Greg Krehbiel on Publishing and Online Marketing

If I steal a brick from you, you no longer have the brick. But if I make a digital copy of a song on your hard drive, we both have it.

Some people think that makes all the difference, and that copying digital information is an entirely different thing from taking a tangible thing. I don’t agree, but I realize I am biased because my career has been based on the production and sale of copyrighted material. Allowing people to download it for free completely ruins the business.

SOPA is an attempt to rein in some of this copyright infringement because, as we all know, people in the information business rely on copyright protection.

I don’t know if SOPA will pass, and even if it does, I don’t know if it will solve the problem. I tend to doubt it. It may curb it somewhat, but it won’t solve it. People will find new ways to “share” copyrighted information.

If you ask the anti-SOPA crowd how people who rely on the sale of content are supposed to survive in that kind of environment, they say we have to come up with new business models.

So, what kind of a business model can work in a world where you can’t sell your content because everybody downloads it for free?

Well … you could put advertising right in the middle of your content. I don’t mean a little space add over on the side, or an ad on page 4 of a 6-page report. Those things can be removed. I mean that the advertising is built into the content in such a way that it’s inseparable.

Here’s a ridiculous example that occurred to me this morning …

Yesterday all my truffles seemed so far away,
But Fed-Ex delivered them in a day ….

Or, in the next Jason Bourne movie, he’ll be wearing a Coca Cola hat, and he’ll give us a little discourse on why he prefers Smith and Wesson handguns. And in the next piece of fiction you read, the main character will not only remove his shirt, but tell you wear he got it and why he prefers that brand.

Hey … make your choice. Either pay for content, and protect the rights of the people who sell it, or expect all content to become a commercial.

Not that this is a complete solution, by the way. It may work to some extent for consumer products, but what kind of product marketing are you going to do in high-end, expensive legal and compliance services?

Anyway, that’s where we’re headed. If the producers of content can’t rely on sales for revenue, they’ll have to go to an all-advertising format, and it’s going to be more invasive and annoying than commercials. (At least at first. It’s possible that some people will learn to do it well.)

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If you make a payment over the telephone, the guy on the other end will usually give you a “confirmation number” that’s something like this.

1H779301-0104725367489-C7283S

I often joke that such a “number” is precise enough to define any particle in the known universe, but I’m exaggerating a little.

It seems absurd that the numbers are so long, but we all know how this works. Different positions in the code mean different things. E.g., the 2 digits before the first dash indicate the 2-digit year, and the 4 digits after the dash are the month and day.

This is supposed to be more “convenient” for somebody. They can look at the code and tell you which effort it was, or which phone operator, or whatever.

But who is it convenient for? It’s certainly not convenient for the customer.

This will become an increasingly important issue for publishers as we try to link the online and the print world.

For example, we may print customer numbers on mailing labels and ask the subscriber to enter that customer number somewhere online — to synch up the print and digital subscriptions.

If the customer has to enter 1H779301-0104725367489-C7283S he’s not going to be happy. Especially if it’s case sensitive.

So when your operations people argue for reserving positions X, Y and Z to mean A, B and C, just say no. Make your customer numbers (or equivalent) as short as you can.

Unfortunately, some of us are stuck with legacy systems and these awful, long, complex numbers are built into our data. You may or may not be able to fix that, but going forward, don’t make the problem any worse. Focus on short, simple codes that customers can use.

And while I’m on that topic, if you mix letters and numbers in your codes, you should probably set up the system so you never use zeroes or o’s, l’s or ones, etc. That is, don’t use characters that can be easily confused.

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I just read Ronn Levine’s thoughts on Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman.

Sounds like the sort of book I enjoy.

If you have a direct-response professional on your Christmas list, you might want to consider it.

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I was the co-chair (along with Heather Farley from Access Intelligence) of SIPA’s 28th Annual Marketing Conference in Miami Beach.

It was fun and an interesting experience. Here’s my de-briefing, based on my own thoughts as well as the responses I got from attendees. (I tried my best to work the crowd and solicit reactions from the good folk who were there.)

It’s a lot of work, but the more work you put into it, the better it will be. We definitely could not have done it without the professional assistance of the staff at SIPA. They took care of a lot of the details.

You need to work with the presenters ahead of time to make sure they have enough material, that it’s well organized, and that it’s on target. Require them to submit their presentation beforehand (or at least an outline) and run it by some people who know the topic to be sure nothing obvious is missing.

You should also get some assurances that the person is at least a decent public speaker.

The #1 thing people want from a presentation is actionable content — an idea they can use when they get back to the office.

Each presenter has to ask himself, “What’s the ROI on my session?” Somebody spent a lot of money to come to this conference, and they could be using that time building their business. The presenter’s job is to make sure the content they hear more than pays for the cost of the conference.

People like interaction in the sessions, especially when the speaker is getting other opinions and perspectives on a problem. But most people don’t want to interrupt the speaker and volunteer their own thoughts. (And the people who do aren’t necessarily the ones with the good ideas.)

You can encourage conversation within the session by having a few moles in the audience. Ask the speaker to select two or three people in the audience and ask them to interject something. Ideally he should pick people he knows are knowledgeable about the subject.

Nowadays people also interact on Twitter. Some of the speakers at the SIPA conference tried to get people to interact with them via a twitter hashtag, but that didn’t work out so well. It’s very hard for the speaker to do his presentation and also watch his twitter feed.

A solution may be to ask someone in the audience to monitor the Twitter feed and get the speaker’s attention from time to time with the questions and comments that are tweeted. (BTW, I hate using that word.)

We tried something new this year. We had a “training track,” which was a series of presentations designed to give new marketers an overview of the kinds of things they should know to be effective marketers in our industry.

I was afraid nobody would attend the training sessions. I thought they might be offended at the idea that they need basic training in marketing. But it was very well attended, and there were lots of positive comments.

Anybody can issue a training certificate, and it’s a nice thing to put on a resume.

“Certificate in basic marketing from the Specialized Information Publishers Association” … or whatever.

And I think there’s some value to presenting the content in that context. If my goal is for you to leave my session adequately equipped to do X, I’m going to be a little more sure that I cover everything.

There is a custom in our organization that the people who organize the conference do a lot of the introductions and other announcements. I’m not sure that’s the best idea.

I’m decent at public speaking, but the skills you want for an organizer are not the same as the skills you want in a “master of ceremonies.”

If the goal is an excellent program, it might be a good idea to separate those functions.

Finally, on a practical note, it would be really helpful if the hotel or the conference host set up an internet-ready workstation (with a printer) so people can print their boarding passes.

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“Thank you for calling. Your business is important to us, but we really don’t want to talk to you, so please go to our website. It’s a great website that makes perfect sense to us, because we use it all the time, but will confuse the heck out of you.

“Of course we could talk you through it, but … he he … we don’t want to talk to you.

“If we haven’t yet convinced you to get off the phone and go to our website, you can sit through this horrible automated voice system. We know it doesn’t make any sense — that the categories don’t cover everything you want to do, that they overlap, that we use confusing terms and all that. We designed it that way because we want you to give up and go to our website.”

Then after you use the website it says, “sorry, there’s something wrong with your request, please call our friendly customer service hotline at [the number you already called].”

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I used to manage the audio conference department for a publishing company that sold legal reference guides. The guides covered everything you needed to know about the topic, and had monthly updates. If you needed instant information, you could call the editor.

Nevertheless, we had a successful business selling 90-minute audio conferences on some narrow topic that was already covered in the guide. And our subscribers were our best customers.

So why listen to an audio conference when you can just read the relevant section of the book?

I ask myself the same thing when I see a conference that interests me. Why go? I could spend 1/4 the time and virtually no money scouring the internet for articles and white papers on the topic, and probably learn more than I’d learn at the conference.

And this has made me wonder if companies should give employees a day every once in a while to spend entirely on their own, off site, just studying some topic. I’ve done this sort of thing myself, and I’ve learned a lot.

Still … there’s something about a conference. You come away from a conference with a different perspective, and it can’t all be explained by the content. So what is it?

Maybe it’s a matter of different learning styles. Some people learn better by hearing, or seeing, or being shown how something is done.

Maybe it’s the ability to focus on the topic. When you’re at a conference, your attention is corralled into a narrower band, without the distraction of phones and emails and such. I find that I think more creatively about a topic when I’m listening to someone speaking about it. Somehow it’s easier to let my mind wander and think about related issues and their application to other things.

Sometimes you’re not hearing anything new, but the focus reminds you of things you know you ought to be doing.

Maybe it’s the presence of your peers. We like to think that we’re independent thinkers and come to our own conclusions, but we’re just kidding ourselves. We’re incredibly influenced by our peers, so perhaps seeing all of them concentrating on the same topic reinforces the gravity of the topic and helps us to be serious about it.

But there is definitely something different about a conference, and I think it’s worth the money.

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I’m generally not the type to be giving a shout-out to Playboy, but I was encouraged to read that both Playboy and Rolling Stone have started using HTML5.

This sidesteps the Evil Empire’s app store. Hurrah!

So, to mix my sci-fi references, resistance is not futile, and the more you tighten your grip, Governor Tarkin, the more star systems (publishers) will slip through your fingers.

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I have installed a WordPress plugin that optimizes this site on mobile devices. If you have any trouble reading this site on a mobile device, please let me know.

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I just got an email from The Wall Street Journal advertising their digital edition.

Part of the ad reads …

When it comes to getting critical business news, there’s no substitute for The Wall Street Journal.

You may agree or disagree with that claim, but at least it’s a reasonable claim that some people will accept.

Can anything like that be said of The New York Times or The Washington Post?

“When it comes to getting X, there’s no substitute for The New York Times” ???

It’s hard to imagine what that might be.

And that is why the WSJ can sell online subscriptions.

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At a recent conference I was chatting with some SIPA friends about the idea that “something done adequately today is better than something done well tomorrow.”

It’s not always true, but it’s often true.

I thought of that when I saw this post from Chris Brogan: Simple Plans Executed Trump Complex Plans Still Planned.

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