We were fortunate to have GamblingCompliance CEO Greg Kilminster stop in this week for a chat during a visit to their Washington office. Headquartered in London, GamblingCompliance is your classic online publishing business, putting out strong content that they sell through the various channels.

We’ll have more on Greg in a future member profile. One thing in particular that struck me is his commitment to eLearning. While the rest of the world conjures who should work in pajamas vs. the possibilities of my innovating with my co-worker Katrina in the kitchen at lunch every day, I feel the potential of eLearning should register higher for us. I’m staring at a headline in The Washington Post this week: “U-Va [University of Virginia] embraces the online lecture model.” Says Professor Philip Zelikow: “True, it’s a lot of conversations to have with the professor, and you don’t get to talk back directly. But on the plus side, you get to stop, pause, fast forward, rewind—or if you get tired of the professor, just turn him off. So, welcome to The Modern World.”

What seems to make eLearning so attractive these days is just what SIPA members often speak about in a more general sense—it fits into customers’ workflows. They can watch it any time, and as Zelikow—who served as executive director of the 9/11 Commission and is a member of President Obama’s Intelligence Advisory Board—mentioned, you can go back and forth as other technologies and real life interrupt.

Zelikow refers to the advantage of being able to “read particular passages from a textbook or another source just as that information is most relevant: when a student is about to watch a related lecture.” This struck me as very similar to what SIPA is doing with our Book of Models webinars. If you’re signed up for this Wednesday’s webinar, you get the related chapter in Dan Brown’s highly regarded book. This reinforcement can be a crucial tool for learning. Zelikow is also delighted to be freed up to lead discussions with his students every Tuesday, instead of just reciting the material. He calls it the “most powerful design” in his 20 years of teaching.

How do you get started? If you’re doing webinars, you’re probably more than halfway there. There was a wonderful SIPA webinar given by Jonathan Ray of Access Intelligence and Bradden Blair from Contexo University last March that members can access on our website. (Both the recording and transcript are there.) You can be sure there will also be much discussion on eLearning at SIPA’s Annual Conference, June 5-7 in Washington, D.C.

Ray and Blair said the key to getting into eLearning is getting to know the ADDIE model, an instructional design standard with five phases—analysis, design, development, implementation and evaluation. They go into exceptional detail in the webinar. They also delve into instructor compensation, pricing—they sell programs per seat—and engagement, where they agree with Zelikow about the importance of a live component. Said Blair: “I think the empirical research out there on just human learning and cognition has shown that the more that you can engage the learners and ask them to do something in response to that content, the greater likelihood there is going to be a retention.”

Zelikow’s massive open online course (MOOC) offers people around the world a free dive into higher education at its best. In all, about 47,000 people registered for it. Yes, it’s free—it’s a huge industry; Coursera, edX and Khan Academy are some of the huge players—but for specialized publishers offering their highly niched content, the profit potential is obviously high.

It can also create some personalities in your ranks, never a bad thing. And the bottom line—well, besides the actual bottom line—is that both students and instructors seem to prefer eLearning. Even the chancellor of the University System of Maryland, William Kirwan, said both factions are “more satisfied.”

As Kilminster left our office—excited about SIPA’s London Conference in September—we were excited to see a member looking to take his classic publishing business in new directions. We’re happy to both lead, as we did with the webinar, and follow closely as he and other members pursue this road. More reports to come.

Subscribe to the SIPAlert Daily for more specialized publishers industry news.

Ronn Levine began his career as a reporter for The Washington Post and has won numerous writing and publications awards since. Most recently, he spent 12 years at the Newspaper Association of America covering a variety of topics before joining SIPA in 2009 as managing editor. Follow Ronn on Twitter at @RonnatSIPA

Digital ads. It’s a revenue stream that most members have not tapped into very much. The website Digiday brought it up last week in a good post. Josh Sternberg wrote that the old way of charging—CPM, cost per thousand views—doesn’t make sense for small publishers.

“While they may be large enough to have influence over a particular demographic, looking at them on a buyer’s spreadsheet, they’re still peanuts,” he wrote. “Instead, by positioning their expertise about their audience in a marketplace that has gone whole hog into pageviews, these smaller publishers are making a go at creating working models.”

He cites the “publisher as agency” model, where the publisher actually helps brands develop advertising content for their site and others. This, of course, moves closer to native advertising which I discussed here earlier this month. But it also takes advantage of some of the things that publishers do well—creating content, writing, knowing your subject and audience. The Digiday story referred to an interview on another site—AdExchanger—with Todd Anderman, the new president of sales, marketing and operations for Thrillist Media Group.

Instead of looking at your digital ad scope haphazardly, Anderman wants you to focus. “It’s not just about throwing up an ad unit around [your] content, though those opportunities do exist. It is about finding out from marketers what product they have that should be recommended to our audience.” He believes that ads on the site should be of value to your audience. And he even wants it in a similar tone to what you’re doing. “The idea is to do it from an editorial perspective so that it completely resonates with the users, as opposed to marketing messages that comes purely from outside.”

It’s truly amazing how far things have come—from that never-to-be-tread-upon line between editorial and business to the almost complete melding of them. Wasn’t it just yesterday that The Los Angeles Times was ready to fold when a scandal erupted with an article in their magazine that dared cross the line? Now that seems light years ago. There are no more lines—though one SIPA CEO suggested sales and marketing might be on the verge.

“If we make sure that you start with a complementary message to the content we run, it actually becomes the content,” Anderman says. “To the user, it is just as valuable as any other piece of content.” This actually has exciting possibilities. Say you post a video of a one-on-one interview with an industry player or government official. In the past, we’re used to seeing a preceding ad that’s of totally no interest to us—but if we want to see that video we ride it out. What if it’s interesting ad content to your audience? Maybe an ad for something espoused in the interview. That could be a win-win scenario.

Again, the line crossing of native ads sounds a bit extreme. But Anderman is one of the most successful players in digital ads. He was asked about where to draw the line, but except for saying, “We will clearly differentiate between the two for the user,” he doesn’t care that much. It’s quality he’s after—and dollars, of course.

Maybe that’s not so bad. Digiday quotes John Shankman, publisher of The Awl, which gets 425,000 uniques per month. “Data and production value will become what we compete on more and more.” (SIPA2013 will have a must-attend Pre-Conference session on data with Russell Perkins, the guru on the topic. He will be able to explain its growing importance AND how you can profit from it A LOT better than I can.) Shankman believes that “you can win business on production value.” In other words, who is providing the best overall experience for users? Content, ads, events, videos, etc. It’s all one.

Even a daily deals publisher like Thrillist is not after pageviews any more. Say they’re selling a bar crawl, then on the right you’ll see “native ads” for shirts, shoes, ties and a membership-only penthouse pool club. It’s all high production value, and then those same ads can be mixed and matched with their other content—chef tastings, March Madness get-togethers, turntable tutoring, etc.

Ties on a bar crawl?

Ronn Levine began his career as a reporter for The Washington Post and has won numerous writing and publications awards since. Most recently, he spent 12 years at the Newspaper Association of America covering a variety of topics before joining SIPA in 2009 as managing editor. Follow Ronn on Twitter at @RonnatSIPA

Every time I hear a member talk about having a good renewal rate but the company could use more new customers/members, I think referrals. I run a social group on the side and every day I see new people joining—the primary reason they list is that someone recommended it. Now that’s a much smaller and cheaper scale, but still the basic idea holds up: They’ve been referred.

Harnessing the power of references and referrals seems like an obvious win-win. But Bill Lee, author of The Hidden Wealth of Customers: Realizing the Untapped Value of Your Most Important Asset (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012), believes that “companies don’t take it seriously. You just can’t half-heartedly paste a few new tactics on top of your current operations and expect advocates to start singing your praises,” says Lee. “Nor can you rely on a few enthusiastic supporters with vibrant personalities to carry your message. He quotes Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff who said that even though every company knows customer references are important, most companies have a lax approach to actually managing them.

Here are 7 ways Lee advises to improve your likelihood of success:

1. Increase executive support. Too often, customer reference programs are rolled out with limited resources and staffed by junior people working off a spreadsheet—a recipe for failure, says Lee. A successful reference program must cross boundaries, working cooperatively between divisions. He’s worried about good references staying within sales and wants you to encourage your best customers to advocate on social media.

2. Use more imagination. Out with pdf case studies and long PowerPoints, Lee advises, and in with testimonials, serving on advisory boards, and participating in your customer communities. He believes customer advocates can also lead customer communities and forums, create content and video. That may be a lot to ask, but the idea of giving your customers a reason to go on social media or join a community to help plug your brand seems sound.

3. Commit to resources. Lee doesn’t want this to be an afterthought. “Enthusiastic references…can close deals that were stuck, convince skeptical analysts or media that your product or service is the real deal, build your brand on their social networks, provide referrals—the least expensive and most powerful marketing tool out there.” Giving a list of prospective references to an assistant is not enough, he says. You don’t know if they’re happy or strategically significant.

4. Install the right systems and processes. This includes an adequate reference management system (RMS) that automates as much of the data needs of the program as possible. To engage these customers you should have all the data. What is their history with you? “What policies have you established for references and testimonials in your sales and marketing efforts?” Lee asks. At what points in the sales process should references be used? What is your social media strategy? How will customer videos, stories, and other customer content be used?

5. Integrate references into the growth strategy. “Managers of reference programs that are well integrated into strategy can tell you, in your next product launch, how many customer references you’ll need,” says Lee. They’ll also tell you from which customer segments these references should come and who can be an early adapter? Keep everyone in the referral loop.

6. Measure and understand the business value of references. “Reference programs can dramatically improve sales productivity by freeing salespeople from the time-intensive task of hunting down references themselves,” Lee explains. Managers should continually measure the business value of referrals instead of the number of new references found. In other words, gather input, tout the output.

7. Give customers a good reason to reference them. Lee does not advocate “bribes” to get referrals. He believes the smart companies think through why their customers would advocate for them. Get creative in providing appropriate reciprocal value to your potential advocate, he says. “Does she like the limelight? If so, offer to do a joint case study or marketing piece. Does she want to affiliate with her peers? Invite her to your user groups or customer events. Would she like a higher profile in the industry? Hopefully, you know your customer well enough to know what is valuable to her.

Ronn Levine began his career as a reporter for The Washington Post and has won numerous writing and publications awards since. Most recently, he spent 12 years at the Newspaper Association of America covering a variety of topics before joining SIPA in 2009 as managing editor. Follow Ronn on Twitter at @RonnatSIPA

Max Hotopf, President, Healthcare Europa, London

SIPA: You have an interesting background.
MAX: Yes I started off working in public relations and advertising and then moved into trade journalism ending up on the Daily Mail. Being a journalist was great as it gives you so much more freedom from censorship. But it was very useful to have a PR/marketing background. It meant I had the rudiments of direct marketing.

Yes, most journalists stay clear of the business side.
Or are horrified if they are asked to sell. They position themselves as skeptical purchasers of information pumped to them by PRs. I think good journalists have to be good salesmen. They have to win the trust of contacts for instance. Bernstein and Woodward sold themselves to the Watergate story.

It takes time though, which I’m sure you know.
Yes. It’s hard to build a new subscription site from scratch. In fact I remember people on the SIPA listserv saying in 2008 that it would be impossible to launch a new newsletter in a new industry as response rates are so low.

Though you did do this before.
I set up my last subscription newsletter, IT Europa, in 1991—mailed stuff out, which [in some respects] was actually easier. The barriers to entry are harder today, don’t you think? Just the technology alone. Although I did launch this business on Subhub at just $70 a month. But IT is a huge cost these days.

What does Healthcare Europa focus on?
We write about private healthcare service across Europe. It was something no one else was covering. We’re all B2B, going to investors, nursing home groups, hospitals, banks. There’s really good journalism value about it. It seems good content has become more valuable now.

How often does your newsletter come out?
It’s weekly with a big 20,000-word pdf issue at the end of 10 months. We don’t necessarily always send the weekly on the same day—depends when news might break. We think of ourselves as the journal of record in this field. We dig deeper. I find Google news to be helpful there. It provides me with a good introduction when I ring people up for a dig around which often results in something totally different. I may also talk to a guy from Sweden and benefit from his news sources.

Did you have a hard time pricing your content?
We’re a niche market, so it wasn’t that hard to figure pricing. I knew about how large the market is and about what we would get, and what we needed to take in. It’s priced at about £900 for a year and £2300 for a site license.

And your renewal rates?
Around 90%. But getting new members is hard. I tried telesales without much luck. It’s hard to recruit good people to do it.

Have you done much with referrals since your renewal rate is so high?
No. I should try that. This is not the most open of industries though. Writers may not even put their names at the end of blogs. Healthcare is a bit secretive

I see you have a Conference.
Yes, this is our 3rd year and it keeps getting bigger. I find differentiation to be very important. No one else is producing a conference like this [whereas] there’s a plethora of events funded by academics or the public sector.

That’s a good foundation.
Maybe—or maybe it means there isn’t a particularly big audience. Actually, no there is a huge audience, it is a slow burn but we keep adding new constituents like medtech. Healthcare is tough to cover, and there are no shortcuts in subscription publishing. We’ve done well with personalized introductions. ‘Hi Ronn, here is your…’ in a little headline article. Just a jaunty little note. You can personalize with the new CRM system.

How much do you let people read before they have subscribing?
We have headlines with the first line of the story. The problem is I think they kind of get used to that level of “subscribing.” Maybe I should send them the whole article when it’s particularly good to show the difference.

And you do all this with just you and a deputy editor plus a part-time administrator and your wife working part time? Pretty good.
Yes, my wife works some on IT and has a medical background that helps sometimes. But we do take August off and two weeks at December plus a week at Easter as we have five kids. Sometimes it feels like a lifestyle business, other times like a build and sell.

Thanks Max. We’ll see you in September at SIPA’s London Conference.

Subscribe to the SIPAlert Daily for more specialized publishers industry news.

Ronn Levine began his career as a reporter for The Washington Post and has won numerous writing and publications awards since. Most recently, he spent 12 years at the Newspaper Association of America covering a variety of topics before joining SIPA in 2009 as managing editor. Follow Ronn on Twitter at @RonnatSIPA

How much content should you give away to entice people to subscribe or join? It’s a tough question. Last week I spoke with Max Hotopf, president of Healthcare Europa, and he said something interesting about this quandary.

“We have headlines with the first line of the story [available for anyone]. The problem is I think [certain readers] kind of get used to that level of ‘subscribing.’ Maybe I need to send them the whole article when it’s particularly good to show the difference.”

Most of us do that to some extent—read the first line or paragraph of listings that are sent to us. A behemoth like Yahoo just reconfigured their home page into a whirlpool of first lines, designed to draw us into the warm waters. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. The prevailing thought might be that if it’s free, we’ll take that next click. But what if this sub-culture has gotten us too used to a one-line world? With the limited time we all have, what if one is all we think we need?

Looking at today’s Yahoo homepage…Lance Armstrong won’t tell all to USADA—fine; water tested in L.A.—enough; crude oil prices decline-got it; India going to Mars—interesting. Am I clicking through? Not really. So what’s the answer?

A relatively new site called MATTER stresses the quality of their journalism. It “isn’t quite a website, it’s not really a magazine and it’s not exactly a book publisher either,” they write. “Instead, MATTER is something else—a new model for high-quality journalism, an area that’s been hit hard by the transition from print to digital media.”

That perception works against SIPA members, many of whom have come from newspapers and the like and continue to create exceptional journalism. MATTER offers free previews of their long-form articles. The advantage of these is that they are long enough to show off their excellence but still only a portion of the entire piece. Then you can pay 99 cents to get a “distraction-free” web edition and an invitation to a Q&A with the author. I’ve often said that I like the Q&A segments of webinars—sometimes better than the presented content; they can address specific needs—and here’s a business focusing on that.

After that, MATTER offers memberships—I believe starting as low as 99 cents a month—where you then get a place on their “Editorial Board.” “The system is based around All Our Ideas, an open source tool developed at Princeton. Members can use the tool to suggest ideas for stories, filter and refine suggestions made by others, and vote on the subjects they want to see us cover.”

I just received an email from a member listing the five areas he would like to see covered: social media strategies that won’t take all your time; new pricing/marketing strategies for newsletters; enforcing copyright (there will be a terrific pre-conference session on this at SIPA 2013!); online tools for editors; and how publishers are using text messaging to reach subscribers. Imagine if we—or any company—could get this open source tool to elicit more great ideas, filter and refine them and then have our audience select what would be most helpful?

Contrast MATTER’s pricing with a typical member like Hotopf, who is charging around £900 for subscriptions and £2300 for site licenses. It’s such a wide swath! His renewal rate is 90% so he’s putting out quality, useful stuff. But getting new members is tough. He has the data on the people who are just peeping. Does he give them a free preview like MATTER? Does he invite them for some kind of survey just to involve them more in the information? Or does he try to encourage more referrals since his audience is seemingly happy with what they’re getting? Or D, all of the above?

“MATTER is building their most valuable asset: community,” wrote Craig Mod in his recent, much talked about article titled Subcompact Publishing. “They’re hungry and talented. And they’re the tip of an iceberg.”

Mod believes that MATTER successfully marries the old and the new—“an understanding of editorial ethics, storytelling, craft” while changing “the shape of the content and distribution models of the content to match digital.” This is, of course, what SIPA members have the power to do. How to best show that off to attract new members remains up in the new and rarefied air.

Subscribe to the SIPAlert Daily for more specialized publishers industry news.

Ronn Levine began his career as a reporter for The Washington Post and has won numerous writing and publications awards since. Most recently, he spent 12 years at the Newspaper Association of America covering a variety of topics before joining SIPA in 2009 as managing editor. Follow Ronn on Twitter at @RonnatSIPA

Highly regarded author Daniel Pink looks at sales a little differently in his new book, To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others.

“When you go into certain types of encounters, whether it’s a sales call, asking someone out a date, or pitching an idea, the conventional view is that ahead of time we should pump ourselves up,” Pink said at a recent Greater Washington Board of Trade breakfast (published in The Washington Post). “We have our self talk: ‘You can do this.’ ‘I got this.’ The research shows you are actually better off asking yourself a question. Instead of saying you can do this, you are better off with interrogative self talk, asking, can you do this?

“Why? Questions by their very nature are active. If I ask questions, I start to think of answers. Can I do this? Yes, I’ve been in this place before. I’ve done my research. I know the objections, and I’m prepared to address them. I’ve got to remember to make this point. What you do in a more muscular way, is you prepare.”

Here are 3 more sales tips from Pink and 3 from the recent Breakthrough Conference:

1. The people who do best at selling are neither pure extroverts nor introverts; they are in the middle. Research from a Wharton study, said Pink, “shows extroverts are more likely to take sales jobs, extroverts are more likely to get hired, and extroverts are more likely to get promoted. But…the classic, glad-handing extroverts only did a little bit better than the introverts cowering in the corner…Why are the extroverts not very good? They don’t listen. They are too pushy. Why are [the introverts] not very good. They don’t assert. They are quiet. The people who are in the middle, they have the best of both worlds. They know when to talk. They know when to listen. They know when to push. They know when to hold back. They are much more attuned. The good news is most people are ambiverts.”

2. Look for buoyancy in sales reps. Amid what Pink calls the “ocean of rejection,” how do you remain afloat?

3. You must take the high road now in selling. “If you know a lot more than your prospect … if your prospect doesn’t have many choices, if your prospect has no means to talk back, you can totally take the low road. But that’s not our world,” Pink said. “We are basically forced to take the high road, and the high road requires a much more fundamental human approach: understand where other people are coming from, be clear, be honest, put the other’s person’s interest first, have an ethic of service. Those things might sound superficially touchy feely but they are actually very hard-headed ways to [sell] effectively.

4. Empower your sales people with information. The world has changed. There’s a new customer who has all the same information you do, George Colony, head of Forrester Research, told the Breakthrough audience. “To serve empowered customers you must empower your teams. You must support a constantly changing portfolio of channels. And you’d better coach your CEO; their average age is 59—they first went to work with Wite-Out and a typewriter. You have to educate them and educate their children.”

5. You need to move from a one-way organization to a partnership with customers, where you are interested in what will serve them. This comes from a session delivered by the leadership team at the Christian Science Monitor. “We moved from being a silo organization to a collaborative one, where we talk to each other all the time,” said Editor John Yemma. “The new generation is not reading like the old.”

6. Take the time to know what your customer wants to achieve. “This is a trend we see,” said Denzil Rankine, executive chairman of AMR International. “It’s not only a matter of fitting into your customers’ workflow; you need to understand what they’re trying to achieve.”

Subscribe to the SIPAlert Daily for more specialized publishers industry news.

Ronn Levine began his career as a reporter for The Washington Post and has won numerous writing and publications awards since. Most recently, he spent 12 years at the Newspaper Association of America covering a variety of topics before joining SIPA in 2009 as managing editor. Follow Ronn on Twitter at @RonnatSIPA

If you are going to do something new, do you have to do it well right off? Or do you get some slack for venturing out?

I’m branching off from another good SIPA marketing forum discussion started by Greg Krehbiel of Kiplinger’s. “I’m starting to think—based on anecdotal evidence—that people are less particular about errors on mobile websites than they are on desktop websites. It’s almost as if mobile websites are so commonly screwy—because of the device or the connection or whatever—that customer expectation is very low.”

Then Stephanie Williford, CEO of EB Medicine, agreed, writing, “There is definitely an expectation that full-version sites should work seamlessly and be easy to use, but we don’t yet seem to have that same expectation for mobile sites.”

This led me to an article today in MediaPost News’ Marketing Daily. Aaron Baar writes about a J.D. Power and Associates study examining consumer experience with companies based on social interaction. How are companies doing socially for both marketing and service, and how does that affect customer choices?

“Hardly any companies are doing equally well on social marketing and social servicing,” Jacqueline Anderson, director of social media and text analytics at J.D. Power, told Marketing Daily. She says the discrepancy has a negative impact on brand perception. But of highly satisfied customers, “87% said their online interaction with the company ‘positively impacted’ their likelihood of purchase from that company.” But it’s not as harmful on the other end. Only 10% of dissatisfied customers said that their experiences “negatively impacted” on their purchase decision.

Those numbers actually present a bit of a win-win scenario for you on the social front—and perhaps we can extend that to mobile. Do it well and you’ll be rewarded; do it not so well and there won’t be many deep repercussions. That’s a nice cushion to have, although it probably won’t continue for much longer as technological expectations improve.

The servicing and marketing variances pose another question: Are departments within companies talking to each other enough? At the recent Pre-Conference session in Miami on sales, Dan Oswald, BLR’s CEO, spoke about the relationship between sales and marketing and the tension that can be created. “[Marketing is] generating [the leads] and you’re not closing them,” he said. “Managing both and trying to find the optimal point between the two” is the key. Is that healthy, he was asked. “It’s conflict, but it is healthy.”

In the same session, Bobby Edgil, BLR’s sales director, took the leap to customer service. He is in favor of putting customer service and sales side by side. “Make sure the managers get along and communicate,” he said. If a customer calls with a problem after buying, Edgil wants them tended to. Tell them, “We want to put you in touch with a specialist in customer service.”

This apparently rings true for J.D. Power’s Anderson as well. “Many companies are still organized around servicing on one side and marketing on the other,” she told Marketing Daily. The advice would then be to figure out what your customers are using social media for—information updates, friendly interaction, customer service, discounts, community engagement, etc.—and then address those uses head on. “It’s kind of a failure to understand why consumers are reaching out,” Anderson says.

Bringing that back around, it’s good to venture out in new directions and okay to make mistakes—but perhaps more so on the smoothing-technology-out end. The failure that Anderson is talking about has a good chance of being prevented by communicating both inside your company and outside to your audience.

Subscribe to the SIPAlert Daily for more specialized publishers industry news.

Ronn Levine began his career as a reporter for The Washington Post and has won numerous writing and publications awards since. Most recently, he spent 12 years at the Newspaper Association of America covering a variety of topics before joining SIPA in 2009 as managing editor. Follow Ronn on Twitter at @RonnatSIPA