The SLA and SIIA are partnering for a Certified Content Manager course, feedback is extremely positive. There is a growing relationship that could be leveraged powerfully. Some members do not support the relationship, but Janice sees that both parties have an enormous stake in the future of information. Both want the best products, best information and for clients to be successful. If we agree on these core values we need to work together. Can advocate for products, licensing and other win-win propositions. SLA membership relies on information that will help them to make critical decisions. Predicting the future is a risky proposition, especially in public, but clear that prosumers will be stretching the limits of personal and professional expression. May reconsider the value of virtual universes such as Second Life, would be nice to replicate for SLA.

None of us will be getting much sleep any time soon, Janice notes. SLA knows what the customers want and they want to tell vendors. Use the SLA membership to help define the new information infrastructure. The role of SLA members is changing. Recent survey of SLA members, 75 percent likely to get a rewarding sense of job satisfaction over the next five years. How can they be happy when they know that their jobs are changing? 50 percent of corporate libraries are available electronically, how does this resolve? Change is creating opportunities for information professionals to be embedded in business units - new SLA units for competitive intelligence and knowledge management. Survey found 300 titles in disparate roles such as knowledge officer, business analyst, electronic resources coordinator, etc. Playing integral role in many decision-making process. Cindy Hill: local organizations realizing that they need to turn information into knowledge that hits the bottom line and decision making processes.

73 percent of execs spend 2-3 hours looking for information, huge cost to top management. Who's better qualified to explain to senior management the benefits of information technology or benefits of ads behind firewalls. Not every organization has seen the light. Some need to understand the value of human management over pure automation. Interested in Covey's comments on trust and credibility. Infopros also educate members on value of copyright. Members need to communicate their value throughout their organizations. Infopros are the strongest internal evangelists for premium content products, considerable influence on adoption.
Janice has done a lot to position the SLA far more aggressively to help its membership adapt to a rapidly changing marketplace for content services. Information professionals are becoming resources for insight into how knowledge is built in organizations using the best information available. Looking at the history of market data managers in the financial industry, though, the further challenge is for infopros to enable enterprises to integrate content from all sources, including internal and private sources. In doing so they face the challenge of trying to manage information budgets from within business units where decision-making processes may be different than in their traditional roles. As information professionals become distributed throughout enterprises increasingly it's line managers and key executives who are responsible for the final decision on content services. This only accelerates as publishers focus on workflow solutions that provide more turnkey solutions. Janice claims that infopros are oftentimes becoming the default decision-making point for line executives faced with these challenges, and in many instances.

I believe that she's right: the role of infopros will parallel the role of market data managers' role of trying to make cost-effective sense of a myriad of information services in a highly integrated information environment. But the sales process is shifting and placing more emphasis on direct selling to line executives, many of whom can access some form of premium services online and who may choose to deploy them more fully. As a generation of Web-educated executives enters the work force more business information providers will be working to ensure that they can reach web-savvy users directly - and to sell to them directly. Still, information professionals are likely to gain power in those organizations that know how to leverage their skills more effectively.

Labels: events, SIIA Content Forum 2007

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

An innovative approach to events: vendors get to pitch to live clients. Charlie Terry of Marketresearch.com and Barry Bealer of Really Strategies get to listen to vendor pitches from companies who have called on them acting as fictitious buyers. I'll spare you the details of the vendor pitches but will try to provide some key points. Todd Mickelsen of FAST Search and Transfer pitched their stability, their market momentum and their ability to exceed expectations. Key question posed by Barry: how do we get legacy programmers comfortable with this new technology? Todd focuses on connectors that make it easy to integrate content from legacy systems.

Jean-Paul Chevet of Nstein Technologies pitched from the position of a small company focused primarily on helping publishing companies to be successful in electronic publishing. Put together a portal for Wolters Kluwer that allows users to build a book with just the content that they need. Jean-Paul went into the details, emphasized that the "how" of creating content matters and managing time-to-market for a solution. Audience response: do you need to work with integrators to get these types of technologies? J-P: we have an in-house team, typical implementation 2-5 months with two developers.

Debby Richman outlined the pitch for Collarity, a 2-year old startup that enables improved content discovery through developing clustered communities of interest. A sliding widget on their search interface allows a user to indicate whether they want search results that match their personal profile as well as clustered tag clouds, related content suggestions. The goal is to build natural communities out of generic Web site traffic. They don't charge for the technology, they share in ad revenues.

I am getting second-day live blogging fade, so my apologies for the abbreviated entry. A clever concept for looking at the vendor evaluation process. Overall FAST, being a large incumbent, can come in and say that they solve everything - and in some instances perhaps they can - but the pitch gets bogged down in the usual I.T. box diagrams and doesn't get to business benefits quickly enough. The Nstein pitch is compelling in presenting benefits and payback as well as their real-world expertise with publishing, but needs to tune its implementation success stories. Collarity has a very interesting tool for improving the value of search results in context, but it seems to be the typical tool-as-a-product pitch that needs to focus more on spelling out what the problem is that's being solved up front.

Labels: Collarity, FAST, Nstein, SIIA Content Forum 2007, technology

In the tradition of the SIIA Content Forum being a little more nuts-and-bolts, search engine optimization is a key how-to topic that this panel parameterized. What does SEO mean in the content world, what are its pitfalls and risks, what does SEO mean to publishers, vendors and SEO experts, how can it be deployed. Bruce Clay of Bruce Clay, Inc. noted that 87 percent of clicks on Google search pages are on items in the organic search results, hence SEO's importance. Google and other search engines looks at the search itself to determine if you're a shopper or a researcher and try to deliver appropriate content, for example, if I am researching a car I may put in just the name of a car, but if I say "Ford Mustang pricing" I may get another type of response. In Web 2.0 content comes to the user via feed aggregation and embedded content, providing new contexts beyond search engines. Most Web pages with research-oriented content have at least 500 words, so the length of an item will also be important. Edmunds was creating content that was optimized better by AOL's syndication of the content - and draw more visitors. This goes into the design of the content itself to make sure that editorial content is going to be optimized for search engines.

Jill Konieczko of U.S. News and World Report notes that they "got religion" on SEO when their editors noted that their bread-and-butter college rankings were not dominating Google search results. They have ten librarians who respond to internal corporate information support requests, but recently they have been taking their traditional skills and applying them to SEO for editorial content. They've focused on licensed content as well as optimization for optimizing their content for DoubleClick ads. They combined the traditional USNWR taxonomy with a customized taxonomy to create a folksonomy of sorts that is inserted into Web content metadata. In metadata they focused on both "site" and "zone" tags for use in Healthline.com's search engine to help drive up their rankings. [Very interesting use of traditional skills - we are going to see more information professionals helping their institutions to organize their own content more effectively.]

Paul Mouton of Thomson Gale sees multiple partners involved in SEO providing different perspectives on the same problems. They saw that Google was not going away and decided to take on the challenge of using Google to expand their footprint via coopetition. Experts will try to take your content and build more personal relationships with your content via search engines, working hand-in-hand with a few manageable expert relationships to help publishers. Publishers can assert themselves as being authoritative by proper SEO techniques and to optimize their preferred content landing point. Thomson Gale's Goliath product developed with ECNext allows them to get exposure for content that also helps to have your content occupy other levels of ranking for your content - in other words, don't just get one page out there, dominate the rankings with your content.

Harlan Ratzky of Investors.com noted that they were one of the first publications to create a digital edition, but now see themselves as a crossroads. They have one of the highest levels of engagement for their audiences and they repurpose content extensively to make sure that they deliver content the way that their audiences want it. The big balancing act is to keep ad-supported content attractive while building subscription content that's valuable. Ultimately they don't see a conflict as long as you're constantly building up value on the subscriber side. Alongside these challenges is the "how much" of ad-supported content: is it all just extracts to drive traffic to full content or is it worth exposing full content. Their decision is not to dilute content quality just to improve SEO exposure.

Productive panel, good insights, and good comments from the attendees.

Labels: advertising, SEO, SIIA Content Forum 2007

George Beckerman of Marlin & Associates conducted a conversation with Cindy Hill, focusing on how to approach the convergence of media and enterprise content markets and to manage the acceptance of content from premium services with ads in the services. Cindy points out there that there's a huge "what's in it for me" from users but also a willingness to consider ads from subscription services if it doesn't impede access to content. Print-based journal providers are getting pushback on budgets not only on the basis of price but also on the basis of budget for storage, so migration to more ad-based content aimed at institutions into electronic media is going to be crucial. George points out that at the Amsterdam SIIA conference Claudia Juech, VP of Central Information Services at Deutsche Bank, was definitely open to the concept, so there was some anecdotal evidence for ads in enterprise-oriented content having support.

But Cindy point out that you do need eyeballs for content to make this work. Cindy and George have been doing research as to what the real receptivity is for ads. George points out that Steve Goldstein, CEO of Alacra, has done some experimentation with premium ads. Outsell research highlighted by George indicates that people in professional roles do respond to ads, so there is also some broader evidence for this response factor. Cindy underscores the need for ethical standards as a key factor for moving ads into enterprise-oriented content. Her research with George indicates that they would consider convergence pricing, but that they expect faster access to more essential informaiton in the process. So instead of having ads as sidebars direct embedding with useful information would be key. [COMMENT: We've been suggesting this for years, monetize context does not necessarily equate to traditional advertising.] But not everyone is in favor of ads in enterprise content - interestingly coming from individuals who were of the opinion that they were already able to negotiate pricing effectively and from those who are concerned about objectivity. So although that there is promise for this concept more insights and experimentation is required. Metrics are highly important, Cindy indicated that if a journal is not used at least one hundred times it's cancelled - a relatively low threshold of usage. Ads could help to offset the cost in these kinds of instances. There may be a number of solutions to be worked out for this, especially given earlier models for sponsored content in the financial industry.

In Q&A it came out that Alacra has done research and received strong push-back in their markets, Dow Jones is working on an enterprise-based product for financial information and news, BLR has added ads to some of their business and legal content with no pushback from subscribers.

Selling context in enterprise products can be tricky - interrupting workflow is a huge issue, but that's subject to interpretation. People are going to Google and other search engines as a part of their workflow any way, to implicitly there is a strong degree of acceptance for ads in business information anyway. The key factor to focus on is the value of context - content in context could be an ad, it could be objective content with sponsorship, it could be a database that has some content distributed on a licensed basis and other content on an ad basis, it could be the customer themselves offering that context for content that could be useful for their purposes.

Labels: advertising, business information, business models, enterprise, media, SIIA Content Forum 2007

George Beckerman of Marlin & Associates conducted a conversation with Cindy Hill, focusing on how to approach the convergence of media and enterprise content markets and to manage the acceptance of content from premium services with ads in the services. Cindy points out there that there's a huge "what's in it for me" from users but also a willingness to consider ads from subscription services if it doesn't impede access to content. Print-based journal providers are getting pushback on budgets not only on the basis of price but also on the basis of budget for storage, so migration to more ad-based content aimed at institutions into electronic media is going to be crucial. George points out that at the Amsterdam SIIA conference Claudia Juech, VP of Central Information Services at Deutsche Bank, was definitely open to the concept, so there was some anecdotal evidence for ads in enterprise-oriented content having support.

But Cindy point out that you do need eyeballs for content to make this work. Cindy and George have been doing research as to what the real receptivity is for ads. George points out that Steve Goldstein, CEO of Alacra, has done some experimentation with premium ads. Outsell research highlighted by George indicates that people in professional roles do respond to ads, so there is also some broader evidence for this response factor. Cindy underscores the need for ethical standards as a key factor for moving ads into enterprise-oriented content. Her research with George indicates that they would consider convergence pricing, but that they expect faster access to more essential informaiton in the process. So instead of having ads as sidebars direct embedding with useful information would be key. [COMMENT: We've been suggesting this for years, monetize context does not necessarily equate to traditional advertising.] But not everyone is in favor of ads in enterprise content - interestingly coming from individuals who were of the opinion that they were already able to negotiate pricing effectively and from those who are concerned about objectivity. So although that there is promise for this concept more insights and experimentation is required. Metrics are highly important, Cindy indicated that if a journal is not used at least one hundred times it's cancelled - a relatively low threshold of usage. Ads could help to offset the cost in these kinds of instances. There may be a number of solutions to be worked out for this, especially given earlier models for sponsored content in the financial industry. Great insights, would have loved to have heard more.

Labels: advertising, business information, business models, enterprise, media, SIIA Content Forum 2007

The strong weather back east prevented LookSmart CEO David Hill from delivering this address so Mike Schoen stood in to deliver his insights on advertising buys. All media audiences fragment over time, forcing advertising buys further into high-demand media and publishers ramping up their own sales efforts as they try to control and sell as much advertising as possible. As audiences fragment the pricing goes up for buys, but it requires technology that supports both the advertisers and the publishers. Mike sees publishers need to be able to build their brand their own sites, much as YouTube has managed to get its content embedded in other sites. Publishers need to do this in a way that protects their own brand.

In the face of fragmentation LookSmart focused on increasing audiences to leverage the trends falling out of fragmentation. More content, better SEO tools, one of the first social bookmarking tools Furl, focused on introducing vertical sites - all of which grew their audiences 4x and to build a deeper relationship with advertisers. This has resulted in LookSmart owning more ad relationships with a more focused sales force. Looking at ad networks and ad technologies as well as SEO and audience development systems there is a myriad of services available, including LookSmart's own auction based sales and service systems, Quigo, Doubleclick for banners, Google, Yahoo and others.

Faced with all of these forces and choices, there are some key factors to consider. Is your brand going to get the proper brand recognition? Is the right strategy being pursued for verticals, do you understand the demographics clearly? Do you get complete control over ad systems providing whit label services and pricing/terms control?

A good basic primer on managing online advertising, would have liked more leading edge insights but good content.

Labels: advertising, SIIA Content Forum 2007

Patrice Curtis of Curtis Research moderated a panel consisting of Russell Miyaki of TMP Worldwide and Valerie Williamson for The Electric Sheep Company. Patrice provided an overview of Second Life, she's not arguing that it's the only way to go but it's an interesting way to go in her own estimate. SL is a dynamic community with its own economy, multiple languages, good people and bad people and, recently, even the U.S. Internal Revenue Service scrutinizing as to whether this virtual economy should be subject to taxes. About 10,000 virtual square miles of real estate, 6,003 islands, about USD 36,000 generated in Linden Dollars. 31 percent are huge fans, 19 percent are there just to take a look. Average adult age is 33, average teens 15. 31 percent of users from U.S. Lots go to engage in very "social" activities but there are also universities, libraries and other publishing-oriented institutions. It's a community, though, there needs to be a "give to get" aspect to content here so that users who are not turned off by over-commercialization and exploitation. Toyota's site was "vandalized" because they were not giving back to the site.

Russell outlined how they can engage job candidates to encourage them to consider their clients' companies. Helps them to find out about an organization much like old-fashioned career fairs but on a captive "island". Demonstrates in second life how employees can network with one another. Inside the "main lobby" of their virtual business to look at mini-islands of employers. Shows a sub-building for T-Mobile, candidates are pre-screened to understand who they are, while they're waiting for interviews, can sit down in "interview rooms" with a company interviewer. Can use a private chat channel to have a private conversation not displayed to other users. SL "note cards" provide summaries of the organization to help cue conversations. "A virtual world is about co-collaboration, need to help them seek information, not just a billboard, if you're selling cars let them build a car."

Electric Sheep creates content for virtual worlds, including SL but also an MTV platform and others. "If you haven't gotten on the Web 2.0 bandwagon just bypass it altogether and go to virtual worlds." Gives people a chance to interact in an immersive world. Built content for a television show "The 'L' Word", entertainment companies are driving people into SL, like 1995, the "dot com" phenomenon. "In the land of TiVo, DVDs and pirating people need to figure out how to extend engagement with their audiences." Lots of lookers but SL is a difficult platform, they provide an orientation interface. When they register on a Web site such as Showtime they get a billboard that will provide orientation. A "greeter" logged in for the TV show is directed by her to a newbie who seems to need orientation. Linden Labs' "stick rate" for their own orientation is only ten percent - their numbers are much higher. A toolbar will highlight events and content that's interesting - i.e. - *gasp*! - Web site navigation. Most areas are empty but where they program content people congregate - e.g. a building party that allows people to create spaces and structures in SL.

It's all neat stuff, but the bottom line is that unless you work hard to build real communities it winds up just being a very complicated display ad. Yet there is a "tactile" aspect to Second Life that could provide a new way to build commercial relationships effectively. The thing that comes to my mind is how local communities in the real world could create their own SL islands to recreate the experience of navigating a real downtown area - and to ensure that there is community built around a real community as well. It's also an interesting way to bring together from very dispersed geographic cultures in a way that goes beyond typical social media technologies - giving a sense of physical closeness that otherwise would be very difficult to manage. I disagree with Valerie's statements about Web 2.0, but it's an important extension of Web spaces that should continue to be interesting to follow. Hopefully new generations of this type of technology come along to simplify membership. I envision Google or another vendor providing a much more accessible version of SL and that ties in to other key content from the greater world of cyberspace. XML feeds already used in SL make this easier, but more consistent use of "author once, use many" in BOTH directions will be an important factor for SL. This is an obvious acquisition target for Yahoo - especially with its brand orientations. Needs a very strong destination content partner.

Labels: Second Life, SIIA Content Forum 2007

Chris Tolles, VP of Marketing for Topix.net moderated a panel includind Yves Auger of Transcontinental Media, Adam Bernacki of Leadership Directories and Paul Forster of Indeed. Indeed provides Web jobs content on a pay-per-click model, Yves shepherds technology for Canada's 4th largest pubisher, with both French and English sites on the Web, with advertising on the Web a relatively new revenue model, turning into a source of revenue last year. Adam manages sales and licensing for Leadership Directories, which provides detailed contact information for business professionals, transitioning their business on to the Web with some success; Web clients provide about 45 percent of their revenues. Chris relates how Topix targets content for specific geographies via an ad-supported portal.

Companies admired? Adam: Leadership Directories is like a phone book on steriods, admires tools such as Jigsaw but their most critical value is accuracy, a value above and beyond community and other potential value points for business information. They allocate much of their headcount to ensuring accuracy. Yves: no real example. Paul: About.com was like a network of weblogs before weblogs were invented, they keep the business model simple through their relationship with Google. Paul also looks at Amazon.com, first to harness reviews and ratings.

Changes in the market, is there a difference between advertisers expectations and the people actually reading the content? Yves: high penetration rate of markets, trying to leverage that for communities. LinkedIn? Adam: They have a special demographic, late 40s-early 50s on average, more likely to use print pubications. Don't anticipate that these users will go elsewhere. Job listings, are there tradeoffs by aggregating a relatively few number of sources? Paul: actually aggregate thousands of sources, makes sense to go to a central place to do a common search. Now that newspapers have been aggregated you can't simply tack on classifieds into a monopoly channel. Search makes it critical to return the most relevant results, important to manage the ranking of your content. Who's been contacted by someone they know on LinkedIn that they've been out of touch with? Lots in the room raise their hands.

Newspapers are disaggregating content and advertising, how do you respond? Yves: looking at aggregators to front-end their content, mostly for magazines, need to repurpose content more effectively. Would you use tools such as Spoke or Zoominfo to repurpose your content? Adam: Love Web 2.0 gadgetry, but how do you look at your next $50K technology investment. It's a question of ROI, need to look at what's going to bring in revenues carefully. Introducing a professional networ product based on data that they've collected, will allow users to annotate networks but don't allow them to publish content directly, don't want to be known as "information socialists," need to protect reputation for information accuracy. How do you manage data quality for jobs? Paul: need to filter out spam from job boards, eliminating bad sources.

A lot of the "block and tackling" is the same in publishing as ever, but it's interesting to note how publishers are making decisions based on both reach and content quality that are taking products in different directions in spite of similar goals. On the one hand Leadership Directories keeps the focus on doing what they do best: building a very pure source of high-quality content by their standards for a mostly print-based product. How one transitions out of that model effectively as a new generation moves away from print is a question. On the other hand Indeed works hard on content quality for their online-mined content as well. The bottom line is that content quality will always be an important publishing product attribute and one should not make broad assumptions about a given platform "solving" content quality easily - or meeting an audience's needs on presumed content quality when competitors may be sweating the details on a given platform better than you.

Labels: business information, business models, SIIA Content Forum 2007

Ann Michael, Founder of DeltaThink, moderated a panel including Bill Burger, VP of Marketing at Copyright Clearance Center, Sasha Gurke, SVP and Co-Founder of Knovel Corporation and Jim Reeves, SVP of New Product Development for Thomson RIA. Why, integrate content, into who's workflow, and what does content integration mean? Ann outlined how enterprises can review numerous workflow products in "bakeoffs" to determine which are meeting user needs most effectively.

Sasha outlined Knovel Library, a collection of scientific references that has been digitized through Knovel to allow engineers to access individual graphs, charts and tables from these references and to use them interactively via Knovel-generated tools. By getting the content to be highly usable, the user's workflow is transformed through increased productivity. Jim Reeves from Thomson Tax & Accounting focuses on CPAs and other financial professionals. Users can log in and find information on Sarbanes-Oxley andother key topics of interest, search by keywords. Documents retrieved from this system can be integrated into Microsoft Office documents and charts can be generated using content from a wide variety of sources into a common view of regulations. Bill Burger outlined how CCC's Rightsphere has integrated content licensing awareness relicensing capabilities into corporate workflows. Rightsphere is integrated across all kinds of content as opposed via a vertically assembed content collection. Starting with Pfizer and AstraZeneca as research and development partners CCC provided a tool that helps enterprises to understand licensing across all of their licensed content. The key thing that CCC learned from their research into enterprise markets is that rights management is a "speed bump" that people need to verify quickly and effectively. The Rightsphere tool provides a simple graphic that lets users check whether they have full permissions to redistribute content.

All interesting examples of workflow integration, but I think that the key lesson I learned from this is that your product will benefit from thorough field research to understand your users' needs. I.T.-centric products that presume too much about the value of a current platform are likely to result in "workflow" solutions that may increase productivity on some level but are not necessarily truly integrated into the ways in which users really to their job. Workflow is a sword that can cut both ways: if you invest heavily in a tool that works well in a closed environment when your customers are looking for more open-ended workflow integration you may be finding your content locked in to a platform that will have a problem responding to competitors who can devise more horizontal integrations via widgets, mashups and other new technologies.

Labels: CCC, Knovel, SIIA Content Forum 2007, Thomson, workflow integration

Frank Bilotto is VP of Publishing and Digital Media at MuseGlobal, Inc. but he's also known increasingly for his entertaining "undiscovered genius" interviews. Under Ezra Swets has grown significantly through canny acquisitions and intelligent positioning of its electronic products. Frank noted that Ezra is a proponent of the "long tail" concept of content marketing, essential for the scientific/academic sector. Unlike other publishing sectors, in which typically 80 percent of your revenues may come from only 20 percent of your titles, scientific publishing relies on selling a broad array of niche content. Frank noted that in his Dialog days only a handful of content sources actually attracted revenues and the rest operated at a relative loss. But in ecommerce, Ezra notes, players such as Amazon rely on the drip-dripping of small sales along the long tail to drive them to profitability. This is important in the scholarly sector, he notes, as new R&D markets such as Singapore show increased demand for scholarly literature.

In institutional settings, though, sales are more complex than in the consumer sector. Oftentimes scholarly content providers find themselves selling at the national level. Ezra notes that exposing content in their long tail sometimes means working with clients to let them know that they have rights to their content from existing services and it's just a matter of letting users know - so that it's part of a budget. [COMMENT: Very similar to what's happened in financial market data for decades.] In China, for example, you're selling through four consortia to the entire nation. China will buy a trial to content "X" and see who accesses it and will then dictate the price to the publisher. This provides motivation for publishers to make sure that their target markets are aware that they have access to their content. "It's not just switching deck chair, there's opportunity for new business," Ezra notes.

Ezra sees the aggregation of sources from established publishers helps to increase the awareness of "credentialed" premium sources that helps scientists move more easily from one discovery to another. Librarians still recommend and teach audiences about their content but increasingly they rely on publishers to help them make their users aware of publications. Swets tries to make the librarian the "hero" in their organizations as they help to promote content that's useful. ROI? How do you compete in the long tail? Ezra: metadata, metadata, metadata. If you're not out there being noticed via metadata and other key elements that expose content to searches then you're not competing in the long tail. Small publishers need to invest in it especially so that they can stand out on a crowd. There is also the long tail of customers, with the 60,000 major institutions of the world being joined by more people purchasing in a procurement mode for small corporates and governments. So as the client bases expand, you have to make sure that you're promoting content to end users. This requires publishers and aggregators to accept that librarians don't like bundling of "the good stuff" with weaker titles, but publishers push harder on such packaging. The key is to work with clients to find packaging that will work for individual customers.

This was a good session, but I wonder about how quickly scientific publishers are really moving in to the true "long tail" of publishing. The problem with China sales point out the long-term problem: when you sell large collections on a licensing basis, you think that you're locking in long-term success but what you're also doing is locking in long-term pressure on margins from customers. But Ezra is highly innovative in conceiving of the need to promote content on a grass-roots basis by bringing the publisher's message directly to academic audiences. The methodology is still primitive, and the question of how to do this more effectively via Web search engines and social media is still on the horizon, but Ezra is clearly interested in pushing innovative concepts for traditional publishers.

Labels: Frank Bilotto, MuseGlobal, SIIA Content Forum 2007, Swets

Our own Jean Bedord highlighted the overall nature of mahsups and efforts to integrate content into business information services via what some call broadly "mashups." Wikipedia calls mashups a web-based application that combines content from two or more sources. There's not much new about mashups in a general sense - integration of content is at the core of the industry - but with affordable user technologies that allowed remixing of videos and music the general audience for aggregating content accelerated. Hurricane Katrina's explosion of user-generated mashups that leveraged application programming interfaces from Google Maps, Flickr and other sources. Jean highlighted an interesting example of content from public data records on Chicagocrime.org to allow citizens to understand where crime was occurring and what kind of crimes. A key problem resulting from mashups: what owns what, especially when people are creating derivative works.

In the enterprise mashups are progressing quickly to help businesses accelerate their efficiencies, as highlighted by Jean's panel. John Taschek VP of Market Strategy for Salesforce.com highlighted the Apex platform used by publishers of software and content vendors to develop services via SF.com's AppExchange platform. Instead of proprietary APIs and technologies mashups use standardized APIs that allow content to assemble content simply and effectively. In the process, how we think of integration is changing. It democratizes innovation, allowing communities instead of vendors to create valuable integrations. SF.com enables through its APIs integration into Google Maps, Skype and Sales Intelligence to allow SF.com users to create valuable contextualization of proprietary content both inside and outside of their own platform. Right now they're doing basic integration, but they're moving to provide further integration of ads and other key tools that will help to make for monetizable services. The key point is that nobody at SF.com prompted these integrations - innovation came from the growing ranks of Salesforce.com users.

Simon Bradstock, VP of Corporate Products for Dow Jones highlighted DJ's ability to support mashups. Within the Factiva interface Factiva integrates their content into a map display, an account planning tool from Factiva SalesWorks, which can be populated with external information. [COMMENT: this is traditional integration as far as I can see - very effective, but a closed platform.] Dow Jones wealth manager provides a customizable interface. Web services APIs are powerful but most have traditional development cycles that are slow to deploy. Factiva is working on "widgets" that allow them to embed information such as key executive profiles into other applications. Simon showed content integrated into a QED Wiki, and IBM-based mashup enabler that included conent from Factiva and Google Maps which is a true user-enabled mashup.

Tim Ramos, President and CEO of Before the Call, a platform that aggregates content with personalizing controls that allow salespeople to focus on their sales processes. Content is aggregated from Google Maps, YouTube, Factiva and other online portals to create applications such as geographic displays of prospects, reps familiar with the accoutnts, nearby restaurants for wining and dining and the "Glengarry Leads" button which gives the most likely closable leads.

It's interesting to see the transition of traditional business information services into environments in which online mashup tools are allowing both individual people to create applications as well as content companies who want to build more powerful business information applications. On the one hand you have traditional workflow integration powered by Factiva's powerful platform and then you have the open Web tools that allow content to be integrated from any content sources quickly and effectively. To some degree the capabilities offered by a platform such as Before the Call is emblematic of how a new generation of aggregators are enabling enterprise-based professionals to combine licensed content from any source in a way that is in general in line with existing licensing. But that's not going to be the case in all instances. As we tend to underscore content owners have to be ready to accelerate efforts to enable licensing of content on an on-demand basis so that content can flow to its most valuable contexts more effectively.

Labels: business information, mashups, SIIA Content Forum 2007

Scott provided a timely picture of Yahoo in the post Lloyd Braun era, a portrait that detailed reinvigorated efforts to build the Web's leading destination content. Their new mission statement: "To connect people to their passions, their communities and the world's knowledge." When Scott first came to Yahoo their external content was mostly traditional news wire feeds, but Braun got people thinking in terms of story-telling instead of just traditional aggregation. Yahoo has the largest reach, but engagement of content was relatively low compared to competitors, so more interactivity was needed to lead people into interesting content journeys. Yahoo has been working hard to infuse social media elements into all of their properties, moving far beyond message boards to integrate it with licensed content and original content.

Yahoo's partnering with traditional media companies gives them a powerful context for their content - about 80 percent of the content on Yahoo is licensed from other sources - and fills gaps with their own content where they see non-competitive openings. Scott highlighted the partnership with CBS News' 60 Minutes program to develop a compelling destination portal. For their Tiger Woods edition of the show people wound up spending more time watching the rich content on the Yahoo site. Last fall the term "60 minutes" began to outpace searches for competitor's TV shows - in part due to the portal presence.

The McClatchy partnership is yielding content from around the world, but instead of just licensing tradtional feeds they decided to try some blogging. Scott showed slides of reporters reporting directly from around the world in Yahoo-formatted blog entries. There are now 264 companies in the Yahoo newspaper consortium, hoping to help them complement their strengths with online platforms, products and both national and international sales strength.

Scott demonstrated a section on the Yahoo! News home page in which local news headlines from RSS feeds are inserted, which enable about 15 million clicks a month to be sent out to local news providers. [COMMENT: smart, about time. This is something that the newspapers are shy to do themselves and it will cost them.] There are now about 36 million users of Yahoo! news - numbers that any newspaper would be glad to have.

Fantasy sports is a natural choice for social media, with users contributing lots of content that engages audiences. Yahoo! Sports has engagement levels that "dwarfs" their competitors, Scott says. Yahoo! YouWitness News makes it easy for people to upload news, but Scott indicates that he thinks that it will take a while to get used to uploading news. [COMMENT: the slowness from Yahoo's perspective may be individuals who are mindful of how they manage their own personal content brands. Are they all ready to give their brands to Yahoo? Yahoo's branding is too heavy in social media for many who are the most self-aware personal publishers.] Yahoo also gives tools to U.S. Presidential candidates to communicate more effectively, knowing that social media is going to play an enormous role in this sorting out a very open-ended field of candidates.

Kevin Sites' reporting from the field is but one example of original reporting offered by Yahoo, along with sports, money, food, technology and other key topics. Yahoo! News Underground brings stories from eccentric communities, bringing a street-savvy view of society. [COMMENT: Again, as I've mentioned elsewhere, this will go somewhere but when people can build their own communities I have my doubts that "underground" branding will be effective in the long run. The Web as a whole is a more effective way to tune into these communities - and it underscores the lost opportunity in not having acquired YouTube.]

Yahoo! Brand Universe helps them to leverage the key consumer brands in which they are deep in content to help consolidate people's interests. By putting the brand in the center of the experience people can navigate their relevant content and keep people immersed in both the consumer brand and the Yahoo brand. [COMMENT: Good stuff, but as we've noted before, this is something that the consumer brands should be doing themselves. That could create opportunities for Yahoo and others to license their content to the brands themselves.]

All good stuff, and demonstrating how Yahoo is the most savvy and powerful packager of traditional media and is becoming a strong force for packaging social media alongside it. The ability to aggregate both content and communities gives them a powerful edge over most traditional media brands. When you look at a Yahoo you see a company that has invested heavily in technology to create an integrated and relatively neutral environment that allows audiences to explore and find content in ways that most media companies are nowhere near ready to provide. When you look at Fox Interactive Media, FIM bought MySpace, which was actually pretty poor from a technology and usability perspective, the acquisition brought very little platform strength to MySpace and few assets that FIM could leverage to build other properties. On the other side of the coin, more source-neutral aggregators such as Google that allow both buyers and consumers to meet in an environment where the Google brand is less overshadowing offer cost-effective solutions to allow audiences to go wherever content takes them - not just to Google's own platforms. But these are largely complimentary outlooks, each of which is not likely to disappear any time soon. Food for thought, and powerful food at that.

Labels: SIIA Content Forum 2007, Yahoo

Steven MR Covey's father's book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is a global business classic and his own book The Speed of Trust is aiming to expand the family franchise. Opening up with a story of a USD 23 billion deal with Wal-Mart in which no due diligence was done - it was a deal based on trust. A deal could be done with a two-hour meeting and close in a month, versus the months that it takes a Wall Street firm to do a deal based on traditional due diligence. [COMMENT: In the old days this is how it was done on Wall Street, of course, but then people started to move away from personal integrity]. People working with deserved trust is Warren Buffet's approach to his holdings, he has all of seventeen people in his central office monitoring his broad holdings. Steven sees trust as the key to the new economy.

The business case for trust: the conventional wisdom is that trust is a "soft" virtue. Steven sees in fact that trust is a key economic driver that can accelerate business. Restoring trust takes time, but when you understand trust you can build it up effectively. Once you've established it, nothing is faster than the speed of trust. Exercise: write down the name of a person who you trust in your business life. How does if affect how you get things done, the results that you achieve? Versus a low-trust relationship, where communications and results are different - especially in the time of execution. There's a huge gap between the two, guarded, cautious relationships. Trust always affects measurable outcomes. 9/11 took away trust, the security measures have reduced our efficiency because of the lack of trust reflected in security. Corporate scandals pushed down trust in public markets, resulting in regulations that has helped to rebuild confidence, but at a price. These regulations are a prosthesis for trust. Distrust doubles the cost of doing business and triples the time it takes to do business. Covey sees trust as the new currency in the new economy.

It's interesting to reflect on how this concept plays out in the content industry. I have long used the maxim "I trust, therefore I execute" as the basis for business transactions in online ecommerce, especially from my early experience in financial transactions. I was working on a research project for a major financial publisher and was interviewing a portfolio manager who was responsible for buying and selling bonds and other fixed income securities. He showed me all of his high-tech tools but the key insight he has was "When I am doing a twenty million dollar deal I am not afraid to pick up the phone." The bond market is inefficient in some ways but only because of the efficiency of trading partners who trust one another. We see this reflected in the problems with media companies insisting on lock-down DRM controls for entertainment content, rather than developing systems of ecommerce based on trust. It's also visible in the social media arena, in which trusted peers develop efficient systems of developing and sharing information with one another. Wikipedia has its pluses and minuses, as even its co-founder Jimbo Wales has acknowledged, but the rapid acceleration of growth was built on trust.

The key factor is developing filters that let us know when and how to trust one another. This is where credentials come in - an element that was missing in Wikipedia and that bit them hard. By contrast, eBay's ratings help people to learn how to trust one another effectively: there's a system that enables peers to understand who's trustworthy. This ability to build personal brands is key in online ecommerce, and the most successful systems are based on self-regulating controls that ensure a high level of trust. In more traditional content markets peer-reviewed journals have continued to have viable business models in large part because of their long legacies of trust based on systematic input from respected peers.

This was a very good presentation, but it also pointed out a lot of the sad facts regarding trust in the workplace and in the public realm. Covey pointed to research indicating that less than half of the people in the U.S. workplace don't trust their workplace peers. But trust can be turned into a strength, he noted, if you build credibility and behavior. Reflecting on the changes in our society in the wake of 9/11 I must say that it's discouraging to think about how much a sense of trust has been eroded in our society, but it was something that is a constant struggle in society. Our media have not helped this process as we are now captive to a system that tries to create artificial trust based in the power of individuals and institutions to shape advertising and promotions. My hope is that social media will help to create a balance for publishing that will call back more peer-level endorsements that will place pressure on traditional channels to reconsider how they support or undermine society with the propagation of messages promoting products and people.

Labels: SIIA Content Forum 2007, Steven Covey