Mar

13

Realism and Re-invention

Filed Under B2B, Blog, data analytics, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | 2 Comments

But first of all, a practical question. How sensitive do you think you really are? I only ask because tears and laughter while reading a novel seemed to me a most natural consequence of emotional excitation, so when I read about an experiment at MIT in Sensory Fiction (http://www.fastcodesign.com/3026104/a-wearable-book-that-programs-you-with-feelings) I really wondered if Wearables were going to provide our emotions as well as our logic boards. It turns out that they are not quite there yet, and, anyway, the heat generated burnt out the system, but it left me wondering: networks and communities are all about emotion, and we are sufficiently inept at communicating those emotions remotely (phone, email) already without living in a densely rather than a lightly virtual world. Add the developing communities in the network and our capacity for increasing the sum of human misunderstanding will be infinite.

It was Victoria Mellor of Melcrum (www.melcrum.com) who started me down these tracks. I was lucky enough to be moderating her session at Digital Media Strategies, one aspect of which I wrote about here last week. As CEO of Melcrum (4-5 March), she and her co-founder have more reason than most to think about this, since they chose to work in the entirely thankless field of trying to help executives to communicate more effectively. In Old Time Classifications this would have been stereotyped as a training business in B2B Events and Publishing. New Style, this is a Re-invention, and the current versioning of Melcrum is as a community based peer group.

The fulcrum is the Forum, enabling members of Melcrum to get research, in-house support from Melcrum’s professional advisors (aka training), diagnostic and assessment tools to measure practice against best practice, but all of it driven by and from peer-to-peer meetings and leadership sessions. So welcome to the age of Networks, but in order for everything to work remotely, as it should, there have to be moments in the mix of intensive face to face, of peer recognition and satisfaction, and of privileged moments of listening to market leading thinkers one on one or in small groups. The organizer of this physical to virtual spectrum can achieve powerful positioning and margins, but it makes me wonder what we were doing when we sold all of this research and support materials remotely – in a catalogue or online. The world we have left is not simply to be typified by moving from a real world relationship to a virtual networked world relationship. It is moving from a world of the remote where we knew little about how our users were thinking, feeling, changing, reacting, – to a world where we both meet our users regularly, we embrace them as fellow-members of the same community, and we listen and speak with them digitally every working day. It is a world where a re-invented Melcrum competes with Corporate Executive Board, not a myriad host of small training outfits. And it formed a very exciting vision.

But, curiously, the themes it explored had already resonated through the meeting. There was, for example, Adrian Barrick, Chief Content Officer at UBM (www.ubm.com). Now that session, you might have thought, would take us firmly back to the ancient regime of B2B. Not a bit of it. In a company now seemingly dedicated to events the role of content becomes more critical, not less. Think of the network presence needed to maintain the buyer-seller dialogue online between annual trade shows. If content is the connection between network players, what do you need to provide to maximize network connections by customers? Adrian’s vision was very much of the time: treat attendees and exhibitors and conference delegates as communities and create the content that binds them together. If the new look UBM is an events player, it will also need to be a content player to sustain its market positioning.

Yet the next speaker, I thought, will surely have to be wholly outside of this theme. Damian Kimmelman, CEO, DueDil, is the entrepreneur re-inventing the credit and company information market. That morning, 5 March, he had issued a press release confirming a further £17 m in mezzanine financing for his company (and also issued a report from a research group that he supports which indicated that the entrepreneurial activities of immigrants create a net gain for GB PLC over the costs of immigrants). DueDil (www.duedil.com), at launch, drove straight at the heart of the UK’s duopolistic credit and business information companies by offering core government-derived (Companies House) information for …free. Even now, less than 10% of his million or so registered users pay anything. So, the Financial Times and others were saying that morning, how does he monetize the community he has created? What happens next?

In what followed Mr Kimmelman reminded me strangely of what I had heard earlier in the day just as vaguely hinted at by Andrew Miller of the Guardian Media Group. we began to think about the meaning of a network of users. About the potential for user generated content and what people might share with each other. About the fact that these markets had always existed by sharing trading information between each other, and that the free was the glue in an extended dialogue. So perhaps the future here lay, as did the Guardian’s, in some form of membership organization. All of a sudden we were leaving the world of Dun & Bradstreet and Experian far behind and heading for a world far more familiar to Victoria Mellor’s re-invention.

Yet this was all B2B – but not as we know it. It was all accommodation with living in a digitally networked world, yet using the real world, as in Adrian’s exhibitions, to give purpose and vitality to the networked equivalent. I thought I was moderating three wholly different speakers with widely divergent subject matter. I left the stage knowing there was only one.

Feb

18

Waving And Drowning

Filed Under Blog, data analytics, eBook, Industry Analysis, internet, online advertising, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

From the seashore the poet could not be sure if she saw waving or drowning. And so it is with nations, if you are a London correspondent of the New York Times (16 February: Roger Cohen/Intelligence): “It is not difficult these days to imagine Britain as a flooded speck of land bobbing around in the North Sea, reduced to rump status by the secession of Scotland, cut off from Europe by its exit from the European Union, ruled by a bunch of Old Etonians squabbling over how to dredge a river, plagued by officials issuing frantic edicts on “health and safety” and criss-crossed by a barmy prince declaring that “there is nothing like a jolly good disaster to get people to start doing something.””

Yet appearances are deceptive. This land is flooded, but all the other statements in this quotation contain truth, or are aspects of truth, but none are absolute truths. Yet what has been written is perfectly valid. And I was thinking of angles and aspects of the truth when studying the mass media as I have done since Marshall McCluhan identified them for my generation) when this week a wise friend in the US sent me this idea (https://medium.com/p/e7ed95079a43) “There are in fact no masses,” said sociologist Raymond Williams, “there are only ways of seeing people as masses.”

So I was well-prepared for this week’s new battle ground – how big is self-publishing and how much of a threat is it to the natural order of things (e.g will it displace publishers from the top of the heap)? The big story of the week was Hugh Howey’s assertion that most fiction publishing is now digital self-publishing. And as the dams burst on blogs and innocents were drowned in a millrace of speculation and accusation on self-publishing, I took comfort in that old (and now electronic) stand-by, The Times Literary Supplement (13 February), whose NB column records “Self-publishing has a rich past, as well as a digitally-enhanced and off-puttingly successful future. “The past is represented, says the TLS, by Proust, Blake, Walt Whitman, Jane Austen, Beatrix Potter and Stephen King, but it turns out that the only target here is the unfortunate Ms Debbie Williams (no relation?) who has had the temerity to launch what they describe as the world’s first MA in Self-Publishing at the University of Central Lancashire. And if this claim is wrong, tell them, not me.

I am sure that they see things differently in the USA. It all depends where you are sitting. Self publishers buried blogger and self-publisher Hugh Howey last week in accolades, praising his research into statistics derived from Amazon on the proportion of eBooks self-published in popular fiction genres. Here is a pleasing sample:

“There’s a second and equally important reason to doubt a 25% e-book penetration number: The other 75% of those titles includes textbooks, academic books, cookbooks, children’s books, and all the many categories that are relatively safe from digitization (for now). Print remains healthy in these categories, but these aren’t the books most people think of when they hear that percentage quoted. E-book market share is generally spoken of in the context of the New York Times bestsellers, the novels and non-fiction works that are referred to as “trade” publications. If we look specifically at this trade market, it’s quite likely that e-books already account for more than 50% of current sales (some publishers have intimated as much). Factoring in self-publishing and further limiting the scope to fiction, I’ve seen guesses as high as 70%. But that can’t be possible, right?…
“Did the smelling salts work? Are you with us? It turns out that 86% of the top 2,500 genre fiction bestsellers in the overall Amazon store are e-books. At the top of the charts, the dominance of e-books is even more extreme. 92% of the Top-100 best-selling books in these genres are e-books!”

So at the heart of this is an argument that states that when publishers say that the market is 25% eBooks, they are grossly misstating the position, since they are not counting self-published eBooks who account for the difference between the 25% that publishers acknowledge and the higher figures that Mr Howey discovers in his Amazon data dump. Please go and get the full story at http://authorearnings.com/the-report/ – the report is long, but the effort is worth it, if only to enable an appreciation of the publisher backlash, which starts with the politics of dispute – the man knows nothing of statistics – and ends with the politics of envy – how dare he speak so when his own self-publishing is backed by movie contracts!

For the fight back against the Howey Heresies see http://boingboing.net/2014/02/13/self-published-ebooks-the-sur.html and http://dearauthor.com/ebooks/how-not-to-lie-with-statistics/. Like the author of the latter, I too have “no dog in this hunt”. But I have heard hunts like this before, some baying sonorously and some anxiously in pursuit of an inadequate argument. Mr Howey’s samples are probably too small, his arguments too far-reaching and his data source too limited. But he has put his head above the parapet to say that traditional publishing business models are threatened and that the publishing value position, in mass market popular fiction, is being disintermediated. A few weeks ago I made similar comments here about the rise of self-publishing of academic research articles. And having observed the impact of the network – global scale inter-networking on the level that we now know it – I have to say that it twists every business model out of shape, flows around obstacles like flood waters and leaves few real world players of the previous generation intact. Mr Howey may be wrong on current measurements, but he is almost certainly right on direction of flow and eventual outcome.

Lets step back a bit and put ourselves in the position of confidential and trusted advisors to Rupert Murdoch, or Arnaud Lagadere or Dr Thomas Rabe (interestingly not a native born American in sight when it comes to the ultimate decisions on global consumer book publishing). Can Harper Collins, Hachette and Random House continue for ever on the Big Bestseller model? Will the agents let them? Will the stance of Amazon be decisive? Will initial publishing be self-publishing – and will consumer publishing be selecting already published winners to be groomed for stardom? Will social media be the marketplace and will advertising/sponsorship be part of the business model? We have already had Amanda Hockings and Fifty Shades – how many signs in the night sky do we need? Above all, can the big players re-invent – not transition/migrate – themselves in alignment with this new world. If the answers are negative, then should we advise these managers of assets to re-invest in consumer publishing in their current major holdings?

There are other games to be played, as the Netflix/Game of Thrones story in a parallel entertainment market shows us. Perhaps we should stop criticizing Mr Howey’s statistics and start fundamentally re-thinking what all of this means for a global networked society which shows interesting signs of reading more, by all measures of that word, each year.

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