Mar
4
Sell the Magazines – NOW!
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, Cengage, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | 2 Comments
As a Thomson man of the generation of ’67, I was well schooled in the dictum “its not what you buy, but what and when you sell that makes the real difference.”* And having spent almost three decades button-holing anyone who would listen, like some crazed digital ancient mariner, on the importance of building digital presence in B2B publishing and information markets, I should probably be pleased to see headlines in the Financial Times (3 March 2012) heralding the sale of EMAP’s print assets (“Analysts say EMAP faces challenge to move away from print”). But I am not. I know exactly when these print assets should have been sold: in 2002 at the end of the Dotcom Bust. And I cannot persuade myself that a wrong move then will be rectified by a pointless move now, or that value will be added to anything by selling the subscription/advertising print stable at EMAP – or at UBM, or at Haymarket, or Centaur, or Incisive – to someone who is simply going to live on a declining annuity until it expires. There will in any case be few buyers, and those who do appear will not want the stable, but just one or two of the old nags. The analysts who shriek the headline of this piece are simply transaction mongers who have a firmer grip of deal commissions than they do of the current strategic realities of B2B. So lets go back to 2002 and see what has happened after the management of B2B information and publishing and events decided that it was far too early to exit print subscriptions and, like the regional press, the market would come back to them.
By 2005 it was becoming clear that the bits that worked in B2B, outside of events, were information services and solutions. By that year controlled circulation magazines and newsletters, which had proliferated and at times been generated by online at the end of the previous decade began to wilt. Just as in the pre-2005 period we had spoken of VANs and VADs, so we began to talk about “vertical search” (it turned out to be much the same anyway) and started providing tailored information to self-defined users in commerce and industry. We were beginning to experience for the first time what it was going to be like to live in a “networked society/economy”. A small revolution was taking place: managers were beginning to have to find out what their users did for a living and construct solutions around their daily lives. This meant specialization and expertise in particular verticals: managers could no longer be shifted from title to title on the basis that they knew journalists and advertisers and everything else was the same whether you were publishing in machine tools or in ladies fashions.
And then we came to workflow. If we were really entering an information solutions-type world (where Thomson Reuters had already gone in IP and GRC , and Lexis Risk in insurance) then we had to provide our content directly to the desk of the user, sliced so that it modelled his working patterns, and supported by software tools that added value to it and kept us essential to his processes, and thus too important to be lightly discontinued. And how did we plan to earn his trust in this guise? By either inventing a new brand (think Globalspec in engineering) or by using our old print brands to ensure user confidence (think Bankers Almanac at RBI). Never mind that the print which supported those brands had eroded away, since they were there for entirely different reasons.
And now we are laying another layer in digital development on top of all of this. We now talk of Big Data, of using the services we have created for users as a sort of focussing glass so that we can go out from them to the client’s own content and all sorts of other datasets and find linkages through data mining and extraction, squeezing fresh insight all the time into the workflow of users who, wherever they work, have increasingly become, like us, knowledge workers. And our events activities increasingly morph into always-on trading and learning experiences, where we do introduce clients to the range of products and services in the sector, update and inform on new releases to people who have said they want to know, and move increasingly into the training and professional development of the sectors that we have chosen. Do you see where we are going? We are going to be the full service providers to a handful of vertical markets which we feel confident about dominating.
Why are we confident about that domination? Because we have the brands, many of them over a hundred years old in this country, which our verticals were brought up upon. And behind those brands are archival morgues, full of data with residual value in a Big Data sense. We did not sell those brands in 2002 when they were a going concern, so why sell them now when they are a cause for concern. By all means close the print, by all means reconstruct the service values using far less journalists in targeted niche environments online. By all means drive towards areas where you have real data intensity, but on the way remember the community and its existing brand affiliations. You want to take them with you.
Which brings us back round to EMAP. I see no point in hanging on to peripheral services, even data-based services like DeHavilland bought as recently as 2007, if they have no strategic coherence in terms of the markets that give EMAP positions of strength. I take these to be construction, local government, broadcast media and fashion. If strength in automotive cannot be linked to the Guardian’s position in Trader Media, then sell that too. But hold onto brands where they can be used to give community credibility and data where it can give archival searchability. By selling them you get a smaller but more profitable business. And that is also the result of digital network development of the type described here – smaller and more profitable businesses. Just don’t throw away something which is pretty worthless now on its own, but which may be needed on a journey to a much better place.
* Note that the companies that Thomson SOLD in the mid-1980s in the UK form the majority of EMAP and Trinity Mirror today, as well as large chunks of Springer and Infinitas, and elsewhere and afterwards the bulk of Cengage and a big portion of the US regional press. Were they right or not?
Feb
27
Beyond the Death of Email
Filed Under B2B, Blog, data protection, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, online advertising, privacy, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
I am not sure that I go as far as “Email is where knowledge goes to Die” (http://ipadcto.com/2011/02/28/email-is-where-knowledge-goes-to-die/) but I certainly respond to the current levels of discontent over web-based email, and the comScore survey on data, comparing 2011 and 2012 and released this month, produces some evidence of dramatic declines is usage:
And we all think that we know the reasons. We see the rise of social media and MMS/SMS as equivalents to what happened to the letter form in the mid to late 1990s. In retrospect what happened then seems to have been compressed into a very short time. One minute I was a regular desk worker, with a dictation machine and a secretary, and the right to spend a week deliberating before responding to an idea or an invitation. In an instant all that morphed into a world where response had to be, at most, within the day, though communication could be shorter and less formal. Much wider groups could be co-opted into the ongoing discussion. I now needed to become a two fingered keyboarder. And changing skills meant changing etiquette. I had just asked whether I needed to have two email addresses – one for public and one for private correspondence – when the roof fell in and everyone reached everyone with everything everywhere – including sending so much unwanted advertising matter in one form or another that it was easy to predict that this alone would bring email systems groaning to a halt.
Now email itself is the ancient regime. There is an interpretive temptation as a result to think that events are repeating themselves and that we are all going evolve into a social network + texting communications environment. Certainly articles proclaiming the “Death of Email” have gone incautiously down that track, though the real trends may be a little harder to forecast. To discover them we may need to be more critical in our analysis of what is missing from our email world, and what corporates as well as individuals want to get from their communications. What is happening to email at least permits us to make alternative predictions along these lines:
* Corporate email, internal and private and housed inside enterprize operating systems, makes a comeback. External clients and associates can be co-oped into these circles, temporarily or permanently.
* Corporate users at last discover why they created a corporate Wiki, which has been standing all unused for five years.
* Social media applications like LinkedIn or Yammer (micro-blogging for corporate users: www.yammer.com) will handle a great deal of outbound corporate messaging as web-based email continues to decline, and orkers seek to diminish the time-wasting capacity of email.
* The largest increase in communications will be M2M (machine to machine), as sensors drop below $10 each and all of our gadgets start reporting that they need servicing, or fuel, or that they are too hot or cold, or we are almost out of milk.
* Amongst consumers, Facebook and IM take up the slack, as even less formal and even shorter communication modes become essential.
* Voice drives many of these applications, either via voicemail or through voice to text service environments.
* Most personal communications will be mobile device originated and received.
Within two years, if comScore is correct, those of us who have to send a seventeen year old a text and a voice mail asking him to read his email will be ceasing to bother with the longform communication at all, and in five years email will be an important, but minority, expression of the need to communicate. Looking back, we shall say that we went in this direction in order to realize a need for privacy, but that was only a part of the question. In fact, email overwhelmed us. It became the excuse not to work, instead of a part of work itself. And as soon as it became the focus of unsolicited advertising, its days were inevitably numbered. Far from the future being inexorably web-based, we now perceive that many functions that we rely upon will retreat to the internet or the mobile network: interpersonal communications will lead the way.
So is this really another “death of advertising” piece in disguise? As online advertising share of market continues to grow, and as online sales show impressive annual growth it would seem perverse to take this line. Yet privacy, in currently proposed legislation on both sides of the Atlantic, seems like a political crowd pleaser. And behind it lies another urge, which is not just to control and defend one’s own information, but to be able to trade that information to the highest bidder in return for perceived or sought after privileges. Seeing the founder of Paoga (www.paoga.com) across a crowded room last week reminds me that there have been visionary attempts to do that for some time, so this email decline triggers their powerful emergence. We then create a permissive society of a different type, where we have allowed a marketeer whose goods we seek to message us in return for discounts, coupons or other advantages, and in a context where that privilege can be removed rather more decisively than the current rigmarole unleashed on email users when they hit “unsubscribe”. Social marketing takes up the pace from wasteful and intrusive email blanket bombing. For a time we get back into balance – though no doubt we soon overbalance again in new and unpredictable ways.
Yammer is now used in 100,000 US corporations. Emails are still not admissable in much litigation in UK courts. The speed of change is now so fast that we do not get to fully move into something before we begin move out of it. And, alas, as soon as we migrate our communications elsewhere, Mr Murdoch will probably employ someone to find a new way of hacking into them. Eventually, we shall reach Venusian mind transfer (aka thought driven computing) and StarTrek will return to high fashion. In five years we will describe email with the same nostalgia now reserved for letter post.
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