2010 year in review – 9 things that made it special despite recession and austerity

Posted on December 29, 2010 by stephen bateman
Concentricdots Stephen Bateman A Capstone Year

2010: A Capstone Year

A whizz through my 2010 calendar has reminded me just how busy 2010 was: a year of change; a creative year; a fulfilling year but, above all, a year of transition.

2010 was shaped by four things: curiosity, independence, connection and reinvention. So here, in reverse order, and with no further ado, are the 9 capstone elements that, despite the austerity of recession, made 2010 a very rewarding year for me.

1. GreenWise®

In December I joined GreenWise, a specialist online publisher that focuses on helping UK SMEs “green” their operations and reduce their carbon footprint. The business, founded by Louise and Mark Fewell, serves the needs of four distinct business segments and has established itself as a premiere destination for “green” content, providing trustworthy information and resources to a growing tribe of subscribers and advertisers.

GreenWise is a pure digital player that relies on an integrated mix of online digital media to grow and sustain its online customer communities. The challenge in 2011 will be to diversify the revenue streams, leveraging its Audience, Brand, Content and Data revenues by further engaging and sustaining its community of users.

2. iGlimpse™

The decision in November to start iGlimpse came from the conviction that a proven segment of lifelong learners in the outdoor leisure and pursuit sectors could be served with better media. Hence, the content we will create at iGlimpse will inspire, instruct and interface with outdoor enthusiasts providing them with an entertaining experience on their handheld devices.

The overall aim is to quicken an enthusiast’s ability to master their chosen outdoor recreational activity wherever they are and whenever they need quality instruction. iGlimpse will combine new media technologies with the wisdom of leading outdoor experts to create rich bundles of convergent media that instruct, entertain and make a tangible difference to the lives of those seeking progression and proficiency. Making all this happen for time-poor and mobile enthusiasts will be a key focus for me and my business partner, Simon Jollands, in 2011. Website under construction.

3. Like Minds

Like Minds is an international community of business leaders, entrepreneurs and creative thinkers which emphasises innovation, learning, connecting and engagement on subject digital. There’s an annual conference in Exeter in the autumn. This year the conference theme was “creation and curation”.

The workshops and plenaries were blistering, the participants were tropical and the gathering of like minded people was thermogenic.

The founders Scott Gould and Drew Ellis have built a community with attitude. And, just as it did in 2010, Like Minds promises to float my boat again in 2011. Follow #likeminds on Twitter and see what I had to say about the 6 magic ingredients of the 2010 autumn event in a video blog here.

4. CAM / CIM Diploma in Managing Digital Media

The best way to learn about digital media is to roll up your sleeves and get stuck in. But I’m a great believer in structure and discipline, which is why, in September, I enrolled on the CAM diploma course in digital media management as a postgrad professional student to undertake four modules covering digital campaigns, branding, online advertising and public relations. The course provides a solid framework and objectives to underpin strategic and operational work undertaken in the field. Studying the course and working on assignments whilst managing and implementing digital media campaigns will help me consolidate and strengthen my digital marketing and media competencies in 2011. All essential to doing battle in the ensuing digital media landscape.

5. Idio

I can’t talk about 2010 without mentioning Andrew Davies, Ed Barrow and the great team I’ve had the pleasure of working with at idio. This is a truly passionate and talented team of young semantic experts. They develop some great semantic software and they’ve been an inspiration to work with. We’ve got some exciting publishing projects in development and I’m really looking forward to my collaboration with Andrew, Ed and the rest of the idio team in 2011.

6. Micro-blogging

Twitter has undoubtedly been a major focal point for me in 2010. Whilst only starting to gain popularity in the UK, the micro-blogging platform has allowed me to connect to +250 of the most influential thought-leaders in my industry. It’s been like drinking from a fire-hose and I can genuinely say that without Twitter I wouldn’t have discovered nor assimilated 30% of what I’ve learned in the last six months, since June. Twitter has not just allowed me to connect with people in the virtual online world but to meet extraordinary people “irl” (tweet speak for “in real life.”)

My use of Twitter has been professionally focused and this has allowed me to build a tribe of  just under 250 followers without distraction. Combined with this blog and my professional LinkedIn groups, Twitter has been a force unlike any other. In 2011 I will align my use of Twitter to ensure my content remains relevant and authoritative.

7. Professional Networking

I joined LinkedIn over 3 years ago and I have consistently updated and embellished my profile. And I’m so glad I maintained my profile because no other social networking platform has been more valuable in helping me connect with my primary network and extend my reach into my secondary and tertiary networks than LinkedIn.

I’ve discovered numorous specialist LinkedIn groups that have been powerful and engaging platforms to bring me into contact with people who share the same interests but who have different perspectives. The quality of interaction has varied widely from group to group with the best groups hosting open-ended posts to stimulate discussion and give users room to add their perspective. The best moderators have also thanked people for their participation to the group.

8. Blogging

Joe Pulizzi (Junta42 and CMI) famously said “you can’t be taken seriously in social media unless you have a robust, consistent blog”. I’ve loved blogging and whilst my Google analytics won’t break olympic records, the results I’ve achieved across different metrics (unique visitors, individual page views, average time on site, new and repeat visitors) have all made my blogging activity worthwhile, providing me with a hub toward which I can point my readers whenever I discuss a subject dear to me.

I’ll admit I’ve sometimes struggled with the time and frequency of blogging but, through perseverance, I’ve found my voice and built my authority independently of any publishing corporation. Having my blog has forced me to be analytical and to ask questions about the changing nature of publishing. I know from direct feedback that my recommendations haven’t been in vain and that I’ve helped others make sense of sometimes complex challenges.

Above all blogging has given me a platform to engage in meaningful conversations with industry colleagues, prospects and customers, establishing my credibility and authority whilst having fun.

In 2011 I’ll be committing to blogging better and, dare I say, more often.

9. Family and Friends

Other highlights (non-professional) of 2010 include Louis, my eldest son, achieving the “A” Level examination grades he needed to read International Politics at Aberystwyth University (August), My mother’s 70th birthday on the Isle of Wight (March), A touring holiday with my wife and boys on the Basque Riviera (August), two magnificent stage performances managed by my daughter at the Bath Ustinov Theatre and my gruelling GR20 high altitude trek across the Corsican Alps (June). Oh, and the iPhone and iPad weren’t bad either ;-)

Happy New Year All

Posted in Career, Community Engagement, Marketing, Personal, Social Media, Technology, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Publishers can compliment revenues and drive cost-of-sales down with e-commerce

Posted on December 1, 2010 by stephen bateman
e-commerce solutions for book publishers

e-commerce solutions for book publishers

The internet is disrupting the core of book publishing and distribution. In 2008 at the beginning of the recession, I steered the specialist publisher David & Charles (now F&W Media International) out of the turbulence of the recession by focusing on two key areas of cost improvement: a) moving away from loss-making negative-option direct mail book-club operations and b) outsourcing to better value trade distribution. These were both critical to the business and the goal was to drive higher-margin publishing and e-commerce activity, which we achieved.

Prosperous new distribution territories

Making decisions about changes in distribution is complex but there has never been a more urgent time for book publishers to embrace e-commerce fulfilment. That’s because book audiences are shifting from being mass clusters to niche audiences connected online. The core of book publishing is no longer about large print runs and a few retailers of scale. Book publishing is abut low cost distribution to individuals’ homes.

As the market transitions to meet the needs of smaller, more fragmented reader groups, there is a growing demand for more effective and targeted e-commerce fulfillment to reach the many people who are ordering specialist books from their homes. Therefore, publishers urgently need to integrate their direct-to-consumer (DTC) operations within their overall commercial operations as they shift from predominantly B2B trade-focused businesses to increasingly consumer-focused B2C businesses.

Fertile opportunity for smaller specialist publishers

In printed books, it’s difficult to compete with Amazon on scale, pricing and just-in-time delivery but there is a opportunity for some specialist publishers to work with seasoned, lower scale, reliable e-commerce, white label and drop shipment partners. This model might not work for everyone but for niche & enthusiast  publishers focused on community, DTC can be a great revenue and margin driver.

The DTC opportunity is really most suited to special interest publishers bundling a variety of non-book merchandise with their books (paint brushes and easels with art books or needles and scissors with sewing books). These publishers need solutions which allow them to add value by leveraging their specialist product and customer knowledge.

Caution

If a publisher is unable to offer more than they already offer customers on Amazon, they should not bother to set up separate fulfilment because a) they will fail to ween customers off Amazon and b) they will add cost rather than increase margins on their business.

Gap induced demand

If there’s a market for bespoke fulfillment, it’s because there is a gap in the supply side. Current book distributors, besides Amazon and its competing online clutch of online book retail sites, focus their efforts on reaching a dwindling trade market and there’s little evidence amongst these distributors that they are adapting to the changing market, changing customer behaviour or that they are able to meet the needs of publishers wishing to fulfill the specialist needs of special interest communities. There are specialist publishers in the UK working with their usual trade distributors to fulfill DTC orders, but it would likely be more profitable for the publishers if UK customers ordered their books from Amazon rather than the publishers own e-commerce platform.

If I were a special interest publisher today

I’d be looking for a fulfillment partner for e-commerce who can offer the following:

1. Competitive Pricing

This can only come from economies of scale since its dependent on the overall volume a fulfillment house dispatches. Therefore, I’d seek a partner with a solid list of customers and a growing turnover. A profile not dissimilar to The Hut Group.

2. Digital Marketing

I’d look for a partner with an understanding of digital marketing and social media who can contribute to online and offline marketing and PR efforts to achieve the best pull and push marketing.

3. Customer relations management

I’d look for a distribution partner who could grow my list of customers emails and and promote/sell more of my books and merchandise to this group via targeted direct marketing.

4. Meta language

The ability to be discovered online is critical when you’re niche publisher with specialist titles. This is why successful online dicsoverability relies on having the best possible product descriptions in the form of carefully chosen and structured meta language. I’d look for a fulfillment partner with an acute understanding of this prerequisite. Although a publisher needs to develop this modern day digital marketing skill in-house, a worthwhile distribution partner needs to demonstrate an understanding of the skill.

5. Feedback from customers

The most valuable driver of success for any creative publishing business is continuous and reliable feedback from customers, so look for a distribution partner that is able to provide consistently good feedback via their customer service people who can tell you what is and isn’t working: what customers are/aren’t buying and more WHY? Without this feedback it’s very difficult for editorial and marketing teams to improve the offer for future and repeat customers.

6. Up-sell

It’s in the nature of special interest communities that they’ll need individual care so there’s a great opportunity around regular customer interaction. Look for a fulfillment partner whose staff are trained in the art and craft of effective up-selling. Increasing the average basket value is a key success driver.

7. e-books

This will be an important future need for all niche publishers and consideration of a fulfillment provider’s capacity to integrate digital content distribution and DRM will be key. It’s good to have one-stop solutions.

Finally, it’s a myth and a potential business calamity for a an small or medium-sized publisher to believe they ought to be running their own DTC fulfillment. Publishers are better off seeking solutions of mid-scale or they will take on an commercial activity that will drive their costs up not down.

If you feel your company is a pioneer in mid-scale e-commerce fulfillment, I’d be interested to hear your experiences. Please comment below or send me an email.

If you’re a publisher who’d like to discuss your e-commerce solution please contact me for an initial chat.

The above article originally appeared as a comment I posted to the Specialist Media Network discussion group on Linked In  as a response to AASM Fulfilment suggesting publishers could compliment their revenues with e-commerce.

Posted in Business Models, Community Engagement, Distribution, Marketing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

From push to pull: How digital interaction is changing marketing

Posted on November 20, 2010 by stephen bateman
Push & Pull Marketing Tactics

When push comes to shove, it might be time to pull

Reinvent or perish: no one gets out of here alive.

If you’re a mainstream media business facing internet-induced decline, you will need to overcome huge challenges as your circulation, reach and influence are marginalised by new entrants chasing and responding to your customers’ needs online.

To survive in any form (most likely as a smaller, tighter entity) you will need to reinvent many of your business practices. To achieve this, you will go through many restructuring exercises before you hit your optimum operating configuration and size. Even then new market entrants will disrupt your market further, making it a perpetual process of readjustment. And finally, very few of the things you were once expert in will be relevant to your business in the digital online world.

No more wallflowers

People are no longer the wallflowers they were, sitting idly and waiting to be told what to buy and how to behave. The internet has changed that forever and people can choose what they buy and consume from an infinite range of sources. People are resisting being broadcast to and are preferring instead to gather information for themselves. So it stands to reason that if people (prospects and customers) are more discerning and communications channels are more fragmented, marketing, the discipline that is responsible for identifying and satisfying customer needs and desires, profitably, will need to reinvent its practices.

Recasting marketing

The first challenge is cultural and demands a shift from transactional to relationship marketing: what is sometimes referred to as the shift from “push” to “pull” marketing. Influencing and persuading prospects to join communities and embrace brands in a world of intense competition and infinite choice online requires the deployment of specialist new marketing skill and deep-seated relationships.

For a discipline that has learned to push messages through mass, one-to-many media channels, there is a danger that the widely used marketing techniques of old will be used in new channels instead oflistening, empathy and the granular one-to-one practices of niche marketing. Like Eric Qualman says in his “Socialnomics” video, today’s successful companies “act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy: listening first, selling second.”

Community spirit

Traditional sales and marketing people are used to exploiting rather than co-opting community and they will find it hard to resist the temptation to revert to the kind of sales and marketing hyperbole they have been trained to use in their copy for B2B trade audiences. Successful community building is all about building and maintaining trust which takes patience and persistence. It requires participating in conversation (which includes a big dose of listening) and helping community members to express themselves.

This is a significant reversal of the traditional “one-to-many” broadcast model. The challenge is not to talk about how great your product is but instead focus on understanding the lives and challenges of your community so that you can help them lead easier lives. Empathy, patience and authenticity are the new marketing and you must show you understand in order to be understood.

It’s good to talk

The business objective for marketing in a digital online world has not changed: it exists to convert non-interest and casual interest toengagement, approval, endorsement purchase and repeatpurchase, profitably.

However, the means of achieving this outcome requires a radical rethink of marketing practices and a shift from transactional to relational marketing. And because successful community engagement requires attentive management and empathy 365 days 24/7, genuine community engagement strategies and tactics can not be owned, managed and implemented by marketing personnel alone.

A healthy, engaged community requires everyone whose job is dependent on the livelihood and satisfaction of a prosperous community to engage with it. Simply put, engaged customers require engaged staff. As Paul Gillin says “Growth will be focused around conversation-based tactics”. In my experience there are many people in editorial, customer services able to use the tools of social networking to grow and retain community.

Some tips for building a digital marketing framework for engagement

- Change in culture, strategy, practice starts at the top – share the ownership

- Marketing actions need to have roots in a larger, joined-up business development strategy – share the vision

- Ban the word “consumer” from the business vocabulary – replace it with “community member”

- Share the workload – ensure business-critical time being social is distributed

- Social marketing is by nature impulsive and disorganised – marketing can introduce process to structure the activity without dampening the enthusiasm

- Online community benefits from real life meeting – create events that bring community together in a physical space and allow people to build connections

- Don’t talk at members of your community, converse withthem and accompany them with empathy – they will pay you back many times over.

What has been your organisation’s marketing response to the digital media shift?

This article was originally posted by me on The Media Briefing a real-time news and information resource for the media industry.

Posted in Business Models, Business Rewiring, Community, Community Engagement, Marketing, Social Media | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Rethink How You Do Everything: A Lesson From The National Trust

Posted on November 2, 2010 by stephen bateman
The National Trust: core transformation

The National Trust: reinventing core business

Confronting Change

Every business needs to confront change at some point along its cycle. Yet change isn’t simple and the fear of alienating core customers whilst trying to win new ones is a strategic dilemma that challenges every business and its leadership team.

No one gets out alive

Museums, charities, restaurants, pubs, hotels, attractions, clubs, broadcasters, cinemas, newspapers, magazines and book publishers (the list goes on), all need to align with new market forces in order to make their businesses emerge stronger and fitter in the future.

Tools

Managing change means managing a portfolio to ensure new and relevant products and services are being developed in time to satisfy emerging needs. The Boston Growth-Share Matrix helps us do that.

Relevance

The challenge for any business is being nimble enough and the danger is only doing what you’ve always done and expecting to satisfy new customers with new tastes by asking them to order from the old menu. They won’t enjoy their meal, they won’t come back and they won’t recommend.

Sign of the times

One conversation I’m hearing a lot in the media and publishing sector is the following:

“We want to find ways to make our business more engaging and lively online. If we do this, we can be more relevant and attract a more diverse audience of younger people who want to engage at a different level with our brand and help us grow. But our traditional customers don’t come for that. So, how can we find a way to be relevant to the new without alienating the old”

Audience development isn’t a series of concentric circles. You can’t start with the people you traditionally serve and build infinite circles of new customers outwards. Instead a business has to shift, and shifting means some people will leave as others join.

Customer segments

There’s no better way to understand this challenge than to sit down and analyse the personas that make up your existing and potential market. Good customer segmentation will help a business see whether it can reconcile the needs of an existing audience under one program or whether it needs to service each segment separately in order to grow and retain the traditional cash cows to ensure an effective and timely transition from old to new. It’s a juggling act that is not for the faint hearted. It’s also why change feels like the only constant: a business never stops changing and it needs to be one step ahead of the market to thrive. What is your business doing to stay ahead and thrive?

A lesson from the Trust

Although I’m writing about forces of change in the media industry,  I find it useful to view change and the way it is being implemented in other sectors. One current fascinating example is the UK’s National Trust.

The Trust has implemented a customer engagement strategy and is being savagely accused of ‘Disneyfication’. Its chairman, Sir Simon Jenkins, wants to make properties more accessible to the public by opening up roped-off areas, recreating historical scenes, lighting fires and getting rid of ‘do not touch’ signs that are the traditional demarcation lines of non-engagement in its 300 or more properties. His strategy is about making the customer experience more memorable and driving a higher level of engagement to provide a visitor experience that will help grow the Trust as an attraction and family outing and have new people visit more frequently whilst also encouraging their friends to join. Critics say this is ‘intellectual slumming’.

Rethink the way you do everything

But the Trust will have pondered the risks of alienating their 3.8 million core members long enough to know that the risks of inaction, and therefore not appealing to a new generation of consumers, is an even greater threat than change.

New initiatives, like giving velvet cloaks to visitors as they enter Hampton Court are, in the chief curator’s words, ‘for our very survival (…) we need to reach out to people who just aren’t interested in history.”

Naysayers complain that the “buildings are not meant to be welcoming”, calling the initiatives ‘infantile’, and accusing the Trust of ‘crossing the line into entertainment’ and being “patronising to the public.’

Parallels

Every business has a legacy. This is why I see parallels between the Trust and UK publishing. Like the Trust, UK publishing needs to trade a certain history for an uncertain future. Fear and habit make us protective of the core and, even if we know core customers are not likely to ensure long term viability and sustainability, we tend to hang on to them and allow them to run our businesses.

I’ve written about transformation before and practised it at many levels.

A solution for publishers might be to develop a “parallel” offer for new audiences instead of trying to entice them directly into the traditional “pipeline.” This is because square pegs don’t fit round holes and reaching new audiences usually works best with new approaches. If new approaches differ significantly from traditional practices, they may be more effective as standalone diversifications rather than extensions to the core.

Don’t change the core – re-invent it

The National Trust aren’t in fact choosing between one audience and the other. Instead they are leading a “parallel” strategy by offering participatory activities whilst preserving old labels and interpretative tools.  At some point the business will have to make a choice. It won’t always be able to afford to do the “and”. Effective portfolio management means juggling parallel offers long enough to get started with a new audience and, once you can show how this converts to sales, you will need to make informed decisions about divesting parts of the business that might no longer qualify as “core”.

Is your business trying to cut a new direction but having its efforts sabotaged by the old guard? If so, how are you handling the situation?

Posted in Business Models, Business Rewiring, Community, Community Engagement, Leadership, New Product Development | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Like Minds: 6 ingredients for “total community engagement”

Posted on October 31, 2010 by stephen bateman
The secret ingredients of total community engagement

Like Minds Conference: The Ingredients of Total Community Engagement

After participating in the Like Minds Autumn 2010 conference, I was eager to share the experience of “total community engagement” provided by this unique and groundbreaking conference for cross-sector media professionals.

I hope my analysis does the Like Minds conference and its organisers all the justice they deserve.

Like Minds: 6 magic ingredients for total community engagement

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Curation: the new salvation for non-fiction publishers

Posted on October 15, 2010 by stephen bateman

A well curated exhibit engages and retains an audience

Most book publishers are geared toward stability.

But the big disrupter (the Internet) is providing readers with more content choices than they can process. To add insult to injury, B2C Brands, Google, Bing, AOL and Yahoo are all focusing their strategies on content. Therefore, life is going to get even harder for special interest publishers.

Look the monster in the eye

Demand Media is already operating in the UK, and has introduced its model of content produced at the lowest possible rates. eHow one of its portfolio brands marches to the beat of the biggest search engines, commissioning content based on popular search terms. Publishers might poke fun at that content, but Demand Media is eyeing a multibillion flotation.

So how can specialist non-fiction book publishers turn themselves into nimble content players and retain engaged communities in the light of such aggressive competition?

1. Press the cost button

From my experience, competing online means lower operating costs. To do that publishers need to transition their core operating practices to new models that align with the realities of the market and the new competition. In other words, publishers need to make it possible for their teams to save time on performing daily tasks.

2. Be nimble

Solutions are never far away and, in this case, the solution resides in the web itself, the very thing publishers labeled “threat” can suddenly transform into “opportunity”. To transform the threat into an opportunity, special interest publishers need to make content aggregation and content curation integral practices in their core business.

Some publishers get this and some don’t. It tends to be mid-sized special interest publishers who are already moving away from a book-centric publishing model to a community-centric focus, that understand the value of aggregated and curated content.

3. Change faster

However, if UK special interest publishers are to successfully future-proof their positions as doyens of content in a fiercely competitive landscape, they will need to move more quickly than they are today and embrace the modern practices of aggregation and curation. They will need to understand how these semi-automated practices integrate operationally, where they add value, how they impact on people and, more importantly, how the semantic platforms help a business to transition from pure creation to a hybrid creation-curation model that is fast and effective.

Cross-pollenate

The most rewarding aspect of what I do currently (help publishers think about strategy and plan operations) is having the time to focus on medium and long term solutions. Working across a range of media sectors, but always with clients in deep content verticals, I am able to draw on a vast network of interconnected media cases to understand the challenges, business practices and practical solutions each sector is applying to identical problems but in their own individual way.

Where once my perspective was restricted to book publishing, my work now makes it possible for me to encompass a broader range of  solutions “borrowed” from the worlds of newspapers, journals, magazines and broadcast. Consesequently I am able to cross-pollenate the solutions from one sector to the next. In this instance the responses and technologies are borrowed from the news and magazine sectors. And although the solutions were built for media players requiring bigger volume and faster, more regular content they are perfect for todays online community publishers.

It’s because books have resisted longest in the shift to digital that book publishing professionals can benefit more fully from the lessons, practices and lower costs of technologies borrowed from the news and magazine sectors.

Curate

But what do we mean by curation? The Latin root of the noun curator means “to care” and we use the word primarily in connection with museum and gallery practices. When we refer to curation in connection with content, we mean the work practices employed in scouring, finding, sorting, organising, selecting, structuring, framing, contextualising, enhancing and exhibiting content in a way that offers enthusiasts the most memorable and engaging experience.

Whether we’re dealing with content or objects, selecting the best pieces from a range of items to tell the best possible story is a specialist craft. The craft requires subject and category expertise. Told like that, curating is a job non-ficiton publishers have been doing  since the dawning of time.

So what’s new if publishers have always been curating? The new bit is that audiences have moved away from the costly and cumbersome medium of print to their preferred, more convenient and interactive medium: online. The way we consume content online has changed forever and displaced the way publishers need to produce specialist content and serve it up.

If special interest book publishers are to connect with this new breed of media consumer, they need to get ahead of the game and be offensive.

Online Content Curation

Technology to the rescue

Thankfully there are tools to help publishers sift through and structure the colossal amounts of content. Working with semantic tools like Idio’s Cloud-based semantic & social tech platform to supercharge content, special interest publishers can win back some of the audiences they have lost to broad-based content aggregators like Google, Demand Media and YouTube.

None of the emerging content monsters create content; they each aggregate content. Aggregation is powerful but its sister practice, curation, is what adds value. And it’s by focusing on quality curation that publishers can add value to their communities and reduce the risk of losing further loyal followers.

Add value

Spotting trends and using content from book sources to support new editorial is something that every publisher needs to do if they are going to refresh their extensive backlists and make it visible to the tribes of enthusiasts eager to gain a deeper level of knowledge. Used properly, curation can increase page views on material that would otherwise be relegated to the archive in a dark and dusty basement.

Furthermore, properly curated articles can lead readers to continue clicking through a site, spending more time on it and returning to it more regularly.  Search engine users (that’s most of us) have little allegiance to brands but we are much more likely to be interested in the key word topic we enter into our preferred search engine. Thus, a well indexed spread of content increases the likelihood of us stumbling upon content using keyword search. Seen from this angle, publishers have an opportunity to use content to make every page of their website a landing page. Rather than rely on their own slim content offering, publishers can use boost their subject content using aggregated and curated content to attract and retain readers.

Working with book publishers in the special interest sector is helping me realise the vast opportunities for semantically structured topic pages (these can be partially populated with content from aggregated sources to kick wikis off). This way sparse content can be beefed-up to boost underpopulated sub-categories which, if they are left unchecked for too long, will die.

Conclusion

The processes of curation I have described in this post means that editors and marketers can spend fewer precious and expensive hours managing the aggregation and curation process that needs to integrate with core business practices; the platform effectively does the job for them and they can focus on using the data gathered by the platform to inform marketing and editorial decisions. Of course, there are many other benefits to working with semantic technologies but I will save those for another post. However, if you have any questions, do please post a comment, drop me a line or give me a call.

Reward

To end this post, and to reward those who read to the end (thank you for improving my average time on site stats!), I’d like to reward you with two further items that may be of interest: the first is a forthcoming “Creation and Curation” conference in Exeter, Devon and the second is a the seminal article “Aggregation and curation: two concepts that explain a lot about digital change” by Mike Shatzkin’s. If you’re a non-fiction publisher using online content curation and aggregation, I’d love to hear how you are integrating curation into your core business practice.

Posted in Business Models, Business Rewiring, Community, Marketing, New Product Development, Social Media, Technology, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Frankfurt: what was your focus, old content or new community?

Posted on October 10, 2010 by stephen bateman

Timely, relevant content: the social bait that feeds and retains community

Whilst many of us were visiting Frankfurt Book Fair, on our annual quest for new titles to populate our already overpopulated catalogues, two savvy media execs were busy launching an innovative new media proposition online: The Media Briefing. Their objective? To connect audiences of likeminded media people with quality, relevant content and to grow a loyal rapid and dynamic community to, in turn attract sponsors and other stakeholders in the sector. Here is a great video that shows the two protagonists Neil Thackray and Rory Brown discuss the objectives, approach and business model.

The duo’s vision is to take a radically different approach to the business media industry. An approach that takes many of the disciplines of traditional niche media publishing and combines them with the latest semantic technology (highly targeted and intelligent curation and aggregation) to aid the rapid and seamless discovery and distribution of the best third-party content available on the web.

The team developing the new offer has done a great job; their success is confirmed by the traction the site is earning from specialist media content curators on Twitter.

The site already boasts an impressive faculty of media experts from the across the industry who are already providing exclusive interviews, video commentary and regular columns about what’s shaping and defining their verticals.

I will be joining the two founders, Rory and Neil as facilitators on the panel of a workshop, chaired by Andrew Davies and entitled: “How to Build for the Future in Media & Publishing” at the  Like Minds Autumn conference on Thursday 28 October 2010. Read on to find out more.

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As publishers head for Frankfurt, it is customers they should be seeking, not books

Posted on September 30, 2010 by stephen bateman
The Threat

Digital content production needn't be so hard

Everyday powerful digital media companies like Yahoo, AOL and Demand Media are creating new content around niches, and household brands, as well as the content farms are marginalising special interest publishers who fail to respond to the new competitive threat that is being mounted by these new, non-traditional competitors.

To compete for attention in this new world of fragmenting audiences, publishers need to keep pace and be in a position to provide enough refreshed and relevant content to stay on the radar of the search engines.

To compete effectively, publishers need digital aggregation and curation tools to help their editorial and marketing people drive interaction and make more frequent connections, without the sweat of additional effort and toil.

But many special interest publishers are struggling to provide enough relevant content to satisfy their community members. The danger is not that they will not have the books to sell, but they will soon not have the customers to sell to. To stay relevant publishers must be in a position to implement the new digital marketing practices that are becoming mainstream, and use these to grow their communities.

When it comes to new marketing techniques, it is not the publishing skills that publishers lack but time. Also the antiquated work-flows and editorial processes of old are failing them in this post-digital era. Publishers’ archives and content is often inadequately formatted, not retrievable nor appropriate and, all too often, out of date for it to be of any use to them for content marketing purposes.

So, how can publishers do better than dish up poor, infrequent and irrelevant content whilst their readers disappear elsewhere?

The Fix

Publishers can do several things to mitigate the threat and, probably the most effective is to use other people’s content on the web to curate aggregate, nourish, grow and retain their communities without the burdens of hard labour.

“Oh but no!”, I hear publishers cry, “that is stealing and, anyway, we prefer to use our own content, it’s better” . I sympathise, but to argue this is to miss the point. In reality, content curation and aggregation are not stealing and the practice (I use it in this post) does not take anything away from a publisher’s creative output. Quite the contrary, as you read on, you will see that the practice enhances the ability to generate original, relevant and targeted content. The curation and aggregation practices don’t remove the need for quality original content, but they do provide a means to work more quickly, less painfully and through the channel of aggregated content, allow publishers to plug the gaps in their content marketing programs, solidify a faster-paced digital editorial flow and keep the output pegged to a sustained and disciplined digital content schedule.

So how do curation and aggregation work and how do they help produce faster, targeted and relevant content?

Content curation is the process of sifting and filtering articles and blog posts from across the web. Aggregation is bringing that content from multiple source repositories for retrieval at a later date.

Modern Functionality

A well designed curation and aggregation platform, built with a publishing focus will enable the following functions:

  • Aggregate large amounts of content, from internal and external sources
  • Sift and select the most relevant, quality content
  • Provide a structured process for identifying external contributors, gathering permissions, selecting and vetting chosen sources
  • Identify and extract key topics: concepts, people, places, companies, events and many more
  • Classify the content according to a taxonomy, across different subject categories, and encase content in intelligent, rich and descriptive meta data
  • Collect relevant meta data from external databases to provide context, topic summaries, person’s biographies, concept definition
  • Moderation procedures – automated and manual

Multiple Benefits

  • This ‘aggregated’ content provides a bedrock and a full perspective on specialist subjects
  • Original content can be created on top
  • The content can be shared on social networks
  • And visible on search engines
  • This attracts and retains new customers
  • Content is targeted to many more niche searches, improving SEO and increasing Google ranking
  • Allows you to display real-time trending content, such as popular issues, people, and companies

Other Considerations

Like all operational improvements, there’s a cost to maintaining a competitive advantage but, with content marketing, it is important to view the investment through the lens of community and not the traditional lens of pure spend/revenue ratios. This, as Junta42 explain on their website, “is because the shift from company-centered branding to customer-centered branding changes how we use our marketing budgets and the resulting return on investment (ROI).”

In may ways, publishers are needing to recreate their businesses. That will always have a start up cots that needs to be recouped over time. The shift in business focus for special interest publishers is the strategic decision to invest in community, knowing that when that special interest community reaches critical size, the life-long value of the members in community will be worth more than the few additional book sales that occur in the year of transition.

So, can book publishers go to Frankfurt and be focused on filling spaces in their 2011 programs when such a threat and such an opportunity are on the doorstep?   Find out how a community building content platform can help you

Posted in Business Models, Community, New Product Development, Social Media, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Community: a focal point for core transformation in book publishing

Posted on September 19, 2010 by stephen bateman

Community: an opportunity for teams and their leaders

In these times of transformation, corporate attention tends to be on digital tools, platforms, dashboards, analytics, budgets, timeframes, business models, ROI and an inordinate amount of technical detail.

Our instinct seems to be that systems will solve all our woes. But leaders will tell you that successful change occurs when people in the business are “on the bus”. So why is it that conversations about digital transformation focus on systems first and people as an afterthought?

Think about it: in the new connected world, successful publishers rely more than ever on collaboration between the people on the inside (editors, community managers) and those on the outside (readers, authors, bloggers). People-passion is at the heart of community and, yet we fail to take the time to open it up and overhaul the moving parts.

Transitioning a traditional book publisher from a book-centric business to a community-centric business requires something special: leadership at every level of the business, regardless of job function; leadership instilled right across the workforce.

Meeting the needs of community is a collective game that requires the entire business to be outward facing. That scale of change means rethinking, resetting and re-configuring business practices and the roles of every employee. Core transformation is about refocusing the entire publishing activity to align with new goals, a larger playing field, new forms of distribution and marketing,  a bigger more aggressive competitor environment and the consumption and buying habits of a new generation of media consumers.

Setting the vision for this level of strategic leadership, and planning the operational outcomes is a job for leaders and their leadership teams. It starts at the top with a new vision for the business and it drives down to the teams who, in turn, take ownership of the vision and enact the changes needed to achieve the newly defined goals of the business. To ignore this process of resetting the business in its entirety is tantamount to suicide. Leaders not doing enough, not being rigorous and exacting enough in this process of core change and not moving fast enough to redefine the focus and practices of their business will fail their staff and fail their communities.

However, the leadership team can only go so far. Staff need to step up and seize the opportunities that are being presented to them and avoid hanging on to outmoded practices. The job of change is a collective process of immense learning and discovery.

For leaders and their teams, everything begins with an understanding of community and the new role and place of content within the new media environment. The good news is that, as publishers, we already have some of the most sociable and creative minds around, and this talent can easily be transitioned to the new media world. The focus across the business needs to adjust from being book-centric to people-centric.

For this, team members require a 360- degree pan optic view of the new media environment and their roles in it; only then can they truly start to engage with the breadth and length of opportunity that emerges from a community-centric publishing model.

Educating teams on the diminishing scarcity of expert content and, working alongside them, to expose ways in which the disruption is affecting the traditional publishing model garners a desire for action. This is why, when drawing on employee knowledge, leaders will see their teams quickly put forward initiatives that address the need to change business practices, job functions and collaborative workflows. Discussion will uncover new opportunity and business practices to make money from community. Everything the business does will begin to be viewed under a different angle: through the lens of community, not the lens of book making.

What changes in a team is seeing and accepting that we are no longer in the business of publishing books and, that challenged revenues must be replaced by other sources of revenue which are only possible with a community-centric business model.

Together, with our teams, we need to examine the dynamics of people and content, connect the dots between the two pillars of the business (content and people) and embrace audience marketing. We need our people, who have long been experts in very specific content domains, to fully appreciate the way digitally-empowered audiences consume, produce and circulate content and the initiatives that are required in our content and social commerce hub to attract and retain fellow enthusiasts, in community. That’s the 360-degree view our teams need to embrace in order to make a full contribution.

What needs to be done isn’t a mystery (I’ve written it before) and there are some key actions that can help accelerate the process of inoculation. Here are four suggestions from a repertoire I developed in my last corporate leadership role:

  • Set clear learning objectives: we are all students of business. We need to be constantly learning and improving. There is no room for passengers. Personal learning objectives put valuable focus and structure around learning and help employees learn on the job and apply that learning to work.
  • Establish collective learning teams: these are groups of people who are given a responsibility and opportunity to participate in a learning initiative together. These can be task or subject orientated. The group can be given a room and some time for group discussions to talk about ways they can improve their jobs and subsequent contribution to the business and they can report back on their progress.
  • Offer mentoring: change is a time of personal opportunity and as leaders at all levels in the business we can have the opportunity to take another member of the team under our wing and by means of coaching help them develop new skills and strengths.
  • Offer guidance, encouragement and feedback: in the current climate when financial reward is not possible, encouragement is a great incentive.  A constant stream of feedback, both corrective and reinforcing, is one of the best ways to develop employees. Without a clear and balanced understanding of what they are doing right and wrong, employees, like athletes, are unlikely to improve. That’s not good for the business and not good for the people in it.

Specialist book publishers, if they are to survive the post-digital age, need people who can see the reality of today and describe a brighter, more prosperous tomorrow; people who challenge the status quo and change everything. Those publishers who choose to behave like a swift-footed 2-toed flightless ratite bird will only know the consequences when it is too late.

Special interest publishers who bury their heads when they could be acting will only have themselves to blame

Posted in Business Models, Business Rewiring, Career, Community, Leadership, Social Media, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Positive signs for a bright future despite the decline in book retailing

Posted on September 6, 2010 by stephen bateman

Implementing change requires effort

After getting back from a long summer break and an extended digital fast, I was curious to know what changes and developments had occurred in publishing during my absence.

Three concurrent events helped me take stock of the current state of book publishing:

  1. The first was a wander through the book aisles of WH Smith in Exeter, which, as you might imagine, did little to provide me with a compulsive new vision for a brighter publishing future.
  2. The second event that captured my attention was a more compelling story from Michael Morpurgo’s on the creation of Penguin 75 years ago, on BBC R4. This was a more uplifting experience and a timely reminder that ideas and more ideas drive success in publishing.
  3. The third stimulus was the news on almost every industry blogger’s pages that Seth Godin pulled his ripcord and jettisoned his publisher Penguin in place of self-publishing. This, I pondered, might be the long awaited catalyst for change in our industry.

But what of these three events? Firstly, as you may have predicted if you know the stores, my amble down the aisles of WH Smith was not, as I mentioned, a trip through Publishing’s Gardens of Paradise. It felt more like a violent reminder of the biggest problem in book publishing today: swathes of poorly published titles stacked to the ceiling in lurid lollipop displays. Then, to add insult to injury, behind the floor-to-ceiling piles of “bestsellers”,  rack upon rack of poorly presented, slowly rotting backlist titles leaning in disarray on shelves that no self respecting shopper would care to browse.

How sad that the UK’s largest retail book chain has had such a detrimental effect on our publishing. Is it any wonder publishers see no alternative but to run headlong into poor list creation, snatching titles at auction that they can ill afford to pay for, just in order to jump on the bandwagon of celebrity publishing and try their luck at the lottery?

This type of distribution might work for the likes of the Guinness Book of World Records at Christmas but it’s questionable whether it works as the retail standard for publishing, 365 days a year? What lifebuoy can there be for an an industry as sick as this?  Is there any hope Tim Waterstone might buy back his flagship stores from HMV and restore sense and purpose to an ailing and butchered publishing and retail industry?

On a brighter note, Michael Morpurgo’s account of the creation of Penguin 75 years ago, on Radio 4, was a keen reminder of how successful book publishing is shaped by the initiatives of keen entrepreneurs who have vision and a sense of risk. The story on the radio happily coincide with a presentation Simon Jollands, my digital publishing partner, and I were giving about our new digitally enhanced e-book series. Our aim is to use high quality instructional content and compulsive functionality to bring engaging learning and interactivity to lifelong enthusiasts seeking to improve their proficiency in leisure pursuits (knots, gardening, golf etc..). Like Penguin, our series of digitally enhanced e-books fills the sort of gap Allen Lane spotted in the market as he was waiting for a train to take him from Exeter back to London. Like Allen, our aim is to supply a convenient and affordable series that revolutionises the existing.

Finally, news that Seth Godin has thrown down the gauntlet and decided to self publish was predictable but none the less exciting. I wholeheartedly endorse his decision to go independent and demonstrate new marketing practices. Sure, not all reputable authors are ready to follow but Seth’s insights into a failing industry and his leadership and teaching will spur many authors to move in that direction. With the right support, guidance and training, authors can successfully transition to an independent model. But happily, not all authors will feel a need to because some publisher (SIPs in the main) will themselves transition to provide the platform and the community for their to engage with their readers.

When Seth Godin addressed a group of independent publishers in May and shared his wisdom with them on the future role of special interest book publishing, he hit the proverbial nail on the head: the best way forward from here for niche publishers is curation, permission marketing and community leadership.

For me personally content curation of any sort is a victory. It reflects the way the industry is moving and it reinforces the change we, at Idio, are helping publishers and authors tool-up for.

On balance the barometer says book publishing is moving in the right direction. So let’s get on with it!

Posted in Agents, Authors, Business Models, Community, eBooks, Leadership, Marketing, New Product Development, Social Media | 1 Comment