Moderator:
Henry Blodget, CEO & Editor-in-Chief, The Business Insider
Panelists: Gaby Darbyshire, COO, Gawker Media
Cheryl Milone, CEO, Article One Partners, LLC
Jim Fowler, CEO, Jigsaw Data Corporation

Labels: business information, content, media, news, patents, premium, Siia information industry summit 2010

Boardroom Insiders' Principal and Founder's Sharon Gillenwater, highlighted this new service that is a database of corporate boardroom biographies and backgrounds, built around people who are not your typical high-profile CEOs. What these people do, however, is publish content on the Web, and Boardroom Insiders goes through social media sources and other sources to glean information about who they are personally and professionally. There are about 100,000 records in teh Boardroom Insiders database, and with a lot of human input to make these more than inch-deep records it will limit the overall scope of this product. She sees the competition not as Hoover's, Jigsaw and other online information providers but the people who are trying to find this information on their own via the Web. Sales are both on the per-profile and enterprise basis, so it's a good mix of revenues to support this specialized service. This seems like a potential strong offering, similar to the original Reuters business of closing a telegraph line gap with carrier pigeons carrying messages. Human input and insight can apply semantics for hard-to-mine information very well at this scale, but it will be an ongoing race to apply those resources ahead of improving semantic technologies and social media services. The response will be, hopefully, that Boardroom Insiders keeps ahead of that curve continually by incorporating these types of capabilities.

Labels: b2b, Boardroom Insiders, business information, corporate governance, harvesting

Moderator: Steve Sieck, President, SKS Advisors, Inc.
Panelists:
Bob Carrigan, CEO, IDG Communications, Inc.
David Mather, President, Hoover's
Michael Dunn, VP , Hearst Interactive Media
Clara Shih, AppExchange Product Line Manager, Salesforce.com

[Technical difficulties at the beginning at this panel, apologies to early speakers]
Steve framed the discussion by referring to his research for the SIIA showing the gap between social media's payback versus focus.
Steve: Why focus on social media?

Carrigan: Have to focus on it, need more editorial impressionsy
Dunn: Focus on it intensely
Mather: Provide tools to make more actionable informaiton, how to give value when you're entering into conversations in your professional activities. Hoover's Connect, purchased technology from VisiblePath
Shih: AppExchange investment but also online community IdeaExchange, Salesforce to Salesforce, entity nodes can be your sales partners, exchange information. FaceForce integration, pull up contact info but also Facebook profile information real-time into SFDC.
Carrigan: TheHub, generates thousands of visits and page views, all comments from users, very high monetization. Direct advertising benefits.
Dunn: Small teams can do a lot, low-cost efforts can yield high benefits with a lot of feedback from the community.
Mather: People want to be tethered to their workflow, were making so many changes to incorporate privacy that they needed absolute control over platform to manage these issues.
Shih: Keeps people from having to log into multiple sites, keeps them productive.

Steve: Social media communities don't happen by themselves, what do you need to do?

Carrigan: Don't hold on too much, can't be too regulated. Didn't hire a community manager initially, hired a CIO. Need to put in people that community members will relate to.
Dunn: On the boards of several companies, including Internet Capital Group, if you're considering moving into social media technologies first you should be getting on B2C networks, people want to interact constantly. Lots of evil things out there but that's an educational issue. Facebook is a good platform, Twitter good group chat, Seesmic is video chat in alpha. Lots of people involved in these sites, bring this back into your work environment.
Mather: Once people have the sense that it's a secure environment they play a little bit and start to get confidence. People begin to tap into your own organization's knowledge network for business-like goals. People will use it in the right context.
Shih: Trust is key, openness also, engagement. The content and services have to provide ongoing value, or they won't log in again.

Steve: Google OpenSocial, implications?
Shih: A set of open standards that publishers can use to build applications on social networking platforms, implementers can implement once and have data shared on many sites, remains to be seen whether people will go for it and whether publishers will be implementing it on their end.
Mather: As a publisher of insight, need to provide a 360 view of the world, if you are learning about a person you may want to know that Hoover's says versus LinkedIn versus MySpace. Standards can help us to unleash the power of these platforms.
Carrigan: From a user point of view there's OpenID, too many logins for social media, OpenID can help.
Dunn: Blogosphere is the largest social network today, you control the data, you're responsible for comments and trackbacks. In a Facebook environment you can't eliminate yourself and put it elsewhere, that's a challenge, data portability can address that. Every environment requires a profile, redundant, quite a bit of fragmentation, everyone has a little different feature set, everyone should have an about page, not worry about companies managing that.
Shih: Standardization is good, but sometimes profiles need to be separate, what if you're a musician on the weekends and want a separate identity.
Mather: Standards are good, but need to be careful about having too many controls.

Steve: 99 percent of SM applications are amusement oriented so far, what are some of the business widgets that may turn out to be killer apps.

Carrigan: We're working on lots of widgets, now career widgets, content related to career events, review widgets, looking at many cool business widgets.

Question: To what extent are lawyers getting involved on specific terms for social media.
Dunn: On same floor as lawyers, go to lunch with them, get advised on absolutely everything that we do. Launched a magazine completely in a blog format, lawyers help a lot.
Mather: Attorneys needed for Web tool world, how reliable are we when a blogger that says something in detriment to another company, they want us to filter everything, but hard to do in a community environment. Lots of rules in place, but sometimes we have to push the envelope.

Question: Looking at demographics, are there are demographics that resonate most? Tech or other industry?
Carrigan: Skews to younger audience, try to get the same quality, don't qualify as much as we do for print format.
Shih: Two phenomena, grown from Silicon Valley, which is young, but the audience is aging, as college students. mature they become the business consumers of the next generation.
Dunn: If your B2B footprint is global, social media can help you to break down social and time barriers. China is a bit rougher, tech community is an early adopter.
Mather: Much older audience than typical internet company, C-Level exec at D&B, do you know anyone, not a Silicon Valley type, intuitively jumped to use the tool.

Question: ROI?
Shih: Can calculate spend for partners, can close the data when deal is done, SFDC needs to do that to maximize value.
Carrigan: Journey of buying behavior, score provided to marketers in reporting, so if signed up for a program they can see that not all of the leads are created equally, new program. Market Fusion site.
Mather: Hoover's Connect is a free network, ROI in value of relationships, can manage private networks and provide economic benefit. Add value, make product actionable.

QUICK TAKE: Excellent panel, I thought that it was a great mix of core B2B people, representing publishers, enterprise platforms and new models that are spanning the world outside of and inside of the corporate firewall. Clearly it's very early days for social media in B2B, many of these initiatives have emerged fully only in the past few months. But the trend is to empower people in business to harvest value from their core professional relationships as well as to pull in their more multidimensional selves from social media online portals to help relationships become deeper more quickly and more effectively. The next generation of applications is likely to start mining social media content more effectively to provide alerts, trends, behaviors and other key indicators that can effect both relationships and transactions. If there's anything that can refute the question of social media's value it's what's happening in business.

Labels: business information, SIIA Information Industry Summit 2008, social media

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

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

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

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

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