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 really love Rafael Sidi's Really Simple Sidi weblog, it's a great compilation of insights into sciences publishing that is easy to read and is in my daily bookmarks of news sources to monitor. Turns out that Rafel is a big fan of ContentBlogger also, so I was pleased to get a preview briefing from him on Elsevier's new Illumin8 product making its debut today. While it's hard to draw major conclusions on the significance of any product Day One, it appears that Elsevier has enabled Rafael's team to come up with what promises to be a real breakthrough in STM workflow solutions focused on getting the right insights into emerging solutions to scientific problems effectively.

The problem in big-stakes scientific research and development fields is that most search tools are oriented towards topical approaches to research that don't necessarily focus on relating problems and the organizations and people focusing on them with the solutions and benefits that they provide. For example, if one were to look for research, news and Web content relating to the HIV virus, the typical search engine is going to look at a search centered on that term and come up with documents that relate to this topic - but not necessarily focus on the solutions and benefits being provided by specific research studies for available new products.

This is a critical factor when trying to select a new line of scientific research or to understand how to position a new product based on that research. How quickly can one define what solutions are in play for specific types of scientific problems by specific companies or universities? Who's delivering the most beneficial solutions? Illumin8 addresses these kinds of questions by adding an important semantic twist to search processing. Instead of focusing just on nouns to define how content relates to a topic Illumin8 clusters results based on how they fall into verb categories that align topic groups such as organizations, products, experts and technology with problems and benefits associated with those topics. Using this tool one can discover easily not just recent research, Web postings and news stories but the items that the real problems being addressed by that research and the real benefits being revealed very rapidly.

Illumin8 has a very simple search interface thus far, a "white box" approach that will move from topics to problems and benefits mapping automaticaly or the ability to define more sophisticated queries using special keywords. You can choose from news, research and Web content or any combination of these via a checkbox interface and adjust your precision/recall balance for getting lots of results or just of few of the best matches with a slider bar. Search results come with graph bars and totals to make it easier to see which keywords and clusters of topics, problems and solutions are coming up most frequently in results.

While lacking some of the interface sophistication of a more mature product like Collexis that focuses deeply on helping people navigate expert network relationships and still needing to address some entity mapping issues the fundamental power of Illumin8 is quite evident even in its early introduced form. More sophisticated analysis of verbs as valuable tools in semantic processing is in part behind the proliferation of "sales triggers" intelligence products such as Generate and InsideView, which enable sales professionals to understand when news and other content sources are pointing towards companies involved in activities that impact their sales processes. Applying this type of processing to scientific studies and product development is likely to help scientific, medical and technical companies and organizations to get a similar leg up on understanding who's moving towards revenue-impacting insights more quickly.

It's an approach that can probably yield tangible benefits for many types of business information as well as consumer information. It would be nice, for example, to see a semantic engine such as Illumin8's applied to product and catalog sites. To some degree many existing search engines factor these kinds of semantic issues into their processing behind the scenes, but Illumin8 demontrates that when one focuses on the problem-solution relationship from a product standpoint instead of a straight topic approach the benefits can be dramatic.

I am skeptical oftentimes when new products claim to be "workflow solutions," but Illumin8 seems to be pointing towards a pain point that people in R&D departments encounter often enough without real effective solutions being offered elsewhere that it probably qualifies as such a tool. It's another way of saying that there just might be some significant ROI in there if someone can do the research to tease it out from an early adopter community. Hats off to Rafael for a nifty product launch - helps to have that blog - and to the folks as Elsevier for giving Rafael a chance to strut his stuff. Hopefully Illumin8 continues to grow in scope, substance and quality.

Labels: elsevier, rafael sidi, search, Semantic Web, STM

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 of Neuroscience 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.

Labels: books, elsevier, reference, Social Media, STM, Wikis

Rafael Sidi is pumped up about Elsevier's new 2collab social bookmarking service, which he describes as the product of "the young turks in Amsterdam," presumably product developers trying to encourage this major scientific publisher to engage the online world of collaborative content. As what sounds to be a countercultural "intrapreneur" initiative 2collab has a lot going for it. 2collab has all of the features that one would expect to find in a modern social bookmarking service - public and private groups, tagging, commenting, voting, easy bookmarking and a very attractive and highly usable design - combined with editable citation information stored with each bookmark (click on the screen grab above to get a flavor of the metadata). However, the citation data cannot be referenced via the 2collab search engine yet, a minor inconvenience in the short run but something that should be addressed once a significant body of content is aggregated via the service.

As to when that significant body will appear is anyone's guess at this point. In spite of a decent launch and prominent billing for the service on Elsevier's corporate portal there appear to be relatively few takers for the service so far. I was challenged to find any publicly posted articles with comments other than my own in five days' worth of posts and thus far today there have been nine public posts in all. To the product's credit the timestamping makes it very easy to figure this out, but in the meantime it's a reminder that the community is still in the process of forming around this product. Group participation doesn't fare much better, with public groups still very small and formed around topics mostly centered on online technology topics.

2collab has an excellent design and the development team is to be commended for a first-rate job in launching a highly credible platform right out of the box, but it's going to take more than features similar to established social media outlets to attract people already using those other platforms. Just as a simple example of the challenge that faces Elsevier, a topic like "congestive heart failure" returns 141 results on del.icio.us, accumulated over a long period of time, to be sure, but in the meantime indicating a ways to go for 2collab to attract active participation. As important as it is to get the technology right in social media it's equally important to get some core communities invested in the platform so that their examples of successful interactions can get other participants jazzed. Consider 2collab to be in serious need of jazzing at this point.

Can Elsevier manage to get some more mojo behind 2collab and develop it into a thriving social media community? In truth Elsevier and other scientific publishers are so far behind in embracing social media that it's going to be an uphill struggle for any of them to make significant progress in developing social media capabilities that are, admittedly, rather long-term investments for as-yet-uncertain future revenues. But one thing seems to be certain: whichever scientific publisher is able to finally crack the social media marketplace and develop a tool that becomes the "go-to" place for sharing and discussing scientific literature is going to win a big, big prize at the end of the day - regardless of how that prize scales to current revenue streams. Consider 2collab a modest bet by Elsevier on the future of social media as a publishing platform that is in need of doubling-down sooner rather than later to ensure a place at the emerging world of user-driven publishing markets.

Labels: 2collab, collaboration, elsevier, Social Media, STM