Buying & Selling eContent 2009 Program

Sunday, April 5, 2009

The pressure is on. Though negotiating content and data licenses may still involve pricing, cost is not the only issue content buyers face as
their owners race to improve performance by getting the right information to the right place at the right time and in the right form.

What do companies need to do with your content in order to  cost-justify the bill? Data mining? Repackaging? Repurposing? Broad distribution? What contract terms would need to be negotiated to achieve these demands and what are the considerations for the content sellers? How can the usage rules and licensing terms play leading roles in helping both sides maximize the return on investment?

Enterprise content buyers, content sellers, and licensing experts sit down at the same table to discuss the challenges and identify the opportunities.

Participants in this pre-conference session, will identify the “five hot topics” for enterprise buyers with regard to content licensing and
distribution. Results will be reported Monday to the full assembly. Follow-on conversation groups will be convened during the meeting,
and a white paper will be produced and distributed to all registered BSeC delegates following the conference.

Attendance limited to the first 35 to sign up.

This 10th Buying and Selling eContent conference is dedicated to the winners of EContent magazine’s juried EContent 100 Awards. Though there are no formal awards ceremonies scheduled at BSeC ’09, winners will be toasted at during the Dinner Reception, and the contest’s judges will be making brief cameo appearances during program interludes to discuss trends and opportunities in each product category.

Monday, April 6, 2009

 

If there's anyone who knows what's happening in the information industry, it's the consultants of Outsell.  As Information Today's initial partner in offering Buying & Selling eContent, Outsell's CEO Anthea Stratigos is being honored at this year's 10th annual event.  But who was it said there is no such thing as a free lunch?  In this command performance, Anthea shares her outlook for the information industry in the coming year.  We have asked her to discuss how your company might not only emerge from the fray but emerge at the head of the pack.

Sunday's Content Buyer's Forum brought buyers and sellers together to discuss ways to assure the ongoing viability of content collections and information services within constrained enterprise operations.  In this initial report from the working group, Bill Noorlander identifies five things you can do to delight your customers to such an extent that they can go on being not only your customers, but your best customers. 

Author, visionary and consultant, Lior Arussy terms himself a “creative catalyst” in the art of delighting customers, inspiring employees, and driving results to the bottom line. If you’ve been feeling like your business is being held back and that employee performance, customer loyalty, and competitive advantage are going right out the door, despair no more. At Monday’s opening session, Lior is sure to delight you with his tips and tricks for inspiring your employees, delighting your customers, and laughing all the way to the bank. (All delegates receive a complimentary copy of Lior’s book.)

In Search of Excellence in Content Commerce, Creation, Delivery, and CMS
What makes the EContent 100 award winners so successful? Hear from the EC100 judges: Tony Byrne, Founder, CMS Watch; Ron Miller, Editor, Fierce Content Management; and Martin White, Managing Director, Intranet Focus, Ltd.

Web 2.0 for the enterprise needs to be geared towards providing a secure form of collaboration that takes place within the framework of a rich contextual backdrop. Ultimately, the more effortlessly employees can communicate, collaborate and share new insights with one another, the faster an organization can respond to changing customer expectations and business conditions. Today, employees are spending more time working remotely, and many projects require insight and collaboration from employees working together from different corners of the globe in separate time zones. This changes the way people work. Employees are in need of a smarter approach to techniques used amongst colleagues for collaboration, and the current Web 2.0 implementations, such as wikis and microblogging, are providing that new context to workplace integration and best practices.

Social networking has made a big splash with consumer-related sites such as Linked-In, MySpace and Facebook. For business users, however, more robust social networking capabilities are needed to make a real impact on the lives of sales and business executives.  More and more companies are warming up to the idea of using social media, not just as a fleeting test, but as an integral part of the overall business plan.

Social media tools allow organizations to focus on the most relevant, actionable information that will yield results for their business.  The right combination of next generation technology with actionable information powers the performance of sales and business professionals to further increase effectiveness.  Once these professionals identify connections their colleagues, executives and board may have from business and school affiliations, they can take advantage of their organizational relationship capital.  Learn how to take advantage of yours.

The need of marketing executives to know the ROI of social media is one of the key barriers to the implementation of any social media program. These marketing decision-makers understand the importance of being able to measure the progress and success of these programs and ensuring their alignment with key business objectives but it can be hard to know what exactly should be measured to qualify progress and success. Just as social media itself represents a new set of tools for the enterprise, measuring the ROI of those tools requires a new approach as well.

YellowBrix has been in the content syndication and analytics business for more than 10 years. The company specializes in providing business, industry, and financial markets news and general consumer information for websites, intranets, wireless devices, and telephony services requiring real-time information. Contextual matching and analytical processing technologies are employed to deliver content through licensing agreements to Fortune 1000 corporations, associations, middle-market and small businesses across the United States and worldwide.   CEO Jeff Massa discusses the state-of-the-art in content syndication models and discusses how both publishers and corporate information centers can benefit from adopting them.

Archived content is searchable, relevant, sought after, easily maintained and a key differentiator for content providers on the Web. Yet, most publishers give short shrift to content that has the potential of increasing site traffic, upgrading Google rankings, bolstering their brand and in the process, allowing for increased ad revenue. Where the content is sourced is really not a concern. AllBusiness.com, for instance, aggregates data from a number of sources, including their editorial staff and an internal team of industry-focused bloggers. What is most important is how quickly and accurately readers (i.e. searchers) can find the information they are looking for...which often times is content that lay behind a myriad of obstacles in the "archive abyss." All too often readers either have to click through a sequence of landing pages or pay a fee in order to get what they need. If they can not get the information they seek on your site, they are apt to look elsewhere for it and almost always do. By clearing the barriers to archived content, online publishers stand to gain everything they are in business for:  audience, ad sales and revenue, brand awareness and site traffic. One of the key benefits of online content vs. traditional media vehicles is that every bit of content remains eternal. Interesting stories or uniquely useful expertise are evergreen. Access to it should be as well.

Mike will focus his remarks on strategies and practical applications for capturing (or recapturing) the value of every piece of content, so long as it lives within the digital ecosystem. No matter where a piece of content goes, how it is used, or by whom, there are ways to create revenue from it, attract new readers, subscribers, and advertisers. E-content publishers today are caught up in a vicious cycle of commoditization, piracy, and myopia. This vicious cycle is eroding publisher rights, revenues and brands. The potential audience for the content has gotten bigger, not smaller, so why are many Econtent publishers struggling? The answer lies in turning this vicious cycle into a virtuous circle that preserves a publisher's rights, attracts new consumers for the content, and maximizes revenues. This virtuous circle also provides buyers of e-content more options for reuse and redistribution, no matter how big or small their budget.

Pick up a gourmet goodie box and head off with your colleagues to discuss your favorite topic.

Carol Ginsburg will lead a conversation based on the results of Sunday's Content Buyers' Forum. What are buyers expecting sellers to do in this volatile economy?  What do sellers think about "maximizing the rules of engagement" to help their customers cost-optimize in order to justify the ongoing investment in information tools?  Here's your opportunity to add your thoughts to the equation. All delegates will receive a copy of BST America's white paper on the results of this BSeC '09 project.

What's your content licensing strategy? And does it still work?  Some speakers at BSeC ’09  are suggesting that you should let your content go.  Is there a syndication feed in your future?  Many strategies are at play in today's content licensing landscape. Join Corilee Christou for a conversation about licensing strategies that pay you back.

Why are content experts “content” (to coin a phrase) with trickle-down technology?  Since 1982, the speed of a microprocessor has increased 100-fold, computer memory capacity has increased 1,000-fold, and disk storage availability is up 10,000-fold. But the number of daily news stories in the world has merely doubled. How can media companies exploit the technology to make digital content more distributed, accessible, and findable? Larry Rafsky leads a conversation on the role media companies must play in shaping the future of content delivery.

One question that has haunted publishers since the dawn of web-based content delivery has been: Free or Fee?  Today, we know the answer is both.  What are the issues involved in building information services that incorporate "free" web-based content into new enhancements and service offerings? Who has succeeded in building hybrid fee and free services? What are the pitfalls? And how do we avoid them? How can we locate quality content on the free web and leverage it to help us meet market needs? Share your experience, vision, and hopes during this open lunchtime discussion with Steve Goldstein.

 

In a recent New York Times article, David Pogue wrote of Google: "Any time you cram some 20,000 of the world's smartest people into one company, you can expect to grow a garden of unrelated ideas. ... Unfortunately, it's so vast, you'd need a professional tour guide to help you find the gems." In this session, Google's director of content partnerships will provide a guided tour of the (mostly free) tools the company offers to help publishers better distribute and monetize their content. These many tools include Google News for free and fee content; News Archive Search; Magazine Search, Scholar, Book Search, YouTube and more. Jim will help attendees navigate these Google-enabled opportunities, with the hopes that they will discover a few gems, and find their way to improved content distribution and increased revenue.

The global marketplace is coalescing, with social networking connecting information professionals as never before and technological changes creating demand for content to be available in many formats and on many devices. How have different parts of the world reacted to these changes? What impact does it have on branding? How does it affect the buyers and sellers of econtent? 

The digital content ecosystem is complex. Meanwhile, e-content has become a virtually mandatory component of business strategies from those of niche publishers to those of independent booksellers and top libraries. However, leveraging existing opportunities requires significant investments in technology infrastructure. It also demands that companies shift resources away from their core businesses to tackle the operational complexities inherent to the digital marketplace. Meanwhile, the print content market is still robust. By leveraging resources and strategies currently available, companies in the content value chain can bring innovative and highly profitable digital products to market.

Larry provides an executive view of how to run a virtual content compan--one with no physical assets. From leveraging other people's content to hosting valuable assets in the cloud, Larry will explore emerging methods for building or expanding a content business without adding extensive overhead.

Cutting-Edge Success Stories in Collaboration, Social Media, and Mobile Content
What makes the EContent 100 award winners so successful? Hear from the EC100 judges: David Meerman Scott, Author, The New Rules of Marketing & PR and World Wide Rave; Steve Smith, Digital Media Editor, Min Online; Peggy Anne Salz, Founder and Chief Analyst, MSearchGroove

According to Forrester analysts, “An application without APIs is like building a house with no doors.”  Adam Hanin, Senior Marketing Director for Hoover’s, will discuss API strategies for opening up your platform and providing open access to business intelligence – the benefits, use cases, and associated risks.  Hanin will show, through use case examples from the launch of Hoover's API, how content providers can easily integrate content and tools into mashups and other Web 2.0 services and applications, improving end user productivity by delivering reliable, on-demand, real-time information directly within users’ existing workflows.

What is the best way to make sure your website can weather any economic storm? Throw away that crystal ball: The answer is more straightforward than you may think. With agile development and a hosted web content management platform you can toss out those guesstimates for high and low capacity needs, quit wondering if you're in lockstep with the right partner and stop worrying about your level of R&D spending. In turbulent financial times, it's essential to be able to scale up quickly and be able to take advantage of new technology trends swiftly and be able to keep your costs predictable.

Do you tweet?  Are others in your enterprise twittering around?  What purpose could all this micromessaging serve in an enterprise context?  You might be surprised.  Join analyst Sarah Milstein for a mind-opening presentation, with an open discusison to follow.

Celebrating BSeC's 10th Year

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Marty Kahn is CEO of ProQuest, a company created in 2007 through the merger of two leading and historic online information technology firms: ProQuest Information and Learning and CSA. On the heels of the first merger, long-term rival Dialog and its family of databases were quickly added to the mix. Marty brings more than 30 years of experience in the information industry to his role at the helm of ProQuest, but with three legacy products to manage and a herd of “next-gen” information users coming rapidly to the forefront, what’s he supposed to do? What are we all to do? Join us at breakfast on Tuesday morning to see it from his perspective.

At Leadership Directories, they've tried it all in the past couple of years—they converted their venerable database into social networking stuff, tried their hand at ebooks, and mobile access.  They experimented with pricing models, repurposing of content, even the dreaded user-contributions (well, not quite…)  What did they learn?  That it all comes down to simple math… Find out what LDI discovered by trial and error and share your experience in the open discussion that follows Adam's talk.

Content as a Service: The Demand for Content Flexibility and Social Networking Tools
Major ECM vendors are all trying to incorporate some elements of social software into their existing platforms, but a new generation of enterprise content management tools are making content accessible as a service and taking the concepts of social software and applying to enable communities, which can enhance the value of content offerings. John will address the opportunity that content flexibilty and social networking offers content providers and how it can be facilitated by effective content management.

Dynamic Publishing is the publishing process that allows publishers and content creators to create information as reusable components that can be combined for different uses, different types of documents, different channels and different audiences.  How can content be reused across multiple channels? --- How can you generate revenue on the Web while protecting your print revenue? --- How will you feed your content to new channels and new customers? Dynamic publishing can empower business by improving operational efficiencies, customer communication, customer satisfaction, productivity, brand consistency and much more.

Hallmarks and Imprimaturs – The best in content collections, DRM, and Search
What makes the EContent 100 award winners so successful? Hear from the EC100 judges: Theresa Regli, Analyst, CMS Watch; Steve Sieck, Founder, SKS Advisors, Inc.; and Paula Hane, ITI News Bureau Chief.

The biggest challenge facing information professionals today is the need for search tools that will provide them with a unique vantage point to understand all angles of their business. It’s not enough to simply organize the world’s information, rather, information professionals need resources to help them distill the information overload down to what matters most and shorten the decision cycle for knowledge workers. By taking a look at industry trends such as Semantic Web, Social Networking, Visualization and Mobility, Connors will address how the trends of today will impact the researchers of tomorrow. How will the enterprise of the future be empowered with a wealth of useful information, search tools and best practice knowledge? What will be the demands on information providers?

Social collaboration software has moved from the consumer market into the workplace and users increasingly expect community and social interactions around their activities. Yet jumping on the social bandwagon with a superficial approach, such as deploying standalone blog or wiki, doesn't provide the informed, integrated experience users expect. For many types of organizations, it can be difficult to evaluate the ROI of doing social well, but in the publishing community in particular, it creates a more engaged user base and can even help supplement traditional content offerings. In this presentation, Brian will shares his vision for portal-based social collaboration solutions that bring social interactions and transactional application integration together in a cohesive whole, with real metrics on key performance indicators.

Providing, the right information with the right context is the brass ring for business intelligence systems today. Yet, business intelligence applications rarely integrate unstructured data for decision making, often ignoring 80% or more of an enterprise's internal data as well as much of the information available on the Web. This talk will discuss the use of innovative new semantic integration technologies to bring together structured and unstructured data to to provide enhanced information and context to business decision makers. These new semantic technologies that can now bring structure, meaning and accessibility to previously unused or under-utilized data in the disparate, heterogeneous enterprise information cloud. These systems collect data from virtually any source, in any format, and transform it into structured, pervasive, contextualized building blocks of business information that can be directly searched and queried, or used as the foundation for a new breed of operationally-oriented, content-driven business intelligence applications.

There's been a lot of recent news coverage on using text analytics for reputation management in brand metric tracking applications, but how do you create systems that assist in business analysis, strategic research and competitive intelligence from the multiple sources of econtent that you create, license, or mine from the web? For example, rather than merely tracking mentions of your brands and measuring the sentiment toward them, you could find out technologies your competitors are working on, uncover where your competitors are using pricing to gain market share, and identify what product marketing tactics are being employed in your target markets. Text analytics can greatly assist in this process, but using text analytics for strategic research is very different from using it for reputation management, and requires completely different solutions. David will present the opportunities and challenges in creating systems for the automated analysis and discovery of strategic meaning from market intelligence content. He will describe what it takes to create such systems and will outline the pitfalls you need to avoid in developing and deploying them.

As consumers continue to become untethered to their home/work PCs and access the Net with powerful mobile devices like the 3G iPhone, the physical location of where people consume content represents limitless possibilities for today's publishers to diversify their product offerings. By adding digital content assets with geospatial information, publishers now have the ability to dynamically deliver focused content and highly-targeted advertising to consumers in geographic context. This educational session will present ways in which publishers can better exploit geospatially tagged content with rapid query and analytics capabilities to discover new sources of revenue.

How can you turn your data into a valuable information service?  Darrell Gunter will address this important issue in the context of its customer, Asklepios Group, which operates hospitals and highly specialized rehabilitation clinics in Europe and the United States. Asklepios struggled to share its knowledge across a variety of locations. On-duty doctor must be able to search and access information across a breadth of specialties quickly and efficiently. Its network of health care specialists doesn't equate to a community. The answer is to develop a system that provides doctors with virtual-knowledge services when treating patients, thus improving the level of care to patients.  Darrell then discusses how you can make your data valuable to the people who need it most. 

Join in on one of our conversation groups and then join us for a farewell luncheon buffet.

How does your content "chunk up" for rapid delivery into a variety of contexts and onto a variety of media platforms? If it doesn't you might want to ask, why not? Many content buyers today want to do things with your content, which you may not have anticipated, but that make their users happy by facilitating its reuse and enhancement. That may mean mixing and mashing it, scaling it down, or blending it up with related stuff. Join Robin Neidorf before lunch to discuss the various strategies for enabling the kind of flexibility that makes content buyers happy while maintaining a successful content business model.

The program at BSeC '09 has included several presentations on social networking platforms and collaboration tools.  By now we are all familiar with the successes in the consumer world, but what application do these tools have inside the enterprise?  Join Monica Ertel before lunch to discuss the challenge, opportunities, and best bets for implementing social networking and collaboration tools in a way that makes business sense.

Though some might argue that the very notion of “copyright” is arcane in the age of digital information and widespread content sharing on the web, copyrighted works still remain important elements of the content mix.  Licensing remains popular as a means of making content easily accessible to users while protecting the rights of copyright holders.  And earnings from royalties is still a viable revenue stream.  Join CCC’s Miles McNamee before lunch for a discussion on the enduring virtue of copyright and its continuing role in a web-enabled world.

Concluding thoughts by those who led the conversations at BSeC '09

Dick Kaser leads a focus group with those who conducted conversation groups at BSeC '09.  What was the mood of the moment?  What topics were most on the minds of industry executives?  What strategies emerged from the discusisons as ways and means of moving forward in our challenging times?   Join us in this concluding BSeC Open Forum session for valuable take-aways.

 John Thomas Gensch wraps up the conference by drawing together themes and threads, weaving them into a tapestry of opportunities and giving solid advice on how to turn your products into "must haves," even in an economic downturn.  It's not enough to just cut costs during this hurricane!  You've got to maximize revenues.  Tom has the experience and know-how to end the conference with a bang and send you on your way home with a plan in your hip pocket.