I just received an email from MP Greeson, president of The Diffusion Group. They are a research and advisory firm focused on the connected consumer, in particular the broadband media ecosystem and the “Internet of Things.” Greeson writes that he grew up in the town of Moore, Okla., actually attending the schools that were destroyed by the tornado. “I rarely put my name on a cause, but this one hits home,” he writes. “Donations may be made online at www.unitedwayokc.org or by mail to United Way of Central Oklahoma, P.O. Box 837, Oklahoma City, OK 73101 with notation for May Tornado Relief.” Thanks for that.

A new member, Wilkinson Publishing in Melbourne, Australia, sends a very interesting daily ezine featuring well-written stories that often plug books they are selling. For instance, a story this week on the retirement of Manchester United Manager Sir Alex Ferguson led to a discussion of leaders. “Management theory is it is best to make a clean break. Don’t let an old master hover over the new leader. According to Nicholas Barnett and his team at Insync Surveys…‘A 100 per cent rigid rule is not always best these days.’…Alan Hargreaves, author of the new book, 60 Second Recharge [offered by Wilkinson], sees the good, the bad and the ugly transitions as he consults [internationally]. ‘There are leaders and there are leaders. Call it the Recharge factor. The best have an amazing ability to stay young, innovative and passionate.’”

Here’s information about members who are coming to SIPA 2013, June 5-7, in Washington, D.C.:

You might want to talk about video to someone from Editorial Projects in Education, publishers of Education Week. They have an excellent feature called Leaders to Learn From with 2-3 minute videos of school superintendents from across the nation. (And catch today’s SIPA webinar on video if you can.) Look for Ryan Lanier, digital content sales & marketing manager.

eLearning is definitely one of the next big things in our industry, and PaperClip Communications will be a member to talk to in Washington. They have jumped into it with The Residence Life eLearning Training program and done a great job with the landing page, giving plenty of information and providing both a short and full demo for customers. Look for Andy McLaughlin, president, or Katherine Bitgood.

Interested in getting more advertising for your website? Talk to Dawn Sweeney, Donna Jefferson and Heather Grant from Jefferson Communications. A quick look at their Chesapeake Family website shows ads for the state of Maryland, an orthopaedic center and a water park. Click to a blog page and see more ads, for a health center, summer camp and music festival.

Barry Graubart has joined Connotate as VP, Product Strategy. Connotate is a market leader in web content extraction. They enable pricing intelligence, job posting aggregation, automated background checks, financial data aggregation and lots more—all done at scale.

Jack Farrell & Associates, an executive search firm, is a new SIPA member that will be represented at the Conference. They are dedicated to recruiting the top talent for clients in publishing, media and digital health information.

If you’re looking for a company that has been successful in social media, check with David Burns, VP/publisher and Katie Christianson, senior marketing planner, of Magna Publications. At the start of 2012, Magna created new groups on LinkedIn and worked to establish a more consistent and visible presence on their existing Twitter and Facebook accounts. As their social communities grew, the multiplier effect helped amplify each like, share and retweet.

Want to get on the airwaves? Guy Cecala of Inside Mortgage Finance Publications and Bob Coleman of Coleman Publishing would be good people to ask. Both have frequently appeared as industry experts on national news shows. You might have to be prepared to put an occasional dinner on hold, however. They would be happy to speak with you about the plusses and minuses of their relative stardom.

If you have a copyright question, be sure to attend the session of—or corner—Lesley Ellen Harris of copyrightlaws.com on Wednesday.  She is a popular speaker and has another conference in San Diego to head to on Thursday.

Almost every person attending SIPA 2013—all 300-plus—probably has something to tell you that can be valuable to your business. But there’s only one way to get that information—come to Washington, D.C., June 5-7 and join the crowd.

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 @SIPAOnline

The keynotes, sessions and speakers for the SIPA 2013 Conference, June 5-7 in Washington, D.C. have all been carefully selected to deliver the most relevant and timely information possible. Here are some excellent tips from speakers pertaining to their sessions or keynotes. (Check here for the current list of more than 200 attendees.)

1. “Perception of value is extremely important with webinars…” said Leslie Davidson, a top webinar consultant. Webinars help not only to drive revenue but also establish your thought leadership to members and customers. But how can you take those webinars to the next level? The expert panel will share best-practice techniques as well as creative new approaches to event development, pricing and marketing. Learn how to resell your webinar content, increase price points and profits and build your marketing value proposition. “I’ve had at least two clients who insisted we lower the pricing on their webinars and in both cases, it suppressed response,” Davidson said. “Make the regular price higher, then discount down from there. That way you show the true value but can still offer lower early-bird pricing. And it also makes it much easier to charge more over time…”
Davidson, Novella Green, director of learning, Thompson Media Group LLC, and Lindsay Konzak, vice president, Gale Media will present Make Even MORE Money With Webinars, Friday, June 7, at 10:20 a.m.

2. “Is content marketing another kick in the stomach for publishers?” asks Joe McCambley, co-founder, The Wonderfactory. Everyone’s talking about “brand journalism,” “content marketing” and “native advertising.” But in a world where advertisers create, aggregate, curate and syndicate their own content, he wonders, is there still a role for publishers? Will advertisers compete with publishers for consumer attention, or will the bonds between publishers and advertisers grow stronger than ever? McCambley will discuss the path that led Coca-Cola to become one of the world’s newest specialty publishers. He’ll also give a glimpse of what advertising might look like when advertisers think like publishers and publishers think like advertisers.
Joe McCambley of The Wonderfactory, will deliver a keynote address on Thursday, June 6 at 8:30 a.m.

3. Both Andrew Elston, CEO of iCopyright, and Andrea Broadbent, director, eBusiness development and licensing for McGraw Hill Financial, used the phrase “content gone wild” in a recent webcast. “[Because of this,] there are new types of licensing agreements that we need to understand,” Elston said. “The web spawns new business models and license types. Licensing professionals need to stay on top of it. [Things are] changing from cut-and-dried agreements to limited agreements. Now licensing professionals need to be ready for anything—no more one size fits all agreements.” This session will cover the full landscape of revenue opportunities in publishing and republishing in aftermarkets, and what key risks exist in the publishing life cycle. You’ll also get advice on how to protect your company from the risk of losing control of your content in the aftermarket process. “How do you keep up with all the new products?” asked Broadbent. “I go to all the SIIA Conferences.”
Elston and Broadbent – along with Angus Robertson, will present Stretch Your Content to the Limit: Rules, Risks and ROI in Content Licensing, Thursday, June 6, 9:30 a.m.

4. You want to charge for access to your online content, but there are many ways to do that. Do you charge by the drink, after some pre-determined number of views, or do you only wall off certain content? Do you give people a preview of your for-pay content? (Even an entity as big as The New York Times seems unsure of their paywall—they’re now making videos available free to everyone.) How do you integrate the paywall with your fulfillment system? Can you bundle the paywall with print subscriptions? What are the best pricing strategies? This session will cover the waterfront on successful strategies for paywall sites both with and without advertising.
Minal Bopaiah, editor, Subscription Site Insider, will speak on Strategies for Successful Paywalls, Thursday, June 6 at 2:15 p.m.

5. “We offer the why of the story and solutions, and then tailor that for a specialized audience that cares about a higher level of knowledge,” said John Yemma, editor of The Christian Science Monitor. “So we took our human relations people and other brainy people in the company and turned them to web first. We learned web practices and search optimization, developed quizzes. We’ve been able to increase unique visitors tenfold.”
John Yemma, editor, and Jonathan Wells, managing publisher, The Christian Science Monitor, Luncheon keynotes, Thursday, June 6, 21, 12:15 p.m.

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 @SIPAOnline

Lately, I’ve been receiving all these emails from Washington, D.C.’s oldest historical buildings-the Marine Corps War Memorial, the Washington National Cathedral, Dumbarton Oaks-asking me to vote for them on social media. And I didn’t understand why. Now I do.

According to an article in The Washington Post, the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the American Express Foundation are bringing a $1 million “American Idol”-inspired contest to Washington this spring. The historical properties with the most tweets, friends and votes can win as much as $100,000. The National Cathedral is apparently in the lead. “The organization taped a YouTube video featuring mason foreman Joe Alonso to make a pitch for the 106-year-old building, which still has safety netting in place to protect against crumbling mortar.”

This may be the most clear-cut social media ROI we’ve seen: get the most traffic, win $100,000. The mix of old and new reminds me a little of my conversation with Lisa Anthony, publisher of InFaith Publishing Group. “We’re trying to help [the priests with tweeting],” she said. “They don’t know how to use LinkedIn, and they’re intimidated by Facebook. That’s more for the parents and parishioners and takes more commitment than Twitter. Sixty-three is the average age of a Catholic priest, so you can see there is some educating to do…We’ll try things on social media to test the market. We put a saints piece on Facebook and it went over really well…For Twitter we’ll post surveys and links to promotions or content we’re running. We’ve even done force-free trials on Twitter.”

Anthony uses SocialOomph.com to help her with social media. “It helps me schedule my tweets throughout the day, so I’m not overdoing it,” she said.

The upcoming SIPA 2013 Conference, June 5-7, in Washington, D.C., will feature both a session and a roundtable on social media—and many networking conversations. Social Media: The Big Picture for Marketers will be led by Rachel Yeomans, vice president of marketing at Astek and proprietor of The Working Wardrobe website.

Lesley Ellen Harris, who was profiled in this space on Monday and will be speaking on copyright at the Conference, is also hooked on social media. Her advice: “Go on Twitter, see who’s retweeting what. Go into LinkedIn and contribute to discussions and dialogue. Social media is fine but it’s not the first thing I would do every day. It’s a way to share what you’re doing. But you can’t get carried away. If you have an addictive personality, stay away. Be very realistic. My friend says that at the end of every workday, she spends 15 minutes on LinkedIn. That’s okay if you can keep to that. I love blogging, but it takes a lot of time [whereas] I can do Twitter while eating lunch or in a carpool line.”

There is also a method to the madness of supporting your local historical monument this way. “Voting online, posting photos and tweets after visits all score points and—ideally—increases the buildings’ exposure to visitors and the organizations’ capacity for marketing through social media,” the Post wrote.

It’s an interesting concept, almost teetering towards gamification. Have a contest, draw people to your site. The key might be that once they’re there, you need to take full advantage and engage. Sure enough, there it is on the National Museum of Women in the Arts site: “We broke the glass ceiling—now we need a new roof! These funds will support vital roof repairs that will ensure the continued integrity of NMWA’s building—and a place for women artists.”

Clear and clever. Social media may require some out-of-the-box thinking—and may not always lead so directly to monetization—but its upside is very high. Try things.

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 @SIPAOnline

SIPA: You will be delivering a session at SIPA 2013 on Copyright for Publishers. What will you cover?
LESLEY: We’ll talk beyond the basics of copyright law, one of the biggest issues being ownership of content. What I saw [at the SIPA Marketing Conference] in Miami was a lot of questions on reuse and adaptation of content. It’s really important that companies own the rights to the content they use and adapt. Online has opened up obviously more opportunities for new content and reuse of content. Content is now regularly modified and adapted, and often used in a multimedia manner. Whatever content wasn’t and isn’t created in-house is not owned by SIPA members and needs to be licensed.

Sounds like an hour isn’t enough time.
We’ll try. Members also need to be careful when using third-party content. If you’re inserting a photo, image or table, and you don’t own the rights in it, you need to get permission. We’ll talk about when and how and hopefully make the process simple and clear.

I read this week that a person can be liable for an inflammatory retweet!
That may be going a bit far. We want to be retweeted—that’s the idea. That goes into the area of implied consent but let’s save that for the permissions talk in my session.

I saw in your bio that you were interested in copyrights early in your career.
One summer in law school I worked in a lobbying organization on copyright for publishers and authors and liked it right away. This was in Toronto. I was originally interested in copyright as a writer; most people never heard of the Internet back then, and there were only a handful of copyright lawyers in Toronto. I then started working for the Canadian government on revising the copyright laws—before my brief career change.

What was that?
I left government to go write screenplays in Los Angeles. I actually had a screenplay optioned. It was called Trouble in Bangkok and was about a writer whose fictional character comes to life and has an affair with him.

That sounds like a movie I saw last year called Ruby Sparks.
There aren’t many original ideas in Hollywood. The whole experience was a lot of fun; I was single and it was short-term. There’s a huge Canadian community out there. Some of them knew of me and put me in touch with the head of the Writers Guild of America. They hired me as a consultant and helped me with visas. Back then you needed a visa.

And that eventually led you back to Toronto?
I decided to move on and open a law practice in digital media. Always thought I would produce my own script but haven’t yet.

Yes, I’ve heard you’re a big fan of analytics.
Personally, I love everything digital. If possible, I would spend more time online. In fact, if I was starting out now in a career, I’m not sure I would pick law—even though I’ve had a great career in every way, writing books and traveling. Technology and laws change hand in hand over the decades. Going to school now, I might do something “more” digital and more creative.

You seem pretty digitally in tune now.
I’m lucky in all my teaching that I talk to people who follow my blog. I get a lot of feedback that way. Even though I look at my analytics every day or night, there’s more to it. You need to be intuitive, talk to your audience and see what other people are doing. And make sure you like what you do.

How do you get everything done?
I try to divide my work time between my copyright and new media law newsletter, teaching and writing books—the latter which I try to avoid. My last two books were edition updates: Licensing digital content for libraries and Canadian copyright laws. And I enjoy copyright consulting work in the U.S., Canada and globally.

How do you keep up with all that stuff?
Canada is a little easier. In the U.S. every time I read my Twitter feed, it seems something has changed. And then there’s the UK. If you’re not keeping up, you’re not going to have information to give. You share what you keep up on.

And speaking of keeping up, what keeps you up at night?
If anything, it’s a deadline by a book publisher. But especially since having children, I try to set all my deadlines way ahead of what I need. I hate being late.

What should people do if they want more copyright information from you?
I also give webinars and work with the major library associations. Those are open to everyone and concern publishers. In fact, I’ll be flying to San Diego right after my session here to teach two, full-day sessions on Copyright Management and Copyright Education at the Special Libraries Association Conference. We always get some editors and publishers there.

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 @SIPAOnline

Greg Krehbiel, director of marketing operations for The Kiplinger Washington Editors, Inc., compiled this list with a little help from the SIPA online forum. Greg is one of five track chairs for SIPA 2013, June 5-7, in Washington, D.C. (Register today! The early-bird deadline expires Monday.)

Different types of information lend themselves to different devices, presentations, etc. For example, smart phone users tend to have them at all times, but you don’t carry your PC around. Some devices are good at search and others are not. When considering a new digital publication, thinking through the factors listed below can help target the idea:

Is it immersive or a quickie?
When you read a novel you want to be immersed in the experience. You have to think about it, and you don’t want to be distracted. You don’t have the same expectation when you look up a definition of a word or check your email.

Is it interactive?
Does the user expect to interact with the content? E.g., quizzes and discussions are interactive, lectures and essays are not.

When will it be consumed?
Do they want it at the point of purchase, to download now and read later, to come back to again and again, etc.?

Is it sequential or is it searched?
Is the material structured (e.g., linear, or with a table of contents) or is it random access—something you would expect to search?

Integration
Will the user be incorporating the material into some other work or process?

Is the buyer the user?
A professor might order a book for a class, and the boss might choose a data service for his division. Is the person who makes the buying decision the same as the person who uses the content?

On demand or casual use?
Does the user need it to make a decision, like driving directions, cost comparisons, ratings on products, etc., or is it a matter of education or entertainment? Closely related to this is immediacy.

Product discovery
How will the buyer find this product? To what extent must it be searchable? What is the role of metadata (e.g., proper classification by category, subject matter, etc.)?

Annotation
Will the user take notes, pull excerpts or highlight the material?

Archives
Is older content valuable?

Location
Does the information need to be available on a mobile device?

Does technology really help?
Search helps, but quirky bookmarking tools on a digital product can be less convenient than a yellow highlighter.

Should the presentation of the information vary by use?
The way you read a menu in the restaurant might be different from what you want to see online.

Distribution
Does distribution need to be controlled? If so, how?

Financial sense
Does the back end—fulfillment, revenue recognition, customer experience—support the business model? Some sales reps sell stuff that cost more on the back end to build than the actual product.

Perspective
Does your evaluation keep some perspective in mind while answering these questions? It’s easy to get excited about what we can offer, but is that super fancy product anything the user cares about?

Social
Has the social and community elements been accounted for?

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 @SIPAOnline

Are you following up? According to one study, more than 70 percent of sales leads are lost simply because the sellers don’t make contact quickly enough after an initial contact.

“A study of more than 600 companies by Dr. James Oldroyd of MIT found that the odds of a lead entering the sales process were 21 times greater if the business made contact within five minutes of generating the lead versus contact in 30 minutes,” says Brandon Stuerke, president of Advisors Edge Marketing. “Another study, this one by the Harvard Business Review, found that the average response time by businesses to a generated lead is 42 hours—and that’s just for responses that occurred within 30 days.”

Generating sales leads is big business, with more than $23 billion spent on Internet leads alone, he notes. “If you’re a financial advisor or another professional, you may also be spending money on direct mail, invitations to seminars, TV commercials and/or print ads,” Stuerke says. “How many leads are you generating, and at what cost per lead, only to lose them?”

Lexie Gross, sales director of BVR, has her own tips for creating and keeping leads. “Your website is your sales tool,” she says. “The customer on the phone is going to be looking at your website while you’re selling.” Make sure it’s good and current. She also wants you to send thank-you notes, handwritten ones occasionally. I just received one for some judging I did for another association—it works.

Sales will be a big topic of discussion at SIPA 2013, June 5-7, in Washington, D.C. (The early-bird rate expires this Monday!) Shopping Cart Marketing: Today’s E-Commerce, Selling Website Subscriptions and Creative Packaging, and Pricing Strategies for Groups and Site Licenses are just three of the sessions that will touch on this topic. Plus Rick Longenecker, a frequent speaker on sales, will be on hand to talk about eLearning.

Stuerke gave two important ways professionals commonly lose sales leads.

• Indifference in interactions. No matter what your profession, it’s likely you’ve got a lot of competition. For consumers, shopping includes researching, and they’re comparing services, expertise and experience before deciding who best deserves their patronage. If your interactions with prospects fail to “wow” them, they will quickly move on. But most professionals don’t have a storyboarded plan for giving prospects that experience, which is what is needed for consistent results. An automated system that delivers carefully planned interactions is a great way to achieve this.

• Using social media without a plan. Many professionals have discovered that delivering consumer-friendly, useful content through social media is an effective means of attracting followers and cultivating prospects. However, one of the biggest problems with how businesses use social media is that they post a lot of high level, one-way communication with no call to action. Having a call to action in your posts leading prospects back to a website designed to capture leads is critical for producing tangible results through social media.

Gross says that she checks LinkedIn every day. “It’s one of the best sales sources ever. You can do searches by state in that industry. Like Kevin Bacon’s 6 degrees of separation, I know people one or two degrees away. It’s a great place to get new fresh names. On the west coast, people do their mining between 3-5 p.m. They aren’t as used to being sold, so [your message] can come across nicely, not as overt. Invest the $26 for LinkedIn upgrade. It will tell you who looks at your profile.”

Twitter is harder to track, she said, but she likes Google Alerts. “Who has Google Alerts set up for your company names? Who has Google Alerts set up for your competitors? Get your major lines of businesses on it. Spend 10 or 15 minutes on it every day.”

Stuerke said that a lot of these sales issues stem from a common problem: businesses focusing only on the hottest leads—the people who are ready to buy today. “Instead of allowing those ‘cooler’ leads to fall by the wayside, businesses should capture and cultivate them,” he said. “Eventually, they’ll find that instead of constantly chasing leads, they’re harvesting new clients.”

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 @SIPAOnline

I decided to check Facebook for the first time in a while last night. Post one was from John ranting about his awful repair experience at the car dealership. Post two came from Monica in Maine, complaining about taking her two school-age sons to the State Theater in Portland and instead being subject to a frat party. Post three hailed from a SIPA member friend who sadly had his scuba-equipment trailer broken into, losing valuable stuff. And post four came from Lynn, stuck in traffic on I-95 at 1:30 in the morning.

That’s a lot of venting. Only Monica followed up, saying that she exchanged emails with Lauren at the theater and all was well. Monica has 995 “friends”—so it was probably a good idea for Lauren to respond to her. I’ve had recent conversations with members who tend to dismiss social media—“I don’t know anyone making money from it,” they might say. (We have a category in the SIPAwards for Social Media Success Story that drew just two entries—and one I needed to coax in.)

But, of course, you can’t dismiss it. We’re all there in some form or another. Any big event now gets reported on at least partly through Twitter, whether it’s the bombings in Boston or this past weekend’s White House press dinner. Celebrities and athletes think they’re better off with their own words rather than the reporters’, and that’s proving a fallacy as well.

Maybe the problem is with ROI and our expectations. Maybe the key phrase should be, “I may not know anyone making money from it but I do know people losing money because they are not on it.” With an active LinkedIn, Facebook and especially Twitter audience, you are much more likely to hear about any problems that customers/subscribers/members have with your product(s). Thus you can be like Lauren at the State Theatre and correct them. Maybe we need new call letters for measuring social media like Prevention of Loss on Investment. (What’s the PLOI on that initiative?)

The upcoming SIPA 2013 Conference, June 5-7, in Washington, D.C., will feature both a session and a roundtable on social media—and many networking conversations on ROI and PLOI. Social Media: The Big Picture for Marketers will be led by Gabriela Zabalua-Goddard, vice president, multilingual content & editor in chief, AARP, and a new speaker for SIPA. I think it will be particularly beneficial to have a social media speaker who deals mostly with older audiences. It should give the session a relevance it wouldn’t have otherwise. (She’ll also have a co-presenter to give other views.)

And what are we to make of my Facebook findings? Obviously, people like to vent, and social media gives us the perfect forum. We also want our bad experiences to be made right in some way. That’s perhaps the biggest reason why you need to spend time monitoring Twitter and such. People may not tell you what’s wrong or what’s on their mind, but they will tell others. You want to be in on—or at least listening to—those conversations.

Ken Wasch, the SIIA president, told me a story recently where he was trying to choose between two cities for his family to visit in Japan. He went on Trip Advisor and saw that one of his Facebook friends had traveled to and commented on one of those cities. He messaged her, she tweeted him—or something like that—and within minutes he had his answer. No money was made but it certainly qualified as a success story.

Or I just saw that I missed out on a fancy reception thrown by the furniture store Room and Board this weekend. So I got on their email list, and minutes later they’re now a sponsor on my Facebook page. Things move fast today. That’s why coming to the SIPA 2013 Conference is so valuable—do you know how much you will miss by not being among the hundreds of people in the room?

Talk about Prevention of Loss on Investment.

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 @SIPAOnline