepest insight into a given topic. There's still room in such a system to reward individuals - one can imagine a system like Wikinvest in which a collaborative neutral article could be supplemented by opinionated personal articles - but first and foremost one hopes that Google will see that the best system will be one that serves the truth before it serves the bottom line. Knol holds out great promise as a platform that can help individuals to create useful reference content, but it may wind up having to serve too many competing interests to gain much of an impact on the marketplace.
As an ever-broader swath of professionals setting up Facebook accounts the buzz amongst content industry professionals sometimes has it that LinkedIn has lost its mojo. Compete statistics show that although LinkedIn is no match for Facebook in total audience it has grown its overall monthly audience more than 500 percent in the past year and has downright robust month-to-month growth. A lot of this growth has been based on major improvements in basic social media functions - ahem, it took you how many years to allow people to post a photo of themselves? - and some of the growth has been based on improved networking features and user-generated content from LinkedIn Answers. As noted in the LinkedIn blog the list is getting longer quickly with a an integration toolkit that is enabling BusinessWeek to integrate LinkedIn content into their news portal . LinkedIn is also enabling its members read news that's about one's company and read by people in your company and your personal network.
While some of these are rather tame efforts - the news feature won't be of much use to small businesses not covered deeply in the selected mainstream news sources - it's the sum of the parts that business information providers need to look at carefully. LinkedIn grows through members inviting new people into the LinkedIn environment, but the challenge for LinkedIn, as it is with any media service, is to keep people engaged once they get there and to give them a reason to make LinkedIn a must-visit site for professionals. As it stands now, though, It's must-visit for very specific types of functions - it's not a "check it every hour" type of experience.
The rapid rise of Facebook is based on its ability to act as a "social inbox," generating a stream of content and events from members that makes it the ultimate online water cooler on both a personal and professional basis. LinkedIn's addition of applications toolkits and mainstream news are a step towards that effect, but it's still feeling its way towards the level of personal engagement that allows Facebook to appeal to professionals trying to connect to their peers.
LinkedIn has enormous potential to become a "must-have" context for business information providers to integrate into their own environments and a key portal on which to ensure the presence of their own content. But it needs to get some of that personal, "water cooler" touch into a product that has long been strong on basic structure and professionalism but short on personal charm. Here's hoping that LinkedIn can continue to accelerate both its prowess in content integration as well as move towards tools and design elements that will enable it to bridge more of the gap between its "strictly business" roots and a new generation that's not afraid to show their face to the public online.
I took the suggestion of my colleague Jeff Cutler and sat down to lunch recently with Collexis EVP and CMO Darrell Gunter to get a briefing on their progress in launching product platforms leveraging their core content technologies. I must admit that I approached the lunch with some skepticism. The knowledge management landscape is littered with startups that had great technology ideas but which never quite made it as independent companies. With this troubled environment in mind, what was it that Collexis could offer that would distinguish it quickly enough to be a successful David amongst content Goliaths?
Collexis' core competency is being able to apply its "secret sauce" of semantic processing and faceted navigation to more valuable forms of content than others and to develop unique ways to apply those semantic tools to real-life business problems. Where companies like Inxight had semantic engines trained to parse already commoditized forms of content such as news articles Collexis focuses its semantic processing capabilities on unstructured content generated by professionals such as medical researchers. The story could have ended right there like so many other companies in the KM "dead pool", but instead of settling for marketing a nifty content categorization tool Collexis has worked with its recently acquired platform partner Syynx to develop some very serious solutions for scientific, technical and medical clients that are strong indicators of how semantics and professional networks can combine to create powerful publishing solutions in high-value enterprise markets. The most interesting of these emerging platforms is biomed experts.com, a portal being readied for launch by Collexis that combines Collexis' semantic capabilites with public research articles from PubMed to develop an extremely powerful expert network tool. Put in any relevant set of terms from the world of STM publishing and biomedexperts.com will return a cite-ranked list of relevant categories that can be navigated to find experts who publish research in that topic specialty. Choose any one of these experts (click on screen grab to right for more detail) and get an excellent analysis of their publishing patterns in this topic arena, including a publishing timeline and categoried publication cites organized by more than a dozen related topic areas, including disorders, anatomy, procedures, physiology and so on. If this person's work is of interest to you it's easy in biomedexperts.com to track this person's publications and to invite them into your personal network. Biomedexperts.com enables one to view patterns in research and relationships amongst researchers with other powerful analysis tools, including a nifty map representation of which locations are collaborating heavily with other worldwide locations on a topic as well as a startree-like representation of the strength of publishing ties between different authors.
While we've seen some navigation tools like this deployed on platforms such as Factiva's Search 2.0 research portal Collexis has taken sophisticated analysis of texts to a whole new level in placing the exploration of authors and their network of relationships at the core of biomedexperts.com's capabilities. Not only can one identify rapidly the strengths of an author's research with biomedexperts.com but one can also move rapidly to understand the social contexts in which that research is developed. When your next step in your own research is understanding not only who wrote what but who's in thick with whom in their research it can accelerate rapidly your own next steps.
While it's uncertain that biomedexperts.com will succeed in developing community around its platform any more effectively than other efforts such as Elsevier's 2Collab its focus on organizing both content and authors into meaningful patterns is a key advantage that could help Collexis accelerate its product development efforts in a number of very interesting directions - including other market verticals where professional expertise is expressed effectively through publishing. Collexis understands as well as any other content company out there today that content is as much about the people who create it as it is about documents and data and has developed tools that exploit that understanding very effectively.
This interesting marriage of social insight and insight into topic expertise is a valuable combination that we can expect to see in many major content platforms over the next few years. Collexis has a window of opportunity in which it can sling its very potent capabilities at Goliaths focusing on similar opportunities - or decide to collaborate with a wide range of Davids and Goliaths to help them succeed in keeping their value propositions from frittering away as social networking tools begin to replace document repositories as primary content discovery tools. Lock and load, Collexis, you're in the right place at the right time. Thanks for the sandwich!
Yahoo joined the list of online companies 
