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Ken Doctor, in his book entitled NEWSONOMICS: 12 New Trends That will Shape the News You Get , adds some great points to the debate about the future of news. He weaves in interesting facts and figures and interviews many industry thought leaders. He’s been a frequent speaker and contributor to SIIA events so it was interesting to get his take on the topic. A few points that really jumped out at me include: How much influence will be exerted by whoever pays for the news in the years ahead? He reminds us that “Someone always pays for the news, and the support has always spawned debates about who news organizations favor or fear.” As news organizations experiment with hyperlocal coverage at The New Haven Independent or the non-profit business model of The Texas Tribune , we get some perspectives on how that news will get paid for and delivered. Ken also points out that “News is unlike any other business. It balances profit-making and public service at it score. Citizens across the globe ...

Do You Know How to Make Your Spoken Content Memorable? A few months ago I had the chance to speak at a panel at the O’Reilly Tool’s of Change conference. As part of the attendee registration package I was given a copy of the book Confessions of a Public Speaker , by Scott Berkun . It was a great read packed with humorous insights as well as useful tips that the author has honed over the years. I enjoyed it so much that I took it as one of my vacation books back in March. Here are a couple of highlights: 1. Good Discussion of the Practicalities of Public Speaking – Berkun has been on his own making a living by speaking and writing. As a result he’s compiled a lot of best practices and tips that come from his extensive experience. Some are obvious like showing up early while others are clever like wiring the microphone through your shirt so the cords are not swinging while you are speaking. 2. Tools of the Trade – Berkin writes about what kind of equipment to have, what ki...

Paid Content on "the office" I was catching up with some episodes that I had recorded and saw the entitled The Office Murder . Michael Scott, Regional Manager for Dunder Mifflin, hears some bad news about the company from his boss who cites an article in "The Journal" that talks about impending doom for the company. Michael and the staff rush a nearby computer and look up the article, only to be stopped by a pay wall! Michael shrugs it off with an "oh well". One of his staffers pulls out a credit card so they can access this important story that gives them details on the impending bankruptcy. As more news sites ponder the pay wall, pay ramp and pay ladder approaches -- these vignettes may play out in lots of offices. We will undoubtedly start to see more password sharing.

You Should Crave the Rave! I recently finished reading David Meerman Scott’s latest book World Wide Rave . It is a great how-to book on creating “triggers that get millions of people to spread your ideas and share your stories”. With the same quick pace of his past books Scott introduces readers to his six Rules of the Rave: 1) Nobody cares about your products (except you) 2) No coercion required 3) Lose control 4) Put down roots 5) Create triggers that encourage people to share 6) Point the word to your (virtual) doorstep In the following chapters he shares some powerful examples of how PR, marketing and product professionals took advantage of these ideas to raise awareness. My favorite story was how Cindy Gordon, VP of new media at Universal Orlando Resort, hyped the upcoming Harry Potter attraction by telling just seven people. These seven were so influential that eventually 350 million people heard about the attraction. He also weaves some best practices like creating buyer person...

Stephen King & Intertemporal Pricing About 11 years ago, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled The Future of the Book. It was written by Daniel Akst on December 18, 1998. It made a real impression on me because he made some prognostications about what would happen to the price of books when they became digital. Akst argued the following: The cost of books ought to plummet once they are distributed and consumed electronically. Consider that a hardcover book retails for $30 and wholesales for $16. Out of that sum, $6 goes into manufacturing (paper, printing, etc) to say nothing of shipping, inventory costs and publisher’s overhead. Editorial expenses are a mere $.67, and the author’s royalty is $4. Publisher’s pretax profits is $1. E-distribution could radically lower the cost of publishing – and the barriers to entry in the publishing business. I was reminded of this article (subscription required) recently when I read about Scribner’s decision to delay the ...

Content Nation Review I just concluded John Blossom's Content Nation. It was a great read that taught me alot. As promised, here's the reveiw I posted on Amazon.com: I have found Content Nation to be an informative read on several levels. I like how the author shared a variety of rules and guidelines including Seven Secrets of Social Media, Content Nation Marketing Rules, Content Nation Enterprise Rules etc. The benefit of these distillations is that they can help the practitioner evaluate their current and future social media strategies using these tools as guidelines. Moreover, each of these is illustrated by case studies and examples that help explain the concept. I learned about many new companies and brands as a result of reading Content Nation. I also found it useful that the author shared both the positive and negatives of this phenomenon and provided cautionary tales for people who might seek to deceive the marketplace. Blossom has created a very useful tome that puts...

New York Times Automotive UGC In a recent NY Times "Wheels" email, I clicked on a curious link entitled 2008 Collectible Car of the Year Contest (I must have missed it during the last six months of emails). I was brought to a user generated photo gallery where readers had submitted photos and descriptions of their cars for the community to vote upon. The winner, in case you were wondering, was The Marquis de Soto . The fact that users are submitting this kind of info to the web is not new. Rate My Space, which was constructed by SIIA Member Neighborhood America does this for living spaces, and I'm certain that Car & Driver, Road & Track, as well as Hemmings Motor News are doing this for cars. What impressed me was that the venerable NY Times was trying to build such a niche audience. I dont' know how successful this venture has been, but I'm sure that many readers of the NYT have the disposable income to buy collectible cars. By creating a way to draw us...

= Panels? In looking at some of the people I follow on Twitter, I'm impressed and intrigued by the number of followers they have accumulated.  Then it dawned on me that perhaps there's a way to make some money by selling access to your twitterati.  Suppose you wanted to gain some insight into what David Meerman Scott's followers had on a PR or Marketing idea you had.  For a price and maybe a $ on the hash tag you would be permissioned to survey his list.  Same could go for someone who wants to know what David Pogue's followers have to say about a new gadget or device. Is anyone doing this now?  Do you think it is similar to the panel business that market research firms have built?

Substitutes & Complements If you've ever taken a marketing or economics course you've been introduced to the notion of substitutes and complements -- these are products or services that could either replace your offering or could make it better. I had a real life example of that concept this morning at Union Station in Washington DC. I had to catch a train to New York and had limited time before the train and headed toward the Starbucks and saw a line that had at least 20 people in it. Doing the quick calculus I figured I'd miss my train so I opted for a substitute -- Primo Cappucino that had virtually no line. Big surprise that the espresso was lousy, the scone was stale, and the yogurt tasted like strawberry frosting. In the information industry we've talked about the phenomenon of "just good enough" replacing premium services. As in the breakfast example above, you get what you pay for and next time I'll get up earlier for the premium service...

Content Nation now available from John Blossom John Blossom, a friend and longtime member of the SIIA has recently published his first book. I've already ordered mine from Amazon and will post a review after I read it. Here's a description from John: Content Nation: Surviving and Thriving as Social Media Changes Our Work, Our Lives and Our Future How will you survive and thrive as social media changes our world? What are the best ways to use social media to succeed in our work, our lives and our future? "Content Nation" is a wide-ranging look at what makes social media tick, offering case studies and practical tips as to how we can conduct our business, our politics and our personal lives using social media and a look at how a future shaped by social media will be very different in many ways than the civilizations of the past several thousand years. In the process of changing our world, social media will bring us back to our pre-historic roots and simultaneously thrus...

GOOD -- brought to you by Starbucks A few months ago I noticed a new newspaper available at Starbucks. It is quite small, free and is distributed right where one waits for coffee (at least in Madison, CT). The idea for this came from the Mystarbucksidea.com website. The paper takes advertising, covers one topic and helps disseminate useful information all while you wait for your double tall nonfat dry cappuccino. I remember reading years ago that the articles in People Magazine were short enough to be read during a visit to the restroom -- perhaps the Good sheet fills up the time while waiting for your coffee. More details here: http://www.good.is/

F l o o g l e I read with interest about the new service that came out of Google's philanthropic arm. By culling data from the last 5 year's of searches and running it against reports for the Centers for Disease Control Reports, Google found that they were two weeks to ten days ahead of the CDC in learning about the outbreaks. I hope they call it "Floogle". What a great use of "data exhuast". I think it also shows how important it is for publishers to see and understand how their customers construct queries on their databases. It can be such a great data set to mine for new products or to improve existing ones. 20 years ago while working in Washington DC, I used to file Freedom of Information Act requests at the Securities & Exchange Commission for all the other FOIA requests that had been filed. We found some great product ideas and market insight in those letters. The Internet makes the process a whole lot easier!

No Free Launch I attended the InfoCommerce Conference in Philadelphia this week and caught Ann Michael’s interesting session on launching products. She was joined by Michael Balsam , VP Products & Services, Onvia and Adam Bernacki, VP Sales & Marketing Leadership Directories . Ann started out by remarking how change has affected product launches. Back in the day of books you had to be perfect because if a mistake was made it would live forever. This is not true in the Internet world – you can no longer afford to be perfect as you'll never get the product out the door. The panel addressed this phenomenon by reviewing its impact at several places along the development process. Michael talked about how Onvia publishes 60+ million pages per year with all sorts of detail about government contracts. This information can help clients like Dell know a year ahead of time when and where a new school would be built. Dell can use information to help them size future markets Onvia’s de...

Selling Cookbooks by Giving Away Recipes I'm an avid cook and am the person responsible for the grocery shopping and cooking at our house. An article entitled " A Plan to Sell Cookbooks: Give Away Recipes Online " in the Saturday New York Times caught my eye. Reporter Motoko Rich writes about a site called Cookster that draws on recipes from chefs like Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson, Mario Batali and a hundred or so others. Each recipe will appear on a page with a picture of the chef and links to places to buy the book. Users will be able to search the site using a multitude of criteria. Founder Will Schwalbe said the site will go live with 2,500 recipes and he hopes to expand it to 10,000. The aim of the site is to sell more cookbooks. It is hoped that by giving recipes away as samples, people will buy the books. This business model has worked very well for Martha Stewart and Rachel Ray, neither of whom are participating. Not surprisingly Cookstr will be suppored by adver...

Whining about Wine I was flipping through the Saturday New York Times and was intrigued by a full page ad from Wine Spectator that screamed FREE ACCESS in massive type. The pitch is to provide visitors to the website with free access until October 1st. The offer provides access to 200,000 wine ratings and tastings as well as access to newsletters and other content. In mousetype the limitations are barely visible to point out that "Free Access does not include use of site personalization tools or the ability to post comments on our Editors' Blogs". All in all a pretty standard online publishing offer of giving some content away for free in the hopes that you will become a subscriber. I clicked through on the link and not surprisingly was confronted with an email capture box with another bit of fine print. This one disclosed that "By entering your e-mail address in the field above, you give WineSpectator .com permission to send occasional e-mails regarding promotiona...

SIIA in Paris II While in Paris I was able to spend the better part of a Sunday wandering around the Louvre . I paid for one of those dorky headsets with an oversized Palm Pilot-like device swinging around my neck. Some of the content on the device was quite good -- the Masterpieces of the Louvre tour took you around to three of the museums signature pieces like the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory of Samothrace. That tour provided step by step instructions on how to maneuver around the museum and through the crowds. I was pretty impressed at this point and thought that Korean Air had scored a great coup by locking up the sponsorship of these devices for 1 million euros. Imagine my disappointment when I found that the other tours were lacking in that level of detail. They only provided crude maps to direct you to the next piece of art. In some cases the art had been moved! It seemed that the museum had put all their effort into their A-List products and had skimpe...

SIIA in Paris I Early this summer I was invited to speak at GFII’s “Summer School “ program in Paris. The GFII is sort of the French equivalent of the SIIA. I was told I’d be the only English speaker so I thought it made sense to try out Rosetta Stone to pick up some language skills. I was impressed first by their pricing model as it had a perfect option for me – a three month software as a service model. For my $150 I could use all three levels of the product. This was a much better deal than buying the $495 version of CD-ROMS. Although I did not make it as far as I would have liked in the program, it was impressive software that tracked my progress and presented the material in a pretty intuitive interface. But there were a few drawbacks and limitations that could have increased the utility of the product: Profiling & Market Segmentation – Although I signed up as an individual, I think they should have asked if if my use was going to be primarily business or leisure. Thi...

A Different Take on Orphaned Works -- Orphaned Brands! I received a press release last week from the team at CoreBrand . They focus on brand power and strength and its impact on a company's value. They wrote to tout a new service call Brandvault that will allow marketers to purchase or license once popular but now defunct corporate and product names. Names include Shearson, Allied Signal, Breakfast Mate and Handi-Wrap. The company claims that "BrandVault offers marketers a turnkey collection of 120 out of use brand names that have been revived and newly trademarked in a wide range of consumer product categories, all ready for re-launch." “This is a rare opportunity to acquire a classic brand that has been pushed aside through a merger, or some other quirk of business, yet retains tremendous brand equity,” said James Gregory, CEO, CoreBrand “The astronomical cost of creating a name from scratch includes; research, name development, and legal research, just to get to t...

Part 2 The June 7 th Economist has an article entitled Unbound about Book publishing in America. It highlights Amazon's impact on the industry through POD (Print on Demand) and the Kindle. There were a few key points that are worth noting: Unlike digital music or video, digital books require consumers to change their consumption habits. Textbooks is a growing category and it is helping to reduce costs by eliminating all the frictional expenses that occur along the value chain. The Economist points out that this could have a huge impact for Springer & Elsevier in terms of the $2.3 B college textbook-resale market. If the books are only available electronically, they become very hard to resell to the old college bookstore. POD is now cheaper than standard print for runs of fewer than 1200 copies according to Steve DeForge of Ames On-Demand. The last paragraph says it all and ties in with my last post: Publishing has only two indispensable participants : authors and read...

Standing in between someone and the information they need... is a sure way to lose a job. Jeff Jarvis, in his excellent blog Buzzmachine recently commented on the Justice Department’s antitrust settlement with the National Association of Realtors. He rails against the market inefficiency created as realtors monopolized listings. He goes on to point out that 6% commissions are a thing of the past as internet brokers will now be able to compete on a level playing field. It brings to mind a comment that a b-school professor made to me years ago "Never stand between someone who needs information and the information itself as you'll soon find yourself out of a job". So far I can only think of examples that by and large support this theory. For example, when financial data became more ubiquitous, the role of stock brokers changed drastically. The same is true for travel agents thanks to websites like Expedia, kayak.com and travelocity. However, it is important to note t...