Book Now For Sipa Conference 19th Nov

Another interesting looking event from SIPA.

Full programme

SIPA’s 3rd online conference will feature two keynote addresses – from David Cushman of 90:10 and Julian Turner, CEO at Electric Word – followed by six interactive round tables.

Each round table will be prefaced by two, 15-minute practical case studies on the topic, leading into a 45 minute discussion.

The breakout sessions include:

• E-readers and mobile apps, and how they will affect the way you do business. (Dominic Jacquesson, Ink on Dead Trees; and Ed Coburn, Harvard Health Publishing)
• Free versus paid content – how can you combine both into a profitable publishing model? (Craig Hanna, E-Consultancy)
  Plus, Subscribers or members? – hear how one leading publisher has turned all his customers into members, improving loyalty and retention  (Robin Crumby, Melcrum Publishing)
• Using social media to build and strengthen your brand. Plus, how does it shape up against other forms of marketing, such as banner advertising? (Matt McGowan, ClickZ, Search Engine Watch & SES, Incisive Media; and Andrew Seel, Qube Media)
• Why dedicated email marketing is more important (and profitable) than ever. How trigger emails and automated campaigns can boost your revenue, how to combine online and offline channels to create sales momentum, using the e-charm offensive to boost sales and renewals, plus the truth about Google Adwords (Riaz Kanani, Silverpop; and Nick Laight, Canonbury Publishing)
• Interactive media and new product launches – Case studies from the winners of the SIPA UK Awards, why they won – and how you can harness their approach (Emma Rogers, Electric Word plc; and Andy Wiliams, Informa)
• Transitioning your product from print to online – Case studies from two leading publishers on how they’ve taken products from individual print subscriptions to portal driven site licenses and membership models  (Louise White, Incisive Media; and Vicky Page, Emap Inform)

Wringing our Hands about paid content and advertising

I didn’t manage to get to the AOP Conference last week, but no surprise that it appears the discussion there was mostly much wringing of hands about how to make the paid content model work.  The Guardian reported;

“Digital consultant Bill Murray warned publishers that if they put a barrier in front of their users, it is likely that they will disappear. Instead he suggested, they need to rethink the concept of content. The most important factor in the success of iTunes success wasn’t the content, he argued, but the service”.

This seems to me to be the crux of the issue and is accidentally a key insight in to the reasons that publishers find the paid model challenging.  The natural instinct for a publisher is to put the content at the centre of the thinking.  Magazine publishers start their working day by thinking about how to make a better magazine and then work out wards from there.  When they ask what their readers want, the answer can only be something that can be squeezed into a magazine delivery format.

“Not me!” I hear the progressive publishers cry.  The honest truth is, it is almost all of us.  The paid content model requires a fundamental rewiring of how our media brains work.  Instead of putting the content at the centre of our strategy we need to put the user at the centre.

If I ran a chain of coffee shops I might consider that if I make the best coffee I can my business will thrive.  I invest in better beans, more reaosting technology, training my staff how to make the best coffee, serving the coffees in the finest china mugs money can buy.  I will fail every time until I realise I am not in the coffee business at all.  Not sure? Well think about this;

A famous case study of the demise of the Parker Pen company exposes the same mistake.  When Bic began eating into the share of the Parker Pen business by selling cheap biros the managment at Parker determined to compete.  They reworked their manufacturing process to produce cheaper pens.  They judged that to match the price of the new upstart they needed to cut their own price.  The result was disasterous and share conitnued to fall.  After a while the rate of decline accelerated to a faster rate than the growth of Bic.  What had gone wrong?  The inisght to fixing the problem was to recognise that Parker was not really in the pen business at all.  When a customer selected a Parker Pen it was most usually as a gift.  The substitues were not the Bic, but a rather a cigarette lighter or a letter opener.  A reduction in the quality of the Parker Pen had sidelined them in the gift market and continued to leave them at a competitive disadvantage to Bic on price.

What is there to learn from this for business media? The content we used to offer (mostly news) is now avaialable for free.  We have competed by offering our own news for free but have discovered that our users, instead of rewarding us with loyalty and praise, now simply take us for granted and use us as one of many sources of news on the Internet.

Other articles in this blog have said this before, and I make no apology for repeating it again.  Our business is not content.  Our business is helping users to make better decisions and helping vendors to sell more.  When David Gilbertson says that we over estimate the importance of business journalism he makes a fair point and if you read this blog and others you will find lots of clues about what to do about it.  But now for a heresy.  What would happen if we put the question differently?

Instead of

“Giving content away in an advertising supported model does not create enough user engagement (page views/session) or repeat visiting to justify a high CPM.  As a result we conclude that the ad model doesn’t work and we say, how can we create a paid content model?”

Lets try, “What would we need to do to persuade users to engage with our content in such a way that advertisers woudl agrees to pay a CPM sufficent to pay for the content creation costs and give us a profit?”

Let’s think about the scale of that task.  In the old model a typical B2B magazine with a 20000 circulation might have expected to sell ads at around £1500 a page.  That equates to a cost/000 of about £75.  Our current free content model is a long way short of that.  Our typical B2B companion website might get 100,000 page views a month. With a 70% bounce rate only 30% of that traffic is likely to be effctive for advertisers to reach.  Let us imagine that we can service three ad impressions on each page.  So if we sellout our usable inventory our total ad impressions will be 90000.  If you are selling your inventory at £30/000 cpm you are probably doing well.  So if we sell out, our monthly revenue will be not more than £2700 – less than two pages of advertsing in the old model.  My hypothesis could be wrong by a factor of ten and we still don’t have a great business!

We need to find a way to take this model and achieve at least £50000 revenue/month. Driving the number of user visits up is unlikely to work.  The universe of relevant people is limited by the scale of the niche.  In any event the task is daunting.

Consider this:

Where maximum monthly revenue = M

Monthly page impressions= T

Bounce rate (expressed as a decimal) =B

Number of Ad impressions/page =A

Average achieved CPM =C

Then M= T*(1-B)*A*C

Max Rev = 100*(1-0.7))*3*30= £2700

So. all other things being equal, by how much would any one variable have to move to achieve our £50k goal? The terrifying answer is we would need either 1.9m page impressions/month or 55 ad impressions on each page or a CPM of £555!

This seems to me to be so far removed from anything that could be remotely achievable that the drive to paid content is impossible to resist

Does this mean that we should give up on the ad model. If we could improve CPM by 50%, increase available traffic by 50% and halve the bounce rate would that help?  The answer is not much.  Our maximum revenue would still be just £13000 a month.

As with content strategy, using offline thinking in the online world is always going to disappoint.  If you think about it, the magazine ad model, where we could charge £70/ooo to perhapsps fifty advertiisers in the same issue is the equivalent of having 50 ad positions on every web page.  No wonder the offline ad model doesn’t work in the online world.

Is it possible to consrtuct an advertsing model for the b2b web that pays the bills? While I think about that keep cracking on with those hybrid strategies.

Appointment of New PPA Chief Executive

The PPA is now engaged in the process of recruiting a new Chief Executive following the abrupt depature of Jonathan Shephard last month.  The PPA has a key opportunity to to raise the level of its game, to reinvent itself and become relevant again in the new media world.  My posts try and stay away from specific news events, but I make an exception in this case as I care about the PPA and I want it to be relevant to me in the future.

When I was at Nexus, for the first time in my professional life we were not members of the PPA.  I thought about joining but then wondered what would happen if I didn’t.  The answer was not much.  Perhaps most surprisingly nobody from the PPA ever called us to invite us to join.  This led to me think about what would persuade me to pick up the phone and join again on my own initiative.  Here are some of the things I thought;

1) Although periodical publishing remains part of what we do, I no longer feel defined by the concept of periodical publishing.  I would be much more likely to join an Association of Business Media Providers.

2) If the PPA, or whatever it becomes, is to survive it must get its membership marketing act together by giving all business media providers, large and small, print publishers and web only providers, good reasons to join the party.

3) Abandon the increasingly irrelevant PPA Awards and replace them with two events – one for consumer media and another for business media.  The categories have barely changed in twenty years (with the exception of adding a business website category).

4) Change the priorities for the PPA lobbying activity.  PPA did a great job over many years in negotiating and managing the relationship with the Royal Mail.  I have no doubt they still do.  In 2009 most of us we are as interested in the relationship with Google as as we are with the post office.

5) Decide defintively what the PPA is for and then pursue that goal with a passion. Lobbyist? Trainer? Networking faclilitator? Promoter of business media benefits to business media customers?  All of these?  None of these? One of these? Which are more important?  Here is the current list taken from the mission statement published by the PPA with my annotations in brackets

By engaging with Governments in the UK and Europe, to defend the legal, regulatory and commercial environment in which our members operate (Agree absolutely, but what are the key deliverables from this work?)

To help our members navigate the transition to the changing digital environment (What if I am in business media but don’t publish magazines.  Am I excluded? The goal assumes that transition is the right approach when it might not be.)

To provide up to the minute information, market knowledge, case studies, analysis and insight  (for whom? Publishers? Agencies?Readers?)

To promote magazines and their brands as the advertising medium of choice (But they are not.  . The emphasis on magazines implies that they are more important than other media deployed by media companies and increasingly they are not.  We know it, our readers know it, our advertisers know it, but our trade association appears not to)

To bring members together to share ideas, information and best practice (Nothing wrong with networking but apart from an annual conference what has actually been achieved here?)

To ensure that the industry continues to attract and develop talent. (Thats an impossible objective for the PPA but it can play a role in facilitating such an outcome. )

To deliver positive results for all parts of our diverse membership (meaningless)

To celebrate success and promote the health and image of our industry (our industry is in a crisis of strategy, profitability and confidence!)

In short too many goals, defined to widely.

Sometimes the PPA appears to live in the same Village as Noddy.  The trees are lovely, the grass is green and we must never go into the dark wood.  Its time to face up to that fearand come and join the rest of us fighting  goblins.

I am a believer in the PPA.  I want it to be relevant.  I hope the Board of the PPA use this opportunity to hire a CEO who has a clear and focussed plan for how to make to make it so.  To get that kind of vision and leadership it may need to pay more than it has ever done before.  If you think that person might be you, give Paul Farrer a call who is acting for the PPA in making the hire.

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• Jonathan Shepherd leaves PPA (guardian.co.uk)

Paid Content – A snack or a Meal?

A lot of people are talking to me about the paid content problem. When Rupert Murdoch starts takiing the subject seriously suddenly everyone sits up and pays attention.  Just a few weeks ago Emap announced that the content from their paid mgazaines was no longer to be made available free and would be put behind a pay wall.  Every media company I know is thinking about how to sell content. Most will fail.

The motivation for this is the difficulties many are having in building a sustainable advertising based digital solution.  Building strategy around the failure of its predescessor caries some risks, not least that the implementation will misunderstand how online paid content works.

If readers have paid for magazines in the past, some argue, then there is no reason why they should not pay for that content online too.  For newspaper publishers and business media owners this is a fundamentally flawed understanding.  Consumption of newspaper printed material is a “lean back” extended disovery of content.  When I pay for my Saturday paper I know I will spend at least half an hour and probably more exploring it.  I am likely to read most of the UK news pages, a good chunk of the foreign news, at least one of the leaders, a rummage through the sports pages and an attempt at the crossword.  I am concentrating on the newspaper, and am fully engaged wth the taxonomy of its construction.  I am enjoying the atmosphere of the paper and its familiarity of structure.

In business magazines the experience of readers is similar.  When print readers are researched they will tell publishers that, depending on the magazine they spend, between 20minutes and an hour on reading their trade title (leastways they used to before the Internet.)

How different is this from consumption on the Web? It is completely different.  The traffic patterns on web sites are very different from print circulations. Most b2b sites will have characteristics similar to the following list;

1) Most traffic comes from natural search (implication – answering the search enquiry is more important than the publishers brand)

2) The bounce rate is between 60% and 70% (implication – if the purpose of a landing page is to get the user to consume another page the approach is failing for most users)

3) The average page views/visit is between 2 and 3. (Implication -  A few users are consuming many more than the average but our levels of engagement with users, even when the information is free is too low to create a paid content model)

4) The amount of time spent on a page averages at less than a minute. (Implication – an individual page or article does not matter that much)

What can we conclude from this?  It appears that consuming web news is a lean forward short content consumption snack.  Readers who buy the Guardian every day and would never been seen dead with a copy of the Telegraph are much less loyal on the web.  If I want to read about the Grand Prix last weekend, I can make a search engine enquiry and discover muliple sources of information.  I will visit a site, perhaps not even note the publisher and then back out intothe search engine and move on.

Snacking for information in this way is very different from the lean back engagement I once enjoyed with the printed media and cannot be monetised in the same way.

There may be a very small number of users who can be persuaded that a subscription to online newspaper content is worthwhile, but it is highly unlikely to be a sustainable business model.

Does this mean that paid content strategies are doomed?  Not at all and in business media the opportunity is huge, but the approach to content selling is not the same online as in print, any more than the marketing and pricing strategy  for Gordon Ramsay is the same as that for Spud u Like.

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The End of B2B in Print or the Beginnning?

Emaps decision to make a dramatic change to the editorial structureof Local Government Chronicle is very significant.  For some time I have been telling anyone who is prepared to listen that part of the problem with the b2b print model is that it has barely changed in twenty years.  This despite the impact of the Internet and the effect on media consumption habits.

Many publishers are worrying that ad yields and volumes are under presssure but have not yet tackled the likely cause.  It is too simplistic to blame the recession.  The facts of the matter are that advertisers have sensed that business magazines are not read in the way they once were.  We should not be surprised.  Before the days fof the web every piece of research I conducted on magazine readership showed that readers wanted to know about news, jobs and products.  The problem in the internet age is all of this is readily avaialable from numerous sources on the web.

What is the value of news pages in a print mag published weekly? Emap have made what I think is welcome decision to abandon the old News, bridge, features structure, replacing the old content with a series of long analytical articles.  I haven’t  managed to get hold of copy so I can’t express any view about the execution, but the priniple seems sound.

Let’s look at some of the evidence.  Almost every paid title in b2b has seen copy sales and subscriptions fall. As this effect is universal we must conclude that something important is happening.  Readers don’t need mags in the way they used to.  They have been subsituted for the Web.

Oddly most CC titles continue to pump out the same number of copies as they ever did.  For many, a good part of that distribution propped up recruitment advertising response.  But with recruitment now being almost entirley a web only play, what is the value of that circulation toda?  Worse, a key motive for picking up the magazine, a browse through the jobs, has vanished.

As revenues have fallen, costs have been cut, impacting on the quality of features journalism.

So, pick up a typical business mag, tear out the news pages, whats left of the jobs section and the “ad get” feature and what are you left with? Not much.  No wonder engagement with magazines is falling away and advertisers are voting with their feet.

The answer is not to give up on print, but rather to create a new print model which offers the kind of content not readily available or easily consumed in a digital format.  I don’t know whether Emap have come up with the right answer, but on this issue at least, it appears they may be asking themselves the right question.

My own view is that there is a future for print in b2b, and I have some thoughts on what that future might look like.  I might yet get to put it into practice!

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Can we make a value add model for online recruitment

First, apologies to those who come her regularly for the lack of posts over the Summer.  I have spent most of the time honing a model for how b2b might look in the future and this blog has not been front of mind.  But the Summer is over and it is now business as usual.  There is still pain all around us.  Results from Centaur Media, where revenues have dropped by nearly a third in a year, will come as no surprise to anyone who works in this space.  More cost cutting has been announced at Emap and RBI.  The downturn in revenues is now affecting events as well as publishing and the online world remains challenging operationally commercially and strategically.

Nowhere is this more  important than in recruitment.  I went sailing last week with a recruiter in the finance sector.  He was telling me how tired he was of job board offerings.  Where is the innovation he pondered?  For publishers the price point on job boards is very challenging.  With the market thinking that £150 a job is a lot of money, it is hard to see how small publishers can compete with the mainstream job boards.  The volumes that are needed to create a viable business are very large.  You need to sell more than 500 postings a month to create a £1m business.

How can niche publishers add value both to compete with generic boards and to justify a higher price?  One answer comes from an interesting US business www.jobvite.com.  

This solution offers employers an application which plumbs vacancies into its employees social networks.  Vacancies are posted on employees Linked In or facebook pages creating a viral access to audiences of potential job applicants who may not be actively searching for a post.  This tackles one of the main weaknesses of the job board solutions.  Their model requires potential applicants to be active.  In our old print model we could push recruiters messages at possible applicants who had not considered themselves active. Reruiters will pay a premium to access these potential applicants.

Although I can see some real challenges for the jobvite model (getting employees to agree to using their personal networks for their employers interest is the obvious one), this represents a an innovative step forward.   So much of our old model profits came from recruitment, we ignore the challenge of innovating new solutions for the online world at our peril.  The question we should be asking ourselves is,  how can we add value to the recruitment offering?

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The Tend to Zero Risk

One of the reasons so many media companies are in trouble is the simultaneous crisis in all revenue streams.  It seems to many, that whatever strategy is deployed, the size of the potential revenue pot keeps falling. 

Back in the sixities, almost all business to business titles were paid for.  News about your industry was valuable and that value could be measured with money.  Today nobody charges for news.  In print, yields have been under pressure for some years.  Online display advertising with it’s transparent measurability has given advertisers a legitimate stick with which to beat media owners.   Where there has been success in selling online display the achieved CPM has been falling.  Too much traffic, too little of it useful or enaged, consequent poor click through rates mean that much inventory remains unsold – a growing proportion for many – and what does get sold is at rates that are falling.  Where once the choice advertisers had was limited by the number of titles in a market, today they are confused by so much choice.

We lost our way with recruitment.  Where we used to charge thousands of pounds for a page of advertising, the job board model now offers an ad £100.  In the recession prices here too are falling.

However we solve the current strategic conundrum, it seems pretty clear that unless we can push back the tide of prices tending to zero we don’t have a business.    The truth is, whilst there are things we can do to make a difference the price of a transaction in the new world is unlikely to reach the heady heights of the old world.  There are  four steps that all media companies must take:

1) Set the fixed cost base at a  level which is supportable by the new model.  This means attacking some sacred cows and stripping away layers of management costs.

2) Improve the value of your advertising proposition.  Seth Godin says,

“As long as your site is about something else and the ads are a distraction, you’ll see CPM rates drop. As soon as you (or the advertisers) figure out that creating online communities aligned with the advertising, where attendance is a choice by the consumer, then you’re creating genuine value.” 

In B2B that means making ads relevant and targeted.  Don’t give up on vertical search solutions.  Keep experimenting – there are riches ahead for the media company that gets it right.

3) Audit every activity that leaves the building and assess it for value.  Use that value audit to establish the prices that could be achieved.

4) Give up on the idea that you are going to survive by doing the stuff you used to do.  News products supported by advertising are going to be very small businesses.  Plan and implement a series of new product developments that will help you scale your business.  Buy some expertise to help you do it.

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Strategy Destroys Value

In another ineresting talk at the Acitivate 09 Summit, Umair Haque of the Havas Medai Lab points out that we are now all hyper connected.  This hyper connectivity is driving a new kind of networked economics.  This network effect can be seen all around us.  Look at how Obama used the network to raise funds; look at the velocity of growth of Twitter as it leveraged viral networks.  But there are unintended consequences too.  There are viral diseconomies that can lead to panic effects.  Look at how the passing of toxic assets between banks spread rapid panic and led to an implosion of the financial markets.  

These negative viral effects are what Haque calls, “the zombie economy”.  An economy which is stuck and unable to innovate its way out of diffiiculty.  When there are negative viral effects value is destoyed and strategy ceases to create value.  He concludes thet, “Twentieth Century capitalism is not fit for twenty first Centry purpose.  We need a new constructive capitalism.”  This must be based on renewal, democracy, peace and equity rather than exploitation, tyranny, war and domination.

How very Guardian!

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Your Computer Is Killing the Planet

Gavin Starks, the CEO of Amee, shocks us all in a presentation at Activate 09 by claiming that a 2.5kg laptop computer produces 460kg of CO2.  The average annual emmission of C)2 for a human being is 2 tonnes.  So people like us are generating a quarter of that just by using a computer.

Amee is abusiness that aims to produce a carbon footprint of everything on earth, to build what they call environmental intelligence into evrything.  The scary prediction is that we are heading towards “peak consumption” on all our ebergy resources.  MIT has noted that surface warming is accelerating to a level which makes mass extinction a real possibility.  The warming willeventually blow the atmosphere away and Earth will turn into a planet like Venus.

On the basis of the old adage that if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it, Amee aims to make carbon data transparent.  Their metering tools will helps government and business to measure their energy identity.  The energy identity of an individual or a business or a nation is more important than digital identity.

In the UK an average person produces 10 tonnes of CO2.  In the US it’s 20 tonnes.  For the planet to survive the sustainable level is 2 tonnes.

 

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From The GUARDIAN Activate Summit

Activate summit

 

A panel on Society Humanity Technology and the web.  The panel includes the CTO of Amazon, Werner Vogels,  who speaks first.  Your worst nightmare is that you throw a party and no one comes. On the web you throw a party and everyone comes.  How do you prepare for this uncertainty.  He mentions a web site called playfish which built 8m users for a new game in four weeks.  Also mentions the web coverage of the indie 500 series.  3-4 m users show up but only for three or four days a year.

There is a growing abundance of products

Intensifying competition

Growing power of customers

Reduced pricing of products

Limited acces to capital

 

How can you manage all this uncertainty and risk. There are four principles to look at. 

Acquire resources on demand.

Release resources when no longer neeeded

Pay for what you use (change fixed costs to variable)

These infrastructure services as he calls them are becoming more like utilities and we should think of them as such.  This is about focussing on the core competencies of the organisation where value can be added.  I t means you can move from a a capital cost model to a variable cost model.

Cloud computing is one of the keys to deploying this approach where you only pay for what you use.  If possible operate without any infrastructure of your own at all by using cloud computing services.  If a web service becomes rapidly popular either you have to buy many s3ervers (capital) or use cloud services and pay for what you need if and when you need it.

http:Aws.amazon.com is the site where amazon will give you access to these infrastructure services.  Anyone can do it he says.

The second speaker is Clare Lockhart, the CEO of the Institute for State Effectiveness.  Their role was to help set up state goverenace in Afghanistan.  A fascinating insigth in to how infrastructure was built in Afghanisatnan using local networks and heirarchies to create a a single common currency, telecoms etc.

Is this a metaphor for the Internet?  Mmm.

If the citizen is at the centre of state design, then the user is the centre of tech design she argues.  In time distance learning, tele medecine, and market pricing will be vital Internet applications as the emerging nations become ICT enabled.  These nations have no back story on using tech so how can we make sure that we learn from our mistakes in building these plans.

Now comes Arianna Huffington.  No introduction needed. The past is well organised to block reforms.  The future is much less well organsied.  Look at how Obama is struggling to get his agenda moving in health. Wall street etc.  Change is often slowed by lobbying even though it may not be in the interests of those lobbying.  Look at the money spent by the banks to lobby governments. It was successful  from the banks point of view in limiting regulation, except that all the banks went bust.  Sometimes change is blocked even when it is in the best interest s of those who commit themselves to blocking the change.

Huffington is evangelical  about the damage lobbyists do and using the viral nature of the net to spread news about the money made and the damage done by lobbyists.  The drip drip nature of the Internet is often more effective in making a story impactful than a big splash in a newspaper which then rarely gets followed up.

Of course the Net can produce errors and untruths but it is remarkably effective at self correcction. Look at how the nonesense about Obama being part of a muslim/black conspiracy was dissembled.

“you consume old media sitting on your couch.  You consume new media galloping your horse”  Users want to get involved (look at Iran)

In business, the next big thing is going to be about helping people to connnect and how to disconnect and reconnect again.

She worries that papers are believing again that content can protected behind walled gardens again.  This won’t work.

 

Now we move on to philosphy from Nick Bostrum from the Future of Humanity Institute.  In our ancient past there is no record that leaders expected anything to change save for who was in control and had power. It is only in the last 200 years since the enllightment that we have begun to coonsideer a=how change might affect the masses not just who rules them.

He shows a table of daetahs from causes such as the plague and HIV and WW2 and argues that they are all pretty small in the grand chem of things> A  four by four matrix with at the top right some event that ends human extinction is shown.  An existential catastrophe.  He jokes therehas never been one, but 99.9% of all species that ever lived here are extinct.  The Toba eruption killed all but 500 females it is thought.  Some human like species are extinct (neat=nderthal man) so the possibility of future extinction exists.  Two kinds of existnetial risk are the natural and the anthropogenic.  The second of these is the most dangerous.  We have survived many natural risks over thelast two hundred thousand years but the man made ones are new and therfore more dangerous. In the posdt human world tech development stops.  He shows a graph of world product as a proxy for this which shows that over 200000 years the growth in product is a very recent and extreme spike.  But looked at over 100 years it deosn’t look as though we are close to the end yet.  It is possible that tech oinnovation wont collapse but could go through cycles of osciallationas within boundaries of magnitude that don’t reach the point of human extinction.

 

f earth had formed one year ago, homo sapiens would be 12 minutes old.  Computers just 4/10ths of  second ago, the Interent just 1/10^th of a second ago – so this is all very recent.

 

Cresation o f an untraintelligent machine would end human invention as an ultra intelligent machine could design ever better machines, so an ultra intyelligent machine is the last machine man would ever make.

What would be possible in a post human world a world where everything is very different, perhaps the popualtion would live for 500 years, be not confined to a particluar space. There may be many kinds of being.  He concludes that this summit might not be very important in the scheme of things.  In addtion to being very small in the schem of things we are also in our human devlopment very young.

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Line up for the SIPA Conference

The annual SIPA conference is due to take place during the seocnd week in July.  Chaired by Rory Brown, formerly of Incisved Media and now a blogger on business media, the line up looks interesting and tackles some of the burning issues of the day. 

Keynote speakers will include the renowned Bill Bonner. Founder and President of Agora Inc, the largest financial newsletter publisher in the US, Bill revitalised his business by his early use of free ezines – which became the model scores of other publishers now use profitably in their own organisations. Here he’ll talk about the new world of communications in the post-bubble era of the 21st century… describing why the world economy is in a deep, multi-year slump, and what publishers can do about it, using what he calls ‘total integration marketing’.

 

Jim Bilton of Wessenden Marketing will present the results of a recent State of the Publishing Industry survey he undertook with InPublishing magazine; and Andy McLaughlin, President of PaperClip Communications in the US, will present his findings on who exactly are today’s new online information buyers – and how publishers can reach them to sell digital content.

 

Other topics to be covered during the day include using Twitter and other social media to drive traffic and sales to your site; launching successful products, even in hard times – three practical case studies; why subscribers lapse, and how to increase retention; lead generation, and turning prospects into buyers; and generating new subscriptions, both on- and offline.

 

Along with the keynotes, the morning presents a choice of 20 round table discussion groups, ranging from telesales, new product development and syndication to email marketing, social media and SEO. The afternoon features a choice of three breakout tracks on marketing, publishing strategy and content issues. There is also a comprehensive exhibition where you can chat with our sponsors – Premier Print Group, Adestra, WORKSsitebuilder, Abacus E-Media and BPA Worldwide.

 

There will be two pre-conference business discussion forums the day before the conference (Tuesday 7 July), aimed at senior marketers and publishers.

 

The line-up of expert speakers includes some key names in business publishing, including Ashley Friedlein of EConsultancy; Anthony Ray of Stingray Research; Nic Laight of Canonbury Publishing; Ian Lancaster of Reconnaissance International; Lindsey Greig from Cecile Park Publishing; Angus Phillipson of WORKSsitebuilder; Toby Bray of MoneyWeek, and from the US, Jeanne Hopkins of MarketingSherpa.

The Future for B2B May Not Be In Content

A study by Outsell (only available to subscribers) surfaces one of the underlying systemic issues affecting business media companies.  They asked business to business marketeers in the USA what they were doing with the money they were no longer spending on trade press advertising.  In summary the money went;

• 29% will be spent on the company’s own web site
• 21% will be spent on paid search and search engine advertising
• 17% will be spent on events
• 15% will be spent on other online community or special interest sites

Back in the days of Web 1.0 we used to talk a lot about the opportunities that arose from disintermediation.  Now it appears that it is the business media companies  themselves that are being disintermediated by their own customers. 

One of the biggest costs of trading as a magazine publisher is distribution.  Building a circualtion and then providing access to it for advertisers was the essence of the profit model.  In the digital world, distribution is pretty cheap and marketeers are discovering that they can build traffic on their sites directly without relying on business media publishers.

The implications of this are clear.  If we take the Outsell numbers at face value, even if we succeed with our online content models we might only expect to win back 15% of the money we are losing from print.  That won’t support the costs of a comprehensive content model.  If we are to win our full share of the digital cake we are going to have to think differently about the business we are in. 

Last week I spoke on a panel at the E Publishing Innovation Conference and I reminded the delegates of Michael Wolffs book from the early days of the Internet, Burn Rate.  In this highly entertaining book Wolff describes his adventures in raising money for start up companie in the febrile world of Silicon Valley.  At the end of the book, he declares a worry.  What, he postulates, if it turns out that the Internet revolution is not about media at all?

It turns out that he may have been right.  Although content and media may be part of the solution for business media companies it should not be at the centre of strategy development.  What we need to do is examine closely what our customers (the companies we used to call advertisers) are doing with their spend and help them to do it better.  As I have argued before, nobody wants to buy advertising next to content, what marketeers really want is tools that help them sell more stuff.  That certainly means we are in the lead  generation business.  We might also need  to be in the business of providing widgets and applications  and marketing services that improve the effciency of marketeers own websites.  Of course content is part of what we do, but if we think it is the purpose of what we do, our revenues from “advertisers” are going to be modest.

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