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

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