It's always been fun to be a part of ASIDIC events, so I was very pleased to have been invited to moderate a Q&A period at this year's Spring ASIDIC get-together at the offices of Lyrasis in Philadelphia. It's a bit more low-key venue than for previous ASIDIC events, which reflects in some ways the challenges that many enterprise-oriented publishers have faced these days, but also the degree to which their business models are trying to catch up to the value points in publishing that revolve around metadata and search technologies. The good news is that the ASIDIC meeting pulled together some excellent case studies demonstrating how publishers are moving away from "pull up a document" styles of electronic publishing towards using sophisticated semantic processing to get their content ready for battle for use in contexts driven by metadata. Here are some links to the panel-by-panel posts that I recorded on Google Buzz (no login required to view, login required for comments):

Labels: 2010, ASIDIC, collexis, conferences, enterprise, events, mark logic, search, Semantic Web, Taxonomies, temis

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.

Labels: aip, alpsp, ASIDIC, collexis, dylla, gunter, ingoldsby, physics, scholarly publishing, Social Media, uniphy

Darrell Gunter, CMO for Collexis holdings, kicked off the session noting some key examples from the past and present of how radically different pricing schemes can help to define marketplaces anew. A couple of decades ago, companies like Telerate were dominating financial markets with USD 700 terminals, yet Bloomberg started with USD 1500 terminals and eventually went on to dominate the financial information marketplace. By contrast, today oncology.com - now folded into cancer.net - tried doing oncology journal content in an ad-based online model. Disruption can come from both sides of the scale.

Adam Bernacki, VP of Sales for Leadership Directories, noted that revenue retention is always a key goal while at the same time listening to clients and understanding what they really find to be valuable. Neal Posner, for VP of Pricing for Avaya and Elsevier, pricing is a practice focused on bridging many conflicting approaches between internal divisions
and a limited sales force that can sell only so many ways. One of the biggest challenges is when new players come in with completely different business models. When Avaya found more competition for their core technology from companies with different goals they began to focus more on value-add content.

Rob Docters, Managing Partner for Abbey Road Associates, runs a boutique consultancy specializing in price strategy. He sees pricing not as the price tag, or price level, but the inputs into that tag, the gross or net value, including the brand value. Brand drives price when it tells a story that you can't tell yourself. USPS was looking at rate pricing, they did some interviews on bulk mail pricing, noted that people throw out mail with the bulk mail insignia. People will spend more for first class mail just not to get into the junk-"branded" stack. Toys 'R Us tried having no tags and a kiosk with a device that could tell you what the price was. This enabled experimental pricing to adjust pricing and discover the best price, much as Web sites do via ecommerce software. Goods such as software are not tangible, you need to know how much your customer knows to understand brand value. With tiered pricing, but in minimal effort to de-feature, the manual will tell them what they can and cannot do. A key problem is when customers get out of touch with the benefits of a product - don't cancel, give your advocate for the product the product for a year to keep your brand value still in the door.

Charlie Terry, President of MarketResearch.com, has a customer base of brand managers in consumer products, biotech,investment banking and professional services. The challenges for an aggregator are different, pricing and discount don't play as much of a role. The customer's perception of value is the most important factor, have to have a sale - the customer being comfortable with a price - but you need to capture the market as well, to price to what's generally accepted for a given marketplace. It's oftentimes perception - originally black Motorola Razr phones were USD 35, red ones double or more that price. Getting the price right is a tactical issue oftentimes, you have to match delivery with the people's expectations for a given medium. In the mid '90s, hardware was driving much of the value of many financial information services, not the content. They had to adapt their models accordingly as the Internet shifted the value point of information delivery.

How do you establish value in pricing? Neil: oftentimes there are many different price points that will work, buying behavior is not always rational. There has to be a group to monitor what's happening with pricing,typically - though only one person in the audience had such a unit. On bundling for pricing, Rob notes that there can be weak bundles, for example, cross-promotion of car rentals from airline reservation services. This is stronger overall than when airline companies bought car rental companies and discovered that this was not necessary or even advantageous to make good price bundles. Bundling can also help to make complex products more simple to sell, whereas simple products are easier to de-bundle. Terry: There's a temptation to think that selling value is good, selling price is bad. If you sell a report one year you may not buy the same report next year - and you may be able to bundle other products, such as a newsletter, that extend the research's value.

Adam notes that it's important to make pricing a collaborative process, the process originates with a calculation to understand how much one can afford to lose on a product, then with other groups to understand what it means to a product group, and so on. More constituents have more of a voice these days. How do you determine if you've done a good job? It has to be consistent within the company's own scheme and with the methods used to deliver the product. It has to be logical, so that an average sales person can explain it in a minute or so easily and consistently. Finally, it has to be transparent on some level; if you've done a good enough job and it becomes known in the marketplace it doesn't become a target for discounting, because it's sensible and accepted.

Charlie notes that a major publisher put all their books on the Web in PDF form, their print sales doubled. Rob notes that this example of "hooking," where one thing leads to the purchase of another. In amusement parks, you get "hooked" into being in line for a particular line. Lawyers that practice only in Pennsylvania won't buy federal content - until they need it, at which point a service like LexisNexis will charge six times for a "rush order." Question from Jeff Cutler: pay walls reduce SEO optimization, how does that affect a premium service and how much do you give a "bite of the apple". Charie: will return table of content and synopsis at first, after a few times you need to register, so this enables search-enabled sales. Sales reps will also help you to search Marketresearch.com. Need "real words" there, work with publishers to get the right content for search engines.

A real difference between price and cost, how is that managed? Neil: What's the real cost to you of not having the product? Work from there. My question: how do we do better in publishing at establishing value in context? People look at the internal data too much, look at your customers. Large companies less sensitive to cost drivers, small companies more sensitive. Neil: Look at net price as much as list price, if you're in control of a net price - the price after terms and discounts and concessions - you can match the sale more exactly to people's value sensitivities.

A good session, I think the real question is perhaps not so much how pricing itself needs to change but how publishers discover demand in the marketplace. The relatively fixed pricing that we see in enterprise content publishing especially tends to create the ever-present compaint about content commoditizatization. Too much money is spent on creating custom workflow applications - the equivalent of Rob's example of the airline buying the car rental company - to have a captive context. But the Web is showing us that content thrives when it's more able to travel quickly and effectively into different context where it's valued highly. Publishers are relying far too heavily on old production-oriented models for pricing when they should focus more on market-driven models more akin to a transaction-driven marketplace. This will carry more risk, but ultimately more reward for those who can get content into the right contexts most efficiently.

Labels: brown bag, collexis, elsevier, marketresearch.com, pricing, SIIA

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!

Labels: biomed experts, collaboration, collexis, knowledge management, Social Media, tools