Manage To Change

SIIA Day 1 & Tom Glocer Keynote

Yesterday marked the beginning of the SIIA Content Division’s Information Industry Summit. In order to keep up with the flow, I’m posting my notes and highlighting other blogs that are commenting on the presentations.

The keynote speaker this morning was Tom Glocer, CEO of Reuters. PaidContent.org covered his presentation in detail, but here are some additional points.

According to Tom, the following forces are shaping our industry and determining what the media company of 21^st century might look like:

• Personalization of media - the increasing ability to receive the content we want.
• Two way pipe – busting the content creation and distribution monopoly previously enjoyed by publishing companies.
• Social networking – allowing upstart competitors to disrupt media giants.

His premise (with the stated goal of being provocative) was that the economics of the information industry make consumer media companies ill-suited to be public companies. The pace of change is rapid and the investment is large with payback occurring only over the long-term. It’s hard to reconcile long-term payback with the short term financial view of public companies.

However, Tom believes the economics can work in professional publishing. Professionals will pay for content. Why?

• Professional publishing deals with must have information and software.
• An individual’s professional reputation and millions of dollars in value are at stake.
• Often the professional’s employer or a third party (the client paying an attorney for research) pays the information bill.
• The professional is looking for the right information and doesn’t want an excess of information (they value a trusted filter).
• Information can be delivered precisely at the moment and in the format that fits a professional’s personal workflow.

Of course Thomson/Reuters plans to fulfill these needs!

Other SIIA presentations yesterday included:

From Content Matters by Barry Graubart: After the Froth: How the Financial Markets Will Affect Information Companies.

From The AppExchange Blog by Clara Shih: B2B Social Networking at the SIIA Information Industry Summit

From PaidContent.org:

• Interview with Caroline Little, CEO WashingtonPost.Newsweek Interactive
• Old Media versus New Media, a panel discussion with Ken Auletta, Author and Annals of Communications Columnist, The New Yorker; Michael Barrett, EVP, CRO, Fox Interactive; Jim Kelly, Managing Editor, Time Inc.; and Alan Patricof, Founder and Managing Director of Greycroft Partners.

Depressing or Re-assuring?

I haven’t posted in several weeks.

No posts. No links. Nothing new.

Yet my Feedburner subscriptions, page views, and unique visitors each decreased by less than 8%. Why?

The biggest reason: Google (or more accurately, search).

Roughly 85% of my traffic on a weekly basis is from search. For example, I wrote a post on passive aggressive behavior more than a year ago and it still gets hits every day.

The remaining traffic is from community. After years of meeting people, making friends, and meeting colleagues, some people come by to check in and sometimes to say hello.

Now I don’t write for the statistics. I like to share experiences, information, and observations and then hear what others have to say. I do this to learn.

For me it’s reassuring that my stats stayed pretty constant. It showed me that 2 years of effort (my blogging anniversary is February 6^th) has paid off with some success in the search engines and, much more important, a network of fine friends and colleagues.

But I wonder…

Do you know how people find you on the web? Do you know what they’re looking for?

Why are you in it? Is it paying off?

It’s nice to be back.

Forgive me if I’m a little rusty…