Who are you and why should I buy from you?

Just found this fantastic presentation from the Business Marketing Associations' "Unlearn" conference. A fantastic illustration of how markets and technologies change but the fundamentals of the business relationship don't.



I found a link to it on one of my favourite blogs, WebInkNow. I also noted that the author of WebInkNow, David Meerman Scott, is coming to Sydney and Melbourne in September. Here's the tag for his course: "Instead of explaining what Social Media is, David specialises in showing Marketing and PR experts exactly how to use it."

Now if only I could justify another training course LOL!

Oh well, there seems to be a blog specifically for the Australian masterclasses with Australian examples, so I'll have to get stuck into reading that instead.

News online - a "crisis of intellectual property"?

A study by PwC that has been reported in The Australian seems to bear out what I and many others have been saying:

A GLOBAL survey has found that readers could be willing to pay almost as much for some high-quality online newspapers as they do for print versions, particularly in specialist news areas.

The study of 4900 respondents in the US and Europe by accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers has found sport and business to be the areas in which consumers are most ready to pay for content.

This bears out the findings of CCH's "Professionals and Web 2.0" whitepaper, namely that people still expect to pay for quality content when it affects their business or professional decisions. Don't ask me why sport is the other special area, I have no interest in that particular topic!

Of course, there is a proviso to this assertion:

The survey said consumers would be willing to pay 97 per cent of the purchase price of a traditional newspaper for online business content, provided there were no free online products of equal quality on the market.

Providers of business and B2B information have been far more cautious in releasing free content, plus only a handful of providers have the capacity to research and verify the information. Small wonder then that this "specialist" area is considered of high enough value to purchase content, as opposed to standard news which as I pointed out in my previous post can now often be harvested from the eyewitnesses themselves.

I think Crikey.com have nailed the whole situation on the head with this pithy observation:

...what is happening is not the death of newsprint, but an effective crisis of mass intellectual property and copyright.

Again - what areas of information are worth investing time, IP and money? Selecting the wrong field or channel for journalistic or publishing efforts could mean saying goodbye to any kind of return on your work.

The exponential decline of newspapers

The New York times has announced its intention to shut down the Boston Globe. The decline of traditional newspapers - and the attention given to it - has escalated rapidly over the past few months, thanks to declining advertising revenue and the ubiquitous Global Financial Crisis. Australia is fairly protected from the current drama - but the reality is that the GFC has only accelerated the inevitable.

For the past decade news online has been free. This was not a problem when it was merely a supplement to print and broadcast news. But suddenly the internet is the predominant medium, and some very upset media providers are struggling to jam the cat back into the bag. According to the New York Times, possible solutions the AP is investigating are:

"to make sure that the top search engine results for news are “the original source or the most authoritative source,” not a site that copied or paraphrased the work.

The A.P. will also pursue sites that reproduce large parts of articles, rather than using brief links, and it is developing a system to track articles online and determine whether they were used legally."

I think both of these strategies are reasonably fair, as far as they go. But the reality is that an increasing quantity of news is now made available by the people who are there to witness it - on twitter, flickr, even Wikipedia updates. Yes, there is still value in quality investigative journalism - this is hard to replace. But the people who distribute this journalism need to rethink their target audiences and how they can reach them effectively. Thanks to the internet, there is no need for newspapers to be all things to all readers. There's no need to create new content to a topic when you can link to the equivalent.

Jeff Jarvis wrote a passionate and articulate response to the increasingly shrill cries of traditional media, entitled "The "speech the NAA should hear". I highly recommend it and am slowly plowing my way through the copious comments underneath it. Lots of gems of wisdom, although everyone is still struggling to answer the same question - how do we reinvent the media business model so that it is still high quality and sustainable?

Media companies realising new media is well and truly here.

Just thought I'd share this quote from an article in the Australian Financial Review, "Opportunities in a mix of old and new" (17/2/09, p31). It's from Caroline Little, CEO of Guardian News and Media North America.

"Multimedia platforms are no longer the future, they are here and the focus is not necessarily to preserve newspapers, but to preserve core journalism values while stretching out into the new media."

The article discusses how businesses see the incredible potential of the new media landscape but are "struggling to turn unprecedented reach and audience into revenue streams". AFR is certainly one of the more backwards examples, with all of their content locked behind a subscriber wall with an astronomical price tag attached (as most of you would have discovered if you clicked on my link above). Are THEY feeling challenged?

I've spent the last few days writing an article on these very issues within the general publishing world, drawing on Sherman Young's analysis of the core values of the book. It also gave me the opportunity to really mull over and draw from Sarah Lloyd's article "A book publisher's manifesto for the 21st century". I think this will be a defining work for publishers looking to the next generation of publishing. My article may not be quite so seminal, but I'm reasonably happy with it and it will probably appear in a Wolters Kluwer publication later this year.

Information alone is not valuable - targeted information is

Don't you love how patterns form from random things? A sample of four or so blogs and articles I read over the last week lead to this epiphany for me.

Item 1:
Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 blogged on "The declining value of redundant news content on the web". He takes an example of a news story about Google that currently has 2000 separate articles tracked on Google News - and how for most of those 2000 journalists the cost of commenting and reproducing the news will not be matched by return readership, simply because there are so many other versions to read.

Item 1.5:
Sean from House of Butter observes in the context of the legal industry that while excessively duplicated news has little value, "Human editors specialising in a segment(s) of the legal industry will we think still find favour with time poor readers".

Item 2:
Hal Varian of Google was recently interviewed by the McKinsey Quarterly. There are heaps of interesting insights in the interview, but here are two that stood out for me:

We have to look at today’s economy and say, “What is it that’s really
scarce in the Internet economy?” And the answer is attention. [Psychologist]
Herb Simon recognized this many years ago. He said, “A wealth of information
creates a poverty of attention.” So being able to capture someone’s attention at
the right time is a very valuable asset.....

I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be
statisticians. People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that computer
engineers would’ve
been the sexy job of the 1990s? The ability to take data—to be able to
understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to
communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next
decades...

Sensing a theme here? Information hasn't got much value when it's just floating around out there. In fact it can have negative value -the cost of "publishing" it may outweigh the return (even on the internet!). But information that reaches the right person at the exact time they need it, thus capturing their attention - that's where the money is.

Dave Weinberger recognised this in Item 3, "Everything is Miscellaneous" (p223-4):

Miscellanized information is informaiton without borders. That means we've
been misleading CEOs for the past fifteen years by drumming into their heads
that every business is an information business. Of course information is central
to businesses, but business's reflex action has been to wall off what they know
as if it were gold. Now that information is being commoditized, it has more
value if it's set free into the miscellaneous. For example, airlines do better
when their prorietary scheduling and pricing information is made available to
travel sites...It gains even more value when innovators can combine it with
other data..."

Statisticians, innovators, librarians, publishers - whatever title you want to use, these are the people who can collect and present information in a meaningful way, at the right time, to the right people. And it is that skill that will be valuable, and valued, in the information economy of the future.

An End, and a Beginning, for the Media

"An End, and a Beginning, for the Media". James Poniewozik.

Great article from Time Magazine on how the must respond to the economic crisis and the rise of new media in order to survive and grow. Here's a taste:

People want the vetted information the news media offer--and they want to riff on it, respond to it and even, as in Mumbai, add to it. Journalists should embrace that rather than futilely fight it.

This means offering users more ways of interacting, commenting and contributing. It means seeing new media not as the dumbing down of civilization but as a new way of telling stories and even finding stories. And it means recognizing that the audience is no longer passive--it wants and expects to participate, even as it wants help in making sense of the info deluge.

Of course, what James hasn't figured out is HOW to do that profitably....*sigh*

While you're looking at Time Magazine, check out their article on Facebook and the Gaza Conflict. Most of it isn't that surprising, but it did mention that the Israeli embassy in New York hosted a press conference on Twitter.

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