Who is in charge of your publication's product development strategy

This question is directed to smaller publishers: Do each of your publications have a person in charge of new product development? Are there titles on the payroll, "Product manager" or "Product development manager"? Ten years ago, there was no such thing in B2B publishing. The "product" was a print magazine, and it's stayed pretty much the same for well over a hundred years.

By now, most if not all publishers have an executive in charge of digital media. But I'm going out on a limb and arguing that that's not really the same thing as a product development person at the brand level.

There needs to be someone who really understands the brand, and who is given a budget and a mandate to develop new online products.

This may seem obvious, but after attending the recent ABM Digital Velocity conference in New York City and hearing other publishers present, I'm not so sure we're all on the same page.

There are widely divergent opinions on how to manage new product development, even within the same company. For example, take a Web site redesign. Once you're done, are you done? Some publishers think so. "We spent the budget and got the Web site. We're done." Really? For how long?

Also, I still see evidence of some publishers whose Web site strategies consist of "All the crap we ran in print, archived online." Yes, a great strategy 10 years ago, when many publications couldn't even get their archives online. Enough to build a sustainable Web site today? Few would take that bet.

My argument is that each site needs an ongoing budget and a person whose job it is to constantly come up with the next thing -- at the brand level. Note I didn't say the next big thing. That's certainly needed from time to time, but don't forget, lots of ongoing smaller improvements and course corrections add up. Especially when the competition may not be doing the same.

Does that product development manager position need to be a full-time job? No. It can be an existing editor, salesperson, even digital media executive who is officially tasked with this. I've even seen audience development folks at some of the IT media companies tasked with this.

But it needs to be made very clear that new product development -- and the budget to go with it -- is part of this person's job. One idea I picked up at Digital Velocity was to financially incentivize the person tasked with product development if revenues (or traffic) from the idea takes off.

Should publishers be new product development people? No. They have a magazine, Web site and conference to run. This is a task that needs to be given focus and budget. (Did I mention budget?)

But why can't editors earn extra pay this way? I'm biased of course (former editor) but I think editors are uniquely qualified as new product development folks, because they're presumably the most expert in the market and brand. Why not pay the editor $5K if a traffic threshhold is reached as a result of traffic from the new idea? Or if revenues or profits from a new idea exceed a certain target?

I think in-house digital media folks who are responsible for multiple brands can and should provide the support to the new product people, but the new product people need to exist--along with a budget and a mandate--at the brand level to be remotely effective.

Social media hot or hype?

I remember attending American Business Media's annual Digital Velocity event in March 2007 and seeing some really interesting social media presentations. At that time, I thought social media was white hot. They had a speaker from Gather.com -- a consumer social media site, not B2B -- tout exponential growth curves, with his presentation ending with a dire: "Think this is just consumer? It's coming to business."

Caught up in the hype, I returned convinced that launching social networks in our space (packaging and manufacturing) was an absolute must. We had vendors lined up, strategies in place, editors girded and ready to go. We were going to trounce the competition and be first to market in our space with a comprehensive social networking app.

Then I did my quick reality check that I do with any new project. I ask two questions: 1) Is this something readers are asking for? 2) Is this something advertisers are asking for?

While we did conduct some web surveys to readers that indicated some interest, it's always difficult to tell with such surveys how widespread the interest is and whether people would make a social networking app part of their work life. And certainly, no advertiser has ever come to us and said, "Hey, we want you to offer social networking." The only thing advertisers want is leads. Does social networking provide leads? Not really.

So we pulled the plug.

If social networking seemed white hot in March 2007, it now seems super white hot in February 2008. What's interesting is the proliferation of vendors whose social networking platform can be white labeled for B2B media applications. A year ago, there was Leverage Software, whose platform is used by Infoworld's IT ExecConnect. It was really cool, and really expensive. Initially they wanted $25K per year. We just couldn't justify it for what amounted to an experiment. Then they came out with a do-it-yourself model for $300/mo for up to 100 users. But today there are dozens of companies that offer a social media platform for media companies like us, that we are now enjoying extreme downward price pressure.

I remain dubious of social networking's value in certain markets--such as ours, namely, where people are very private and exist in corporate cultures that restrict outward communication food, drug, beverge manufacturers). If people meet at a conference or event, I can see them maybe using a social networking site to stay in touch--maybe. That said, I am watching this space closely, and I'll jot some notes of vendors to watch (in addition to Leverage Software).

IntroNetworks -- this was brought up to me by some Web gurus at Rockwell Automation, one of our advertisers. Has a very similar cool feature to Leverage software, a visual people finder, that maps your interests onto a circular target with graphical depictions of other people in the circle who are either closer or further from you--depicted in the center--based on their matching interests.

Neighborhood America -- This is one to watch namely because Steve Ennen, one of the sharper folks in this business, was impressed enough to leave what had to have been a great, cushy job at American Business Media to become their business development guy. Steve has called me to schedule a demo, but I haven't seen it yet.

GoingOn -- This is the social networking app from AlwaysOn, the Silicon Valley tech uber-blog founded by Tony Perkins, former publisher of Red Herring. If it has all the functionality of AlwaysOn, it would be quite robust and definitely worth evaluating.

Pluck -- Although this is used by McGraw-Hill Construction, I found it too consumer-oriented. But who am I to argue with McGraw-Hill? Last time I checked, they were doing okay.

Ning -- Powers the social networking function of American Business Media's new site. Why did they select Ning? I asked Joshua Kuvin, their CTO. In his words: "We had interviewed everything from a $100K build-out to the smallest. Ning offered the most professional look and feel, [and] premium service is only about $35 a year and takes all ads out. I investigated it further to make sure that all info would remain private if a person wished to do so… and this was something that very important thing for us." I logged in and experimented with it, and it seemed to provide all the necessary functionality.

KickApps -- Love the name, but it's more consumer-oriented. Worth looking at for enthusiast media.

Near-Time -- This is more of a community Wiki and blogging platform, I found it weak in organized discussion groups when I evaluated it a year ago. Today, who knows, it probably can cure cancer.

CollectiveX -- This site doesn't explicitly bill itself as a social networking app, but that's what it does. And best of all, the free version does all the basic things you'd expect in a social networking site (member discovery, discussion groups, file library). For $9 per month you can have the ads removed, but to tell you the truth, they're at the bottom so you don't even notice. We're experimenting with using CollectiveX as the social networking app for a new packaging line performance workshop we're launching. It's a two-day workshop, and the theory is, if you've spent 2 days in a sweaty room in Tampa with someone at a workshop, chances are good that a strong-enough bond will be formed that a social networking app may have a chance to be used.

Of course, in my opinion, the biggest social networking app is one that's free to everyone with internet access: e-mail.

If you've found some others that would be suitable for B2B, post them here! Better, share your experiences with launching and running social media sites. I'm collecting those as well.

Wither subscription-based content?

With the New York Times' discontinuation of its Times Select experiment, whereby readers paid to access the Times' exclusive columnists, and the buzz of anticipation that Rupert Murdoch will end paid access to the Wall Street Journal in the hopes of opening up wider advertising opportunities, it appears that the future of paid content is in question.

Witness this video of a panel discussion on the future of online advertising at the Ad Tech show in New York, where Arianna Huffington said that in the future, "what's going to be least important is subscription-based content...Unless it's pornography, and especially weird porn, don't charge for it." It was a clever line that drew laughs from the audience, but when it comes B2B, I'm not so sure we can put the nail in the coffin of paid content just yet.

Rather, as I've mentioned before, exclusive content available in a web-only format that cannot be replicated in print can be a big part of the future of online B2B media growth, and is worthy of our time and investment. I'm not talking Web-exclusive articles. I agree with Huffington that people just won't pay for words, no matter how good they are.

But they will pay for other forms of structured content. The most obvious example is structured databases of industry information, which database publishers have proffered for years. Trouble with that is the data business is so fundamentally different than the publishing business that most publishers have trouble making the mental leap.

But with audio, video and images, the Web opens up opportunities beyond data. Witness AdForum.com, a repository of television 75,000 commercials and 20,000 agencies from around the world. It charges $295 per year for access, and the videos are structured and searchable through a slick user interface. By the way, this is owned by Maydream, which is not a publishing company. Why didn't Ad Age come up with this Web site?

Another good example is Reel Exchange from Penton Media.

We're experimenting with a similar concept with our Global Package Gallery, which aims to be the largest online repository of high-resolution package images. We're just in launch mode now, so time will tell whether this is successful. But I can tell you that we will draw very little from our experience of selling ads and writing articles, which is all we've ever known. We're definitely flexing some new muscles.

But sniffing out these new opportunities, which are often right under our noses, requires an entirely different way of thinking about the markets that we serve. By the way, an excellent resource for getting the creative juices flowing is Russell Perkins' InfoCommerce Group. He runs an excellent conference and writes a great blog highlighting these types of business models.

Where to invest, in technology or content?

Where should publishers be investing their Web dollars, in Web site development (i.e., programming), or in content for their web sites? In a perfect world, both, of course, but dollars are finite, so publishers must typically choose one over the other.

Which one you choose is really a function of where your sites are in the e-media lifecycle. My guess is most publishers would say the same thing that Tad Smith said in the October 2007 edition of Media Business: "To me, a dollar spent on site engineering is better than one spent on building editorial content."

This is certainly true if you can leverage that investment across many sites, which obviously any multi-title publisher can. However, once your digital house is in order and your sites are updated with modern functionality that users come to expect (good quality search results, related articles, multimedia such as video or podcasts, blogs, community, etc.), then there is a diminishing return to that mass-replication approach.

I would argue that there becomes a tipping point in a Web site's lifecycle at which dollars invested in new content yield a higher return than dollars invested in site engineering. After all, people are coming to our sites not for functionality, but for original content. Sites that invest in electronic content that is unavailable anywhere else, in a format that cannot be replicated in print, will have an advantage against those that don't. I'm not talking articles written by a web editor. I'm talking image libraries, video libraries, databases, clever mashups, things that the Web is suited for.

Any publisher whose electronic edge over the competition is solely based on technology can't expect to outrun that competition for long. Technology is constantly getting cheaper, and a competitor that's behind you today will leapfrog you tomorrow with a newer site, spiffier content management system, better design, for less than what you just paid for your new sites. Technology is not only a low barrier to entry, it's arguably no barrier to entry.

With due respect to Tad, I'm going to say that in the long run, a dollar invested in content--the right content--will always provide a higher return. True, it's not repeatable across multiple web sites, but B2B magazine Web sites, like the publications themselves, are not factories. If all your investment is going into lowest-common-denominator functionality that works in all markets, it means you're missing all the good stuff that is specific to your market.

Several years of steady investment in unique digital content unavailable anywhere else raises an incredibly high barrier to entry to any would-be competitor, allowing a publisher to lock in audience loyalty and steady profits for years to come.