This SIIA Brown Bag Lunch session brings together a panel of experts to discuss how search has evolved beyond the search box, and given publishers with a better way to drive monetization, create superior user experiences, and deliver highly relevant content.

Panelists:

• Kate Noerr, Founder, Chairman & CEO, MuseGlobal
• John Blossom, President, Senior Analyst, Shore Communications Inc.
• Stephen Baker, Chief Revenue Officer, EveryZing
• Barbara Kroll, Director, Corporate Strategy, Wolters Kluwer

Moderated by Leslie Kues, Senior Director, FAST, a Microsoft Subsidiary

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Is social media advertising a beacon of light or a train wreck? Social media has been blasting through the boundaries of online advertising as consumers engage and carry messages more easily than ever. From ad networks to immersive social brand marketing campaigns that are driving consumer engagement - marketers have more tools at their disposal than ever. How is the marketing landscape changing, where is the creative bar being set and how is engagement being measured?

Joanne Bradford, EVP of National Marketing Services, Spot Runner
Frank Cooper, VP-marketing, Pepsi-Cola North America
Peter Kang, Group Creative Director, OgilvyWest
Patrick Keane, EVP and CMO, CBS Interactive
Gordon Paddison, EVP of New Media and Marketing, New Line Cinema

Moderator: Larry Kramer, Senior Advisor, Polaris Venture Partners; Board Member, ContentNext Media

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In response to consumer-generated content, brands are relaxing communication guidelines and looking at their lighter sides. Two adventurous marketers talk about how taking calculated risks can lead to big returns.

Beatriz Perez
SVP Integrated Marketing, The Coca-Cola Company

Robert Thacker
Senior VP Marketing, OFFICEMAX

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Now lawyers will be able to get into the act. ALM, a b-to-b media company targeting legal and business professionals, and the LegalTalkNetwork have announced the debut of Legal Channels, a new online video production and distribution service for law firms that includes a branded YouTube channel featuring law firms and attorney videos.

The two companies will provide law firms and attorneys with video-based marketing, including video planning, production and editing and online distribution.  For law firms the channel will be a vehicle to highlight a practice area or provide insight on pending law suits, key court decisions or regulations. And corporate advertisers can target the channel to sell legal products or services.

“By coupling high-quality production with a new array of distribution options, law firms can cost-effectively showcase their talent, expertise and accomplishments to current and prospective clients,” said Jack Berkowitz, senior VP of ALM, in a statement.

YouTube, which Google acquired in 2006 for $1.65 billion, has in the last few become a household term. So has “citizen journalism,”  which  has probably been around in one permutation or another since Benjamin Franklin launched The Pennsylvania Gazette in 1730.

But citizen journalism takes on a different edge in the digital age, what with more and more people reporting breaking news through video-enabled smartphones. YouTube is betting it can be a vehicle for citizen journalism with its new channel, “Citizen News.”  According to Art Technica, the channel already has more than 70 YouTube citizen journalists, including “Texascountryreporter” (Oh, just think of the other possibilities in this realm.)

And how long before everyone and their brother fashion themselves the next Dan Rather (who, well before his unceremonious exit from CBS News, really knew how to immerse himself in breaking news). Earlier this year CNN introduced a citizen journalism initiative called iReport, which enables anyone to upload and discuss news from throughout the world. It’s a bit curio how the reputation of journalists is maybe one rung above used-car salesmen but in the digital age everybody seems to want to be a journalist (in one form or another).

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What does AOL hope to gain for its $850 million acquisition of Bebo—and why did Bebo opt for a portal? Will this investment translate into innovations for users and advertisers? How will AOL use Bebo in international markets and what can Bebo do for AOL here in the U.S.? Can AOL make the most of Bebo’s ad inventory? And how will AOL avoid the integration issues it faces now with Platform-A?

Ron Grant, President and COO, AOL
Joanna Shields, President, Bebo

Interviewers: Robert Andrews, Editor, paidContent:UK and Staci D. Kramer, Co-editor and EVP, ContentNext Media

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This SIIA Content Division session brings together a panel of experts who address how B2B publishers can leverage social media to drive revenues.

Panelists
Dora Chomiak, Senior Director, Digital Media & eBusiness, McGraw-Hill Construction, Information and Media Services
Jay Hallberg, VP Marketing & Co-Founder, Spiceworks
George Krautzel, President and Co-founder, ITtoolbox
Anne Hunter, Vice President, Platform-A Strategic Advertising Solutions, AOL

Moderator
Heidi Cohen, President, Riverside Marketing Strategies

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Last fall at Adobe Max we talked with Adaptive Path’s Jesse James Garrett about how to build Rich Internet Applications utilizing technologies like AIR and Flex while simultaneously making them underestandable and coherent to end users.

The issue isn’t just making them intuitive, but educating the public on what their purposes are, how they can be used, and, most importantly, what they can and cannot actually do.

For usability experts viewing from behind one-way mirrors, it’s watching Users struggle with the understanding that Webtop word processors behaves differently than desktop versions, that they do different things and that their underlying purpose is slightly different than what Users are used to.

In a sense, it’s about managing user expectations, and educating users on and about those expectations.

Take AIR apps. They sit on your desk but are literally Web applications connected to Web servers and sites. They just happen to live locally. So how do you convey that to an end-user? To Joe and Jane User they’ve just opened an application on their local machine and are wondering why it’s so different than any other desktop application on their machine.

So run some of the conundrums that designers face.

And here’s another: In an age where search is king, and Microsoft wants Yahoo! so it too can join the search kingdom, how do you balance the searchability of Rich Internet Applications with its usability.

For example, if a Flex solution provides better usability, but isn’t as searchable as something more traditional, and therefore isn’t as ‘findable’ by new potential customers, which way do you go? The internal business decision might run something like this:

• Argument: Well, Ajax doesn’t quite do what we want, but will get picked up by search engines and therefore we might get more customers.
• Counter-argument: True, but Flex will give us the experience we want, so word of mouth will drive more people to the site and therefore we’ll get more customers.

Anthony Franco, President, EffectiveUI, gives a partial solution in the video above. He suggests going with the more effective usability solution, and if that’s one that isn’t picked as readily by search engines, develop strategies that take that into account, but don’t sacrifice usability for the sake of searchability.

He suggests potentially blended solutions. One truly rich version of the application, and another that’s moderately rich. Or, you could assume, wrap the application in an HTML wrapper, complete with something like a regularly updated blog that discusses development, the application, issues and other whatnot important to the organization and development team.

That content will be picked up via search and gives us a Solomon solution to what shouldn’t necessarily be an either/or problem.

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As the search engine marketplace consolidates there are new ways of looking at content that go beyond traditional search engine technologies into forms and formats that place more emphasis on enabling editorial capabilities and complete content products.

Yesterday’s search results page is becoming one of many filtered feeds that support today’s mined analytics, rich editorial output and on-the-fly aggregation tools. How do search technologies create marketable content value today - and how do more valuable content products get built using search technologies?

Moderator
Peter Jackson, Chief Scientist, Thomson Corporation

Panelists
Tom Aley, President and CEO, Generate Inc.
Robin Johnson, CEO, Financial Times Search
Bruce Molloy, CEO, Connotate Technologies, Inc.
Patrick Spain, CEO, Highbeam Research, Inc.

Peter: Focus is going beyond the portal to applications that can allow alerts, summarization.

Johnson: Moving to contexts in workflow, in businesses but also in consumer markets. Some queries are impossible to do in Google, so we need to develop facets, disambiguate things like Ford Modeling Agency from Ford Motor Company. No summarizations of information on Internet, nothing that says on balance this much is positive and negative, just some high-end tools providing this for business. Have to focus consumer on the nature of the question, can’t always be translated into keywords.

Patrick: Free reference site, subscription HighBeam site, Newser, graphic content highlighting. Started to figure out if Web 2.0 is applicable for our business. Concluded that most people aren’t good writers but many are good collectors and recommenders, can vote for content and use search tools to find things elsewhere in product. In Newser we write all story summaries, now users will be able to write about stories that they’re enthusiastic about.

Peter: How do you make sources of information more active?
Molloy: Intelligent software agents monitor a site for changes and create alert streams, can make these sources much more useful. Search can go only far, what do you do with the documents? You’ll cut, paste and compile. Need a search component but also need an automation component to aggregate content more effectively.
Aley: I don’t want to get out of an article to find related information, our tooolbar widget enables people to find rich data in contcxt. We’ve all been saying for years that users need content in their workflow, to be able to embed that information in any page is a way to turn any page into a contextual portal.

Peter: What are the real-world scenarios for workflow that these products help.

Johnson: Imagine a tool that can help a journalist to prepare for an interview, if you have a tool that you could use to rearrange content is difficult. You can’t just do it with keyword search, experimenting with semantic navigation, keeping track of content relationships. We think that this is the way to make workflow come alive.

Peter: What’s feasible right now?
Molloy: Our technology enables end-users to identify data elements in a page rapidly, in terms of workflow, AI mining technology combined with this end-user interface can empower the end-user and bypass I.T. to get their sophisticated needs met. They can go a step further and put their mining agents in a common library that other people in their organization can use and modify to create even more value.

Peter: The “m” word, metadata?
Aley: Technology has come so far in past 5-10 years, intelligent crawling of 70 million domains to extract unstructured content into a structured format. Many publishers and enterprises have terabytes of their own unstructured content, we can extract and integrate it all. “Keyword search is so yesterday.” With robust metadata the query to be interpreted more effectively.
Johnson: You don’t have metadata, you won’t get there. “Customers like you asked these questions” can be created with metadata, hard to do without it.
Aley: More sophisticated, now seeing that an entity is an automotive ad agency instead of an automobile manufacturer.

Peter: What kinds of tools do you create to help users?
Spain: Looked at how we could use data exhaust to help user experience. All stories tagged on scale of hard or soft news, an interface control lets them choose ratio. Interesting - 10:1 people set the controls for hard news but 3:1 look at soft news. Looking at controls that will help people understand what other people are looking at.

Peter: Standards? [comment: have heard too many questions about standards today.]
Johnson: IBM’s open standard may allow some data exchange, but not much adoption.
Molloy: Hard to get people to agree to metadata standards, but with that being said it’s possible to impose metadata standards, but we don’t believe that a grand taxonomy will emerge, we allow industries or companies to create their own standards or map to your consortium’s standards.

Peter: What would you do in the future if the technology was there, how close are we?
Johnson: Annotate on the fly, managing copyright can make this tricky
Spain: Amazed at how different every Web site is, many different ways that archives are managed,
Aley: Looking at dynamic “version of you” and put it in the system, if I have a LinkedIn page, Facebook page, several Zoominfo profiles, can we integrate this. Being able to integrate on the fly, slamming together software and data has been the dream, as the Web world evolves we’re seeing that it’s achievable.
Molloy: See a move from search to business intelligence tools. [Slide of antique “computing division” with dozens of people entering data into mechanical calculators] we see agents extracting but also providing value add processing for alerts and other functions.

Question: How truly aspirational is this?
Aley: Many publishers have legacy platforms, can overlay infrastructure that they have, can work with Generate to free that informatoin without interrupting underlying operations. When we dynamically understand what’s on the page we can match entities and match it with behind the firewall content.
Molloy: We see a real eagerness from publishers to understand this, see need to catch up with search engines, the idea of monitoring and aggregate components on the Web is one model, or create your own kind of an alerting system. Editorial awareness and situational awareness, being able to monitor everything and choose what needs to be seen. Not only a cost reduction factor but also for new revenue streams, new products, new inventory.
Johnson: All leveraging off of creating engagement, make things more sticky, have to invest in what will make them do this, this is what will make C-levels invest.

Question: Proprietary metadata as a competitive value?
Spain: At the end of the day all you may have is metadata.
Aley: Extremely valuable to our clients, DMOZ helps to accelerate.
Molloy: Metadata important, tagging and folksonomies may add value also.

Question: Copyright presents issues, to what extent does copyright and licensing agreements present barriers?
Aley: We process data that’s either proprietary or public domain, very black and white in U.S., privacy laws overseas make it harder to expose this information. Big focus is to maintain copyright.

Peter: Publishers and vendors are cozy right now, but vendors are creating content and content value. Is it always going to be as cozy as this?
Johnson: Isn’t always entirely cozy when there’s intellectual property involved. Software companies survive on reselling ideas gained from working with clients. FT survives with technology, coopetition has required non-competes and to lay out how we dance when a new idea is discovered.
Molloy: A blurred line.
Aley: Reed Elsevier with scientific journals, owned market share for 80 years, Reuters buys ClearForest buys software companies, publishers thinking about whether they want to buy technology from a publishing competitor.
Spain: Web has changed fundamentally what fair use is. It’s all about chunks of data, chunks are hard to protect with copyright. The smaller it is the more valuable it is oftentimes.

Great panel, search is transforming editorial operations radically, the database is now, the metadata and other contextual content features are key to proprietary advantage, own the context and you own the publishing relationship.

- John Blossom, Shore Communications

The Information Industry Summit is the digital information industry’s flagship conference. It provides strategic guidance to senior business leaders representing publishers, content technology companies, bankers, analysts and press.

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From Clara Shih’s AppExchange Blog

I’m in New York this week for the SIIA Information Industry Summit. I was on the B2B Social Networking panel this afternoon, alongside David Mather, President at Hoover’s; Bob Carrigan, CEO of IDG Communications; and Mike Dunn, Vice President of Hearst Interactive Media. The panel was moderated by Steve Sieck, President of SKS Advisors. Hoover’s happens to be an AppExchange content partner (in fact, here’s a link to their listing).

We had a wonderful discussion around the latest social networking trends and what they mean for content publishers. Specifically, we delved into five major threads of discussion. Here was my take on some of these core issues-

1. Convergence of applications and content on the web. The primary value of open web services APIs to businesses and end users has been the seamless integration across multiple services that more closely match business workflow than ever before possible. To this end, we are seeing a convergence of software applications and content/data/information. Users do not want to login to and maintain multiple isolated systems. They want a one-stop shop that will capture end-to-end all of their business processes and content requirements. Software as a service in particular is amenable to content partnership due to the common subscription model, versus the upfront license and maintenance model of traditional software. Case in point are all the content partners like Jigsaw, Dow Jones, and Thomson that have become an integral part of the AppExchange.

2. Closed, proprietary networks versus open networks such as Facebook or LinkedIn.
It remains to be seen whether proprietary networks such as Hoover’s Connect (a product of Hoover’s acquisition of Visible Path, announced today) and IDG Connect will ultimately win out over open general-purpose networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn. They are two very different models - in the first, publisher typically monetize through selling premium content services. In the latter, publishers build widgets to integrate in the social networking container and more likely than not generate revenue through ads.

Clarification (Made on Feb 1): Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Orkut, etc are arguably ‘closed’ networks themselves - what I meant by ‘open’ was open for anyone to join.

3. The role, importance, and feasibility of industry standards like Google OpenSocial.
Industry standards seem like a logical next move to prevent redundant work both on the part of developers/publishers as well as end users. OpenSocial, however elegant in theory, has yet to gain critical mass - moreover, there is concern that a single company (namely Google) developed this "industry standard" on their own. Data portability, though attractive to content publishers and owners, is not top of mind for social networking platforms, each of which has an incentive to "lock in" their users and content.

4. Paradigm shift from search-centric to social-centric content environment. I maintain that it is not so much a paradigm shift, but rather a paradigm expansion to enable more nuanced targeting. Every decade or so, we have seen a disruptive computing technology that fundamentally changes the way we work and conduct business. In the 70s it was mainframe computing. In the 80s it was the client-server and GUI model. In the 90s, it was all about the Internet. Today, it is about social networking and the ability to target not only on search behavior but also demographic information (people are surprisingly forthcoming in their social networking profile pages) as well as leverage social graphs and groups.

5. Best practices in "curation" of B2B social networks.
The three pillars for social networking success in my opinion are trust, openness, and engagement. Of course, trust and openness are often at odds with one another - as a publisher, how do you guarantee a baseline level of privacy and security while still maintaining an open model in which creative destruction can safely take place. As for engagement, I believe it entails critical mass of users and content, and intrinsic value of content and services, both from the outset as well as on an ongoing basis. Too many social networks were "one-week wonders" which initially had tremendous user sign-up growth but then failed to keep their user base engaged.

At salesforce, we are heavily invested in social networking technologies. CRM for one is arguably a social network of sorts among sales teams. We have also implemented a container for Google OpenSocial, which provides third-party app developers with all the scaffolding they need to build and ship a product.

The remaining efforts fall under three general categories. First, AppExchange is our online marketplace that connects customers and partners. Second, our Successforce and IdeaExchange web properties embody a strong social element - with IdeaExchange, for instance, we are crowdsourcing to our customers to solicit feedback for prioritizing product development. Last but not least, we have Salesforce to Salesforce, which is a really breakthrough idea if you think about it - instead of having end users as node entities, the connections in this case are being established between companies, say to co-sell into a deal, approve a contract, or even as simple as sharing marketing collateral.

I also spoke on behalf of Faceforce, the Facebook-Salesforce mash-up I developed last September that was the first enterprise application on the Facebook platform.

Social networking will only continue to increase in prominence and relevance, for two reasons- first, the ‘Facebook Generation’ will grow up and comprise an increasing portion of the workforce and company leadership. Second, enterprises are inherently social - whether it is relationships between employees, between a salesperson and customer, vendor and buyer, recruiter and candidate, etc - to this end, online social networking technologies rather than being completely novel are actually just better able to reflect real-world human behavior and interactions. So, it is not a matter of if social networking will permeate the enterprise or what the killers apps will be, but rather a matter of when it will become a core part of every enterprise application.

- Clara Shih, AppExchange Product Line Manager, Salesforce.com

The Information Industry Summit is the digital information industry’s flagship conference. It provides strategic guidance to senior business leaders representing publishers, content technology companies, bankers, analysts and press.

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David Eun, VP, Content Partnerships, Google, gave the closing keynote to the SIIA Information Industry Summit.

Eun quote from Patrick Spain: value now comes from ubiquity, not scarcity.
Patrick: David, show us the love

Eun: Incredibly busy year at Google, share the landscape from our perspective, explain what we do with regard to content and how we partner with content companies.

1.2 billion people online, every subject available to create communities. Rural schoolhouse, have access to very fast Ethernet router, top researchers have same access to same information. Market is now worldwide. Internet has grown faster than any previous medium, TV took 45 years to reach a billion in revenue, Internet 3 years. An exabyte of new content every year. Would fill 150,000 Library of Congresses. Kids are consuming, trading, it’s the way that people now look at the world.

Model was false scarcity, distribution windows thought out carefully, still compelling businesses, was delivering content to where they were. Today it’s really about ubiquity, companies succeeding embrace ubiquity. Kid in hotel room wanted to watch a TV show an hour from when he wanted it, not used to not having home DVR. Instead of bringing eyeballs to content, bring content to eyeballs. No secret sauce or magic formula, we’re not quite sure.

First thing is to focus on user, doesn’t start on technology, back into whatever applications are interesting. The practice of this is remarkable. Bottom-up innovation, not one product comes from a senior executive, always a small group of people. We always say don’t present me with a problem, present me with a problem with a possible answer. Googlers thought “wouldn’t this be great”

Perfection is the tyranny of good enough, last 10 percent requires 90 percent of the time. Expectation is that it won’t blow things away immediately. YouTube is new every six weeks. Media is used to making perfect products, now it’s about keeping a good product fresh.

Mission is well known and used on a daily basis. Make information accessible and useful. Less than 15 percent of world’s information is digitized. Content partnerships works with media companies, work with Web companies making sure that they get indexed. A few years ago if I had questions on Martin Luther King, Jr., I would find fantastic Web pages. Now I can also find news sites, books, buildings and sites in Google Earth, videos. Future - not quite sure, but a long list. We think broadly, this is all opportunity.

Long tail - media focuses on the head, the hits. See long tail in all products. 65 percent of all YouTube videos were visited at least once by someone in the world. Can now potentially monetize library content, other forms that would not normally get “hit” packaging. Also the “torso,” the “sweet spot” where there are niche companies, professional companies with specific commercial objectives. Professional Bullrider’s Association will not get a cable channel but in torso they will get a slot.

Traditional is large advertisers attaching to highly popular content. But smaller advertisers, local pizzerias, etc., who don’t have access to content owners. Now match users to both content and advertisers. Today it’s AdWords, more relevant ads may not have bid as much but they may get better placement. People pay thousands sometimes to get the right click. Apply same technology to partner sites via AdSense.

YouTube - contineus to grow, hundreds of millions of videos watched daily, hundreds of thousands of videos watched daily. Ten hours of video uploaded every minute on YouTube, 19 local versions launched worldwide. Isn’t just YouTube cut the power of video. Get video, sports, news, howto. Google is the platform, buys tools and services to help peple capture and upload content. Casio has YouTube branded portal for uploading videos. Can zoom in on Eiffel Tower in Google Earth, can click on it to receive video from YouTube relating to it. Panasonic TVs now have feature to watch YouTube through TV. iPhone has huge YouTube video audience.

In-video ads monetization - money very small compared to businesses built up over decades. Users around the world will sample via online video. 300×250 ads on side, translucent bar embedded in video, can close it and video resumes. Easy money in pre-rolls, don’t know how much money you’re losing to irritated users=. In-video makes it easy to help users onpass ads virally, many see them as part of the content.

For print, video is a whole new frontier. Consumers can get what they want, NYT is YouTube branded channel, people can sign up, a town hall, pages are controlled by partners. Forbes - different types of videos, shot differently, have a different response.

We are a technology platform, don’t own content or produce it, want to work with people who do produce content. At steady state in AdSense, a billion dollars go to partners.

Consumers pay with time, I invest in putting in new video responses, attention is what advertisers want. Don’t have to be smarter, just execute faster. Need to set expectations such that when we say it’s in beta that we mean it, but it also means that you’ll get an realy lead on data and have had tremendous benefit from exposure. Risks but also rewards.

Question: How does someone with a traditional background work in an engineering oriented company?
Eun: Is an engineering company run by engineers, shocking experience, people put a premium on efficiency, taking care of action items, who is going to do what by when, the antibodies may reject the virus, might be a few tidbits from outside that will help but it’s radically different. Also a very young culture, lots of enthusiasm, not jaded, not cynical, cross between Red Cross and investment banking. On the other hand, you’re working with a lot of young people, haven’t seen a lot of ups and downs. Remind people that it’s really not about them and their inabilities, you’re privileged to work at Google. Very mission centered, don’t talk about stock work. Money ideas have to pass through the filter of how this helps the user.

Contexutal model is promotional, stimulates interest. Draws people closer to the front door, in constant dialog with content owners, partners have paid models, happy to take content that will stimulate interest. NYT went from paid to free model, amount of traffic from Google increased large, not exact numbers but ten or twenty times maybe. Not always the case, not right for everyone, but on balance the way the web works seems to suggest that you focus on stimulating interest, use different interests.

QUICK TAKE: Interesting to listen to David, it’s kind of the accepted Revised Standard Version of the world from my perspecive, central but no longer radical. It’s also interesting that it’s still early days for making money off of contextualized content. When I asked about helping people used to having people pay for access, the short version of the answer is that they’re mostly doing not much beyond text ads. The key opportunity that will draw this all together for greater value if a broader approach. Instead of the software saying “Now that we’re here, this is the right ad for you” the software should be able to say, “Now that I am here, what is the most valuable thing for me to do next that is acceptable to me, the content producer and the person renting space or action priority?” A simple algorithm with complex implications, implications that tools such as Attributor only hint at.

John Blossom, Shore Communications

The Information Industry Summit is the digital information industry’s flagship conference. It provides strategic guidance to senior business leaders representing publishers, content technology companies, bankers, analysts and press.

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