Digital Discourse / Archives for Jennifer Hansen

Summary of Platform Publishing Webcast

May 3, 2013 By

The notion of platforms in business isn’t new: automakers and product makers realized the value some years ago, software developers adopted it, and most recently Amazon, Google, and Apple have built businesses around the concept.

During the Platform Publishing Webcast held on Wednesday, May 1st, Marc Strohlein, Principal at Agile Business Logic, discussed how to continuously create engaging and successful digital information products and what key ingredients should platform publishing include. He also demystified some seemingly arcane jargon and provided tools to start thinking about creating your own publishing platforms.

Marc Strohlein, Principal, Agile Business  Logic

 

 

 

The PowerPoint slides of the presentation are available here. The full recording of the Data Content Bootcamp session is available here.

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Dont miss these upcoming Content Technology & Platforms events:

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Specialist Media Conference: British Library London April 24

April 12, 2013 By

During this one-day Conference:

  • Discover new ideas for your specialist consumer or B2B publishing business.
  • Hear case studies first hand from Future, Dennis, Immediate, IDG, Incisive plus independents innovating in subs, ads, events, communities and mobile.
  • Get answers to your questions from speakers and experts in panel Q&A’s, round table discussions, practical workshops and one-on-one consultations.
  • Celebrate with the 2013 Media Pioneer Award winners and network with senior specialist publishers.

SIIA and SIPA members can save £100 by using promo code SMPRB when they book online. To book tickets click here.

  • View the Conference Program here.
  • View the Speaker profiles here.
  • View the Delegate list here.

The SIIA Content and SIPA Divisions will also be co-hosting a London Chapter meeting dinner on April 23. Please contact Jennifer Hansen for details. 

 

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Perfectly Measurable

March 18, 2013 By

Russell Perkins, ICG

Post by: Russell Perkins, ICG

How effective is your search engine marketing? It pays to take a closer look.

An interesting new study produced in cooperation with eBay and sporting the weighty title “Consumer Heterogeneity and Paid Search Effectiveness: A Large Scale Field Experiment,” raises some interesting new questions about search engine marketing (SEM) effectiveness. The study involved eBay actually suspending various types of SEM on specific search engines, and then closely monitoring the results.

Read more here

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Learn more about Data and Content through the following activities and upcoming events:

 

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Education Data: Lessons Learned

March 8, 2013 By

Russell Perkins, ICG

The $100 million national student database project  is  another great example of a “data pipe,” where one organization provides data that developers can tap into via APIs to build applications driven by that data. The data provider seeks to become an information utility, while dozens or even hundreds of different developers can identify and mine niche opportunities faster and better than any single data publisher. This is a relatively young model, but it’s quickly gaining a following.

Read more here

 

Learn more about Data and Content through the following activities and upcoming events:

 

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IIS Breakthrough Recap: Using Big Data to Build Prognostication Capabilities

February 5, 2013 By

Marie Giangrande, Public Notions

In a back stage interview, Factual Inc. CEO Gil Elbaz and Cortera Inc. CEO Jim Swift discuss the drivers and requirements to build a Big Data capability plan.

By Marie Giangrande, Public Notions

Tracking Behaviors Fuel Big Data
“It’s all about tracking events and behaviors in order to improve the accuracy of your decision making” asserts Cortera CEO Jim Swift. Cortera produces credit worthiness rankings from tracking the purchases and payments that a Company conducts. “When evaluating companies it’s good to hear what they are saying, but most important is to see their actual behaviors; tracking actual payments and purchases, for example will give a more accurate prediction of a company’s credit worthiness” continues Swift. Factual’s CEO, Gil Elbaz, agrees: “People expect and need the context to correctly interpret data… stitching together the facts and illustrating the backdrop is what Big Data is all about.” Factual offers a path for companies to source external data, enrich their own data and incorporate a variety of new data sets.

Prognostication Capabilities – The Next Competitive Battle
Behavioral targeting has been used extensively by online companies to target advertisements. Now, this concept is gaining broader appeal as a long term competitive advantage enabling Information Companies to match their content to their client’s workflow and distribution preferences. Companies can use behavior tracking to build predictions about client preferences, to identify partnerships and to develop value added services.

The pursuit of prognostication capabilities has a tremendous consequence: It redefines the importance of data in an organization. It puts an emphasis on data management capabilities. Can I handle streaming data from Twitter feeds or social media outlets? Is a ‘just in time approach’ to data collection needed? Can I enrich my data in order to monetize it? Is the data accurate and extensible?

The Strategic Information Spine

“A lot of companies are living with inefficient collection and maintenance of data. They ignore missing data and inaccurate data because they do not associate the underlying data to their ability to compete” comments Factual’s CEO, Gil Elbaz.

However, as soon as executives link their ability to compete with the value and accuracy of their data, the ROI presents itself. “It’s like an Information Spine” reflects Cortera’s CEO, Swift.”For information companies, the core stream of data is the spine and off this, hangs all their products and services.” The implication is that a company’s ability to compete will come back to the design, sourcing, accuracy and strategic health ‘of the spine’.

An Asset or Liability?

As firms embrace the use of big data for a competitive advantage, it changes all the questions and answers. It leads companies to develop a more strategic view: they identify data assets and data liabilities around maintenance and accuracy.

 “But many companies don’t discriminate between data that is an asset versus data that is more common and can be outsourced.” comments Factual’s Elbaz. “If you can buy the data, it is most likely not a strategic asset to build internally” continues Elbaz. In fact, Data that is missing, inaccurate and difficult to maintain may not only be an opportunity cost, but it can be a liability, especially if not kept fresh.

For non-proprietary data, companies are developing Data Acquisition plans to give them new agility along with a managed cost structure. “Just as IT Managers embraced Open Source code, now Business Managers are embracing Open Sourced Data” Factual CEO Elbaz concludes. Elbaz points to dozens of internal databases that should be deleted and licensed from readily available, external, sources. He asks, “Why allocate internal resources to manage data you don’t have to?”

Finding the Skills
But finding the skills to manage the internal build, the external licensing and the data architecture is hard to find. “The biggest problem is the lack of people and talent needed for companies to bootstrap their efforts” claims Cortera’s Swift. Data architects and data developers are very different from software developers and IT managers. And both CEO’s agree this is not -necessarily- the role of a CTO or CIO.

Who, inside your company, could nurture and expand your newly found Data assets? The first step, it seems, is for us to prognosticate on that.

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Filed Under: Content, Information Industry Summit

IIS Breakthrough Recap: Collaboration Fosters Innovation as a News Agency Reinvents Itself

February 5, 2013 By

 

Marie Giangrande, Public Notions

Post by Marie Giangrande, Public Notions Once a push oriented news agency, Christian Science Monitor re-invents itself with the concept of “Content Scaping”, a strategic, ongoing effort to collaborate with its readers, distributors and editors.

Known as “The Monitor”, the Christian Science Monitor is an international News Agency covering political world news across 11 countries. Faced with a continuing decline in earnings, the company embarked on a challenge to explore new digital offerings and re-invent itself.

At SIIA’s Information Industry Summit, Donal Toole, Finance and Strategy Director along with John Yemma, Editor, talked about the key actions they took to change the Agency’s direction. Today the Agency is creating premium digital subscriptions, distribution-specific packages and readership-driven content. The earnings are positive and overall growth is up.

The success of this transformation hinged on a change in philosophy and management processes. The agency started to think about their readers and distributors as new assets. And they nurtured collaboration internally and externally to understand readership needs.

The executives outlined the most impactful steps they took:

1) Tear Down the Chinese Wall

In the past, there was a ‘Chinese wall’ between the editors and readers. This was erected to maintain ‘our independent, unbiased views’ explains Donal Toole. But it meant that they did not understand what the readers wanted.

As an example, The Monitor was serving news about global events while their readers wanted ‘an analysis of the impacts’. This led the Agency to offer a premium product for Global Political Risk analysis. The executives maintain that they now see their business as a collaborative effort with their core readers. Today, they encourage readers to ask questions about articles and this is circulated to the Editorial group to help enhance their coverage.

2) Institute ‘ContentScaping’ Assessing Segments and Trialing New Offers

The term ‘ContentScaping’ refers to an internal management process to develop new information products. Executives described this as ‘constant vigilance to assess our assets and identify underserved segments’. The starting point is to use the Editorial teams to evaluate and identify new skills and capabilities. These newly identified assets are then mapped against market opportunities and market segments.

Once they make a decision to ‘super serve’ a segment, they reshape content and enter a trail phase.

“It’s very critical to test and trial every new offer, because not everything works” commented Yemma. One time they found a video interview was gaining undue attention. People were watching because there was an inappropriate joke made by a Political figure. “That was not the content we wanted to serve,” Yemma continued.

This process is on-going and has helped the organization adhere to a data-driven decision matrix while developing new content packages.

3) Build a Multidimensional, Investigative Team

“Of all the changes made, none are as important as the creation of a new Executive Leadership team,” explains Toole and Yemma. This team establishes the roadmap for the company’s products and drives the ‘ContentScaping’ process. Both executives at The Monitor underlined the importance of the multi-dimensional team to bring together varied expertise. At The Monitor, they instituted a Leadership Team across:

  • Editorial
  • Digital Outlets
  • Content Sales and Partnerships, and
  • Strategy and Analysis

“Ultimately it’s the people” concludes Toole. And for us in the audience, we can only hope we have catalysts like Toole and Yemma to take us on the path of collaboration and innovation.

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About Marie Giangrande, Public Notions

Public Notions provides Thought Leadership Programs for Information Companies

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McGraw- Hill Financial: Market Expansion Opportunities & Challenges

February 5, 2013 By

Written by Michael Thieberg, Consultant, Arche Value Management

2013 promises to be anything but business-as-usual for McGraw-Hill. Over the past few years, the conglomerate has undergone a complete transformation, from a traditional information publisher serving a variety of constituents to a more strategically focused, pure-play, B2B information and analytics provider centered on the capital and commodities markets. The culmination of this process of reinvention, following recent divestitures of its consumer assets, is the recently announced sale of its McGraw-Hill Education (MHE) business to financial sponsor Apollo Global Management for $2.5 billion, which is expected to close early this year. With organizational alignment around its core competencies in benchmarks and credit assessments to assess default risks, the newly renamed McGraw-Hill Financial (MHF) is poised to become a high-margin data and analytics provider with strong cash flow and faster growth potential.

Glenn Goldberg, President of MHF’s Commodities and Commercial Markets Division, delivered a keynote speech at the SIIA Summit that discussed the challenges and opportunities to expand the Company’s businesses and gain market share. Goldberg acknowledged that quality content, in and of itself, is not sustainable, but rather must be combined with technological innovation, and continuously improved upon to maintain relevancy in a changing environment. Breakthroughs and innovation, tied not just to technology but by also linking disparate data sets and customization, will enable MHF to better serve their customers and increase share of wallet.

McGraw-Hill’s strategic objectives will be achieved through a blend of organic growth, focused on content data analytics as well as bolt-on acquisitions. Organic growth initiatives include building new capabilities through product development, further penetrating existing markets and entering adjacent new markets, leveraging the McGraw-Hill brand beyond its core benchmarks, says Goldberg. By accelerating investments in technology to improve customer performance and outcomes, MHF will have the infrastructure to drive shareholder value.

Achieving MHF’s growth objectives will not come without its challenges, however, many of them regulatory. Goldberg urged all B2B content providers to closely pay attention to intellectual property and copyright protection, customer piracy legislation and foreign trade barriers. New government imposed proposals to restrict the gathering and use of customer data could hamper MHF’s ability to provide market intelligence services to its B2B customers. As a global enterprise, any restrictions on foreign trade would also impede the Company’s ability compete effectively on a global basis. And while the integration of social media and mobile delivery platforms is needed enhance customer engagement, Goldberg ceded, at this point in time, there is no clear path to make money and enter the workflow of the customer though these channels.

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Michael Thieberg
Michael Thieberg is a independent consultant at Arche Value Management (AVM), a corporate finance advisory firm. Mr. Thieberg has over 15 years of strategic financial management experience in corporate development, investment banking and private equity investing with industry expertise in the B2B information and marketing services sectors.

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