SIIA Content Division head Ed Keating moderated an all-CEO panel including Steve Goldstein of
Alacra, Mike Pickett of
Onvia and Tom Aley of
Generate. All of these are premium subscription content services for business. Ed: How do you set strategy? Mike: 3-year cycle, intense interviews and surveys of clients, 20 percent respond. Executive oversight committee bring it down to a 16- to 18-month plan, has helped to accelerate the development of products that are building revenues rapidly. Steve: 30 firms make up 75 percent of revenues, work with them constantly to develop new capabilities, few things take longer than a few months. Tom: have 100 companies trialing the product plus live customers, product strategy driven by business plan and client interactions.
Ed: mashups, APIs, where to they fit in? Tom: we are a mashup, take in terabytes of data daily. Steve: very little of our research is geography-based but we put a lot of things together for clients from existing products. Can build PDFs from multiple sources of content. Mike: always looking to bring in tools that are useful for our clients, haven't found anything meaningful enough to market, existing opportunities are rewarding.
Ed: managing competitors. Steve: We exist to solve this, can pull together information from major competitive sources who won't cooperate through other platforms, clients drive the requirement to integrate. Ed: Alacra as the "new terminal", what works? Tom: We're in the real-time business, critical part of our strategy. Some need annual subscription for specific tools but typically it's all you can eat. Mike: Our product allows people to drill down into purchasing in the public sector, most of our clients are wired or wireless, but haven't seen a big push for mobile/wireless access. Steve: Most of our clients use mobile, but banker on the road gets swamped with alerts, customers turn to Alacra to help them consolidate content into one email with content from subscription sources.
Ed: anyone using them for business or training content? Only one in audience. Any plans for video in mobile? Tom: Not yet, but a large bank in NYC giving one to each employee for training videos. Ed: How do customer workflow solutions fit in to your offerings? Tom: Financial institutions like this, most use email as their main workflow solution, need to provide easy ways for people to come into their application but allow them to make use of other resources. Mike: email notifications are key for some clients as well as SF.com connectivity. Try to stick to being a proprietary database but always looking for opportunities to extend "stickiness". Ed: What kind of customization do you do? Steve: Much more today, customers choose database and some aesthetics, try not to customize from scratch. Customers may turn around and realize that the customization wasn't what they needed and use the new version of the product. Keeping close to client needs keeps them at a 92-94 percent renewal rate. Tom: get a lot of requests, may offer it at time and materials or client may do it themselves, the key is to lock in the subscription.
Ed: user-generated content, how can it be used to customize content? Steve: allow customers to annotate research, that's it so far, not a lot of demand. A lot of the information gets collaborated on behind the firewall. Mike: Communities can add value, objective is to give our clients an "unfair advantage." We can tell who bid on projects and who won it, can provide custom reporting. Tom: Aggregate content, customization allows users to provide information in a private mode to understand how their own contacts relate to Generate's central content. Ed: Second Life? Mike: Can't think of one use. Steve: Clare Hart did a YouTube interview with Scobel, was afraid that this would mean it was OK to let people watch TV in office, Second Life would be even more distracting.
Ed: Who pays? Ads vs. subscription, Patrick Spain sees business information being ad supported except for the very high end. Mike: Our information is highly detailed, we believe that our data is unique and worth the price of admission. Steve: need a lot of page views to get up to a $500 report sale. Would be difficult to make it available for free. Ed: SEO, what works? Tom: use SEO to drive content through media partners that can drive subscription sales products. Leverage partner relationships to build sales queue. One-time searchers can turn into leads. Steve: half of our content is sold to destination Web sites, optimize for premium report sales. Critical part of any marketing strategy. Mike: significant leads from SEO, can always improve. Products from $1K-$25K a year. Tom: geographic sales force, face time is great but product speaks with itself, work with partners for mid-market and niches.
Good session, premium content providers do best when they stick close to a focused set of clients and meeting their needs, but it's interesting to see how they can extend their strategies via media exposure. It's a far more complex set of skills required to succeed with premium content, even if core business models for premium content are staying on course for now.
Labels: events, SIIA Content Forum 2007, trends
