Up-front editorial comment: I am familiar with a number of things that Time, Inc. is doing, they're really aggressive on many fronts to leverage their brands to the max online. Does that mean that these efforts will support their current valuation, management and cost structure? That's a different question. Look at Time within the framework of major media companies trying to find a path to the future by being all about brands from the bottom up. It's the right approach.

In every dark cloud there's a silver lining, continuing to evolve the business. Pages down 11.7 percent 2008, 2009 is looking worse, that's good news for us, because we're more than a magazine. Mergers such as CNN Money, one of the world's largest content companies, live in mags, books, online, mobile and more. Our trusted brand content is world-renowned. Strong multi-platform brands, RealSimple was conceived as a brand, not a magazine, promise is a life made easier. Product lines at Target stores. SI.com, the Vault with SI classic photos. Essence, with Warner Brothers launched the new Essence.com, the weekend of July 4th will have Beyonce at the Essence music festival. Nobody is better at telling multiplatform storytelling than Time. Created Life in 1936, photojournalism was that era's storytelling with technology. Words "plane crash in the Hudson," images of passengers on the wing, Luce's original concept remains the same. There's still a beginning, a middle and and end, but not always in order. When we text votes to American Idol the platform changes the experience. Can the new media platforms change the story? Yes.

Look at the Life brand, in continuous publication since 1936. Weekly issues, special books, one of the most iconic brands. If you're Time, how do you leverage ten million photos that you own? More than 73 million people search images, growing faster than any other type of search. In the middle of a digital image revolution. For the most iconic brand, they launched the Life archive search engine on Google. More and more are being scanned, example of Marilyn Monroe is a benchmark of scanning progress. New Life.com is a joint venture with Getty Images, millions of images from the annals of history.

Remember how magazine sites used to look, everything repurposed from print? No more. Content lives differently on each platform. Instyle knows how people feel about their hair, people can "try on" celebrity hair, upload your photo and try away. Editors have become great short format storytellers. Fifty percent of all finance videos are viewed on CNN Money.com. Editoral specials have become huge live online events. The People brand is growing, the "power of People" has become multi-touch-point, interactive community. When J-Lo's twins were born, broke news on People.com, interviews with their editors on TV, mag did 2 million copies, stories on People Espanol. One story equalled 133 million media impressions. Surround the story. Mia Farrow special issue is now a megabrand in its own way. People digital has several brands and skins. People Digital grew bottom line 48 percent. 2007 was 18 percent. Company overall bottom line now represents 10 percent of revenues of Time Inc., many of most profitable titles are online. (COMMENT: Yes, it's low compared to some B2B brands, but think of how quickly they've gotten back into the game). Users spend average 19 minutes on their sites.

We're a content company that makes great magazines. People who had their mags taken away for two weeks really wanted them back. Asked if they wanted them without ads, they said no, they wanted the experience (COMMENT: Lesson for online advertisers, you need to take more care to make your content a part of a person's online experience). Cosmopolitan, brand is getting hotter with younger people. Time's commemorative election issue sold five times more than normal issue. Mags overall up four percent for Time.

How to weather the storm?
1. Thow away your five-year plans. Look out two years at most, be nimble, stratgegy can be successful only when conditions are well understood. What worked today is not necessarily going to work tomorrow. Re-strategized, made three business units. Going to market more strategically, have bigger strategic discussions with clients.
2. Become true partners with your clients. Need to understand their businesses inside and out, have to come with full solutions (COMMENT: This is a long-term trend, ad shops are being trumped oftentimes by well-positioned brands such as Time, Inc.). Clients will remember who was in the foxhole with them when times were bad.
3. Collaborate. Take advantage of collaborative opportunities inside company. Lehman Brothers, a tenant in their building, came crashing down, Fortune magazine writers were chosen to cover it for Time.
4. Don't sweat the small stuff. Focus on mission-critical business issues, focus on what will win business and build the brand.
5. Trusted branded content matters. Branded journalism will take on an increasingly important role (COMMENT: True, but don't underestimate the power of personal social media brands.
6. Be optimistic. Bring a "can-do" spirit to the challenges.

Excellent address, great case studies, fun presentation. Good stuff, but darn, do big media companies need micropayments.

Question from audience - how do you handle much lower online ad rates?
A: If anyone thinks online digital revenues are going to make up falling print revenues, they're not getting it. Need to say to clients that they need each other, they need to keep each other from going out of business, going with collaborative solutions to clients, sometimes even basic merchandizing and bundling assets for them. We're helping them now and come back when times are better with fresh new ideas and new economic models.

Labels: events, SIIA Information Industry Summit 2009

Moderator: Patrick J. Spain, Chairman & CEO, Newser LLC

Panelists:
Michael Angle, Co-Founder, President and CTO, Alacra, Inc.
Christos Moschiovitis, CEO, tmg-emedia.com
Martin Howard, Executive Directors, Transaction Advisory Services, Ernst & Young LLP

Martin: Traditionally CTO was part of management team, CTO would report to CIO. CIO was more business-oriented, but now it's strategic, responsible for I.T. function, more and more has that CTO function, more heads. Still see some confusion in those roles, one may be called the other, titles in flux.
Michael: In my case a COO, my CEO introduces me as the person in charge of everything that plugs in. For our business is incredibly important to the success of our business, not just about accounting and back-office big iron. Unlike top sales person, etc., they have their own domains of expertise, what I do spans all of those functions in the company, help to develop new products, influence how sales does there job, influence how we do social media
Christos: Looking at a transformation in the media industry, CEOs and visionaries trying to figure out the appopriate roles, the marriage between CEOs and the technology function being worked out. Starting to see the ascention at the CEO level that have substantial ownership and understanding of the technology function (COMMENT: Hmm, just like Silicon Valley has done for decades. Amazing. We're finally getting past the post World War II MBA management phenomenon and back to people who want to make products and services work).

Patrick: "Insurmountable Opportunities," what are you embracing willingly and unwillingly.

Michael: Cutbacks with "X" in the double digits, how can we help clients do that. I need to be a part of that charge, leading it if possible instead of following it. Have to have statistics on the ROI of content and services within client organizations. Unglamorous stuff, but you have to build cost control and measurement into the product.
Martin: ROI has to be on a business strategy basis as well as a cost basis. Organizations are asking CTOs and CIOs to be more strategic. Where are the very best places to spend to mitigate risk.
Christos: You bring to the table more than just technology but innovation as well, may not be an apparent savings at first. As technology has increased the size of organizations, more focus on profits and what it all means. We are seeing tremendous growth in our practice because of this reason, looking at what is most cost-effective way to bring in expertise. In each different are there are different value points. ROI is the governing driver.
Martin: Execution is also incredibly important.

Patrick: Issue of "fair use," has technology made the issue of fair use more challenging, are you more aware of what your technology can and should use?
Michael: Monitor for "bots" and scrapers, have automatic shutoff mechanisms. Sometimes you want to get scraped for business opportunities, but not every opportunity is helpful. Have to look at how it's being used.
Martin: It's a key factor for due diligence, for integration and acquisition intellectual property protection comes in very strongly. The law hasn't caught up in a neat way yet, but investors are struggling with the issues when they look at acquiring content companies. Deals can fall apart when internal protections were seen as inadequate or when the threat of its inventors walking away from the company scared off investors.

Patrick: More people contributing content, how does this impact I.T.?
Christos: First on copyright. Obviously the issue of copyright is very complex, involves legislation. If you look at it over the period of the last fifteen years, people have been running for the hills. Content has enormous value. People are doing extremely bizarre things to monetize content, yet people put it up for free to get the eyeballs. How do you think that we're going to protect it? NYT was wrong, if I go to a newsstand with the NYT, all I can do is to read the headlines (COMMENT: again, micropayments can help with this). The issue of IP protection is linked to this problem.
Martin: Content is still king, but that doesn't mean that content has to be turned by professionals. Bloggers have had a huge impact, most bloggers make money indirectly. Wikipedia hasn't put Britannica out of business but they've had to change. People aren't buying papers because they're reading Google News, good enough and free. For news, maybe that's better, reporters can be controlled. Some times people want to pay for access to the analyst for expertise.
Christos: We need to talk about the problems of the business models in a very fundamental way, the pink elephant is that the model is changing, we're going to face the came changes as the music industry has faced. Verizon is in a sweet spot, they own the last mile of connectivity, how do you translate that into the media business? Verizon "owns" Manhattan (COMMENT: well, not on an enterprise level), how does that translate into a media level? "It will go away after I am no longer president". It will always be the next generation's problem; well the next generation is here.
Martin: There is no problem with content, more than ever before, reading more than ever before, a simple problem of companies trying to make money the old-fashioned way.

Patrick: At HighBeam we created a mobile application, didn't make a penny off of it. Mobile has had such great promise, is mobile the new CD-ROM that will be surpassed, are we waiting for a good way to deliver ads?
Michael: In finance mobile is very real, many professionals have given up their desktop, how do I deliver information on a screen three inches square, how do you pull out the meaningful chunks. Need to get content on Facebook, have to look if it's appropriate to get messages on Twitter.
Martin: The technologies and methods of delivery is coming along, coming to a world where each person will have their own intranet (COMMENT: One of the more interesting comments at the conference. Compelling).
Christos: Technology offers something that was not available a year or so ago: location awareness. Can provide very specific content. The world of science fiction is becoming fact rapidly. Happened earlier with instant messaging, it's not that it can deliver quick messages, it is that you aware that you are available. It knows when you've signed in. Your phone tells me where you are and when you are available. Mobile is very real and will dominate the space.
Michael: Technologies solve the filtering and context problem, geolocation helps with that, but what if I am making a pitch to Xerox and want to close the deal? It's not so good for that specifically. For the user it's all about the filtering, for the provider it's about getting the right stuff to filter.
Christos: Now we have technology where we can sell words (hover technologies) for advertising, when you have content that's sellable to the word, how does that affect editorial and sales? The two groups need to collaborate much more closely as a result. Editorial can no longer be in an ivory tower, they are now responsible for creating community around content.

Patrick: Video is entirely new to some in the audience, if you're a content creator and distributor, do you need video or can you live without it?
Michael: Many sites include a video on the outside, more than a teaser, the thought of the day, accomodates how people see core information.
Martin: Video's best for some things, words for others, as aggregators piece them together, not sure that providers have to be all things to all people.
Christos: At the end of the day it's all about relevance, video is straightforward to produce. Can never be ignored, need to talk specifics, though.

Good panel, operational views are a challenge to present in a conference of this sort, I think that Patrick handled it very well and brought some really interesting contributors to the discussion. In Q&A, Michael Angle suggested in a tongue-in-cheek way that perhaps we need to fire everyone in I.T. over thirty. That sounds like a familiar refrain from my own youth, but with online media there's a strong ring of truth to it. The technology landscape is changing so quickly, you cannot afford to rest on your laurels on older views of how I.T. should be done and to hold back your organization. But in defense of more mature technologists, there are plenty of forward thinkers of all ages who are ready to rock with new publishing technologies.

Labels: events, management, SIIA Information Industry Summit 2009, technology

Moderator: Nicholas Ascheim, VP, Product Management, NYTimes.com

Panelists:
Sandy Malcolm, Executive Producer Video, CNN.com
Andy Plesser, Producer and Founder, Beet.tv
Kathy Yates, CEO, AllBusiness.com

Forecast was for a 1.35 billion market, was actually $587 million (eMarketer). Goalposts keep moving out but trends are promising. Number of people going up, Hulu up to 1.7 percent of all streams (COMMENT: that's better, but good..?).

Malcolm: Representing the content owner, cringe at Blodgett's comment about TiVos recording content. Our streaming service runs 24x7, podcasts, doing pretty well in video, in spite of tough times.
Plesser: Been doing a video blog for three years, help decision-makers in digital industry, a virtual meeting for "snacking" on conversations of authoritative voices. Small staff, low costs, small degree of profitability, going well.
Yates: For business owners, evergreen content, customers come to get smart quickly on topics outside of their domain expertise, 18 million of podcasts, webinars, video segments, video about 3,000 segments, also license content from other sources, including other video production units. Have invested quarter million dollars in video assets, operate on break-even with ads and sponsorhips.

Aschiem: What drove the decision to focus on video.

Plesser: Was in PR and ads for 20 years, clients want to get in video, took video camera and taped people and put it on the Web, on the blog. Evolving into a business slowly in a B2B model, Adobe and Akamai want to reach their audience. Niche publishing, lots of opportunities.
Yates: Very nuts-and-bolts, like how to set up a LAN, handy if you don't have a CTO. Scaled video quickly based on feedback from customers, operate on a testing environment, look at which kind of segments drive the most usage.
Malcolm: In video for years, 2002 started a subscription service, started us really thinking about the business, tried a pay firewall, tough to integrate, a perfect storm of events helped us to see that we could do a pay service for live video, upped the clips, built a digital ad sales team that could sell cross-platform. Took the free live service online last year, phenomenal growth.

Ascheim: How much does it cost really to produce video?

Malcolm: We can pick and choose what comes in to Atlanta, few restrictions, look at what works best for the Web, not everything that works for TV works for the Web. Have an editor pool, can pick from the best.
Plesser: The cost of news gathering has changed, reporters send their videos from webcams to be edited, may edit Skype feed. It's not so much the cost as the access to the content. The cost structure has dropped for news gathering and production. Where you had to get big editing systems, now you can get final cut for a thousand dollars and you're good to go. This has become apparent to bigger news organizations. With High-Def, cost of streaming has dropped. We have an editor who works 20 hours a week, an assistant blogger any myself, sometimes ten original videos a week, 800 in archive, grab videos from CNN, again, costs are very low.
Malcolm: Looking at Skype, we understand the value of keeping costs low. Moving away from bigger systems, taking advantage of easier, nimbler and cheaper systems.
Yates: We benchmark production costs at about $250 per segment for 3-5 minute segments. Keep the same cost benchmark, have worked with providers who have developed video for long format, not really focused on what the Web needs, so in-house works better and helps to control costs.

Ascheim: I it mostly the size of your own library that drives traffic?

Yates: We're a long-tail site, so the more content that we have, the larger our audience. We've looked at this, the activity is driven by promotion, sensitive to how it's promoted to people landing on our site.
Plesser: The whole notion of video search is very important, if you have a service about a video or product, put the metadata around it, or use blogging to get the data in the search engines, there's a huge opportinity to get videos in search engines in a big way. People aren't necessarily going to get into your show. Google is making video more discoverable via universal search.
Malcolm: Opening more bureaus, we want to own as much original content as possible. We are not an open platform, you're concerned about where your content is going to end up, but you need to be smart about it, we have an embed player now.
Plesser: If your content is of value and you want to make money from syndication, our ad travels in an embeddable player, so it's possible to play on a much larger field with an advertisting component. What's happening with the Web is that it's becoming more and more a television medium. We're watching video clips, video has to be a part of a site, demand is skyrocketing. Content creators are going to be in a position to get revenues from a licensing fee or revenue share. There's going to be a big demand.
Malcolm: Our ad sales team is working on that now, you can stay on your site, get a high CPM, have to get out there in the marketplace, look closely at revshares.

Ascheim: Is the Web becoming a television medium

Yates: Not so much about what the editor wants as what the audience wants, ability to deliver video content is there now on broadband, the quality of the production is less important to the user than the producer. Obviously very low quality doesn't work, but the greatest value comes from the relevance of the information.

Ascheim: Longer form content, seems to be more demand today, perhaps because the experience is better, but most is in entertaiment. Is there a future for more as the format matures?

Malcolm: News is more disposable, shorter shelf life, long form is a little trickier, can do well, spots for that, live service has taken off, the amount of time that people spend increases, even if it is "snacking," you can get what you want, where you want it. Internet can also harvest live events.
Plesser: It's about snacking now, can't do video online too long, as it becomes integrated into living rooms it will grow.
Yates: For entertainment long form is growing, they watch all of their shows on the Web, annoying to find a second segment on Hulu and YouTube. A growing appetite for Webinars, people cutting back on business expenses, people watching them on the Web.

Ascheim: What models will sustain video?
Yates: Will go to 2-3 percent, perhaps larger, as an audience, today all ad-based but we'll see other models and higher production quality at lower costs.
Plesser: Watching video on PC will be irrelevant, a lot we'll see on mobile and in the living room, the notion of learning from and meeting people will be key, where video becomes a more interactive experience. Broadband and high bandwidth will allow video communication will become two-way. Will comfort people in the know to be in touch.
Malcolm: Program for various mediums, community involvement is key, Facebook was successful beyond measure, 26 million live streams, complements TV. TV is that lean-back experience, you can do that and lots can do that, but the online experience was more intimate, Facebook comments were running as the videos were running, people were commenting all night, created a new community around live. Interaction and the ability to get involved is key, have to plan for all of them.
Plesser: Live streaming is so easy now, not like in the old days where you needed a big professional crew. Bandwidth is really bad in the U.S. compared to other nations.

Excellent session, tightly managed, lots of key best practices. Can't ask for much more. The stats on the inauguration are compelling, that's a mass-scale audience for the feed and mass interaction at a community level. Models are still being worked out, but they follow logically from other social media/Web content.

Labels: events, SIIA Information Industry Summit 2009

Silicon Alley Insider becoming Business Insider, TechCrunch model, 2 million readers, but facing same ad challenges as everyone else. Not a "lifecaster," but real journaism. Still, a new form of journalism is evolving. Old style is to take existing content and to throw it online, reading it online is great, but that's not the real form of online journalism looks like, with strengths and weaknesses.

Aggregation is the key to the new journalism, the very act of aggregation can be valuable. High-velocity production, more similar to broadcasting, like a "text broadcast" (COMMENT: read, "real-time." Again, Wall Street's real-time legacy comes into the online news world). Some say it's garbage, that it will all fail, but if you hear that Steve Jobs is sick you're going to check it out and see if it's credible. There are plenty of people who know that it's true, and it helps to get the truth out more quickly. A source said that there's going to be a massive layoff, in short order we got a lot more information that this was indeed going to happen. Access is great, but on the other hand, when employees contact you with information and emails, access is less important. A lot of the readers will know a lot more than a journalist will know.

People want "snackable" content, see what's happened in the last hour. He wrote an article for the Atlantic magazine, good topic, lots of readership, but nothing like the first Twitter of the video of the rescue of the plane that went down in the Hudson. Online journalism is taking sound, text, video, it's not one medium or another. Gawker pushes this furthest, has eight TiVos capturing shows where someone might say something interesting, then clipping it for online. It's different from MarketWatch and TheStreet.com, which were more online newspaper models.

Huffington Post bigger than the Boston Globe, they find the most interesting stories on the Web, it's cost-effective, which the Boston Globe is not. Gawker Media blog network was twice that of the LA Times. Total team: 80 people, LAT 800. Can't support that kind of newsroom with that kind of traffic, Nick Denton is way ahead. But still big problems, online readers think that everthing should be free. That has got to change, just not enough advertising. Ads haven't evolved, same little box ads, shouldn't have to mimic a newspaper (COMMENT: or a television). People complain nobody clicks on the ads, but we have done almost nothing to innovate. Advertisers only care about clicks, a great ad without a click is viewed as a failure, yet in print nobody clicks and people consider those ads successful.

But the problems are far worse for traditional media. Newspapers have had a great 200 year run, but now it's over. Disruptive technologies are not necessarily better, many products created with it are miles short of The New York Times, but it's cheaper and gradually it gets better. In the meantime the old technology pushes towards premium users with more expensive technology, pretty soon they're pushed out of the mass markets. Google is pushing Microsoft to the high end, won't stop Google's onslaught. The cost of producing online journalism is so much lower, HuffPo 20 editorial staff, Gawker only $15 million while NYT is $1+ billion, profits from lower costs are working. Craigslist is free, unlimited real estate, a lot of traditional publishing companies are hosed. But some do well, like Bloomberg, Dow Jones doing well, the NYT can be saved but will have to cut 40 percent of the cost and re-explore charging for online (COMMENT: yes, but not through the old models. Micropayments will be the way, we can pick up the New York Post for a quarter at the newsstand, micropayments will work if done neutrally).

Journalism is in great shape, will look different but it will be in great shape. There are vastly more journalists than ever before, experts can express their opinion online. Editors need to co through this, some are paid to be editors, others comment on others (COMMENT: or link to it in blogs, what Robin Good calls "Newsmasters." In today's world "Deep Throat" would have sent documents to "The Smoking Gun" and it would have all been online. Papers will continue to get hammered, some will adapt, many are already writing real-time, but they will survive (COMMENT: Maybe). Online journalism will continue to grow, some will build sustainable models, will develop more professional talent, will hire credible journalists, the only thing that will change is that the shareholders of existing companies will get hammered. Creating destruction will bring us to the better future.

COMMENT: Overall, completely spot on. This is the new role of media today, though I think that he underplays the role of on-site expertise, which is a definition that varies with events. For example, sometimes a lawyer or a stock analyst with a blog will be an on-site expert about events in their profession, other times a laborer in China who happens to be near the epicenter of a major earthquake who is equipped with Twitter will be the expert. Expertise is becoming more contextual, but the truth is always larger than a journalist. I do think that CQ's Bob Merry's outlook is closer to the greater truth - we've had journalism in its current form only for about two hundred years, it will continue to be a good profession in its own way but the aggregation of news is taking its place in many aspects, making insight from on-site facts more important.

Labels: Blodgett, events, SIIA Information Industry Summit 2009

Moderator: Jim Kolleger, CEO, Genesys Partners, Inc.

Panelists:
Dan'l Lewin, Corporate VP, Microsoft, and Head, Strategic and Emerging Business Development
Neal Lipschutz, SVP and Managing Editor, Dow Jones Newswires
Steve Lohr, Senior Writer and Technology Reporter, The New York Times
Jon Miller, Founding Partner, Velocity Interactive Group, former CEO, AOL

Jim: Economy?

Steve: Federal Reserve was the lender of last resort, now the Federal government will be the spender of last resort, but it will be a targeted approach, not just shoveling potholes. Anti-trust needs to be watched, new appointee, worked on Netscape/MSFT deal, anti-competitive practices will be scrutinized.

Jon: Our consumer business means impact, as seen in our recent financials, as enterprises cut back economic impact is in the long run optimistic, scaling out of seamless computing is good, very powerful smart devices, blending content that's user-created is key.

Neal: As long as this downturn is going to be, it's hard to go back to what we had before boom times, technology growth and disruption will make some sectors like finance risk-averse, jobs creation is going to be key but it's easier said than done. Free enterprise will be less so than recently.
Dan'l: EBITDAs aren't right, Ballmer's "reset" does not mean that they are going to go back to having companies trade at old levels.

(COMMENT: It's a shame that easy money propped up the valuation of fundamentally weak publishing properties for the past several years. This kept smart money from being spent more effectively on needed transformation in the industry. That doesn't mean that a good part of that transformation hasn't happened, it's just that so much investment was thrown at failing models.)

Neal: America is going to be less important now, opportunities may be greater outside of the U.S.

Steve Lohr: Isn't it amazing how the world fell off the cliff September 15th?

Jim: Money velocity has driven information velocity, will old media dollars be even digital dimes? "A new normal."

Steve: NYT approach is to double down, selling off portion of building, hope is that you can swim to the other shore. Online model that was supposed to help change from print is changing radically.

Neal: Business models will have to rely on quality content and subscription revenues.

Steve: Can the genie go back in the bottle once everyone decided to give it away?

Dan'l: Big believer in news business, not necessarily the newsPAPER business. News is proliferating, consumption never higher, I use 20-30 sources, many do. What model to get from there to there is not known, not supporting things now. The genie does not go back in the bottle.

Jim: Political change, were you suprised about going from X-Box to Atari in White House technology?

Dan'l: They think that digital can have a big impact on recovery plan, it's a question of how you go about it.

Jim: The tools of the teenager are now in the White House (COMMENT: Gentle jab, Jim, the teenagers grew up. It's young adults, now, that are driving social media growth). Organization for America, can be a force for good, but can ricochet, microscripts may embed themselves.

Steve: Obama admin message has been top-down and consistent, stuck with message, no panic when Hillary won in PA primary, in that sense very elitist. (COMMENT: It's different in social media, not a mater of polling strangers but of listening to people with whom you have relationship).

Jon: The polling methods of McCain who was going with where the wind blew showed through.

Jim: 37 billion of stimulus coming.

Steve: Health IT was 20 billion, broadband was 6, broadband will increase. Will not just throw money at things, pay per performance with metrics will rule. We've done this on a small scale so far, will be interesting to see where it goes.

(COMMENT: Interesting to see how this year's panel is really not about gadgets, as has been Jim's usual focus. It's now about what the technologies have done to change society. See "Content Nation" for more).

Jon: Now a matter of public discussion and policy to make more open and avialable content happening.

Jim: Other technology trends impacted by these issues?

Jon: Broadband is a big deal, more recent countries coming online have more, we're falling behind.

Neal: Some major cities will not have major newspapers in print, the trend will accelerate. If the downturn is longer, the trends will accelerate.

Dan'l: Fundamental trends, end of Moore's law, virtualization is starting to happen, lot of infrastrucutre going on, action in conversations at this conference is at the application level, but the data is where there's a lot of action. CIOs looking at where they will balance their infrastructure, where will the storage be, where will the backup be. New markets forming in education, global markets where infrastructure is growing. Won't see a pause. Robotics is hot, vision, spatial, voice interfaces, all of these are evolving rapidly.

Neal: The value of content will be there no matter what the technology, delivery mechanisms will change, but targeted content still valuable, though it may not include general news.

Jim: Always a new wrinkle, what's the new wrinkle?

Jon: Most recent is video and social networking on Web, before that Yahoo and AOL, goes in four-year waves, things do change. But the stuff that rises to the top isn't every day. The industry will continue to re-create itself over time, it's not the thousand little things. (COMMENT: Disagree. Reference the Museum of Modern Betas, where there are more than 4,000 new social media tools in four years. It's the little and the big and the little that become huge).

Jim: Huge changes for the industry?

Jon: iPhone was a huge change, most revolutionary was inclusion of Safari browser in iPhone (COMMENT: Agreed, the platform will be forgotten eventually, the Web will not be forgotten).

Jim: Where does workflow fit in?

Dan'l: Where you are is becoming increasingly important, your location and context is key, what comes to you is key, location-based services are growing, those kinds of services will surface soon. Notion of location in the cloud that's yours that synchronizes with friends' devices is being investigated at Microsoft, social networking is a little out of control, is it mostly noise.

Jon: Speaking up for consumer side, at end of 2008, consumer usage of Internet surpassed enterprise usage for first time (COMMENT: The world is indeed a nation of publishers!). Consumer applications are driving much of the Web use, that will work its way back.

Steve: Where would you invest?

Jon: As a consumer-oriented business, my whole thing is what the consumer is doing. Closed on sale of Expedia from Microsoft, over 3 billion, bad week, dot-com crash ended travel, no precedents, Barry Diller said will consumers continue to travel in the future, and if so will they do more of it using online tools. Video consumption is taking off, makes perfect sense as it is. On a worldwide basis, video consumption is still early days.

Jim: Jon, you ran AOL, how do you see online game playing out?

Jon: Two big trends, consolidation and breakups, content and distribution breaking up (COMMENT: Agreed, but depends in some sectors on availability of monetization tools).

Jim: If you're a company, what do you keep your eyes on, where are the opportunities?

Dan'l: Paying attention to lots of stuff, my particualr interest is to look at entrepreneurial activity and where the money goes to support them. Pragmatic answer as to how they help them. A pretty good bead on that side of global innovation. Larger concerns are there for acquisition, too. You'll see more of the same.

Jon: Mentioned video earlier, what are people doing in mobile environments, need to understand usage contours. iPhone apps, haven't yet understood behaviors, will be profound in a lot of ways.

Steve: iPhone was not an original idea, why couldn't Microsoft do it?

Dan'l: We should have, we'll play catch up. Microsoft is a "hundred flowers bloom" approach to platform, not the tight store and service integration of Apple, historically.

Great panel as always, high-level discussions like this are not always productive but Jim manages to keep them well-focused.

Labels: events, innovation, SIIA Information Industry Summit 2009, technology

Moderator: Lee Greenhouse, President, Greenhouse Associates, Inc.

Panelists:
Diane Corrado, Vice President, Sales, Wolters Kluwer Health
Tom Brown, Vice President, Financial Services Solutions, LexisNexis Risk and Information Analytics Group
Joe Jaksha, Vice President of New Product Development, Thomson West

My former Quotron colleague Lee Greenhouse kicked off a panel of major enterprise information services providers from legal, credit and medical sectors. Lee's kickoff question: Michael Wolff said that the value of content is declining. Is that so?

Tom: For public records, applications built on them can quantify value. Maintaining a certain value proposition requires the ability to add to it constantly.
Diane: Clients say content is king, if the right data isn't there, then it's not worth it.
Lee: But they won't pay a king's ransom for it.
Diane: They don't want twelve million hits, they want one hit.
Joe: Raw aggregated content is less valuable, but you have to have that and layer on more value. Unfiltered, unannotated content is less valuable but clients expect it to be there.
Lee: How has West added value to content?
Tom: Classification of laws, the legal code, was the first step. Now focus on specific customers and wrap it in a package with sophisticated technologies and a services model (COMMENT: Again, it comes back to the Wall Street model. Lou Eccleston from S&P didn't come - again - but it would be nice for a financial person to nail this concept home). Adding value to the public record so that it's the authoritative record. Deploy analytics to make it more actionable in high-volume enterprise environments. In banking, help them to prevent money laundering, help them to know the individuals with whom they are doing business. Also focus on identity theft, will get worse as economy deteriorates and people from the inside help crime. Help customers evaluate companies that are not covered by the credit agencies, on terms that are acceptable to the consumer.
Diane: In legal and medical, years ago you had to bear a gift to get information from a corprorate librarian. Now it's in the hands and the pockets on portable devices of users. Books in a big room have to exist now on an iPod and be fast. Google is fast, but you don't want five million hits, you want the information that you're looking for, with as little librarian intervention as possible. Use contextual design process, work with clients in non-standard way. Usual client interviews give usual answers, contextual design watches how people actually do their work. (COMMENT: This is a key, key factor in product research, I've learned more in interviews just being quiet and watching how a subject responds to a phone call or works at their desk). Helps to reduce fatigue from information use - sometimes as much as 65 percent. We are a publisher, but also integrators, integrate from Thomson and other sources, new tools manage these sources side-by-side. Has revolutionized our industry (COMMENT: Again, done decades ago in finance, corprorate world is just starting to have the technology for more general content sources to catch up). We carry both peer reviewed content and clinical use information, so people can see both the theory and the practice side by side.

Joe: Focused on smaller information bites, could be just a piece of metadata that's monetizable, as a publisher you can take that same piece of information and present it in many different contexts. Contract attorneys get what they need at the point of need. Have to understand what target customers need.
Lee: Do you really get more money from customers or is it treading water?
Joe: Definitely a mix of the two, bigger part is making it a sustainable business model, contextual content changes how our clients do business, the "sticky, viral" way of doing business becomes part of what they do.
Tom: Depends on how much it's a pain point for customers, adding coverage, that's where the pain point is, clients are required to vett each client they do business with, if it's just redundant information, less valuable. Also new applications are key, in some ways we're in a nascent market sector, what we're doing is providing information about the "underbanked" to help people understand them.
Diane: It's also helping our customers' customers, our clients have to do more with less, if you have a relationship with their clients you can command higher prices, you can get a larger share that enhance client relationships, puts us in a unique position. Many are clinicians, scientists, drug manufacturers, defending legal cases, customer's customers could be doctors, consumers, product developers, important to prove value to them. Providing better materials that explain what the product does is valuable, getting the buyer to understand the value is key.
Tom: That's the essence of what we do, we try to be more relevant to the client.

Lee: What's the hard stuff?
Joe: Combining unique combinations of content that cannot be replicated by the next hot technology play. Customers are more and more specialized, means that where they get a question outside of their area of expertise, they need help. (COMMENT: Good point, and a very interesting one). People on the end of a phone line can help, too.

Lee: Lessons from failures?
Joe: Shoehorning content in a product or space where it doesn't belong, looks good on a drawing boards but doesn't work in real like. In contract law, we tested and re-tested things, but if you guess wrong with the customer, you may as well start over.
Tom: If you assume that the need is greater than it is, you can wind up over-engineering products.
Diane: We were working on a high-end product, someone released a similar thing as freeware that wasn't too bad. Have to make sure that it's a unique need.

A good panel, danced around some of the key challenges such as clients and third-party technology platforms eating up the same value proposition, but showed the typical best practices of today's enterprise publishing services.

Labels: credit, enterprise, events, legal, medical, SIIA Information Industry Summit 2009, STM

Moderator: Dan Duncan, Senior Director, Government Affairs, The McGraw-Hill Companies

Panel:
Ed Collaran, Senior Director, International Relations, Copyright Clearance Center
Dominic Young, Director of Group Publishing Services, News International
Caitlin Grusauskas, 3rd year student, Columbia University School of Law
Mindy Pennington, Manager, External Content, Library Services, Pfizer Global Research and Development

Duncan: Apple taking DRM block off of music, France suits, law would have mandated taking off DRM, effort was abandoned. Apple got together with industry, no restrictions on reuse at a higher price. Today, new users all the time, new solutions as well. What works?

Caitlin: People have expectations that it's all going to be free, quick answers from things like Google Toolbar. The idea of copyright is foreign, you assume that you can share it, has serious implications for content owners.

Pennington: People want to make it easier to share, things like CCC Rightsphere work but take time to set up, content is desired on mobile devices, how or whether it works can be problematic, as is who you can share it with. Taking something from your digital library and giving it to partners is a problem, need for more flexible relationships.

Colleran: From the user's standpoint, they're busy people, make it easy as possible, but offering broader rights is key. Pharma industry initiative to broaden contract terms, looking to share content that they license as a key contract factor.

Young: Part of ACAP, news initiative for managing access. To actually manage and control it without licensing is needed in some way, licensing not well adapted for all circumstances, ACAP allows end-users to take control more easily when it's legal and reasonable to do so.

Duncan: Many users don't look at terms and conditions, if they do access it they don't access it or understand it. From the perspective of users, where do they fit in today?

Young: Doing it in a way that's highly automated is key, tools don't exist to do that, so people do things because there's no reasonable alternative. Business models aren't there, either (COMMENT: Micropayments is underutilized, technologies are there that COULD support it, but there is resistance. That resistance is a key factor in today's media revenue gap.)

Pennington: We get questions about usage even with Rightsphere, most people are aware of what they're allowed to do, internal news stories and other communications about what's allowed.

Duncan: Pfizer has its own valuable intellectual property as well. Caitlin, in your experience, are students aware of terms and conditions?

Caitlin: In law school it's different, they rely on Westlaw and LexisNexis, people understand that there are terms and conditions with their accounts. In the broader university community, I can access materials from the university library seamlessly. In some ways there's a problem because there's so much out there.

Pennington: In the last couple of years new programs provide text mining, automated systems may pull thousands of articles in a couple of hours, users may notice first when content is blocked. Work with publishers, understand what's allowed, text mining system will be programmed to obey terms. (COMMENT: But what if an agreement could be executed automatically? Huge under-explored opportunities, let people get a taste for free, when throttles are reached then an ecommerce opportunity can be activated, either through online human agents or an auto-execution micropayment system. Works for mobile carriers, folks, it's not rocket science).

Young: Search engine access works well for some publishers, not for others, ACAP helps search engines to discover terms and conditions. Can be done machine to machine. But scaling up the capability of the network is a challenge. (COMMENT: ACAP still has potential, but, no offense to my European friends, it's being pursued in a lethargic manner, needs to go open source, with multiple serving agents, akin to DNS services).

Collaeran: With social media tools, publishers find it to be an incredible branding tool, FT gives first five articles away, then second five with registration, then you have to pay. Don't have to pay for each article.

Duncan: Caitlin, what's your reaction?

Caitlin: Depends how easy it is to use, didn't sign up for NYT premium, but if price is right, it's worth it. Some kids want to "stick it to the man," but if it's pretty easy to do the right thing, then they comply. HuLu, good quality, people want it fast and quick, people will pay.

Pennington: A lot easier for people not to worry about it when the corproation licenses it, but more flexible arrangement for doing the right thing would be important. When the physician sees the advertising and is measurable, that's important. So, why not make a version of the online product that looks like the magazine? Why won't publishers make another version? We have devices like Kindle now. With copiers sharing was harder, would be nice to have technology advances for today's needs.

Caitlin: People doing online research are used to putting in all sorts of search terms to see what pops up. Topical search would be nice, to see what pops up, more like an index than a traditional book (COMMENT: Works on relatively discrete content sets with tools such as taxonomies).

Young: Things like ACAP are a step in the right direction, we have gloom and doom about old business models, innovation can help. In a world that's well functioning, rewards will be linked to access.

Colleran: Not just about text content, any type of media could be involved, need to license those different kinds of content. Not just publishers, authors are taking a far more prominent role with self-publishing.

Duncan: How will authors be paid for content, major publishing companies have marketing department, sells into an area where the customer understands the value.

Collaran: Creative Commons-style authors may want some content out there for free, but others may want payment (COMMENT: CC does have hooks in its licensing for payment, early days still, remarkably, on activating that capability.)

Pennington: Make licensing more relevant for the specific people using content, critical going forward, especially as organizations divide into global business units, granular licensing needed.

Caitlin: People may use terms and conditions, the ability to share music is there, but I haven't tried it, don't want to be restricted by DRM. Rhapsody is one model, could work for other types of content.

Colleran: Ease of use and compliance are key "microscripts" coming out of this. Education is not sexy but it can help. Users need to be educated what they can and cannot do with copyrighted content.

Young: Micropayments would be wonderful, need the best innovators to help the best content to win out, that may be authors as well.

Pennington: People are willing to pay for what they need.

Question: Agreement between Gatehouse Media and NYT on Boston.com?

Duncan: Not that familiar with it, but not settled law. IP community on the publishing side were happy, but also scratching heads.

Great panel, excellent moderation, Dan.

Labels: enterprise, events, media, SIIA Information Industry Summit 2009

Views from the "evidence-free" zone.

J. Robert Oppenheimer was the father of the atomic bomb, as they were getting ready to test it in New Mexico for the 6AM detonation, Oppenheimer noticed that the mathematician was not there, when to get him, he said, "If I got the math wrong, none of you are coming back."

We got the math wrong on a lot of things in the past several years, but certainly since September 15th.

2005 dinner with new senator Obama, Walsh concerned that Democrats aren't prepared for a knife fight. You're the savior of the Democratic party? Where's the bench strength? You're it? "Who knew?"

Politics is an odd business, it's Hollywood for unattractive people, like Junior High, one-day sale with 100 percent market share. Political marketing: how does it work and how does it affect consumer marketing?

When a sound bite takes hold it's hard to get rid of, we still attribute the "Al Gore invented the Internet" to him, but he never said it. Sound bites become micro-scripts, help your constituents to attack your opponents. "They work." 24 months ago, "Lipstick, Nowhere, Maverick, Change" were not microscripts, the campaign made them so. Candidate doesn't have to defend records with microscripts. When they work, they're powerful. Became the branding tactic for the whole campaign, gave us permission to validate Obama's aspiration and forgive a light background and plan details. "Change we can Believe In" - two microscripts together.

Marketers must have shorter ways to define their brands. Unique selling proposition - USP - the one thing that you can say about your brand that nobody else can. These are the future mantras in our markets. It will leak into our world. "It's not an elevator speech any more, it's a bumper sticker." Kids say "whatever," it's kind of a sub-microscript. How do we increase the bandwidth of customers and citizens? "Are we screwed?" This administration is the "reboot", Obama speaks deliberately and slowly, has thoughtful approaches, "the anti-microscript, human Ritalin." People will shun the easy label, the bon mot. Everybody knows when promises are kept and not kept, political marketers know it, other marketers have to catch up. Some proportion will not get it, they will continue to use microscripts to process things. "Playing to the base" is off to the left or right, they get microscripts such as "God, guns and gays," still useful. Try to bring the bell curve to where the microscripts don't work. "We're better than that." But my microscript: "Shift happens." Shifting away from patent phrases (COMMENT: great points, but I think that history shows that simple concepts are important for communication. They help to build consensus broadly. He acknowledges this in the Q&A when he acknowledges that brands like Apple do microscripting well. I think that the key point today is that social media allows us to discuss, spin and position microscripting very rapidly in a broader conversation).

Labels: commentary, events, media, SIIA Information Industry Summit 2009

Hal Espo, President of Contextual Connections, LLC interviews Glenn S. Goldberg, President Information & Media, The McGraw-Hill Companies. McGraw-Hill has a global footprint in which it delivers both traditional media and enterprise information products. "Content really matters," Notes Goldberg, looking at the energy markets Platt's is doing very well as an example, also helping OEMs build their network in China.

Espo: Content matters more in some markets and less in others. What does McGraw-Hill do to stay ahead?
Goldberg: B2B is key, construction marketplace is a good example, trading and energy also, people make big bets. B2C is more dubious, but in BWeek, traffic has returned to trusted brands.
Espo: Tell us about recent content investments.
Goldberg: Organized around principles, made the McGraw-Hill Construction Network, not just about advertising but also about solutions, not all efforts succeed. Need to understand how leverageable your brand is in specific spaces. We get some plaudits, but the customers need to respond, some customers are slow to pick up in some sectors.
Espo: Layered applications, how do you see content and technology interplay?
Goldberg: Believe deeply in it, but we're not there yet, some do wonderful things around code, still suspicion around motives. Most startups challenge large companies to think different about customers, then they hit a ceiling and look away. There are demarcations that need to be broken down in our own company to be as nimble.
Espo: Tell us about JD Power
Goldberg: Syndicated model focused on customer satisfaction, well-known by auto marketers, helped Toyota get into the marketplace. Were getting paid for surveys and access to surveys, saw that they were missing underlying value, went further in their research into other corporate roles, took a generation or two to move up the value chain. Sweets can now sell lead generation and other extensions of the core value proposition.
Espo: Is the overall strategy a portfolio play?
Goldberg: JD Power is a marketing services company, in autos but also in financial services. We view industries that have benchmarks and standards that can be embedded in the workflow of customers. Each of our properties are the standard in their industry in their own ways. Platt's is the benchmark in oil prices, construction - those are the standards that we look at, don't want to be all things to all people.
Espo: McGraw-Hill purchased Umbria, what does it do so extend the brand?
Goldberg: PhD/Math guys, every year we do syndicated studies, get paid a nice fee to sell studies, but in Web 2.0 once-a-year studies aren't going to cut it. They scrape the web for information on products and brands, can pull comments about brands, e.g. Honda is launching a new Accord, organize in "tribes"/market segmentation, can organize it in ways as to who's saying what by demographics, can complement once-a-year reports.
Espo: Web 2.0, in customer 3.0 model customers are going to dictate model. Shopzilla, Pricegrabber, etc.?
Goldberg: Good point, if you're building a billion-dollar brand, you'll need more than Shopzilla. People still care about quality information, quality content. It's a balance, don't turn our cheek to Shopzilla, but there are other angles.
Espo: Platt's - tell us about this.
Goldberg: 60 percent of revenues are from out of U.S., our oil prices are the industry benchmark. Hard not to see that with globalization trading in commodities is going to be the future. In industries where there's a benchmark, we do it well.
Espo: New energy sources, is that's where Platt's headed?
Goldberg: If it's commodity-related, that's where Platt's is headed.
Espo: What do you think about the new administration's impact on Platt's?
Goldberg: Hopefully they will get the economy in better shape, that will help Platt's, but "shovel-ready" projects will help construction, bailouts of Detriot OEMs will help, investment in education will help.
Espo: What role do ads play.
Goldberg: In aviation and construction it was all advertising, much more broad-based. Major constraint is not hurting brands. Trust is built up in aviation for initiatives for conferences, for example, but you need to be respectful for brand.
Espo: BizWeek, forecast?
Goldberg: Slower years recently, news is commoditized but content matters. We serve a business news audience, last 4-5 months traffic is better, the editorial model needs to evolve, need to create content as they always have, but will also curate content, not just a gatherer and interpreter of news and creating communities. Another way to think about content, helps editorial and helps advertisers, since advertisers want to see their ads in context.
Espo: Television, let's overlay print with TV changes, insufficiently local, what makes it different?
Goldberg: Needs to change as well, hard to envision the longer-term, but people are still going to it in some demographics, kids still put on ESPN, it's not about the medium, it's about the value proposition. When an avalance occurs people still turn to the television. The challenge is to respond to both localization and broader markets. TV still has a longer role to play in markets, but the balance is still to be figured out.
Espo: People turned to CNN.com, not television, for the revent airplane crash landing.
Goldberg: Some of our Web sites have more traffic than local Web sites. The economic model is a balance. We're not an enormous media player, being smaller gives us the opportunity to figure out.
Espo: You're a senior officer in a well-known company. What are the major challenges that you and your peers face?
Goldberg: Sounds trite, but the reality is we have people who really understand what the custoemr needs, I think that I have the right people to solve the next 25 years, but the barriers between content and technology people are hard to break down. Can you get it done, can you keep things simple and communicate with your audience and give them a stake in the future.
Espo: "Digital Immigrants" in our generation, what do you see in the digital native generation that makes you worry?
Goldberg: If my kids who have mid-terms today don't do well as they were multitasking the night before...democratization is a wonderful thing, they're curious, do things on Google immediately that are remarkable. The world truly is borderless now, great for business, thinking about where to place bets. Our kids need to build relationships, devices will be different, but they still need to conduct themselves holistically to be better people down the road.

Standard & Poor's role is under question now, need to evolve steps to transparency, welcome the opportunity to take uncertainty out of the marketplace, will work with regulators to make that happen.

Question: In efforts to trim costs, in a large public company what are the risks that you'll over-react and discover that you should have been more selective?

Goldberg: That's the reality, Platt's is doing very well, large Washington presence, regulatory presence, in business we've made a decision to downsize Washington a bit and deploy elsewhere, it's no longer the only very important place. New tools also allow people to deliver services more quickly. We can use third parties to cover less newsworthy hearing and events. Many of the Platt's investments were done three to four years ago, have to make tough calls sometimes.

Question: Old model was collecting information and selling by the pound, tell us about applications.

Goldberg: Example I use in contruction is forecasting, if you're about to bid on a major job, Autodesk will use our applications to help them to see what's different in a building design with different materials. Take some time, but we're getting there as investments mature.

Espo: Innovation is everywhere, right or wrong, there's a perception that McGraw-Hill is slow, doesn't get it. How do you respond to that?

Goldberg: The reality is that we've done as good a job as we can to be on the cutting edge. (COMMENT: Big problem at McGraw-Hill is culture, I.T. is very traditionally oriented, internally oriented, sales teams have their own resistance also. Heritage does matter, but in some divisions walls do need to be broken down. Heritage isn't always about the past, but about how you apply its lessons to new challenges.)

Great interview, Hal!

Labels: events, SIIA Information Industry Summit 2009

Moderator: Kevin English, SVP - M&E, Satayam

Michael Wolff: NYT not the future of publishing, traditional print organizations are "over", 18 months at the outside. A fascinating historical moment, general interest print is done. Model has to move "all the way," Google has established an absolutely new model. First, they don't create their own content. They don't "do" it. They have monopolized the primary revenue stream - advertising. Everyone here is looking at this and saying, "The game is changed. How do we look at this new model and mimic it or adapt to it?" How can we pay nothing at all for content is the primary strategic question. Just about using everyone's else's content (COMMENT: Not. It's about people creating their own content and putting it in the most valuable contexts. It's about the "printing press" being everywhere. Print is NOT dead, just waiting for new models to exploit it, even as electronic services expand.

Vivek Shah, Time, Inc - Fundamentals the same, you need a great product still. Way too many people knocking on marketers' doors waiting for them to help them. Voice, personality matter in successful brands, points of view matter, a change for parts of American journalism. Scale matters, need to address audiences. Google changes the scale of audiences that can be addressed effectively via advertising. As you go from PC-based web to mobile, real estate for ads is relatively small and revenue potential disappears. (COMMENT: Agreed. The fundamental experience of advertising online is deficient in comparison in many ways to the print experience. Part of the answer is new technologies, but part of the answer is also recognizing that what you do in a space where you used to do advertising has changed fundamentally online. It's about personal transactions as much as Vance Packard's "hidden persuaders.")

English: What do publishers provide now?

Shah: Looking at Time.com, you have to build the content around the formats, smaller audience for long form content. Just because you can write stuff doesn't mean that you have an online "metabolism."
Wolff: Hard to make the case that traditional print outlets know what they're supposed to be doing. Used to be the covers of Time and Newsweek changed national conversations, doesn't happen in the same way today.
Shah: People aren't racing for screen grabs. Time was launched when there were 28 dailies in Chicago alone. They responded to a glut.

English: Environment is changing, customers are changing, newest generation expects it all for free.

Bob Merrym CQ: 70 percent subscription/circ revs and high-margin ad revenues for focused audience. Shouldn't cede circulation revs.
Shah: Marketers. Google satisfies advertising ROI, rest is branding ads, which are hard to measure for success. CTRs are low. (COMMENT: The Web is not about seduction - unless you're looking for a "good time." It's about real relationships and real social transactions). The consumer movements can be overdone, there's lots of media.
Wolff: Direct model has much lower margins, direct marketers give "the piece" in the mail or the advertorial (Disagree, look at sponsorship and private media such as captive magazines, corporate blogs and forums.). Value of content has gone down consistently. Content costs less and less and less. Technology can create cheaper content, and technology itself can give functionality as well. People go to the web for technology AND function.
Oakliegh Thorne, Thorne Information Partners: People go to local papers for information, especially in local outlets. The Chicago Tribune has always been a lousy paper, so slow that they have to do features on the front page.
Merry: Community newspapers struggling, type of news is commoditized, available for free. Web practically killed my business, did kill my competitor, because it was commoditized, so we increased the value of the content. Editorial effort, extremely functional and efficient platforms to distribute. That's what you're going to have to grapple with. (COMMENT: Agreed, the basic formula, CQ bit the bullet at a great time and is reaping the rewards.)
Question: Who pays for foreign correspondents if everything's free? (Ken Wasch, President, SIIA)
Wolff: Probably no one, the "foreign bureau" goes away, and in fact in some ways HAS gone away. You can make the argument that we have more information from foreign markets than ever before. Where once we were dependent on Time magazine for foreign news, we're dependent on new sources and other sources that are on site - e.g., if the Guardian is on site, do you really need your own correspondent? Difficult to argue that we don't know more as a result.
Shah: If you look at Nielsen, sports, etc., all top ten brands are established brands (hmm, guess he's looking at different stats, but I would agree that established brands have capital and unique value as long as there's unique content.) Need voice, personality. (Didn't help NYT with columns, new voices compete.)
Merry: One of the factors is a clinging to the editorial model. (Dang, Bob gets it.) 19th century, papers were going to be objective. That's what we grew up with it, that's dead, technology destroyed it, and people in the news business don't get that. 1840's papers were highly partisan but had great coverage. (Agreed, we're getting a higher quality conversation overall, as long as it's not propaganda dominating the bandwidth). Times-Picayune used to dominate news from Mexico, made its way up and down the east coast. What we had is over, they were small businesses then, will be so again.

English: Who's the winner in this new environment?

Merry: I am! I am in Washington, where billions of dolars are being spent (CQ is indeed a very model for success, not always easy to replicate, but in the right niches it can be done well.)

Labels: events, media, SIIA Information Industry Summit 2009

Moderator: Tad Smith, CEO, Reed Business Information

Panelists:
Vivian Schiller, SVP/GM, NYTimes.com
Rich Skrenta, Co-Founder & CEO, Topix
Ken Stern, CEO, NPR
Kara Swisher, All Things D

Tad: What's the zeitgeist in the newsroom these days? Kara: Awful. Left a newsroom, saw the water was rising and the Web was higher land. People needed to be changing things rather than bellyaching. Ken: Our zeitgeist is rather good, has doubled in recent years, a market for serious and in-depth news. Tad: How do you avoid blood on the streets? Ken: Social media business model feels comfortable to us, get contributions from audience and corporations, foundations, government is about ten percent, listener donation growth has fueled in their growth. Tad: What's ailing newspapers generally? Vivian: Ad market is declining, but online is growing, we're in the process of rebalancing the business to shift more online. But there's no rainbow on the horizon for print newspapers. Focusing on the big opportunities in digital. Report says online ad revenues have stalled out, true? Vivian: yes, it has stalled, still most revenues come from print. Tad: Rich, do you make money? Rich: Yes, ten million uniques on our site, news by zip code commands good CPMs, ambitious plans for news in every zip code, went and got every bit of content, including blogs, and there wasn't enough. Nobody would cover routine news in Sunnyvale, had to turn to social media. Newsrooms are shrinking especially at the local level, if they're NYT is struggling what about the Palo Alto Daily News?

Tad: What is news today? Rich: New restaurant in your town could be news, no longer looking at what's news from a j-school perspective. Kara: That's very valid, doesn't have to be one way or the other, but when stuff gets corrupted by reporters or bloggers with a conflict of interest you get protection. Our disclosure is about 50 pages long, none of us is fully without something to disclose. It's not journalists are not going to say that fries are on sale at a local restaurant. Ken: There's information and there's news, there's a sense out there that we can get rid of reporters but we invest in editors and reporting. I worry about the space for serious journalism shrinking, people going to newspaper conventions are clinicially depressed. Rich: We see journalists are going away before their very eyes, the paper doesn't go away, it becomes a paper with more wire content. There's a lot of stuff floating around in places like Yahoo groups and it's not discoverable. Classified ad dollars going away, Craigslist destroyed 65 million dollars in classified ad dollars in Bay area. Without grass-roots news gathering we're looking at pre-radio days.

Tad: Is there a role for serious journalism? There's always a role for authoritative quality journalism, not scaling back our newsroom at all, looking at how we can do to make sure that we have the financial support for journalism in the long term. Kara: You are under pressure from investors, but a family controls the company, as with other papers, they don't have to worry about the bottom line as much. Vivian: Yes, but let's not loose sight of the fact that NYT and others are extremely profitable, we're talking about growth rates, it's not a business on its last legs. When we started a little publication we saw real opportunity in standards-based content with high quality, can't stand depression part. Why do you have to roll over and play dead? Ken: Do you have to pair with About.com? What about serious investigations? Kara: It's the mid-size papers that are struggling the most with quality.

Tad: Branding, how much does the brand matter to the average person? Kara: Had an argument with the 12-year old who runs Google News, he was saying that nobody cares where the news is from, people don't want to read about the White House from the Rajastan Times. Have to tip your hat to paidContent.org, went to publisher and said the blog thing was going to be big, now we can do it to.

Tad: Founding fathers and court decisions, protection? Rich: DMCA protects us, every day we get legal issues out of our forums, lawyers say that it's opinion, we try to apply a journalistic angle, does it actually look like libel but without some judgment you don't get discussions. We see cases of people flooding us with mail and it's not a valid case. Is it in the public's interest to see something. Tad: Is there a conflict between social media and news that serves the public good? Ken: There are places for a free-for-all, we're one of the few organizations that doesn't review everything before it goes up. Vivian: Major news orgs are some of the few that moderate comments, it's really about relevance and a great user experience. We want to make sure that comments are on message.

Tad: Is there an economic return from high-quality journalism? Is it shrinking? Kara: Always discussions at WSJ, maybe not, doesn't matter where it is, if they want it on salami put it there, focus on the high-quality product. Vivian: Instead of being afraid of the Diggs, bring it on. Kara: individual brands is inmportant, Mossberg is a Brangelina-scale brand. (COMMENT: Newspapers haven't figured out how to monetize journalists effectively in The New Aggregation, especially when a Google Print-like product kicks in. They're losing brand equity to user-aggregators and they haven't compenstated adequately). Question: How soon before citizen journalists win The Pulitzer Prize? Tad: Soon. Question: How do you make money? Kara: We have a really tiny site, our costs are incredibly low, easier to make money overall. Vivian: Constantly innovating. Ken: We ultimately sell in an uncluttered environment.

Question: Google? Kara: Google is a parasite but a helpful parasite. Vivian: We love Google, we get half of our traffic from Google. 35 million worldwide, good SEO. We fall down squarely on the friend side. Rich: syndication made a lot of sense in print, if Google can't do the best job of telling people the copy that you wrote maybe you should reconsider your syndication strategy. Kara: In ten years we'll look at today's Google and other search engines as very primitive. Question: WSJ clings to its pay wall, does this concern you that you're not being found? Kara: ATD is free, we feel free is better, it's better to be part of the conversation. WSJ provides a mass of information. Wouldn't dream of our stuff not being free.

Rafat: Variety dropped the firewall, how is it going? Variety: The early results are strong, looked at how the traffic is growing, felt that for the audience it was worth it. Have 20,000 subscribe online. Kara: so you'll never get to a million. WSJ Online: Online journal now 930,000 paid, trying to have it both ways, trying to offer up a free paragraph in a month, looking at lifestyle content that's not that well consumed behind the firewall. Kara: you can pick your way to sell.

Tad: Social media and the news, the best of times or the worst of times? Vivian: The best of times, new platforms have opened up ways to get the dialog out there. Every day there's a new way to communicate with their readers. Rich: There's no paper in my town, San Francisco paper still shows up but it's not quite as good as it used to be. Looking at the Cherry Hill Observer the news staff is going away while you watch. Ken: Good time to be in nonprofit journalism, a great time for public conversation, but it's a punishing time if you take off the cream. Kara: Grandfather said if someone's going to eat your lunch it might as well be you, people are hungry for great stuff, there's an opportunity for people with high standards to jump in there, sites like paidContent.org are not that hard to make.

Great panel, but clearly the model is going towards supporting independent journalists in context.

Labels: econSM, events, news

Moderators: Rafat Ali and Staci D. Kramer

Panelists:
Esther Dyson, Chairman, EDventure
Jason Hirschhorn, President, Sling Media Entertainment Group
Mike Lang, VP Strategy, Fox
Quincy Smith, President, CBS Interactive

Rafat: Quincy, you were looking for the next YouTube, is there one out there? Esther: These are people who you want to be friendly, small companies have good DNA, large companies sometimes have mass without DNA. Mike: We have a Bay area presence, spend a lot of time working with venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, we have a lot of "old companies" processes, there's nothing closed about where your technology partnerships are going to come from, build versus buy is no longer that simple, you need to nurture the DNA of an acquisition beyond the press release phase.

Rafat: What are the lessons for the MySpace integration? MySpace is so different, IDN is very different in game space, as a result a lot of content gravitates naturally to MySpace. In a lot of ways it's about management. Number one drivers were Chris and Josh, they were maniacally driven, needed that energy. They are now taking on an even larger role across our digital efforts, they've integrated successfully into our organization. Rafat: does social media fit better into angel investment? Jason: Not necessarily, there's been a huge change about the audience being in control, young entrepreneurs with not a lot of expertise so angel investors are forgiving. In some cases companies to acquisitions well, but sometimes it's "We'll change all the people and the name" so it doesn't go too well. When companies understand that you're the talent things can go very well. But Quincy pointed out that unfortunately integration oftentimes ends at the press release. Mike: First thing you say is "what can we do with our own brand" for an acquisition. Esther: There are two challenges: you could put in so much process that it overwhelms the small acquisition in the process of protecting P&L, won't invest in what they bought. Mike: some would rather pay USD 300 million on an acquisition than USD 2 million on creating your own. When you see talented people in an acquistion rise in a big company that's a good sign.

Quincy: Markets are forcing large companies to invest in growth, Internet is not the end of media, its the next step, and you have to invest in it. But they know that they don't control the audiences and that entrepreneurs have the touch. We were fortunate to acquire CSTV, great asset that we keep apart from the organization but we don't starve it, add more allocations around it. This creates a big weapon when talking to other entrepreneurs. Staci: More announcements of large chunk investment funds, but Fox has done small companies. Mike: Our shareholders are looking for value in investment returns, minority investments don't give a preferred path of control and may in fact increase the valuation if you want to acquire it later. We have a lot of commercial relationships that may result in acquisitions - or may not, or may go for warrants. Quincy: CBS might be a little different, made partial investments to help them understand a world unfamiliar to them, a chance to learn and to get exposure to DNA, we have cash, not give it right back to the shareholders all year long. Spend around USD 20 million in seeds. It's a chance to be in the board room to understand the decisions they're making. Mike: Who knows which one is right, it's difficult in today's investment community to have a rational conversation, valuations are out of whack. Esther: We have some companies you may want to invest in.

Rafat: Esther, what are you looking for in investments here vs. overseas? Esther: There just aren't that many people who know what they're doing except for social media, there aren't thousands of Russians using QuickBooks, exits are also harder. Everyone wants to go overseas, just invested in something in Brazil, the best social networkers are in Brazil. Staci: Do you acquire, hire or develop in-house? How do you make that decision? Jason: Hard when you have developers in-house, they feel that they can build things quickly, a lot of media companies were asleep at the wheel, so all of a sudden you need something that scales, if I can buy scale I can satsify advertisers immediately - though sometimes this may scare away audience for social media.

Question: After deal is signed, what advice can entrepreneurs take as to what to do and not to do in negotiations? Mike: Not being realistic. You need management that can say this is what the risk factors are, understand that things may not work out. Don't say that you don't have competition. You need a management team that can react to competition. Don't be too swayed by VCs wanting a theoretical return than to realistic returns from a business. VCs say no, then they don't get an opportunity later. Jason: Sometimes it's a self-fulfilling prophesy, especially when you're talking with 19-20 year-olds. When you have a great product you need to talk about how the company will be run. Oftentimes founders are better off as a chief product officer but they want to be CEO and things can fall if a founder leaves. Quincy: Acquiring companies tend to be slower growers, good at telling people how you need to scale back but not necessarily how to manage strong growth. Accept that acquirers may make mistakes also, speak up. Have to "get real" with each other.

Staci: CNET's been expanding, Zander has been investing, how do you move forward? Zander: Have expanded into games, TV.com, MP3 less so, vibrant properties in Tech Republic, American Babies. We have to go in and sell them a culture. If you pay top dollar, you better integrate successfully. Rafat: Google's acquisition of DoubleClick? Quincy: DC needed a next-generation platform, Google overwhelmed them with salesmanship. Was an anti-Microsoft move. Esther: There are some that are appropriate to sell to Google, some not. The culture match is not always good. Jason: Sometimes Google overpays wildly, hard to turn down.

Question: Esther, how would you now position relationships versus content value, what would you recommend or suggest entrepreneurs for revenue models for social media? Esther: Good advice never means much until you try to apply it. Board members can give specific advice. Try to keep them loyal. Ad models, Flickr has subscriptions, mobile charges for deeper content, selling marketing collateral such as T-shirts. Be creative. Rafat: Can you build a widget company to scale? Mike: Yes, distributors will embrace widget companies, ultimately it will be how experiences are monetized, if you have a small company with a great application come to MySpace, figure out how to get distribution, hard to build traffic on your own. Do whatever you can to partner with distributors. Difficult to hold on to it all yourself. Partners like MySpace will think about the user, that's why they've done so well.

Question: What would you be buying today? What genre? Quincy: Looking at buying reach, consumers control more of the content. We don't compete with Fox, competing with LonelyGirl who uploads her content everywhere. Look for CBS to get into the game like Fox and NBC with deals that help them to make a statement sooner rather than later. Also care about new content, arrogant to say that regurgitated TV shows are going to work. User-generated content can be hilarious, new content and reach is key. Mike: Video applications, ways to do things with video, bullish on video's future on Internet, different kinds of applications. International will be important also, new audiences and new kinds of content for new regions, in many cases mobile is stronger in overseas markets. PhotoBucket guy stands up, we made up with Shawn, it was miscommunication, didn't understand monetization on MySpace.

Question: eBay/Skype deal? Jason: Could be some potential but it seems to be sitting there. Rafat: How long can Facebook hang on? Quincy: A CMO's dream, profiles get bigger, develop stickiness. On Skype, always have to buy from a position of strength, eBay core business proposition had been hacked, I give acquisitions 3-5 years, still have core team, still evangelical, audience user base is growing. On FaceBook, users don't always incorporate a lot of professional media. Over-50s need to take notice. Esther: A few years ago everyone was talking about ideas, now it seems that everyone's destiny is to be sold. Jason: Don't know that FaceBook doesn't want to sell, may be that just the price isn't right.

Question: Have some of these companies taken too much from you? Mike: Yes. Over-200 valuations vs. IPOs. The best part of a MySpace deal is that they didn't have to tell Wall Street what's happening every quarter. We've had conversations where 50 million wasn't enough to cash out. VCs they deal with take the long view, try to work rationally. Rafat: If MySpace had been under MTV umbrella, what would they have done? Jason: They'd have to invest in it. NewsCorp did a yeoman's job of investing in infrastructure and supporting the management team. It's a model for other media companies to watch. You help but you get out of the way.

Question: Google acquisition of Blogger and Dodgeball versus Yahoo with Flickr? Staci: People who leave Google are disappointed in how they were treated, that could leave baggage. Jason: Google makes mistakes just like anyone else. They just happen to have a halo over them. Mike: Yahoo and AOL don't get enough credit for their acquisitions. Esther: Yahoo has the best record of keeping the management. Ex-Googler (ex-Pyra labs, aka Blogger) - they had never acquired a company before, took a while to get their sea legs and to get the right support. Dodgeball guys were in NYC, DoubleClick in NYC also but now has more center of gravity. Some acquisitions go well, looking now at people who are going to lead a product in Google. Jason: should never underestimate how important culture is. You're used to doing what you want to do versus being in a Google where you're not employee 100. Esther: Sometimes the best place for M&A people to come with is from HR.

Labels: econSM, events

Moderators: Staci Kramer, Rafat Ali

Panelists:
Peter Adderton, Founder and CEO, Amp'd Mobile
Maro Boerries, Senior Vice President, Connected Life, Yahoo!
Shawn Conahan, Founder, Chairman and CEO, Intercasting
Larry Shapiro, Executive Vice President, Walt Disney Internet Group
Jason
[NOTE: There's a lot of noise in a change of venue room, will do my best...]
Staci: What are you doing in social media? Larry: Trying to get more activity from users on our sites, as applied to mobile, looking at how it translates. We look at mobile as a part of a connected network, part of the same handheld ecosystem. ???: Sweet spot is where entertainment intersects with personalization and peer-to-peer, working on fantasy sports, can control entire lineup on mobile phone, can compete with friends, interacting with other people. Next frontier is intersection of mobile and Web, social networking and user-generated content. Has to be very different. Shawn: See massive opportunity on Web, social media is a construct, they all do the same thing, to provide a full-breadth approach you have to act as an aggregator. Marco: Mobile is going to be the platform for most of our social media interactions, all about new forms of sharing communications, mobile phone is with us all the time, helping people to aggregate their social networks. Peter: This is about how to make money about social media, and in the process you may lose what social media is all about, exclusive deals may stifle that, even if you think that it's going to make you money. Marco: I am not so sure about that. Shawn: Only new thing we're talking about is that consumers can communicate with other consumers, this is not a new thing. In 1999-2000 when phones were black and white, we thought about what we can do to make this a fun experience. Tried viral chain early on, network was overwhelmed, just made it cooler by letting people know who was sending the message.

Staci: How do you overcome the carriers? Shawn: When network operators shifted model from voice to mobile services they had to redefine their competitive matrix. People are now communicating through their MySpace friends' list. Peter: If you're relying on Sprint and Cingular to tap into users you're wasting your time, carriers are a few years away from working out relationships with social media sites. Shawn: Web is a well devised space, have cut and paste, mobile is far behind. You can provide integration for wireless network partners. Larry: Happy medium is value-add services. Peter: It's not about the user experience for carriers, it's all about money. Marco: Mobile carriers realize that if they cannot create valuable user experiences they're going to find another service that does. People want to see the latest photos from Flickr, that is consumer value. Some areas where Yahoo competes with Verizon.

Rafat: Why should a consumer care how much a carrier has invested in content? What's the value long-term of an exclusive deal? Missing link is an advertising model that works for mobile. Cross platforms applications are going to be very interesting. Question: Apple phone will have a full browser, how will that impact mobile products? Marco: It's all about the best user experience in the long term. Peter: Nobody cares whose network you're on, our job is to enable consumers to use the technology.

Sorry that I didn't get more of this one, had some distractions.

Labels: econSM, events

Moderator: Staci D. Kramer, Executive Editor, paidContent.org

Panelists:
Ilene Chaiken, Executive Producer, The L Word/CEO, OurChart.com
Alan Citron, General Manager, TMZ.com
Carson Daly, Host, Last Call with Carson Daly
David Eun, Vice President, Content Partnerships, Google
George Klavikoff, Chief Digital Officer, NBC Universal

Staci: Is social media like the little black dress in the closet, something that you have to have but you really don't use it? George: What we're about to do is to engage all our fans in what the content has to look like. David: What I'd like to see more is YouTube as a place where communities can form, a community of users worldwide upload responses on YouTube, needs to be more of that. Carson: Great interest in social media, back in 1998 hosted request live, hour of programming chosen by viewers, social media issues are quite important. Site soliciting content to incentivize users. Work also for Demand Media, relaunching DotTV. Alan: Main value of social media is creating value around stories that have most heat. We make it easy for them, doing a good job now and exploring new technologies. Ilene: OurChart.com inspired by character who did this on TV show, for engaged fans and users who congregated around their show, kind of a lesbian MySpace. L-Word has unusually engaged fan base, fans invited to write some episodes.

Staci: NBC has been having producers blog, but shows still die. How useful is social media? George: Very useful, helps to create communities around affinity brands, a piece in a puzzle to get ratings. (COMMENT: When are we going to get to the point when we see TV shows appearing at a sponsor's site rather than just at the media company's own portal? If advertisers want engagement it would seem to make sense. Kind of like Texaco Star Theatre at the Texaco portal) Alan: Now a predictable pattern, story that's exclusive gets posted and immediately the feedback comes in. Responses come in by the hundreds of thousands in forums, similar in comments, but the other part is that while this is happening at their site it ricochets out across the whole Web.

Staci: How can you tell when someone's sharing your video? Alan: A lot of people ask permission and tracking can show. Staci: How does the Chart spin out? Ilene: We have a chart, every one can create a profile on the chart, can go through profiles or go to the chart and get a representation of a primary user (like a Inxight star tree but more interactive). Up just a couple of months, have about 60,000 profiles. Staci: Does every show need a social network? Ilene: No, there aren't a lot of lesbian portals, it was a natural place for it on our site. Staci: Carson, how do you use social media? Carson: We're the caboose to the Conan O'Brien show, have to do everything that we can to engage the audience, invite the community to talk amongst themselves, engage with music.

Staci: YouTube says there's a huge promotional value for videos shown in their brand, does that really work? David: Have created branded channels in YouTube, something that appears bad on the surface could turn out to be good. Staci: NBA content wasn't embeddable, how do you get content partners to understand the value of embedding? David: It's early days, everything about the way that businesses are structured for rights and clearances can make simple things very difficult. We need to work with content partners to create more upside with limited downside. The industry doesn't necessarily reward the first-comers but you definitely don't want to be the last one in. Question: Is there any value to taking people who are popular in social media and putting them in a show? George: We see social media as a great talent system. Every time we make a bet on a television show it costs millions of dollars, any advantage is useful. A study showed that paying attention to how often shows are mentioned and how often positively, it correlates with ratings rankings and you can see it before the show is even launched. Need to use the wisdom of the masses to guide what they do. Staci: Ilene? Still evolutionary, a lot of users ask to be on the show, looking at using more user-generated content to see how it can fit and commissioning content, looking to see if something they're doing in a small venue could wind up being in a network TV show. Will get a better hearing when the show goes to an executive's office. Question: YouTube is a big platform, but there's nichification, Will Smith's site, are the platforms the way to go or is it about niche communities? David: Everyone talks about the long tail, what they forget about is the middle part, the "torso," niche producers who can afford to mine specific audiences, working with producers in the torso to feature their content, but don't want to lock any one in, use YouTube as a fantastic platform but use everyone else in the meantime, then use tools to measure success on YouTube. We're doubling down on the torso (COMMENT: Process of attraction by success. Familiar Google model) There's how-to stuff, serious stuff, too, but entertainment is also very important. George and I talk all the time, but we're not dependent on any one kind of content.

Rafat: You book a lot of MySpace bands, how does the conversation go with your producers? Carson: There's some pressure from above, but for a show that's on as late as we are we can focus on emerging bands. In the days of Johnny Carson your "shot" on his show was your chance, MySpace helps bands to build their own career. We try to find the ones who are right on the cusp of breaking and give them a shot. It's mostly Carson's tastes, small staff, scrappy, soldiers in the street, find out who's hot on the streets but also book bands right off the Internet. David: It's very early, second trial of syndicating content from major with embedded ads, potentially syndicated to AdSense network, experimenting with how long an ad should be, tend not to favor long pre-rolls, but lots of data to be gathered. George: The users will tell us that it's too long or too short. We chapter each show, have found a mix with pre-rolls where 70 to 80 percent stick through all five chapters. Question: Is the internet now seen as a stepping stone to get a TV deal? Does the Internet stand on its own? Carson: Thinking of Rosie O'Donnell, I'd look at the Internet as the priority platform moving forward and look at TV secondarily. Ilene: Talent and representation is always behind the curve. Getting representation to allow their talent to do something innovative is always the problem. Alan: An Imus could go anywhere now. Staci: Changes the dynamics when youlve have options. Carson: It's only been in recent months that networks are beginning to understand that they need a flow of original talent.

Question: Once users understand model how do you share revenues? David: 15 seconds of fame is attractive but hard to figure out how it happens. When we think about monetization we know where the traffic is coming from and its from the users. Corporate sites with video programming? George: speaking with some, looking at muscle cars, working with sponsor to create a destination, being underwritten by a marketer, not a car marketer. Made investment in company selling vertical networks, will assume that we'll be successful to attract people to their own site but will ensure that they can still work with other sites for their marketers.

Labels: econSM, events

Moderator: Jimmy Guterman, Editorial Producer, EconSM

Panelists:
Simon Assad, Co-Founder and CEO, Heavy.com
John Battelle, Chairman, Federated Media
Shawn Gold, Senior Vice President, MySpace
Tina Sharkey, Chairman, BabyCenter
Rishad Tobaccowala, CEO, Denuo/CIO, Publicis Media Group

Jimmy: Comment from mixer last night - the key is to understand when the ad is most desirable. When I hear people talk about marketing they oftentimes are really talking about advertising, not the full range of marketing. What is really going on?

Simon: Have been selling ads for ten years and it has helped us to get out of the gate but marketing is the discipline to create a conversation between two parties that is useful to both. Banners and search are the old world, marketing is about creating the conversations and bring together two people really interested in having a conversation.

Jimmy: The online promise was that we'd be able to track things on a very granular level, hasn't quite turned out that way, John, why can't we measure anything? John: One reason is that we haven't tried, much as the banner ad that made its debut on HotWired in 1994 we're still looking at panel-based measurement, but it doesn't work for niche audiences unless you make fractal-like numbers of panels. Nielsen and ComScore responded aggressively to say that they're going to figure it out, but as we get into conversational marketing what we're measuring is going to change. We're addicted to a certain number of metrics, how do you measure a lifetime value of a customer against a spend at a specific site like heavy.com, don't have the standards much less the conversations that get us to those standards, but we're moving towards it. Jimmy: what's the barrier? John: Time, we're twenty people, takes a lot of time, can't put an algorithm out there and everybody gets it as with AdSense, conversations aren't easy to code into an algorithm.

Jimmy: Quote from MySpace "If you live in a dorm room everything is yours, if the internet were your room it would be MySpace." How do you market differently to people if you think that you're doing it on their turf? Shawn: Have to look at why people are there in the first place and catch people in stride. MySpace is there to help people to discover culture, how do you enhance that value proposition? Talks to advertisers, have to create a subnetwork that is relevant to your value proposition, have to create recognition, brands have the ability to provide access, can offer access to events, discovery, knowledge. There are simple sociological guidelines for social networks. Simple program provided simple contact tables, send a message, personalized, early on was fairly innovative, about 76,000 people used them, not huge but impressions were 2.6 million, helped people to express themselves and to tap into their value proposition.

Jimmy: Because of new distribution methods the release of a film was no longer THE marketing event but an event that begins an extended marketing campaign. How do you adapt? Tina: Must-see TV on Thursdays will never be seen again in our lifetime, the aftermarket is key. Ecosystems are the focus, you have to become part of people's personal capital. People say the music industry's dead, but it's about what friends spin instead of what DJs spin, so those 76,000 people aren't many but their network is of millions, so once in their ecosystem you need to leverage their conversation.

Jimmy: Are there ideas from mass events that social media can learn from old media? Tina: I was watching a concert on MTV, was watching an announcer talk about something backstage that he thought was cool, it was annoying, meanwhile AOL had integrated messaging and other features so that the audience became the experience.

Jimmy: Rishad, the folks that used to be in control are looking for control in an era in which there is no control. What to they do? Rishad: There's still a lot of control, no one would market it there weren't. People are self-marketing, you need to get involved in their self-marketing but you need to be cautious. If you tell people things that are mathematically untrue they'll think that they're idiots and they won't listen to you. Social media will not displace things in five or ten years for marketing, there are companies trying to sell millions of things. What are the incentives for markets and suppliers to change, it's hard work, it doesn't scale. If it won't make money you won't do it.

Jimmy: Conversation in social media always goes towards Second Life, fascinating but a world that's mostly empty except for marketers. What's your experience as a marketer with virtual world? Shawn: unripe and inefficient for marketers, if you look at MySpace and other big social networks audience comes back multiple times a day, Second Life requires a much larger committment, ability to distribute information is very inefficient. John: Was a "Deadhead," went to The Well, there is an incredibly devoted group but it doesn't have the scale to truly pay back that marketers are putting into it. Tina: When we look at Korea we're very engages, multi-generational, think about a marketer from that perspective, very different than it is here.

Jimmy: The Well was so successful because it was really immersive, what sort of immersiveness do marketers need now, does it need to be an amazing looking thing like Second Life? Rishad: In Korea we're very bullish about cyberworlds, in US it's more oriented towards gaming, we monitors Second Life, but we recommend most marketers to stay away. Why do you want it, for a press releases? 90 Percent of SL is for press releases, how is this going to help you sell things and make money? (Scattered Applause) Question: B2B vs. B2C and Ad-generated revenue vs. user-generated revenue (subscription). How are the dynamics different. Simon: Traditional cable companies are set up exceptionally well to sell subscription services, have to buy utility service plus options. Internet isn't that way, for now. John: For now. Simon: Yes, it may become a very different world but right now it's not there. Subscription would be hard to make work where there are millions of options, porn is about the most successful example, ads are not going to solve everyone's problem, every week you hear about one more site or one more model, traditional advertising only grows about 4-5 percent a year, selling stuff is going to grow, advertising is going to be the only real revenue model, and there are a lot of them so you better have a good model. Shawn: On the B2B side, just different application, in the late 90's the "exchange" was a model, that's going to come back. John: Check out GlobalSpec, back end of scientific content, extraordinary, didn't take 50 million in VC to build it. Shawn: There will be technology that will allow you to assess a page, in some sense marketers are concerned about a backlash, it's about what messages you put in the network, so if you're WalMart and promoting greenifying America is doesn't matter if you're against something personal, the value is in the brands that you put in the network. John: Advertisers are afraid of conversations, they're afraid of people thinking about their brands, they get feedback in social media, have to turn this into judo, have to approach marketing from a different point of view, change the structure of how agencies go about their job. Rishad: Marketing is about listening to your consumers, ask them questions, Nike campaign had users send photos to judges, people liked having editing, Zbrand said we're living in a world of crapocopia, bands can eliminate crap.

Question: User strength and power, there are some you want to market to more to promote viral activity, how to you target those types of people? Tina: If you're really committed to social media, you can identify the influentials and send them back out. Can be leaders in the community and spokespeople. Question: The assumption is that individuals control their brands, but what happens when people are talking about their own brands on their own blogs, all of these things are happening away from their control. John: The Cluetrain Manifesto crystallized that markets and brands are conversations, you are the chief conversationalist for your own brands and to guide them, GM posted a blog entry about the do-it-yourself ads that drew some critical ads, but it also drew a lot of positive responses. Shepherding a brand was different before efforts such as this.

Jimmy: Question from social network, egg model, social media on your site, or chicken model, an existing site. Any egg could be the next chicken. Where do you start, a big site or a little site? Rishad: It could be the chicken an egg an ostrich, but please recognize that marketers in America are not stupid, they are not scared, they are not stupid, but they want to embrace a space. The brand does matter, GM incident looks like a mistake, people get bitter, bitterness doesn't attract money. Question: Blend of social media, combined TV, print, banner and community all tied in together, we're seeing that it's very successful. Shawn: You can advertise on home page and reach 30 million people, the marketing mix can be orchestrated, but the mix can take place entirely in social media if they have enough scale. Tina: Social media can become the source material for advertising, winners of contest got to go to Oscars, yet the source was social media. Social media is not one way to do it, prime time isn't dead it's not the only thing that matters. Audences have to be engaged at every point but let them be a part of the brand experience. Question: Is posting and contribution what it's all about, most are consumers, where is the medium going, are more people going to be participating or are they just going to continue to be consumers. Shawn: We choose our friends by our ability to amuse them, that's not going to change any time soon. If they tend to think that we're funny or attractive we stick with them. Content today is so sharable, used to be a cigarette was social currency, now it's social media. John: Surprised that NBC didn't release whole package from VTech killer on Web, social media could chew through it and make sense. White House would try to bury documents but bloggers went through it and found juicy bits for media outlets. Question: Thinking about TV marketing dialogue? Simon: Promise of interactivity has been there for years, broadband will drive the dialog before TV will drive it, kids are using YouTube as their entire entertainment system, by the time that TV figures it out it will be too late. Question: In Hollywood we've stumbled in creating dialogue into revenues, Snakes on a Plane died as a film release in spite of huge online buzz. Awareness might be high but it doesn't necessarily drive consumption. Can dialog move consumption? Simon: there's a fair amount of dialog around TV, 1.3 billion streams on YouTube, we're going to be developing a lot of tools for situations that we just don't know about. Shawn: XMen movie, was an enormous amount of people who found out about the movie on MySpace, 15 percent went to movie because of it, 50 percent became aware of it, AND about half were female. John: SOAP should have been done in DVD and released in 20 theatres.

COMMENT: John hit the nail on the head, social media is an inverted marketing model that allows things to be monetized in small ways, with mass monetization a secondary step. This is contrary to most people's thoughts about mass marketing today, but it's where it's going -and it's where product development will be going as a result. There's a much broader economic cycle that will be coming into play.

Labels: econSM, events

Moderator: Rafat Ali, Editor, paidContent.org and MocoNews.net

Panelists:
Barak Berkowitz, CEO and Chairman, SixApart
Michael Birch, Co-Founder and CEO, Bebo.com
Tariq Krim, Co-CEO and Founder, NetVibes
Richard Rosenblatt, Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO, Demand Media
Herb Scanelli, CEO, Next New Networks

As I am waiting for the panel to sit down, I have to reflect on the scale of this event. paidContent.org is dissed sometimes as being a lightweight in a field of heavies, yet it's ability to build a cross-sector nation of people interested in the future of content is impressive. Core online heavyweights, mobile, entertainment, news, B2B - all have a finger in this event.

Rafat's intro: Primarily focused event on entertainment and media, trying to have it as "social" as possible, will run it as a talk show, will jump into audience after a while.

Rafat: How do you see yourself in social media?

Barak: See social media as a broad horizontal application, everybody will have places where they can express themselves via social media technology.

Michael: Entered market in July 2005, late in this space, in this time became 3rd largest social network in US, bigger in UK and New Zealand, cross between Facebook and MySpace.

Tariq: Founded in 2005, personalization and the ability to discover content is crucial to the online economy.

Richard: Interested in passionate verticals, bought a number of companies towards that goal. First company allowed merchants to build their own stores, spent years trying to empower users to create their own media.

Herb: Broadcasting is about broad audiences, cable more niche, social media even finer communities

Rafat: How to build a brand? Herb: provides navigation for users and surety for advertisers, but brands have to go where the users are. We want to go where the audience is, brand building a combination of making stuff that people love and having people who count in a community and distributing content the way that they want it. TV hasn't had hit since Friends, hits aren't going to happen any more, brands will happen amongst people connected via a passion. These will be the new verticals.

Rafat: What's required for scale? Richard: Bebo used to be just a startup, now the 3rd largest network. For some people who are passionate about verticals you don't want to invite people to an empty party. Buy properties build community around them (COMMENT: pretty much the standard game plan for publishing, nothing new).

Rafat: Built a hot company in France, how difficult is it to build one in Europe? Tariq: Difficult to go from an idea to a product, telcos will stifle any pure plays that upset their position, diversity of languages, required localization to build community. Now we're localized for any country in the world. Europe is a broadband arena, video is huge and the quality is excellent. Rafat: success in terms of audience only? How to make money? Tariq: The Web page as we know it will disappear, NetVibes provides interface where a user can do anything. (COMMENT: publishers are just catching up with the Web as a whole, monetizing widgets is the new frontier and few are ready). Widgets can be monetized but value proposition requires widget to respond to exactly what you want, service will be key.

Rafat: Michael, British-based with US presence, how do you manage that? Around less than two years as a social network, only in key English-speaking markets, can generate greater ad revenue in UK, but a smaller population. The US is a very key market to us, growing as quickly as in any other market. When we launched UK is typically behind US but launched as a mature product, took off in US in pockets, within certain markets Bebo dominates, CA is not a strong market, but succeeding overall. Spent a long time catching up, reached that stage only recently.

Rafat: Barak, you started out as a blogging tool, typically social media company launches with service and then makes a platform available, you did it the other way around, where's the most platform? Barak: In both, TypePad for people who want a low barrier to entry, some very large media blogs on TypePad, LiveJournal youth-oriented, Vox aimed at older community. We make money depending on who's the customer and what they want to do. Focus on giving customer a great experience and apply that knowledge more broadly. Rafat: Are you happy with how it is going, how do blogging tools improve? Barak: Be able to handle more media, become faster, easier to use, not the end of these tools, becoming more critical tools, email not disappearing, blogging tools are in their infancy.

Rafat: Richard, how do you see state of tools for blogging and other media? Richard: Netvibes will address where the user collects it all, users have three or four different profiles around the Web, how do you pull it all together (COMMENT: personal aggregation - The New Aggregation model was ahead of itself...:-) ). One location makes it easier to provide a personal presence online? Rafat: Can you build a company now based on the idea that you can be better than MySpace? Michael: YouTube wouldn't have succeede without being so successful on MySpace, but now its success can allow it to continue on its own. We allow widget companies to invent with us but we ask for a revenue share, Bebo drives as much traffic to YouTube as MySpace. Herb: Part of the mix of how you become a larger entity over time. Richard: Major social networks look at each page as a place to build ad revenues, if you're building your business off of APIs you need to avoid PhotoBucket example of being turned off by a partner. Tariq: Web pages aren't going to disappear altogether, we're looking at how to build a business model over multiple distribution methods, APIs and syndication is becoming the new distribution model (??) will become key for social media. We are going to see more widgets and people will distribute widgets to their friends.

Staci: We always have something online, what happens when we want to go offline? Barak: We don't build our products with the assumption that people are always connected, our interpretation is that information is that urgent to get in IM and email is not always the most precious information, the things that you care about most is not always urgent but important far beyond emails and phone calls, making content permanent and storable when people care about it is key. Can well be years after it was put up. People see the power of the Web as a place to store their life, meaning is in the content that can be stored. Staci: my power was out for a week, can't take streaming video on a plane, does that matter? Tariq: Social media tools are about connecting, in Europe it's a bit different, mobile is a key device, offline you still have your mobile, being offline and doing nothing is a good thing as well.

Keith, Edgio: revenues morph, Doubleclick won the first phase, phase two was about monetizing the exit, AdSense, can you get paid for people leaving your portal, now it seems as if social media has not found its model. Is there something to be learned from newspapers, social media and the like, they make money from their readers from classifieds, can you make money from readers making comments on one another? Michael: many SM companies are not focused on revenues, more on scale, clearly a good model about classifieds, we have many ideas beyond classifieds, at absolute infancy. Richard: Why are people at that social network, are they passionate aobut he group or about meeting people in that group. Bought trails.com, whether they're there to meet people is more of a by-product. Herb: also important to reach the trend-setters. Barak: also important to identify that it's important to have a conversation (COMMENT: THAT's what I am talking about - it's not about the monologue, advertisers need to learn how to maintain a dialogue). Estelle: Are you still planning to have your own ad sales forces? How do you maintain ad inventory? Tariq: Moving to a stage where we're monetizing attention more than audience. So many choices, which service am I going to be using, metrics are different based on desire to interact, have to pay attention that advertising is not always relevent anymore, need to provide a service to build a relationship, when you see AdWords you have a low value, the service needs to learn about you and adapt. Have been approached by large brands to ask how to succeed online when people aren't going to Web sites anymore. Michael: You reach a tipping point that makes sense to bring it in-house with a team that really understands your own product and can pitch the benefits. Becomes a two-way conversation, challenge is to sell large page inventory at huge CPM. Did a campaign with Skittles, listed skins that people can use to decorate Bebo, got views of skins on other people's profiles, users promote (COMMENT: Have to leverage the value of personal endorsement). Barak, the close relationships come from our direct sales team. Herb: The best people to tell your story are your own people.

Rafat: When you're building a new brand without an audience, what do you tell them? Herb: you tell a story nevertheless. Tad Smith: NewsCorp has made hay with MySpace acquisition, how would an independent MySpace be different? MySpace was at an interesting point in its development, different capitalization structure, small public company, had we not sold to NewsCorp we would have not had the capital for infrastructure. Sounds contrarian but it's probably bigger as a result. Would we have blocked widgets? Don't know, don't know that we would have done any thing differently. Today it's much easier to raise capital. Most media companies said no, it was way expensive, "a bunch of teens posting photos," others could survive on their own but investors need the stomach to understand how to monetize social media.

Rafat: You were on the team that was on the team that was trying to buy MySpace - Jason - You are so dead now. The future is about creating a platform for your audience to tell their story, Rupert was more aggressive, paid off way bigger than they thought it would pay off, would I overpay for a platform like Bebo? Probably yes, especially if it wasn't my own money. Question: users voluntarily aligning with brand, what should the standards be? Michael: Example was lead by sales team not bizdev team, people are used to pricing things on a CPM basis, pricing models needed to be invented, had to measure how people viewed skin, looking at profiles. Try to demonstrate effectiveness, metrics seem to underpin that but need more than banners on a CPM basis. Sometimes the parts difficult to sell are thrown in with CPM sales.

Question: How do you make a universal ID portable across message board sites, etc? Richard: starts with your own domain, some of the things that we focus on are one platform that provides a portable profile that allows you to jump from one site to another but that lets you change your profile on each different site, go to the golf site and people see you as the golf pro, as a runner on the running site. But outside of those sites you will need some sort of universal login, but if the user is in control of their own media you need to allow for this. Every publisher will have an opportunity to get paid for what they do, details to follow. Barak: Working with AOL on a way to authenticate across the Web (OpenID), always relates to your core domain, very simple model.

Question: Monetization around profiles are the examples, is that the key to revenues or is it in the portal model of driving people into advertising? FaceBook moving into NBA brackets, etc. Tariq: We first ask a user for personalization information so that they can tailor information, we keep what we like and eliminate what you don't like, trying to figure out where the attention is going, both are interesting model. Rafat: Yahoo is going similar things. Tariq: We are independent and neutral, connecting with everyone, not our job to say that you should use Gmail or anything else, the more that they use the widgets the more that they interact with a site, this is absolutely what's going to drive monetization. If I am happy with a widget I am going to send it to a friend. Question: We produce video, vision is interesting but you are betting on a different strategy, could three of you be wrong and being setting up a level of expectations that are too high? In the greater Web Google and Yahoo printing money, is there way too much expectation to live up to for investors? Richard: not so much us hyping social media as everyone else, three years ago DoubleClick was dead, now find, Amazon was dead, just had a blowout quarter. But we need to show more real data, started with one site that was in bankruptcy, had thousands of articles, used it to test thousands of micro-communities, traffic grew 10-15 percent on the site just by adding community. Google lists the articles and the community grows around it. Hopefully we go beyond the hype to true results.

Labels: econSM, events

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

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

Labels: ABM, advertising, Digital Velocity, events

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Labels: ABM, Digital Velocity, events, Jim Taylor

Patrick had a very nice slide show of how media models evolved from the Stele of Hammurabi onwards Movement towards free content, distribution of copies costs zero, huge online addressable market, HighBeam responds with two models, HighBeam, which culls $100/yr $30/mo subscription, encyclopedia.com site. Subscription grows modestly, slow growth for B2B online information in 2006. Google is eyeing enterprise space, could be THE aggregator for paid content. Online ads $80 billion by 2011 - Piper Jaffray. Not an infinite enterprise market, lower willingness to pay in India and China, Zoominfo/Trip Advisor replace heretofore expensive-to-create information with machine created information.

Choices? Numa YouTube video, viewed millions of times. STM may be the next to go to more of a free model, Steve Case's next play is revolution health, will probably pay for a lot of content and give it away on a lead generation basis. Lay people now want to read about diseases that impact them. Entertainent? Lives in its own world, you can charge for entertainment on a PPV basis harder for other models. Haven't looked at ads for years with a TiVo. Google is our source for content traffic mostly, a powerful domain name. Gap between subscription DBs and Google to fill? That gap is narrowing, Nexis and Factiva succeed by integrating into workflow.

Time and others learned that keeping it behind the wall kept inventory away from the market, might be better business model. Ads have carried media from the beginning of time. Tom Hogan - Chemical Abstracts brings in $152 million w/o advertising, how will services like this be supported? It all depends on the information. Patrick: thank you. Agrees, but not long ago we thought all information had to be paid for. Will be niches where charging works. Way that people responds to free varies, 40x interaction with free content as opposed to paid content, demand rises hugely when it's free. Hal Espo: even in narrow verticals it's beginning to open up. Google Desktop came along, took away technology as a market advantage. Google made the long tail monetizable.

Great stuff, not sure whether it's the whole answer - I think that social media is going to be the focus of most subscription services moving forward - but it's going to be harder to support subscription based on distribution only models.

Labels: Buying and Selling eContent, events, Patrick Spain

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

There are a quarter million media sites, 70 million blogs, heading towards 100 million, different types of content, YouTube phenomenon illustrates the accelerated pace of change. YouTube started surfacing was in August of 2005. Fewer than 70 article. 2006 early 3,000, late 2006 30,000 articles. People are adopting YouTube rapidly, 65,000 new videos a day. Contrast with adaoption of PC, started with primitive machines in 1970s. Pace is likely to continue, consider recent IDC report, last year 161 exabytes of content created last year, 3 million times all books ever written. Will continue to surge. Email inboxes now 1.6 billion inboxes. Talking about a revolution in social media in 1995, ten years after the birth of the Web.

Innovation, simplicity, continuous evolution, accessibility are key.

People love the simplicity of Google ads, continuous improvement. Innovative in the development of ad models, poised to change via pay per action. No longer necessary to own the data. Housingmaps.com combines Google Maps and housing data. Web 2.0 makes two-way communications the focus, allowing the user to participate, collaborate and contribute. "If we don't find ways to let readers interact, we will be left behind in the Web 1.0 world." eBay harnessed collective intelligence, Amazon promotes "good reads," MySpace, others driven by users, mostly young but the future work force.

The intersection of technology and society is powerful, kids and prosumers not the only ones to recognize it. Investors have doubled Web 2.0 investments.

How do we create blue sky ideas? Sellers need to innovate, engage prosumers, engage creatively and simply. Offers unlimited opportunities for innovation. Become customer-intimate and you will find new ways to add value to your content. Must be convenient, fast, provide relevant content, customization, personalization, essential in an exabyte world. New business models must evolve, must transform businesses. New partnerships, distribution channels, coopetition, redefine market focus. Buyers will be successful as 2.0 companies and focus on user experience and the technology and social philosophy of Web 2.0. Fostering community and collaboration, encouraging employees to contribute to the collection, be internal "prosumers." Simple, reliable mobile desktop capabilities essential. At FAST conference, Factiva exec accepted innovation award, employee captured it on video, posted it on YouTube, wrote a brief, provided a link. Enterprise 2.0 in a nutshell, drives innovative advantage. When we think of social networks, we need to think of it in terms of internal collaboration and collaboration with customers. Acquisition of WebEx and Tribe.com by Cicsco, making the technology network a social network.
Each year Edelman publishes trust barometer, trust shifting to peers, buyers and sellers of econtent need to be open to mixing journalistic and prosumer content. Dow Jones recognizes that we need to include Web sites and blogs, part of content collection 2 years ago (?), Web ten years ago. Dow Jones in Web 2.0: beyond WSJ and averages to company with 60 percent print, moving towards 50 percent digital revenues (COMMENT: fast enough?) Enterprise business unit comprises financial information services (private equity, capital, FX, etc., newsletters, events), DJIA and other indices, new content technology solutions - newswires, licensing, B2C as well as B2B, Factiva. It became clear that Factiva would be stronger with one owner, in the end Factiva was more strategic to Dow Jones. Only company of full spectrum of news from low-latency news for algorithmic trading, consulting, working to leverage Web 2.0 technologies, personal pages, shared pages, dynamic newsletter creation, DJ and Factiva embrace Web 2.0 by allowing users to freely share and collaborate.
****************
Great presentation, and I think that Clare "gets it," as Ken Marlin mentioned on the intro, but to some degree the Web 2.0 talk is dressing up long-established traditional enterprise content integration in new clothes. Enterprises tend to develop new content facilities with trusted partners, so this is not to say that competitors are going to swoop in with off-the-shelf solutions with true Web 2.0 technologies, but especially in financial I am not sure that today's vendors "get" just how empowered the "prosumers" are to collect and collaborate on content.

Labels: Buying and Selling eContent, Clare Hart, events