I've been getting ready for my own panel so I haven't tuned into this panel too much, but from what I am gathering is that sales forces are still largely separate for print and digital advertising, in part because the two audiences are seen as so different. That may be true in some instances, but I am wondering whether it has more to do with the print advertiser and agencies being so different. I think that we're going to see that change over time but there's no doubt that print is going to remain a distinct advertising platform that has a different purpose with different outcomes.

Labels: ABM, advertising, Digital Velocity, events

Some see online audience metrics as a black art, and this is a great group of diviners to get to the bottom of audience behavior. Quantitative metrics can help to build a qualitative story, but it all starts with quantitative. Qualitative comes from registration when it works but Paul Gerbino, Publisher at ThomasNet Industrial News, also looks at IP addresses to see where requests are coming from. This work well for an industrial news network as the IP addresses oftentimes go back to company IP addresses. In a raising of hands most attendees had Web sites that have fewer than a million page views a month. Regardless of the size of audience, loyal audiences have value, but providing features associated with registration features can allow non-registered audiences to build audience value while getting demographics about those loyal enough to register. How do you convey information about audience - unique visitors is the standard, but you have to be careful, have to do some cookie filtering to get "first party" cookies from SiteCatalyst and other third parties. Third party cookies are blocked oftentimes by filters so visitors may be assigned new cookies on each visit. Nevertheless you can benefit from third party cookies.

Paul Gerbino: all the numbers could be correct, but it could be how your package is reporting data that could be misleading. He uses three different packages for analysis. Saw what appeared to be a site crash in statistics, turned out to be a reconfiguration error in production. Take it all with a grain of salt, but you can get "good enough" statistics - if you're willing to get more than one package. Not clear, though, if more than one package impacts revenues. But without a good base of metrics to process into cubes in a relational database you could inflate or undercount a particular segment. Need also to get into further behavioral analytics, such as which links on a page are entry and exit points. This can tie into taxonomies, categorization and other tools that help users navigate through a site. To some degree it can be a self-fulfilling prophesy: what you promote through links and content recommendations will get more visits. But other content may be search-driven, newsletter-driven and other points. Use metrics to look at trends and plan accordingly.

Question: How will RSS feeds impact metrics? A bit of a black box, track subscribers, treat them as newsletter subscribers - engaged customers. Like other forms of impression need to be able to follow them after the impression has been delivered, FeedBurner can't tell you what happens what they get to a site. Paul: RSS initiates about 15 percent of their page view traffic, Boeing pulls it into their intranet, it's an anomymous feed, can get a lot of pulls in a 24-hour basis, can follow them as they visit to the site.

There seemed to be a gap in this panel. People like Paul who are using every tool at their disposal have a better chance of being able to paint an accurate story about what audiences are doing. Sticking with one tool for metrics is a little like trying to find a forest fire from one fixed position: triangulation helps.

Labels: ABM, audience measurement, Digital Velocity, events, Paul Gerbino

I missed the beginning of this panel but the key phrase that grabbed me came from Malcolm Netburn of CDS regarding the balance between publishers and audiences: "Are you worried about losing control? We already have." He focused on listening to everything that you audience "tells" you through online use and to never assume that you think that you know what an audience wants. The goal is to manage your audiences better by letting them manage themselves. Tracking audiences that come in directly offers a different sales funnel than people who come in from search engines. Things as simple of a chat community can generate interactions if they feel that it will lead them to their community. Toni Nevitt points out that online, like television, is not a census-based medium, it's more of a rejection-based medium; efficient reach is the key to online measurement. I am sorry for the sketchy entry, this was a busy spot for me away from the program. What's clear is that although publishers are moving quickly to provide better measurement of online audiences the traditional advertiser metrics are not easily served by online measurements. This is difficult for advertisers to absorb in terms of their expectations, even if they do intuit the difference and understand that online audiences oftentimes are not the same audience or the same demographics as print audiences. As panelist Lorrie Thomas noted it's important to focus on listening to what your audience wants. This creates different kinds of metrics. The satisfaction of a site that leads people to stay there may be far more valuable than typical subscriber card metrics: it means that regardless of their categorized metrics the person has self-qualified as an engaged audience member. Print cannot do this: we have no way to know in print to the degree that we do online how engaged people are with the content. For those who do engage print the net endorsement level per reader may be higher but overall there is a greater quantity of endorsements to be gained through online content.

Labels: ABM, Audience Development, Best Practices, Digital Velocity, events, Malcolm Netburn

Howard Sholkin of IDG described how they have segmented their corporate site to make information about their operations as clear as possible to very segmented audiences for their wide range up publications. With over 750 product items to cover segmentation helps people to zone in by sector, geography and other key segments. The products are not done up with glossy graphics consciously because IDG is a holding company for multiple brands: the purpose of the site is to push the visitor to the individual sites of the products that are a part of their portfolio. IDG Chairman and Founder Pat McGovern wants to make sure that there's still a very well-designed print media kit. Took 200K for redesign, media kit printing and related cost, ongoing costs about $150K to do both print and online. Howard suggests to do online first, the print piece is secondary materials, most people are used to getting the information online. The question is what you do with the material after the media kit that's important, once you have their interest you need to move them down the cycle to be a customer. Don't get much feedback, they go off to the brands. Their metric is reduced emails, which means that people are finding what they want. The online PDF kit is going away, people are using the online resources. Steve Ennen did a great job of moderating and making this interesting.

Labels: ABM, Best Practices, Digital Velocity, events, IDG, media kits

Thomas Falconer of Source Media, a veteran of engineering online transformations for traditional publishers, reflected on how IT people are very comfortable with social media technologies and other leading capabilities in ways that editorial is still beginning to adopt. SourceMedia has launched its first born-on-the-web publication called AdvisorMax for financial advisors, which has triple the growth of print corollaries. The ability to make good design choices in this new product was backed up by audience research that reflected which features and content were most important to their target audience. [NOTE: the default URL for AdvisorMax defaults over to a secure connection, important detail for security-conscious financial professionals.] Make sure you come to IT with metrics to measure success and clear requirements.

Ken Hoffman of Standard & Poor's takes content from S&P's ratings process and repurposes it for a wide variety of products and platforms for financially-oriented markets. Ken outlined the traditional development cycle - requirements gathering, have business analysts build specifications, review them with the IT group, iterate for new requirements, pass off to IT, iterate, and then launch. This leads oftentimes to the classic problems of misinterpretation, extended development, compromises to meet deadlines, missed market opportunities and "we'll put it in the next version" syndrome. Taking IT skill sets into account is a key factor in all of this, as well as their ability to provide realistic estimates based on technologies that are new to them. The need for a new product for financial advisors prodded them to use a wide range of product technologies. The solution: everyone was in the same room from "day one," which resulted in a working prototype in 3 months, a radical reduction in their development cycle. One IT person said it would take 8 years, another 22 - they are no longer with the firm.

Ben Telling of Hanley Wood reports to their CIO and is responsible for publishing systems and bespoke software development. "We're pretty much ripping out everything," with new content management, enterprise CRM. HW has 26 on-time projects and one failure - handing it off to tech is not the way to do it. Management may not understand a vision and they turn it into what they think that they need to get the job done - which means that they may envision an underengineered product. Business analysts get creative and add their own visions, and technology adds their own "special sauce." The result is expensive, failing projects that can't be supported. Poor vision definition, no drill down on needs, no clear business ownership, a lot of handing it over the wall. Must meet regularly with technology leadership and speak daily, constant communication and feedback, regular senior management updates, a cross-functional oversight team.

The problems - and solutions - that come from working with IT reflect the problems that come in publishing in general from dated command-and-control structures. These more collaborative approaches to IT projects reflect the more collaborative environment that is helping publishing in general succeed.

Labels: ABM, Best Practices, content management, Digital Velocity, events, technology

This session starts with a demo by Chuck Rose of how Brightcove is being used by USA Today to simplify the addition of graphics files to their site to give their audiences a very rich editorial resource. USAT does a variety of galleries, including slide shows with music and voice audio tracks, historical timelines that can be assembled in a couple of hours via prebuilt templates, interactive maps that can build Flash graphics on the fly so that last-minute changes to data do not require last minute graphics changes and other forms of rich media in both pop-ups and embedded in pages. These kinds of features can help news sites distinguish themselves as sources of both factual content and tools that people understand both facts and events in an absorbing and entertaining way.

Nora Paul of the University of Minnesota notes that many sites may look more advanced but are still stuck in the put-the-text-online syndrome. She showed a lot of nifty interactive graphics such as a game-like graphic that shows you how an airport baggage screener uses their scanning tools to go through the contents of luggage. Nora also showed a Google Maps mashup of startup funding data with a map of Silicon Valley.

Question notes that use of user-generated media use has tripled over traditional editorial sources on their site. USAT has seen huge spikes in traffic. Editors are trained in how to be an interactive journalist and how to ask questions in social media contexts respectfully, etc. How one interacts with a Web site is part of an editorial job performance. USAT has a common platform for print and online but staffing is still separate, still working out the cultural details. In the middle of working out workflows, budgets, print. Trying to get everyone at the same table and thinking about how to tell a story and how to do it on which platforms.

The panel had some technical glitches but it was a good demo of some of the leading techniques.

Labels: ABM, Digital Velocity, events, interactive, multimedia, USA Today

Tony Byrne of CMSWatch.com gave a great presentation on the best practices on CMS systems, it's not typically the focus of our community so I took the liberty of breaking from my blogging it live. Tony covered the waterfront of hows and whys, from full-blown services like Stellant to hosted services to open source systems. This is a huge focus for this audience, so it was a presentation that got a strong welcome. Content management is fairly ubiquitous in some areas of B2B publishing but many publishers still struggle with it. Tony's publication is a great source of research and insights, strongly recommend it.

Labels: ABM, business information, content management, Digital Velocity, events, media

Michael Lavitt, Senior Content Producer, Aviation Week, introduces a panel of plays for user-generated content that integrates with mainstream content: Laurel Touby, Founder of Mediabistro, a site that covers mainstream and new media; Eric Newman, VP and GM for Pluck, providing tools and content for integrating user-generated media into mainstream portals; Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 and Atlantic Media; and Laurel Toby, Editor of MediaPost, exploring how to integrate user generated content.

Building a Web community: Laurel - many in community were content producers but now they're also in PR and marketing. Brought the community online. Put stuff on site that they have to engage with. The aggregation of all of the news of the day. Asks who has bulletin boards, comments, etc., very few hands, one question, "What's a bulletin board?" Oops. But ever her editors weren't sure about discussions. Started with "party marketing," reached out to community members. Got volunteers. See what you can get for free. Now 200 events, some around the world.

Are we doing the same things with better technology: Laurie - Web 2.0 technologies changed things dramatically, a journalist is not the same beast as a result. Still need fundamental skills such as sourcing and verification, but the job is more about putting things in context and finding educated opinion. Everyone has to learn video, a lot of things she learned at iVillage - how to provoke discussion and debate - is part of the skill set for journalists these days.

What will journalists have to give up in terms of reporting: Laurie - at a classic trade show, did blogging, video, show daily and regular online daily news coverage and special email bursts. Did a dozen video interviews, realized that she didn't talk to a lot of people when she was there, didn't sleep a lot. Trade journalism is changing, wasn't sure that she'd make it here today from having to deal with stuff.

How can trade media experience relate to User-Generated Content. Eric - five years from now every site will have interactivity but not necessarily community. It's about taking metaphors that you're comfortable with and extending them. Editorial has to be part of the discussion, no longer an us-to-them model, results are amazing when it works. Pluck powers TheStreet.com comments, skyrocketed the site visits. "We the Media" book, at a conference posts on a blog got back to the blogger who asked questions that interacted with the event. Journalists help to facilitate the news.

How do you manage the content coming from users, how do we feel safe: Scott - getting people to use embedded features is different from "who wants to set up a blog." When comments get turned on all of a sudden people are all over your article. Two different challenges - floods of content of varying quality, or people are scared and don't contribute. Weblogs are just content management, to ask users to blog is to ask them to create content. Laurie - don't allow anonymous posting, people upload party photos. Scott - now we can have an infinite number of columns.

How do we write for online: Scott - in old days held on to stories, now we have the online medium that's great at breaking stories. Nothing drives traffic like real news. When people want to know things they will come. Eric - Web provides unlimited scale of content than can be delivered. Were some other good topics, but by this point the cream was skimmed off. Bottom line: there's a major disconnect between attendees and user-generated content. Most are just beginning to get good focus on integrating traditional print editorial operations and online operations. It's good background for many of these publishers, but most are at the foothills of user interactivity. A good motivator came up in the spirited Q&A: what's the financial upside for blogs? Laurel quipped that it's cheaper than editorial, and that's the point. An audience can generate usable content more quickly than an editorial team in many instances. Excellent panel.

Labels: ABM, cmswatch, content management, Digital Velocity, ediaBistro, editorial skills, events, media, MediaPost, pluck, user-generated content

Mitch Rouda moderated a panel of financiers and media companies who laid out the case for digital operations supporting company valuations. Prime concern pointed out by Peggy Koenig, Managing Partner of Abry Partners: without them barriers to entry in a given segment are low. Tad Smith, CEO of Reed Business, is generally trimming his portfolio but keeps an eye on online-only plays and swapping titles - but he's not looking at print. "Print is in a gentle state of decline," Tad notes, so it's up to the other assets to make the case for a sale. Jay MacDonald, Managing Partner for DeSilva and Phillips, focuses mostly on online deals, but looks for companies plugged into the right environment. Jay notes that there's a perception that online companies have higher multiples, but multiples are well spread, 7-16x EBIDTA. In online businesses EBITDA ratios may be actually lower, though revenues may be higher. Charles Engros, Partner for Morgan, Lewis & Bockius has been focusing on the consumer space recently with deals for NYT, Pearson and eBay/StubHub, buy in general large media companies are always looking for strategic fits for cash flow. Charles outlined an engineering-related acquisition with online tools for specific engineering problems as well as auction vehicles and had created a virtual market in the engineering community that offered great growth opportunities.

RE models that add to valuations: the future is in ecommerce, lead generation and community enhancement, according to Charles. Peggy notes the value of proprietary digital products as another valuation driver, as with platforms in enthusiasts in coin collecting to put their collections online and create a specialized trading systems. Tad looks at growth, predictability, cyclicality, seasonality and defensibility to make sure that revenue characteristics match overall revenue and earnings expectations. Jay looks at profitability, growth, size, revenue, diversity by industries and products, share of market and online profile or plan.

Mitch: How hard is it to move revenue online? If there's a locked connection with an audience why does it matter where they are? Tad: was a little harder in earlier Web days when the certainty of being able to generate revenues online and consistent usage was lower. Peggy: perception is reality, print advertising is not growing, audiences have migrated online, need to build revenues there, lots of blocking an tackling. Robustness is determined by revenue, not earnings. Mitch: well, why not park all of my revenues online and merchandise print? Peggy: Cygnus has a growing online business but a much smaller percentage of online revenues. Jay: Internet provides an opportunity for a much broader audience, 90 percent of online readers were not readers of magazine in OS data. The Web provides a measurable new audience that can be monetized. Jay: you can do so much more online with tools that can help you get people to pay for things.

Mitch: How important is registration for online revenues? Charles: very important. Peggy: need to make sure that people are qualified registrants. Mitch: we're faced with a choice, do we go for high numbers or qualified numbers? Peggy: depends on who you're trying to reach. Tad: progressive registration can work, trade "goodies" for more information.

Question: you look for strong management teams, how important is it to keep a team for new owners? Tad: not sure that it's terribly important to have synergies on basic staffing functions, but on management it's important to have retention elements if you don't have internal managers that will be credible to new staff. Charles: sellers look as carefully as buyers.

Question: lower margins online, if the goose that lays the golden eggs is dying, will online margins make for a good investment? Tad: lots of costs go out when you move online.

Question: Share of market, how to you determine it for an online portion of a company? Jay: look at company as a whole, not just online component. If you have zero online now, it may be very difficult to be sold at all now. Prism/Penton deal - Penton worked hard to come back with their online strategy, have a trajectory online that helped with their exit.

Question: Optimal balance between events, online and print? Peggy: would want to have online revenues at least 15-20 percent. Tad: where a company invests says a lot, what does it says when a company decides to move to other media? It may have implications about what they expect from online margins.

Bottom line: don't expect to sell if you were not trying to work hard to get ready for digital media. The train has left the station.

Labels: ABM, Digital Velocity, events, mergers and acquisitions

A great event so far, one that seems to have met everyone's expectations - and then some. Lunch included 3-minute presentations by the sponsoring vendors, which dragged on a little bit but was a nice mini-event in its own right that gave people an idea as to which vendor's table might be worth visiting afterwards. Good format. I was also interested to see the parade of content technology and services sponsorts included Convera, which has built up a business servicing government agencies and knowledge management practitioners with search results clustering. Now they're targeting publishers eager to provide more value on each and every page of their offerings. One of their angles is providing vertical search capabilities, as well as drawing in related content from a publisher's own site and from Web sources into sidebar links on a page of a publisher's content.

This all seems to underscore the new tagline for ABM: "The Association of Business Information Companies." It's a stretch for where most B2B media publishers are today, but it points to the intersection of media, enterprise and personal content markets that Shore has been emphasizing for the past few years. Business information companies like Hoover's push to build up editorial value through original and licensed content, even as B2B publishers are trying to add value through more technology-manufactured content. We are going to see more of these kinds of intersections over the next few years, with B2B media companies trying to find their place in a business information environment

Labels: ABM, business information, Convera, Digital Velocity, events, Hoover's

A good panel, covering about the nuts-and-bolts required for today's B2B publishing workforce. Lots of talk about writing a story several ways for different audiences, getting digital natives who are ready to make a transition to the mainstream publishing workforce, getting your staff to the point where they're thinking about how to maximize the value of a story to audiences. Need to think about flexible employees, with the ability to work on a broad variety of tasks with an open outlook. There may not be the same career paths, with people moving from departments such as circulation to much different roles. People need to be curious, to like challenge and change. This does not always equate to younger staffs - some younger people may not have that level of curiosity. Recommended site: j-learning.org, lots of basic block-and-tackle resources for journalism. Book on Amazon and elsewhere: "Writing for the Web." Managers need to push constantly to challenge editorial staffs. Blogs can be useful tools, but they can be a "time sink" - just one more thing to do. Job descriptions can be a problem, in that people are talking about being creative and breaking down role barriers and yet job descriptions are designed to maintain command-and-control structures.

Bottom line there are changes underway in staffing and empowering people to be more curious and creative but there's a gap to fill between internal staff who are able to make the transition and external people who may be more open to change but lacking some of the basic skills required for online and print publishing. An example was given of a piece written about the Chinese markets where a new reporter wanted to express some opinions about the Chinese government as on a weblog and the reporter had to be told how to express some of his thoughts objectively in the traditional editorial style. This has its merits, but at the same time publishers need to learn how to deal with opinions as useful insight much more effectively.

Labels: ABM, Best Practices, Digital Velocity, events, Harris Publications, Paul Conley, Workforce Management

Quotes from Outsell research include "We are in a five-alarm fire mode - and it's scary!" Research says goal is 50 percent print, 36 percent digital 14 percent events by 2015. Dip in revenues seen in growth over next five years, then heading up again. [Wow, this is kind of wishful thinking. I think that a 50 percent print revenue goal in five years is reasonable in current models, but in eight years I think that we're heading more towards 40 percent or less.] Org structures, most are hybrid, with online and print P&L rolled up, 61 percent, 17 percent with integrated online and print operations. [The good news is that there are still revenue streams to invest in new platforms, but in a way the I.T. investment is a trap, it focuses publishers on the portal platform when the greatest returns will be in preparing content for consumption away from the portal. B2B publishers need to focus quickly on digital objects distributed by others, including their audience, as the core of their platform operations. Some online publishers are getting there fairly quickly, but it's early days.]

Research quote: "Online staffers don't want to learn print." [This is a key problem from many perspectives, how are you going to reduce the impact of smaller print markets that are not just getting smaller but that require an altogether new approach to print as a platform? My concern is that Google or another major online player will introduce tomorrow's print platform for user-aggregated content. I feel strongly that this will happen. To use Jim Taylor's observation,

Research quote: "In the beginning surgical strikes were okay, now an all-out assault is needed." [Of course the concern is that you wind up fighting the wrong war because you're getting in late. This is in essence what happened with "surgical strikes": publishers went to war with the army they had instead of rethinking the army for a new war until it had turned into a major engagement. When your mortgage is at stake you get creative, but it's not clear that the talent that B2B media needs to recruit will be ready to support the expectations of publishers at the price points that they expect. Good digital talent that gets not only the technology but the content as well is in fairly short supply.] Social media job postings are soaring. [Yet most B2B publishers are at the foothills of social media - viewing it "surgically." Will they get the best talented required to take the lead in social media?] Useful research.

Overall the picture is one of publishers moving aggressively to chase revenues on digital platforms while fretting about how to maintain staffing that will deliver effective print publications. Unified operations can lower costs but they tend to push out print talent that's more comfortable with established production methods and editorial outlooks. I think the real challenge is to find digital natives who are willing to accept some of the wisdom accrued through print media operations but who are also willing to rethink print as a platform. This seems to be confirmed by comments from panelists, who paint a picture of six-figure salaries for "junior" sales people, lots of swapping out of staff for people with digital skills. The key observation seems to be that it's a catch-up game from risk-averse management. Toni Nevitt, SVP of Nielsen Business Media, noted that "it's not going to be perfect." That's a key observation: print publishing is all about creating the perfect publication. The evolutionary and conversational nature of Web content comes from an altogether different angle.

Obviously there is a lot of pain in the transition to digital-first revenues but these are organizations moving as quickly as they can towards those goals. These are not the deer in the headlights. There are some deer out there, to be sure, but these are companies that are fighting hard for an effective digital future.

Labels: ABM, Digital Velocity, events, Research, Workforce

Are magazines dead? The Harrison Group did a study to look at content use. Industry becoming a mediator of standards and conduct as opposed to distribution. "There are few new lightbulbs," Jim notes, more about implementation. This is kind of a rambling thread from the speaker, so bear with me. When magazines first grew, it was in the era of radio, everyone was receiving the same messages. Created social homogeneity. Now fragmentation in devices and platforms. A "take no prisoners" economy as middle class declines and wealthy rise, though poor have gone down (in visible economy).

Research into digital content use: 39 percent think that it's more important to know how to search for a fact than to know a fact. Difficult to get people to understand a day not clear what's free time and not. [COMMENT: this fits in with our "chasing the mammoth" concept, always on the hunt for rewards] Not fitting schedules to content, expect content to fit schedule. People spend 9 hours with technology and media, 6.3 free time. 79 percent good at using multiple media sources. 77 percent say multitasking has helped them to become more successful. DVRs: need to schedule time to enjoy myself, 67 percent say DVRs like TiVo give people the freedom to do so. Online time for C-Level executives now 10.1 hours a week, surpasses TV at 9.6 hours, etc.
92 percent of general public use portals and search engines. 59 percent of C-level executives compare prices online, top tier of income 79 percent. In 1995 it was about 1 percent. High-tier goods much cheaper online, sometimes by a factor of 50 percent or more.

What happens when employment is a detriment to economic self-interest? In 2-income household with high level of discretionary income, if second earner stayed home and concentrated on getting savings will come out ahead. USD 115,000 advantage to reduce costs and spread purchasing power. Challenge is not how I make a better Web site but how to gain impact for this audience. MySpace not for kids, going from a dozen best friends to 40 best friends on average. 41 percent of population customize a start-up home page, 13 percent maintain a blog. You're not a medium, you're a mediator. [Good phrase] Top general business journals with low readership, Forbes on top at 16 percent.

The war as to whether technology is going to shape culture is over, time to take the bodies off of the battlefield. Number one job of professional mediator [read: media] is to validate identities and exchanges. Discontinuity anxiety is key, people worry about what they should have received. "Authenticuloegotosis" - people who think that they're an economy unto themselves. Social media "addicts" allow people to redefine themselves without the professional peril of false identity. The code of trust in one another that dominated business is lost in this mix. People need to understand what it is that they need to know [Weblogs help to do this on a very personal level, search at a technical level, what does media do?]

Back to data: I like brands that reflect high craftsmanship: 97 percent. "Wow factor," iPods "king of contemporary design," Golden Gate Bridge is beautifully done, iPod is a piece of plastic and steel with a circle and a rectangle, its own new "wow" design. Simplicity of iPod liberates from other technologies such as laptop. People love fables like and and grasshopper, tortise and hare, people love metaphors. Study who you are, because who you are is changing. Turn your markets into tribal markets [back to chasing the mammoth].

Sounds very familiar, I do believe that we're moving towards and era that is taking us back to an era prior to farms and ranches and into an era in which life is much more focused in highly contextual rewards. Excellent presentation.

Labels: ABM, Digital Velocity, events, Jim Taylor