Drowning in Content

Thought for the day. I found this on my desk and I can't remember where I sourced it from so apologies to its original author, but this might make an interesting start point for the discussion about b2b information;

"As I struggle to stay afloat in an infinitely growing sea of information, one thing has become clear: we don't need more content. We need our content, the content that will add the most value to our experience. On a good day I've got roughly two hours to read the millions of blogs that are begging to deliver me content.

If you don't make it about me I'm going to drown."

Mixing it up a bit, business media companies! Are you you waving or drowning?

The Future of B2B Media

This survey reports on the US b2b sector. It's not without optimism with a surprising number of CEOs prediciting revenue increases this year. Print is declining as a proportion of total revenue, events and online are up. However one CEO says,

"“We’ve seen slow customer acceptance of Internet marketing/advertising,”

This is a key issue for b2b online players. Building traffic is relatively straight forward but in most b2b sectors advertisers are lagging behind their customers in recognising the importance of the web. Coached over many years to believe in the controlled ciruclation model, advertisers are struggling to understand why they should feel confident that their customers are users of industry web sites. Audience metrics are too simplistic often being little more than a page impression count. Here in the UK our websites are often attracting audiences from around the world and from many parts of the value chain. Advertisers are geared up to promote to the UK buyer in one part of the value chain. When an advertiser books a campaign on a b2b website how does he know how much of the audience is relevant. In the most advanced markets (prinicpally IT) advertisers and agencies are beginning to demand that they only pay for UK IP addresses. They are also moving from a CPM model to a CTR model. Both issues create challenges for publishers. The headline audience stats are overstating the reach into the UK decision making community and CTR is low and in some sectors falling.

The b2b industry has always been about validated lead generation rather than simple audience numbers (remember reader enquiry cards?) but we have not yet created a commonly understood model for how to do this in online.

There are a number of things that must be done;

1) Invest in research that valildates the quality of the online audience.
2) Create new innovative and effective online inventory that converts the audience into effective sales leads for advertisers
3) Invent ways to recapture the ability for advertisers to extract brand development benefits from their advertising rather than just clicks.
4) Get a better understanding of how users make decisions and create tools that aid the decsion making process as well as simply providing news and information.

One of the interesting solutions to this problem is vertical search - a subject around which there is a lot of heat and not a lot of light. Convera are offering a method for publishers to quickly build vertical search solutions and have a number of UK clients incluing CMP and Centaur. Fast, the Microsoft owned solution for enterprise search has some installations in vertical search, most notably Zibb owned by Reed, and Nexus has a deal with Autonomy on a product called Foundography. It's early days for all these solutions but they could be the beginning of a new model which we will follow with interest

Charterhouse on the funeral pire of b2b

Charterhouse Communications, a specialist financial mortgage mag b2b house has finally fallen into administration. Its share price had collapsed to almost zip and revenues were falling off a cliff as the credit crunch bit. But this is not just a story of the US sub prime crisis destroying a good business. Even before the recent crunch this was a business with a poor outlook. Too small and too dependent on magazines to walk across the shifting sands of the b2b media industry, the crunch has simply accelerated the demise.

This is further evidence that survival for everyone in this sector is going to depend on substantial and meaningful innovation on a scale not seen before in the sector. Too many survival strategies are based on;

More events and conferences and awards.

More companion web sites to magazines.

Cost cutting.

This is unimaginative and insufficent to turn the revenues into growth. As the economy downturns publishers are already seeing a tightening in the events sponsorship market. The exhibition and conference sector is overpopulated with events, print advertising decline is accelerating and web initiatives as currently unimaginatively invented are struggling to build meaningful advertising revenues.

The challenge is to create something entirely new that will enthuse users and customers. Here are three possible areas to think about:

1) Building professional networks (vertical LinkedIn)

2) Developing a better recruitment solution that focusses on push marketing rather pull from users.

3) Solving the vertical search conundrum.

We'll explore each of these in future posts.