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BtoBonline: Who’s who in business publishing
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Who’s who in business media
November 16, 2009SIPA UK Congress 2009
June 10, 2009
Details for the upcoming SIPA congress, which will take place in London on Wednesday 8th July, were recently sent through to me.
SIPA is an abbreviation for the Specialised Information Publishers Association. It aims to serve publishers and providers of specialised information – such as online publications, newsletters and directory services.
This year’s congress is packed with material and with the backdrop of the current economic climate and changing reader habits this has to be an industry “must attend” event.
It took me a while to go through the programme – it’s jam packed – so I’ve pulled some highlights out below. The full line up and agenda can be seen here.
Before the congress, there are also two discussion forums on Tuesday 7th July run by:
Jeanne Hopkins, MECLABs and Louise White,Incisive Media; and
Victoria Mellor, Chief Melcrum Publishing and Paul Smith of Kable (part of Guardian Professional).
Congress highlights
- Who is the new online information buyer? (Andy McLaughlin, president of PaperClip Communications in the US)
- Using Twitter and LinkedIn as marketing tools (Ashley Friedlein, CEO and co-founder, Econsultancy)
- Lead generation – maximising name capture on websites and turning your prospects into buyers (Jeanne Hopkins, chief marketing officer, MECLABS)
- How MoneyWeek became the best-selling financial magazine in the UK (Angus Phillipson, managing director, WORKSsitebuilder and Toby Bray, managing Director, Fleet Street Publications and MoneyWeek)
Observations
With the shift to online perhaps there is the opportunity to run more dedicated online sessions, here, or at future events.
Online covers so many aspects; pay-per-click (PPC), cost per lead (CPL), search engine optimisation (SEO), mobile, mobile apps, ad networks, video, ecommerce, affiliates and even APIs.
These are the areas publishers need to be researching and looking at for the future. It’s a minefield but an Association can bring best practice and trusted suppliers to the table.
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Getting back to work
June 3, 2009
I’m finally back in the UK after a big sailing expedition from the Caribbean to Newport, Rhode Island (via Bermuda). You’ll be pleased to know we survived the Bermuda Triangle and after a monster 1500 nautical mile trip, Gulf Streams and rolling fog, it’s good to get back to work and reality. Really!
Beers
A free and informal meet up for B2B online publishers and bloggers / commentators is way overdue, so I was excited to see this evening event from The Sway.
According to its website, The Sway is :
“a meet up for anyone interested in blogging as a business, making money in social media, and rising up as the creators of content to collaborate, not compete, in an online industry that just keeps growing.”
It is “an informative and inspirational event, for networking, learning, and pitching in your thoughts on the big issues facing bloggers and publishers.”
It’s something I’ve been meaning to pull together for a while so it was good to see this. The next event is on Tuesday July 7th and you can check out further details here.
Growing B2B digital revenues: IDG case study
April 17, 2009
MediaShift is a useful US title worth following for people involved in online business media. Today, Mark Glaser has written a profile piece on the IDG chairmain, Patrick McGovern.
Digital now represents 48 per cent of revenue for IDG with the target to grow this to half in 2010. The rest will come from print, conferences and events.
Some of the innovative digital initiatives IDG is concentrating on include:
1. driving lead generation (CPL / CPA) campaigns
2. growing its tech network to provide greater reach for advertisers and media planners
3. developing sites which promote user generated content (UGC)
The full article can be read here.
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Emerging digital strategies for B2B publishers
April 14, 2009Here’s an interesting piece from eMarketer we’ve been sent today. Although American focused, it analyses the state of the market and how B2B publishers are updating their digital strategies to reflect this.
Online newsletters still remain the most popular in providing online content (see below) but few, if any, are using social media formats such as online social networks to syndicate content and drive traffic.
Encouragingly, this seems to be the tip of the iceberg for B2B publishers. There are still new opportunities for revenue growth from new formats such as mobile and web apps.
The last paragraph sums it up well for the industry:
Print editions will likely never disappear, but they may not stay the core revenue model for successful publishers. As additional formats are introduced, audiences will become even more fragmented. Publishers must create multiple editorial strategies to engage their readers at different touchpoints. As more media platforms are introduced at a faster pace, audiences might not stick around for traditional media companies to catch up.
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B2B publishers need to make more traffic pay
April 9, 2009
A lot is being banded around at the moment about newspapers needing to charge for content. This is an old debate and it’s about time we push on.
One solution currently in its infancy for B2B publishers, is charging advertisers or merchants for the traffic they send to another website and which results in an action, such as a purchase or a sign-up.
Make traffic pay
We’ve written about this earlier here in our making online publishing pay series which looks at cost per acquisition (CPA) marketing.
Rather than locking up general content and charging for it, B2B publishers need to look at CPA models which enable them to monetise the traffic they send to another site.
Few examples
The CPA ad metric has huge potential yet there are still very few B2B affiliate marketing programmes. However, give it another 12 – 24 months and I think we’ll see more. The most notable B2B CPA programmes include big brands such as Dell, Vodafone and O2 who are looking to target business readers.
Education and the next generation in business media
Movement to the new online model will take time. It will also involve us getting together as community – whether a PR, an advertiser, publisher or journalist – to understand how each function plays out in the online process. Peter Kirwan writes a brilliant article here which argues that “it’s time for the rising generation to devise a better way.”
Yes, it will involve us, the younger generation, but we can certainly listen to our peers who have strong creds from the print media days.
Who’s up for a beer in the last week of April?
The future is social business media
February 12, 2009We recently attended a call with Forrester Research which looked at how companies can incorporate social media into their business.
Spend on social networking is forecast to grow and company websites will become more open. Just look at what Intel has created. Its community site features everything from forums and radio, to blogs and video.
Why’s this important for business media?
In the future customers will use social media logins – whether it’s your Facebook, Gmail or MSN profile – to access company websites. It’s built around what’s called the Open ID standard. It saves people signing up for individual profiles which is a real pain.
Business media publishers will need to incorporate this standard if they are to create community.
It is no good having a static, in-house, content management system (CMS) because this will not be able to generate engagement and participation. Business media publishers will have to adopt these open standards so their content can seamlessly flow across the web. It’s the semantic vision and if you’re not familiar with this, we’ll be writing about this later.
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Shiny Media: lessons for us all
February 10, 2009Late last week Shiny Media announced redundancies which included the departure of Katie Lee, its co-founder.
When they launched back in 2004 it was seen as a bold move; creating a professional blog publishing company.
Business models and brand
But building a viable commercial model and establishing a brand which was able to take on the likes of T3, Stuff and other, well established consumer-tech titles, has proven tricky.
In my previous roles, we did a lot of work with our clients and Tech Digest. So following Shiny’s announcement I thought I’d carry out a quick review to see what online publishers – established or not – can learn five years on.
The finding – UK association is key
UK advertisers want UK traffic. It’s the best quality and the most valuable. Yet when I went to type in www.techdigest.co.uk it was not the site and brand which Shiny has worked so hard to create.
Tech Digest and the Shiny Media brand is losing valuable, natural UK traffic. And by natural, we mean those of us who type the URL straight into their browser.
It is also missing out on the opportunity to develop a UK site specifically for a UK audience and its advertisers. They can keep the techdigest.tv extension but publishers, B2B or not, must learn to value the importance of a co uk – both for their readers and advertisers.
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Business media campaign goes outdoor
February 4, 2009So the London buses are all back to normal – but check out the ad on the side of this one.
Join the B2B online revolution
Okay okay, slight confession: this is auto-generated. We stumbled across the The Bus Slogan Generator tool which we found posted on Adam Tinworth’s blog yesterday. If you’re feeling creative, and support UK online business media, you can create your own one here!
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