Jerome Bland-Sebrien, FT.com: how to take advantage of video. Video is exploding, similar to TV experience, offers higher click-through rates than other online formats. FT has access to business leaders and top CEOs, can interview them, get exciting responses. [COMMENT: Good leverage of their social network, an important differentiator - for now. As social media builds, will this be a strong differentiator? Perhaps less so.] Clip with typical professional production values, interview with Eric Schmidt. Having done these, why is this going to be unique? Schmidt talks about video, nothing really new. It's a captive game, everyone has too much to lose to slip up greatly. What happens (and has already happened in some Silicon Valley instances) when the CEOs post their own clips and conversations?
Tom Cintorino, PennWell. Mostly ads with some paid content. Showing the evolution of a product from early Web days onward and the revolution to their organization in the process. Building up the troops, still many "traditionalites," but moving forward. "Buy-in" scales, looking for 75 percent buy-in, 100 percent digital group, 50 percent audience (some have to support it), 50 percent revenue source. 2001, Webcast introduced. SOLD their first Webcast 2005 - operating group wasn't bought in. 2006 video, 50 percent buy-in from operations, operating group was "telling" them that static slides weren't very engaging. Podcasts also, hit benchmarks for success. 2007: Simulation project, 100 percent support from operations and digital media, added interactive control, embedded ad opportunities. Bottom line, multimedia is allowing B2B channels to create their own "cable" channel equivalents only much better, because the audience can queue up content for editors to review.
Current comes to B2B! But operations starts getting a little glazed, need to be brought along. Amazing how progressive this is.
Daniel Harrison, ConsumerReports.org - shoots a video for YouTube from the podium. It says it all. Local culture wasn't reacting too well to user input, funny video of a helmet "tester" crashing into a wall, worried about biased results and the impact on the editorial brand. Didn't want to repeat the L.A. times Wiki editorial process. "Design transmits a lot of data" - the venue, the context, is part of what makes it content (see
our Wikipedia definition of content - top one). Tried to focus on the user experience as much as possible, to get users who are loyal and who will help you to get to the next phase in the process. Didn't put up editorial rankings, provide filters to let people know things like what people who are tall think of a car. Invited out a few thousand people who were considered trusted enthusiasts, generated 23 thousand reviews. Had to implement a cuss-word filter. Good stuff, impressive.
Jonathan Hoy, LexisNexis - The blog experience. Mainstream media sees weblogs as mainstream bottom-scrapers, not creative, relying on MSM. Not parasite, more symbiotic, like remoras cleaning parasites off of sea fish. No remoras found in shark stomachs - true for weblogs also? Editorially selected, treated as full-text news articles. Makes L/N a blog archive, as with other news sources. 59 percent viewed by U.S. coporates, used for reputation management, Tracking product "buzz," fodder for story generation, Federal government tracking trends such as opinions on avian flu, legal analysis & insight. Interface is the standard L/N interface. While not the stuff that may get your palms sweaty, it's a better use of weblogs as news as compared to say Factiva Insight, where weblogs are treated more as opinion rather than news.
Great presentations and insights, it's exciting to see these leaders pushing towards making good use of social media content. It's a race to keep ahead of users creating their own communities using content technology tools that enable themselves as publishers, but the sooner a publisher or aggregator attracts a community to their site to generate engaging content, the better.
Labels: Buying and Selling eContent, events, FT.com, PennWell
