CNET News chronicles Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's assertion that the software and services giant would be making a big noise in online advertising - an assertion that's been backed up by two short-term deals and likely to be followed by other major announcements. Forbes covers Microsoft's deal with social media portal Digg to use Microsoft for most of their online advertising, a deal that displaces John Battelle's FM publishing in large part for now - though based on John Battelle's upbeat assessment of the deal FM is gaining some inroads into Microsoft. Such a deal would be good for both partners: FM has done well with a number of major social media properties but has lacked the ability to fill available ad inventories effectively oftentimes, whereas Microsoft, ever late to the game, needs to start finding some leverage in social media as soon as possible. Both deals could presage exit plans that result in Microsoft acquisitions, but Microsoft may be learning from Google that it's more important to own the context than the content.
The other deal announced by Microsoft is the acquisition of ad auctioning technology from AdECN, a capability that should enable Microsoft to succeed more effectively against self-service ad placement services such as AdSense. AdECN is modeled after stock exchanges used in financial securities markets, requiring matching sellers' inventories against offers from advertisers, dealing only with existing ad networks as its members. So in effect demand for advertising coming in from one ad network could flow over to match inventory on another ad network, with each network receiving a portion of the buyer's ad fee proportionate to their role in the brokered transaction for the end publisher's sold inventory. AdECN takes a proportionately small piece of each transaction as a processing fee, in addition to up-front membership fees to cover basic infrastructure costs.
One can see how AdECN can be used by Microsoft to match inventory from ad networks such as FM Publishing to a greater universe of advertisers being glued together by Microsoft, giving FM-affiliated properties a broader universe of buyers without having to expand its direct sales presence. One can also see how this will enable Microsoft to enable traditional publishers and advertising agencies to gain access to a wider array of online properties without having to resort to the legwork required to cut deals with an ever-expanding universe of online niche market players and advertising networks. This will become increasingly important as more micropublishers begin to service niche markets more effectively online in B2B and consumer markets. So Microsoft can play "middle man" now with any number of media players, making easy money in the process and developing more direct sales and marketing relationships where it is most profitable for them to do so.
Given Microsoft's relatively late moves into trying to dominate online advertising a brokered market approach is a good strategic move. It enables Microsoft to gain the benefits of broad market penetration while enabling advertisers and publishers to work directly with the ad networks that make the most sense for their industry profiles. Given the increasingly niche-oriented nature of online advertising this may offer Microsoft more flexibility than a one-size-fits-all network like Google's AdSense network or its potential acquisition DoubleClick. The main weakness in this strategy is that it doesn't help Microsoft reach the "long tail" of advertisers as effectively as Google and Yahoo straight off, but in time Microsoft is likely to make inroads there as well. As its software revenues from tools that create content weaken Microsoft has little choice but to seek revenue from the content that's created by publishing tools. It's early days but expect Microsoft to develop some increasingly savvy solutions for ad buyers and sellers in search of the most premium online content markets.
The announcement of Factiva's deployment of improved integration capabilities via browser-based Web applications is being heralded as a major leveraging of Web 2.0 technologies to improve Factiva content delivery. The new tools allow Factiva SalesWorks content to be integrated into enterprise portal applications via user-embeddable widgets into Web 2.0 platforms using technologies that eliminate having to deal with feeds into back-end server applications. This is an important step forward into allowing both enterprise users and development teams to use SalesWorks content where it matters most to them, without having to rely on expensive and time-consuming custom integration efforts. SalesWorks offers a good range of content, but as enterprises turn to a wide range of CRM applications, Wikis and other platforms as their "go-to" business information platforms services such as Factiva have to move quickly and effectively to make their content a part of those user-centric environments.
While these new integration capabilities are hardly revolutionary by overall industry standards they do represent an important step forward by a major enterprise content aggregator to move further away from its own platform to offer customers the ability to put their content where they will find it to be most useful. Much of the focus on enterprise workflow integration by aggregators has been on creating comprehensive tools to solve specific information retrieval problems. By moving to browser-based content embedding technologies aggregators can move more quickly to bring their content to users via the applications that matter in their workflows already on a day-to-day basis.
This is a sword that cuts both ways, of course: in ceding the complete workflow to other applications integrators trade off more complete integration for more quick market penetration. As penetration is the key to both retaining subscription bases and expanding opportunities for add-on marketing efforts it pays to go the embeddable route - a picture that will become more clear to more aggregators in time. Aggregation is no longer such a rarefied game - both Factiva and other content aggregators will face increasing competition from technology-oriented companies that know how to provide value-add functionality on top of many different types of business information content sets. It's a race of sorts to see how providers of licensed content sets can switch to a strategy that will get embedded in desktops securely before these other providers gain the upper hand. In the meantime Factiva has made a strong move to claim their place in the new widget-oriented enterprise desktop as quickly as possible.
The headline at BtoB Online announcing rosy revenue increases for magazines seemed like great news for the magazine industry, but when you look at the details of statistics from the Magazine Publishers of America’s Publishers Information Bureau there's a far less rosy picture for several major publishers to consider. While Time Inc.'s People showed a reasonable 6.4 percent revenue increase in 2Q07 versus 1Q06 Time magazine was down 16.8 percent, Fortune down 13.4 percent, Money magazine down 8.3 percent, Business 2.0 down 38.4 percent - enough to spark talk of Business 2.0 heading to the dead pool - and the now-deceased Life magazine clocking a 78.7 percent drop in revenues. Overall health, fitness, food titles and hardcore business magazines fared well while older regional and niche titles, small business, consumer-oriented finance and men's enthusiast magazines seemed to fare worst.
Magazine gainers easily trumped losers in overall title count and revenues so there's some good reason for print producers to feel that there is some good potential growth ahead as print becomes the status media of choice for affluent people trying to achieve more and to hold on to what they have through health and diet regimens. But general-interest print publications and publications catering to more traditional home and recreation interests (who has time?) seem to be fading or growing moderately at best, with few exceptions. This may be a reflection of the current U.S. economy as much as anything else, but it also indicates that print is going to continue to succeed as a status symbol for mostly high end up-and-comers but only when it meets very specific points of pressing concern. In the meantime most entrepreneurial and tech-oriented audiences seem to have migrated for good to online venues.
Where this leaves general interest publishers such as Time Inc. is uncertain. The Web's ability to excel in both general audience aggregation and to dissemble general interests into highly focused niches rapidly via social media and vertical portals puts any traditional publication's strengths in a precarious position. For the most part these publications are going to have to make sure that they are contextualizing their content online as effectively as possible via search engines, social media and personal syndication, with their revenue streams following their content to its most valuable contexts. In print these publications will need to consider how mass customization will enable them to extract editorial value from a range of staffs more effectively through different interest lenses.
In general publishers have to consider how they can use their online portal presences to drive print consumption more effectively. Users need to be encouraged to let publishers know what they'd like to see in print - and to facilitate its delivery along with other editorial content that complements those expressed interests. It is difficult for publishers to out-Google Google in contextualizing online content but for now they stand a chance to do that more effectively for individuals in the print medium
I had a chance to catch up with Answers Corporation Chief Strategy Officer Bruce Smith recently regarding their recently announced acquisition of Lexico Publishing Group, the publishers of the Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com and Reference.com online portals , for USD 100 million. Lexico's reference portals are fairly simple and undramatic properties, but they have an audience that's about comparable to Answers.com in overall ranking and a footprint in education that offers Answers.com a complementary and loyal footprint. Most importantly Answers.com has been more efficient in being able to extract revenues from its references audiences than Lexico, so it effectively doubles its advertising base for marketing and ecommerce any may come close to doubling its revenues and then some along the way. As with its acquisition of FAQ Farm the Lexico properties are likely to remain autonomous sites, gaining common branding and integration over time but remaining tools that for the time being leverage highly popular bookmarked addresses.
While many magazine publishers are still sniffing around for undervalued print publications to take under their wings this move by Answers.com to scoop up highly ranked but underperforming online sites with complementary advertising bases demonstrates how quickly a highly profitable online site can extend its advertising efficiencies to build profits - even before an ounce of synergy or integration is added. To hearken back to my earlier post on Yahoo's possible sale it's far more likely that media companies that know how to extend advertising synergies online to related online holdings are going to build profitability more quickly than companies looking simply for overall scale of operations.
Bloomberg News covers Stanford Group analyst Clayton Moran's claims that the seeming listlessness of Yahoo's management since Terry Semel's departure and sinking share prices are laying the groundwork for an inevitable and likely sale of Yahoo. Moran cites Microsoft as the likely bidder and beneficiary of online synergies that would boost both properties into a newly competitive position against rival Google. There are a lot of things that still argue for this combination - invigorated search technology and online office components from Microsoft, advertising know-how and effective destination content development from Yahoo - and a such sale is certainly not improbable. Yet I can't help thinking that this may be one of those "perfect" marriages that would go south far more quickly than people may imagine.
The main rub that I see is that both companies suffer from two similar maladies: weakening market mindshare for their brands and dysfunctional product development cultures. Microsoft has had a remarkable string of product introductions that have been flops, duds or near-misses, in spite of having a near lock on many key technologies. Its Internet Explorer browser, once the unchallenged ruler of online Web content consumption, now boasts only about 70 percent of the European marketplace, a problem only exacerbated by mobile content markets moving further away from Microsoft technologies. Yahoo has many comparatively healthy and innovative initiatives, but some of its most innovative properties such as Flickr, del.icio.us and Yahoo! Pipes are either standalone brands or initiatives that are relatively orphaned from the mainstream Yahoo offerings. The Semel legacy of traditional media development stalled the effective development and integration of social media, a strategic error that Yahoo is working hard to correct but nevertheless a legacy of poor market timing that Microsoft will do little to bolster.
Moreover a Yahoo acquisition will do little to help Microsoft penetrate the enterprise/prosumer space very effectively. Yahoo's withdrawal from enterprise services a few years back left the playing field open for Google, which is still at the foothills of enterprise content but building a steadily growing array of products and integration resources to build that base over time. On the consumer side the addition of Microsoft properties to Yahoo's ad base would be a strong plus, but not one that could not be offered by other parters as well with greater online growth potential.
Which brings us to the question: who would want to buy Yahoo? I think that it's far more likely that News Corp will see a Yahoo acquistion as a perfect complement to its holdings.Its online management team is both upbeat and highly experienced with social media via Fox Interactive Media's MySpace platform and would offer Yahoo a better chance to develop as a dominant media brand with a strengthened advertising base. Yahoo's strong online finance portal would complement potential content fed in from Dow Jones holdings should that deal close, a deal that would have already provided News Corp with good enterprise revenues and technology platforms. Yahoo entertainment offerings would complement MySpace nicely and its enormous base of user accounts would offer MySpace a shot in the arm as Facebook builds a stronger market share.
The only real question for a Yahoo sale is timing - and it's likely that Yahoo's nascent social media replacement for its less-than-booming 360 portal may be the timing telltale. If the introduction of this effort is not stunning or if management becomes discouraged in its early testing phases then it's highly likely that a deal will be executed fairly quickly one way or another. But don't be surprised if quiet talks are already in the works - no doubt awaiting News Corp's finalization of Dow Jones details before focusing on Yahoo. Other potential suitors such as TimeWarner could enter the picture (AOL round two? Probably not.) but few offer clear synergies. We'll see whether Microsoft has the gumption to pull the string on a Yahoo deal, but my guess is that they have their hands full with many core competitiveness issues already - and that News Corp will be able to define more profitable synergies and longer-term brand strength before Microsoft gets to pop the question.
paidContent.org notes the Dow Jones boardroom resignation of Dieter von Holtzbrinck in protest over the pending News Corp deal, but away from the acquisition soap opera are some interesting details culled from the recent Dow Jones earnings report. Though overall earnings are down notably online revenues are up 5 percent and paid subscribers to The Wall Street Journal Online grew 23.6%, buoyed in part by a USD 99 combo package for the print and online edition. These are good numbers at a time in which business news is challenged in all directions by new sources. Think of the WSJ as the world's largest country club, a point of social distinction that allows one to join an elite (kind of) group for very nominal greens' fees.
It's a model that social media plays will be leveraging more in search of high-value focused market segments, which begs to some degree when WSJ will be doing more to integrate community features into their platform. I have great respect for Gordon Crovitz and his business acumen, but the WSJ's shyness on social media is likely to leave additional "gated community" revenues to others in time. And perhaps time will be the factor - they aren't growing any more WSJs any time soon, as Rupert Murdoch knows very well, so Crovitz and others with deeply entrenched media brands seem content to let their content become contextualized elsewhere. A little imagination is in order here to consider how to build a new clubhouse at this online country club - for premium fees, of course.
Meanwhile over at Dow Jones Enterprise Media the Factiva buyout makes things look temporarily rosy on the unit's top line but Factiva's compartively thin profits dragged down the unit's operating margins to 23.2 percent. The Enterprise Media unit is another example of where Clare Hart does a magnificent job of talking about Web 2.0 but so far has not really touched its potential to change the fundamental profitability of a licensed content aggregation business. By contrast Thomson Financial's recent deal to incorporate executive background briefings and private company profiles from Generate is a key foray to use Web content to build premium content revenues via direct extensions to their core content sets. The New Aggregation that we talked about a few years ago, in which publishers and aggregators must embrace Web-generated content and contexts aggressively to generate better margins, is now being embraced by key business information providers very aggressively.
Hopefully the Factiva buyout will enable Dow Jones to infuse their Factiva investment with more capabilities incorporating Web content that will improve both margins and content quality - once News Corp acquisition formalities have settled down. In the meantime here's hoping that Dow Jones' model for online and enterprise success continues to broaden both coverage and online audience engagement.
As noted earlier in ShoreViews Video there are two interesting reports that came out this week which paint a picture of online marketing increasingly dependent on content. The first item that caught my attention was an article from MediaPost, which references a research report from Yahoo and ChannelForce on online content's influence on consumer purchasing. According to the report seventy-five percent of consumers who researched their purchases before visiting a retail outlet used the Internet as their primary research source. The leading online resources were retail Web sites (73 percent), manufacturer websites (68 percent) and search engines (49 percent). Encouraging for search engines was data indicating that purchasers who use search engines tend to purchase more than consumers who don't use search engines - up to ten percent more for electronics such as digital cameras.
But there's an important wrinkle in this research process pointed out by data from a recent MarketingSherpa study of online purchasing. When the retail outlet is an online ecommerce site consumers are waiting longer than ever to make an online purchase. Where in a 2005 study there was typically a 19-hour delay between an initial visit to an ecommerce site in this year's study the lag between initial click and purchasing is up to more than 34 hours. Why the increased delay? Anne Holland at MarketingSherpa cites more research and comparison shopping being done, a view that seems to correlate with the Yahoo/ChannelForce study.
It's good news for content producers that there is more online digging than ever before, but what kind of content should buyers be dawdling over before heading out the door to the store or clicking on that shopping cart? Mike Moran at Web Pro News has some key points of advice on the Yahoo/Channel Force report:
Too often, marketers shy away from providing the most attention-getting and persuasive information. Do you have information on your site about the problems that your product solves? Not just specifications and fancy features, but real problems? Do you tell stories of how these problems were solved for real customers with your product?
Certainly the story-telling part of online content is an important part of a robust publishing strategy. As outlined by David Meerman Scott in his book on The New Rules of Marketing and PR sellers have to think more like publishers - both on their site and through public relations channels that let people encounter stories about their products through weblogs, press releases and other search-friendly channels. But the other side of the story-telling equation is to make sure that your stories are being told by your customers through social media. Though not spelled out explicitly in this research it's a fair bet that some of the extra time being spent by buyers at retail sites such as Amazon and Buy.com is in poring through user-generated product reviews - and generating their own questions and comments that take a while to get answers.
While brand advertising in traditional media outlets is still important to building sales this research argues for more highly targeted advertising techniques that focus more intently on reaching people when they are more deeply engaged in their product research efforts. Focusing ads more explicitly on social media sites and to complement consumer and expert reviews is certainly one part of the lesson to be learned from this research, as is an acceptance of the importance of reaching buyer-researchers when they are in search mode. But the other side of the equation is to think about what kind of content that you're using in your online ad campaigns and marketing channels. The research argues strongly for an approach that emphasizes widgets embedded with facts, product comparisons, customer stories and other decision support materials more than sassy messaging. This is not as easy to fathom out sometimes as your typical online ad run but it's essential to the process of transforming increasingly conversational shoppers into committed - and higher value - purchasers.
Though its reach is relatively small in comparison to the leaders in social bookmarking, the Newsvine portal remains one of the more successful news-oriented social media sites on the Web. Unlike Digg and del.icio.us, which focus largely on social bookmarking for technology and entertainment, Newsviners provide both bookmarks to online content that draws discussion from members as well as original content authored by Newsvine members and smatterings of mainstream news sources such as AP and The New York Times. The mix of user-generated content and mainstream media makes for a lively mix of discussions on politics, religion and other hot-button issues that drive users to vie for top community rankings and their own modest ad revenues. But though the Newsvine community remains vibrant, it has not had a serious growth spurt in over a year. How does a social media property grow beyond a relatively small group of rowdy enthusiasts?
Newsvine is hoping that the answer may lie in nailing some hot scoops dug out by its citizen journalists. In the wake of so-called "D.C. Madam" Deborah Jeane Palfrey's release of telephone records leading Newsvine denizens are hoping to score a big news story of their own by combing through the phone records to see if they can identify well-known political figures who may have been caught up in affairs via Palfrey's escort service. To facilitate this effort Newsvine and some of its most active members have set up some software to enable Newsvine members to do their own sleuthing through Palfrey's phone records in cooperation with their peers. While there are no tangible results yet from this crowdsourced research, the energy level is running high amongst these budding investigative journalists.
Although turning up some high-profile names may gain Newsvine some temporary traction, it's far from clear that this is the type of exercise that will put citizen journalism on the map in any significant way. Leading webloggers have been uncovering major stories for years - stories which are ignored oftentimes by mainstream media outlets or co-opted later on as their own "scoops." The focus of this effort - a Washington sex scandal - tends to play into this trend, as it's the type of work already being done no doubt at a feverish rate by every major news organization in the world in search of a hyped and hot story. Crowdsourcing and some quick coding have enabled some "boots on the ground" via Newsvine and a very interesting precedent for future user-keyed research efforts, but those hoping to gain fame and fortune from uncovering the next "Deep Throat" are likely to find asterisks next to their scoops rather than Pulitzer Prizes on their bookshelves.
The key rub in this push towards citizen journalism is that in trying to go after mass media-scaled stories with a mass media journalism techniques Newsvine is in large part just echoing the existing strengths and weaknesses of today's journalism. While there may be some hypocrisy exposed through these efforts that people should know about it's ultimately the same sort of focus on least-common-denominator interests - who's having sex with whom - that drive many of today's journalists obsessed more with fame, fortune and elbow-rubbing than with reporting on the truth regardless of its sensational value. Where citizen journalism seems to shine most brightly is when self-motivated content producers remain true to their values as individuals and to the important relationships that they want to maintain outside of the context of journalism. Quality citizen journalism seems to grow out of the quality of relationships that generate interesting content as much as out of any inherent journalistic skills used by a content producer.
I think that this is one reason why social media portals such as Facebook are growing steadily - they provide first and foremost a place where people can be themselves in all their personal dimensions. This tends to build relationships based on real-world trust more than the ginned-up popularity of of online relationships with people who hide behind pseudonyms. In turn this is likely to assist in developing more in-depth content close to individuals' interests and expertise that will reinforce relationships in their online community more effectively. Portals that focus more on media before relationships do not seem to have as much growth these days. No surprise there, really - there are already far too many mainstream media outlets chasing the tall end of the interest curve.
Relationships are the truly unique experiences around which content gains its greatest value, content which may look dull in its "long tail" focus but which in sum is far more valuable than the fleeting bits of fluff that pass themselves off as serious journalism these days far too often. This is the real direction towards which citizen journalism is most likely to head - people with substantial "real world" relationships sharing important information with one another which becomes contextualized to broader audiences when it's valuable to do so but in ways that are less exploitative than the typical journalist-source relationships. The need for serious and professional journalism will continue for many years, with citizen journalists providing many capable recruits, but the real future of citizen journalism is one in which people sharing content are more concerned about being citizens than journalists.
After yesterday's Neilsen/NetRatings decision to drop page views from their site rankings two studies remind us that online marketing is a very complex process in which search engines and social media play a key role. A take on Facebook's rise in the ratings, why WikiYou is probably another feature searching for a marketplace and Fair Use Day is celebrated at BoingBoing.
Google has been pushing its search appliances, email and online application services to enterprises for quite some time, but it's inability to speak the same language as I.T. managers on issues such as security has slowed their progress significantly. Consider their recent acquisition of Postini a major investment in overcoming their I.T. gap and providing new inroads for Google's ASP-oriented content and office automation services. Postini specializes in managing security for external communications such as email, messaging and Web site access with services that are compliance officer-friendly and that are totally outsourced.
Investors Business Daily notes that this places Google in competition with other security services providers such as McAfee and Symantec, but it's really a strong swipe at both Microsoft and as well at Software-as-a-Service providers such as Salesforce.com who are making quick inroads with ASP-based content and automation services in the enterprise sector. With its extensive range of APIs Google can now sew together a wide range of content integration capabilities - including embedded services and database services. With more and more content-oriented capabilities being outsourced by major corporations Google finds itself acquiring more and more basic building blocks to become a future "must-have" technology for enterprises of all sizes. But at this point that's still a future at best - beyond search Google has yet to come up with a killer platform that will be hard for major corporations to resist. Still, it will make it that much harder for competitors like Factiva to dominate in this space as Google becomes more of a go-to source for content and communications behind the firewall.
There's quite a bit of buzz out there about Neilsen/NetRatings deciding to remove page views from its Web site traffic measurement rankings. ComputerWorld notes along with others that technologies which enable the embedding of content such as AJAX make it harder to determine what people are really looking at: the page that someone is visiting or the widgets embedded in that page. Therefore Neilsen is preferring to gauge the total time that a visitor engages a site rather than how many pages that they're looking at in a site. Forbes notes that other site measurement services are not giving up on page views just yet, and that regardless of what this may or may not mean the Neilsen/NetRatings methodology is still a "black box" unavailable for auditor scrutiny.
Neilsen has an important point about AJAX technologies making page views that much harder to substantiate as important measurement metrics, but there are other factors at play here as well. The key point that Neilsen seems to be driving towards are measurements that will be meaningful to brand advertisers used to time-based measurements via television and radio. Page views just don't compute with many of these advertisers, and perhaps rightfully so. In the highly transitory world of page views there's hardly enough engagement to provide the level of content endorsement that brand advertisters seek when paying premium rates. So for advertisers seeking "mouse potatoes" who are deeply engaged in a particular site visit time can be a particularly important metric.
The other side of this, though, is that this type of behavior tends to favor social media sites, where there is not only a mix of AJAX-embedded content but as well deep streams of comments, bookmarks and other linked content that gets users working the scroll wheel on their mouses a lot harder these days. Oftentimes the hottest content on a social media site may have dozens of weblog entries in a single page or hundreds of comments: it can take several minutes of focused reading before someone may be ready to move from one page in a social media site to another. So oftentimes total page views in social media may be comparatively low while total time engagement may be comparatively high.
None of is likely to be sweet news to search engines such as Google, where people flit through highly transitory content on their way to destination sites where they dwell over in-depth content. Contextual ads are very potent in these type of page-view environments, though - ads that are not necessarily of interest to the brand advertisers that Neilsen hopes to serve. On the other side of the coin Google's YouTube portal should be a prime beneficiary of such measurements, enabling new revenue streams for video content from brand advertisers who were never quite sold on search engine page views. There are many other details to audience measurement that Neilsen and others must take into account when coming up with meaningful representations of online behavior, but given Neilsen's desire to maintain effective relationships with media companies and advertisers putting an increasing amount of brand advertising on the Web focusing on the time people spend on a site is a strong move towards supporting destination Web site content - and towards providing social media sites with a well-deserved revenue boost.
What the Nielsen/NetRatings change really means, Postini's impact on enterprise Google sales, new Google social media search and initial thoughts about the new Flock release.
Will Yahoo's replacement for its 360 social media product take off, StumpleUpon helps publishers in the long tail of content and Springer deals with an Open Access publisher who turns out to be quite vocal about their early efforts' shortcomings.
Will social media grow to be a $4.3 billion dollar industry on just ads alone? We examine the role of premium content in social media growth. Also, some thoughts on Open Access as a growing trend for scholarly research and bridging the gap between peer-reviewed publications and Nature's Precedings portal.
The announced USD 630 million deal for Incisive Media to acquire ALM is unquestionably the strongest acquisition move in the B2B media space in a year of largely aimless portfolio shuffling. Incisive is biting off a huge piece in the process of doing so - they have about USD 280 million in annual revenues - but this is far from your typical "let's balance the portfolio and combine content management systems" deal. In acquiring ALM Incisive walks away with one of the most effectively integrated range of legal publications for an industry vertical that has strong print revenues but also a remarkably strong and progressive online presence.
In addition to ALM's wide range of traditional ad-supported editorial content they have been very active in integrating leading weblogs into their ad network and have gone way deep into their own vertical user-generated content via VerdictSearch, a portal that allows legal professionals to input details on cases and settlements into a database that can be searched or mined by ALM's editorial staff for hot legal stories. Toss on a strong relationship with Thomson West for enterprise integration and a strong events presence and you get a profile that most business information companies would have to work very hard to top.
And that's before you get to the management team. Bill Pollak has assembled a top-notch staff at ALM to help it transition very profitably into the electronic age, holding out some promise that in the merger of these two companies it will be more than your typical "puff and slough" weed-out of mergee managers. Hopefully Incisive keeps much of ALM's team in place to help them assemble more effectively integrated marketing in vertical segments. Incisive's portfolio includes a wide range of titles largely aimed at financial markets that do very well online in many instances, but they have not leveraged new models of engagement for their audiences as effectively as ALM in many instances while some strong Incisive titles seem to be shoehorned in together rather oddly (do ClickZ and Search Engine Watch really belong in the same group as Inside Market Data?).
Conquering both legal and financial markets in one portfolio is a very shrewd move, with the deal flow in these two segments oftentimes creating very complementary editorial and data flows. While the size of this deal may tie up Incisive's cash for a while it would be nice to think about how some further database acquisitions or alliances might help to create some very interesting synergies for dealmaking business information. But in the meantime there's also the complementary presence of Incisive's UK-oriented legal publications and other globally-oriented publications that will be strengthened by ALM's largely US-oriented marketing.
While doubtless there will be some gnashing of the gears as new interests are merged and some cleaning out of questionable rabbit warrens this is a powerful move that draws into focus the increasingly merging worlds of legal and financial interests that will benefit from the combined coverage offered in these two teams. Hopefully this merger benefits the ALM team as much as it appears that it will benefit Incisive. Time will tell.
Is Twittergramming the future of citizen news gathering? Robert Scoble is bullish on it. Also, a take on Read/Write Web's view of the past and future of the Web.
Happy Independence Day! While most Americans are unplugged today tending to barbecues, baseball games or frolicking down at the beach we thought that we'd offer everyone our view of how social media played a pivotal role in the events that lead up to the historic signing of the Declaration of Independence. Here's an entertaining - and short - photoessay in tribute to those pioneers of publishing. Transcript follows the clip.
It’s Independence Day in the Unites States of America, a time when people of all walks of life get together to celebrate our nation. In most ways we celebrate America as it is today, a unified nation more than two hundred years old.
But it’s also a day when we remember how America used to be on the day of its birth. Who was America on that day? We were people of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Georgia – people who lived along a thousand miles of coast , plains and mountains, each with their own idea of what America was and what it should become.
Where was that common idea that we call America formed?
Was it in the bitter snows of Valley Forge?
Was it on the battlefields of Guilford Courthouse, Cowpens or Bennington?
The War of Independence was necessary to create an independent nation, but there was one real factor above all that created a unified vision of what America would become:
Content.
Out of the printing presses of colonial America poured pamphlets expressing a new vision of politics and democracy that spread throughout the land. The pamphlets were read aloud and discussed in taverns across the colonies, creating a new common consciousness about this new nation in the making. The discussions lead to convictions, convictions lead to action – and action lead us to new discussions, new content – and a new nation.
In our great new era in which so many people are blessed with the freedom to express themselves through publishing, please take a moment today to remember the social media pioneers who dared to express bold thoughts to people – people who would join to become a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the freedom of expression that has ignited a global revolution in content.
CCC's new licensing deal for academics, a take on Nature's blog pushing for more innovation in scientific publishing and what really happened when the iPhone debuted.
We all know those catchy jingles that companies like Microsoft and HP come up with to get us thinking about them as innovative companies, but what's an up-an-coming content company to do if they want their own tune? Well, they could try "Whatdoyouwannaknow," an upbeat tune from NLX Music. NLX is one of a number of indie music acts promoted by online music channel Harris Radio, founded by Pete Harris, a financial content industry veteran with a bent for great local music acts in NYC. The following clip of the song gives you an idea of the kind of energy that the song can invoke, you can contact NLX to arrange for your own cut of visuals or other tweaks as desired. I think that it's the type of tune that can play across a number of generations, so listen to it with an open mind - you, too, could have the next hot marketing anthem...
Our take on a brewing counter-offer for Dow Jones, thoughts on how Wikipedia's Current Events editing challenges news organizations to take a more objective view and ECNext's Manta uses social media concepts to update business profiles online.
