Gilbane Publishing Practice Blog

As I write this, someone in Halifax, Nova Scotia, is editing the entry on British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm. As Ben Vershbow notes over at if:book, it is weirdly compelling.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:39 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)
and tagged: wikipedia
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During this year's Spring Gilbane Conference, we were honored to have Chris Jennewein, Vice President, Internet Operations, Union-Tribune Publishing Co as one of our panelists on the topic of the role of Social Computing in adding value to traditional print publications. Little did we know that just a few months later, San Diego would be thrust into a major crisis and that The Union-Tribune's Sign On San Diego would play a large part helping fire victims find help and support, as well as, locate friends and loved ones. In a recent e-mail these were his comments:

"We're using blogs, forums, comments and a
"people finder" application to help cover this disaster. Our theory is
that different entry points will appeal to different readers. Here are
links:

http://sosdfireblog.blogspot.com/
http://helpsandiego.blogspot.com/
http://forum.signonsandiego.com/forumdisplay.php?f=156
http://firesearch.latimes.com/people
http://signonsandiego.lamphost.net/northcounty/KC_fireWEDNESDAY556

The San Diego community appears to be very appreciative of both the
round-the-clock coverage and the opportunity to interact."

This new service goes far beyond what could have been achieved using the company's website or the traditional newspaper. (They use Mindtouch as their platform) We congratulate Chris and the Union-Tribune for their innovative efforts and are pleased to learn how much Social Computing can help people during times of crisis. Check out the links that Chris provided. My colleague, Geoffrey Bock, and I think that you'll be impressed!!

Posted by Steve Paxhia at 3:05 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)
and tagged: Blogs, Chris Jennewein, Geoffrey Bock, Gilbane Conference, MindTouch, San Diego Union Tribune, Social Computing, Steve Paxhia
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It has been a week since the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference adjourned.
The topics and presentations were provocative and there are sure to be some lively debates continuing on for months to come...

Several of the keynotes centered on the theme that “information wants to be free”.
Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief of Wired and author of the best seller, “The Long Tail”, was one of the early keynoters. He started the debate by announcing that the title of his next book would be “Free” and would focus upon making a case for providing content to consumers for no charge.

Towards the end of the first day, Jimmy Wales, President of the Wikimedia foundation, spoke about his new company called Wikia. His goal is for Wikia to do for the rest of the library what Wikipedia did for the Encyclopedia section and to make the assembled knowledge of the world available to the masses for free. And by the way, he's going to produce a free Google competitor at the same time. (He certainly doesn’t lack for ambition.)

Erin McKean of the Oxford University Press closed the conference with a vivid discussion of “book-shaped objects” and openly questioned whether books were the best information package for the future. As a lexicographer, she weighed in on the “free” debate by saying that it would be better to state that all “information wants to be ambient”. She indicated that in this sense ambient means readily available for use. (Because I always had associated the word ambient with sound, lighting, or atmosphere, I checked several other dictionaries to clarify this sense of ambient. It did not appear. When I went to OED online, I found that their definition of ambient was neither free nor ambient but available for a mere $29.95/month. Because, Erin has yet to post her presentation on the O’Reilly site, you’ll have to trust my memory for this definition.) Her point is well taken; the word “free” is simply to vague. The American Heritage Dictionary (AHD) lists 17 different definitions or senses ranging from “matters of liberty” to “lack of restraint” to “lack of encumbrance” to “provided without consideration or reward”.

Mr. Anderson’s talk seemed to stress the economic meaning of “free”. . Thus, we must assume that he means that information or content should be available without consideration or reward. The popular justification for this approach to content valuation is that because cost of digital distribution is negligible, it is unfair to charge for content or information that is essentially free. If the distribution cost method were used to price traditional book content, the cost of printing, paper and binding would be the determining factor. Of course, that’s not the case. That approach omits many of the costs of publishing content including: reviewing, editing, formatting, proofreading, publicizing, selling, and marketing. And, of course, most authors like to be paid royalties for their work. It also neglects to consider the notion that many readers prefer traditional book formats and therefore many content elements will eventually be published in several media formats.

Mr. Anderson is first to admit, his book entitled "Free" won't actually be free. Okay, the audio book or e-book may be free to those who purchase the printed book.. But if you want to purchase only the e-book or the audio book, you'll be expected to pay for it. Mr. Anderson is also exploring various forms of online books or printed books that would either be sponsored by corporations or supported by (gasp) advertising. While some of these offerings might be free to the reader, it seems that there will be considerations and rewards built somewhere into this project.

He went on to say that he might well be in favor of making the book free because of the publicity benefits to his consulting practice, speaking fees, and the promotion value to his “personal brand”. However, he felt that his publisher would likely object because they are in the business of generating sales and revenues from selling books. (After the session, I heard several people suggest that Mr. Anderson could self-publish his new work and then he would be free to make it free).

Based upon his work at Wikipedia, Mr. Wales could be seen as a developer of truly free content. The governing organization is a charitable foundation and all of the authors are volunteers. The costs of supporting the staff and technology infrastructure are paid by donations. However, during his keynote, Mr. Wales was quick to point out two major differences between Wikipedia and Wikia. The scope of Wikia is much broader and it has been organized as a for profit entity.

Wikipedia represents the “perfect storm” for a collaborative work or “peering”. According to Wikinomics by Tapscott and Williams, there are three factors necessary to make peering effective: 1) the object of production is information or culture which keeps the cost of participation low for contributors; 2) Tasks can be chunked out into bite-sized pieces that individuals can contribute in small increments and independent of other producers. This makes their overall investment of time and energy minimal in relation to the benefits they receive in return; 3) The costs of integrating those pieces into a finished end product, including the leadership and quality control mechanisms must be low.”

While these criteria would apply to a number of other works found in a library, there are many others (novels, monographs, complex texts, dissertations, etc) that don’t meet these criteria well at all and aren’t likely to be challenged by collaboratative works. The costs associated with “wikiing” the rest of the library would likely be enormous. Mr. Wales seems to be banking on advertising dollars to support this effort. If this were the model, these works might be considered free from a consumer pricing perspective but the advertising revenues and potential profits would have to be deemed consideration in economic terms.

One also wonders whether the volunteer authorship model is extensible. I can see how it would work when the author is writing about a topic that is intensely interesting ( as I am doing at this moment). However, a great deal of content is more the result of craftsmanship than inspiration. It seems unlikely that volunteers could be recruited to write “drudge works”.
And as appealing as it may be to write essays or modules on interesting topics for free, I for one would enjoy it even more if I received some consideration for my hard work. (no wise cracks please). As popular as Wikipedia is today, someday it too may face a challenge from some organization (i.e. Google or Microsoft) that might add new features or devise a revenue sharing model that provides authors with incentives.

I guess my point is that an author’s ideas and created content are products. And like other products they should have a value proposition and a go-to-market strategy. The valuation/pricing options might include: purchase, subscription, sponsorship, syndication, promotion, and free. Depending on the utility, creativity, entertainment value, uniqueness of content, etc of content, one or more of the above models might be appropriate. While ‘free’ is one option, why should it be the preferred choice? Talented people like Mssrs. Anderson and Wales create content that is very good and are entitled to receive proper consideration if they so desire. Jeff Patterson, CEO of Safari Books Online, had some fascinating data on this topic. He studied how their customers for largely technical information value their information products vs. other content some of which are "free". He found that some quality content was indeed free. However, most "free" content was either advertising supported or was offered in exchange for specific information about the content consumer or their work projects. He asked customers about the tradeoffs that they were willing to make to obtain content for free. If I recall correctly, about ¼ of their customers would rather pay for content if the advertising was inappropriate and/or distracting. !/3 of their customers would rather pay for content than reveal any personal information other that name and e-mail address. And 2/3 of their customers would rather pay for content than reveal in depth information about a project that they were working on. (Patterson’s presentation was one of the best—I hope that he posts his slides)

Advocating for universally free content might indeed have the unwanted effect of reducing the amount of excellent content that is created by professional authors who depend on their writing as their livelihood. I think that Bruce Chizen, Adobe’s CEO, summed it up nicely when asked by Tim O’Reilly where he stood in this debate. He said that Adobe makes many large investments of human and financial capital in the inventions and products that they produce. While he is all in favor of providing some of their intellectual property to consumers, standards organizations, and society for free, he reserves the right to make the decision as to what should be free. I’m sure that his stakeholders support that position.

I’ll conclude this entry with some thoughts on the provocative concept of ambient information. For many years, content was created for a single purpose and was closely regulated against peripheral usages. With the advent of the digital era, came significant opportunities for deriving additional value from content. I will forever be grateful to the senior management of Houghton Mifflin Company who saw the wisdom of freeing the content of their dictionary from exclusively “booklike objects” and allowed linguists and software engineers to build spelling correction technology. In fact, most of the English language spelling technology that is used today was derived from their American Heritage Dictionary database. And as I described in an earlier Blog entry, Thomson’s retiring CEO Richard Harrington made information ambience central to their core strategy and judging from their financial statements, they are receiving significant consideration for their efforts!!

Making content accessible to inform, educate, and entertain people is a worthy goal, Making content more ambient will offer content creators and publishers many new opportunities to publicize their work, create goodwill, answer new questions, solve difficult problems, and the option to generate new income streams that are appropriate and commensurate with the value of the content.

Posted by Steve Paxhia at 5:12 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)
and tagged: Adobe, American Heritage Dictionary, Bruce Chizen, Chris Anderson, Erin McKean, Houghton Mifflin, Jeff Patterson, Jimmy Wales, O'Reilly TOC Conference, Oxford University Press, Peering, Richard Harrington, Safari Books Online, Steve Paxhia, Tapscott and Williams, The Long Tail, Thomson, Tim O'Reilly, Wikia, Wikinomics, Wikipedia Foundation
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Well, I’d have to say it was a very good conference. Attendance was up, San Francisco was sunny and warm, and I thought the sessions were very good.

I had the advantage/disadvantage of being one of the track chairs of the publishing track, which meant that I had to attend all six publishing sessions. I managed to catch the keynotes as well, which were jam-packed. But I’ll leave it to others to discuss the other tracks and sessions.

We tried to expand the publishing track this spring from a focus solely on automated publishing (we brought that topic down to one session). The subject is important, and very relevant to the rest of the Gilbane conference content, but we had the clear intention of making the publishing track much broader in scope than it had been before.

Steve Paxhia very kindly allowed me to lead off with what was really a dual session. I introduced my new web site: www.thefutureofpublishing.com, but also spoke more broadly on the subject. I’ve got a ton of material that I’m slowly loading onto the Web site, and nine years of research behind it.

We then moved to “Publishing Automation: What Can You Do Today?” and had three great speakers tackle the topic. OK, they were all book publishers, but each had a markedly different approach, and I decided, in the end, that listening to three approaches to a similar problem might be more interesting than three approaches to completely different challenges.

The topic “How Will Internet Communities and Collaboration Technologies Change Publishing Best Practices?” was a tough one, and Steve and his speakers handled it very well. This subject is so slippery. Do you need to create a community on your Web site? What is the ideal extent of collaboration? I was left with the clear sense that community and collaboration are essential to nearly all publishing Web sites.

We then featured two sessions on cross-media publishing strategies. Bill Rosenblatt is the expert. It struck me that there are still a lot of unanswered questions around cross-media publishing, but absolutely no question about the necessity and reality of this phenomenon — not only is it essential, but the tools are there today.

Bill Trippe wasn’t available to moderate “Publishing for International Audiences: Top Challenges and Best Practices” but he had selected two great speakers: Stéphane Dayras, technical services manager for Quark in Europe, and Ben Martin, senior analyst at Flatirons Solutions in Colorado. They were the perfect pairing. Stéphane introduced the topic broadly, and offered a true international perspective. Ben is “the scientist,” and showed extensive details of planning for this tough challenge. Most of the audience stayed behind for an extra half-hour.

Where do we go from here? I’d love to hear from attendees with suggestions. I think we still face a challenge effectively blending this publishing content into the broader Gilbane conference. But I think we’ve given it a home.

Posted by Thad McIlroy at 11:59 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)
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Last month,I had the privilege of being a guest lecturer at MIT for Howard Anderson and Peter Kurzina's Course entitled "Managing in Crisis". I prepared a case study about the current status of the College Publishing market. It included concerns about price pressures, used book competition, channel issues, new competitors and new media requirements, pending legislation about pricing practices, and the continued lack in the growth of unit sales.

The class was composed of 40 or so very bright students who did an excellent job analyzing the case. One student really captured the essence of the case when she said that it reminded her of the photography industry as the major players struggle with the transition from traditional film and paper products to digital photography.

While Kodak moments have long been associated with joyful celebrations, the aforementioned transition has been anything but a celebration. In fact, it is likely that this Kodak moment will come to exemplify the struggles of a powerful corporation as they strive and perhaps even fail due their inability to recognize the customer benefits, opportunities, and challenges associated with non-traditional types of photographic media.

Many publishers are struggling with their own "Kodak Moments". And I think that the transition issues are similar to the photography industry. First, Kodak seems to have been focused on the products that people had been buying for years and trying to preserve the advantages that their film and paper technologies provided. Like many of us who have had market leading products, they were arrogant about their technology, processes, market position and quality. While they clearly were aware of digital photography technology, they dismissed digital products because the image quality was significantly poorer. Then they concentrated on turning digital photos into traditional photos. It seems to met hat they missed
the potential in offering less expensive digital images that could easily be posted on the Internet or e-mailed to relatives.

For many years, publishers offerings have been closely related to technological developments in the Software and Printing industries. For example, software has enabled improvements in authoring, composition, and thereby lowered the costs of elegant or complex page designs. Printing Technology has made four color printing much more affordable and had made shorter print runs economical. These changes have been passed along to consumers of information. (While I understand that there are differences between the terms: content, information, and intellectual property, I will use the term information to subsume all three terms for purposes of brevity) In many cases, they have added value to the customer's experience but there are cases where formats were enhanced and color offered because they could be rather than because they were beneficial. In reality, I believe that the net result was that the size, format, and frequency of the traditional economical delivery unit EDU (my term) of information (a book, journal, or magazine) were modified by technology advances but the traditional media form has remained essentially the same for 100+ years.

The Internet has presented publishers with a radical paradigm shift ( I don't like the term either). All types of publishing entities have had to deal with changes in customer expectations that are easily as profound as those experienced by the Photography industry. They don't just want their information to be more timely and less expensive, they also want their information to concisely answer their questions and seamlessly integrate with their work flows or learning styles.

Perhaps the most significant change is the redefinition of the EDU. In the purely print era, there needed to be a certain mass of information to build a product that would be economical to print and sufficiently valuable to consumers to generate a profit. In manycases, it was assumed that relatively few information consumers would use all of the information that was presented in a single EDU. Rather, the scope of the information (or content) had to be broad enough to attract enough customers without being so broad as to make customers feel that they were procuring too much information that wasn't pertinent to their interests. Hence, we have witnessed a generation of books where authors and market researchers work closely together.

In the digital world, authors and publishers are potentially freed from the strictures of printing economies. Therefore, information currently found in textbooks, references, magazines and journals can be rendered as as short information objects or more comprehensive content modules. Or publishers can produce information objects or content modules that are not anticipated to ever take book form. The objects can be delivered in many ways including search engines such as Google. These new EDUs can be purchased or licenses separately or mixed and matched to create a course of instruction or a personal reference work. One benefit of these nimbler EDUs is that they blend nicely with software to offer increased value in the form of better instruction or more productive work flows.

The availability of these more compact EDUs will likely spawn many debates concerning academic traditions and learning methodologies that we have come to hold dear. It has long been the practice for students to read and master significant quantities of information with the expectation that many of the specific facts will fade from memory leaving a general understanding of the topic. And many people are considered well read because they have plowed through many traditional EDUs (Books) The question will be: Could one become well educated or well read by learning to explore topics of interest through smaller EDUs and/or what blend of contextual and specific information delivers the best and most productive intellectual outcome. There will be some interesting face-offs between technology enabled active exploration and discovery of information to allow students to pursue topics that they find interesting vs. the more structured mastery of a set of information presented in book form. Of course, it is not an either/or proposition as they methods must eventually be blended to enable meaningful knowledge acquisition.

The digital world has also created a demand for information that is developed and delivered as rapidly as possible. Where traditional publishers often justified their value by guaranteeing the accuracy and authority of their published information, many of today's information consumers are willing to trade authority for velocity of information and now rely upon other information consumers to tell them what information is the most accurate and useful. Individuals now actively participate in communities that generate and evaluate large quantities of information objects and content modules. The Wikipedia/media organization and the MERLOT community are excellent examples of communities that produce quality information modules.

While many information consumers may still prefer to consume their information in print form, they may now wish to print their own copies or to create and purchase custom versions produced by rapidly improving print on demand technology. To many publishers, the perfectly formatted page has become almost an art form. They consider those pages to have many of the same aesthetic values that Kodak attributed to images produced via their traditional film technologies. Because customers rarely have the choice of formats, it is difficult to gauge the value that they derive from "perfect pages" vs potentially less expensive simpler pages. Chip Pettibone of O'Reilly Publishing reported at the recent Gilbane Conference that when readers of e-books were offered the choice between a simple HTML design and a faithful rendition of the original book page, 50% chose the HTML version and that population seemed to be gaining in numbers. Because books and computer screens represent quite different form factors, the value of the perfect page can actually limit rather that enhance the effective presentation of information in digital formats. Therefore, rather than trying to maintain the integrity of the printed page, modern publishers are designing their content to be presented equally well in a variety of media forms. Publishers that cling to the page metaphor are putting their futures in jeopardy.

This paradigm shift is replete with challenges and opportunities. Many traditional reference products (including Microsoft's Encarta) have been decimated by new products created in the Internet Era. Newspapers and magazines have had to adapt to the challenges or multiple media environments by creating online products as they have seen their traditional readership dwindle. Journal publishers have had to derive new models to serve their subscriber base. Many categories of trade books now include websites with fancy multimedia elements and discussion groups. I think that some of the most exciting and interesting challenges and opportunities will be found in the world of educational publishing. As witnessed by the decisions of major publishing conglomerates to divest their educational publishing operations, the challenges of mastering the Internet paradigm shift are both daunting and expensive. To succeed, new generations of products will need to be built to take advantage of technology as opposed to being web versions of existing products. Business models will need to be revised and channel strategies re-engineered. One important outcome will be increased information accessibility for readers and learners with disabilities.

Over the next few years, the publishing industry will witness many Kodak moments.... Hopefully the majority will be the old fashioned Kodak moments of victory and celebration.

Posted by Steve Paxhia at 1:10 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)
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Last fall, Martin Clifford-CEO of the web community juggernaut Wis.dm, informed me that I was hopelessly out of date regarding the phenomena of web communities and hinted that due to my advanced years I might never comprehend the impact of many-to-many publishing. It's true that most of my experience is in traditional forms of one-to-many publishing. However, I've always loved a good challenge so I began my exploration of the role of communities in the creation of content.. Early in my explorations, I came across the We Are Smarter Than Me project. This project is the joint effort of Pearson Educational Publishing, Wharton, MIT, and Shared Insights. The goal was to form a community that would write a book about how communities could change and enhance the way that companies do business. I tuned into the "Buzz" to get a sense of the passion of the participants And then, I joined the community and contributed a small section on the importance of word-of-mouth in the marketing of services. As the project progressed, I watched its progress and waited eagerly to see what would happen when the many-to-many model was invoked to produce a traditional business book.

To hear first hand accounts of the project, I travelled to the Community 2.0 conference in Las Vegas. Barry Libert of Shared Insights and Tim Moore of Pearson Educational Publishing presented a fascinating progress report and a conversation with co-founder Jon Spector (soon to be CEO of the Conference Board) filled in some additional information.

The participants are to be congratulated for commissioning the project as a pure experiment. As Mr. Moore said, "I just wanted to see what would happen" As one might imagine, the interaction between web communities and large esteemed institutions presented some interesting challenges. Not surprisingly, the first significant issue arose when Pearson faxed their contract to Shared Insights. While the contract was entirely appropriate for traditional author teams, indemnification clauses took on entirely new meaning when the work of hundreds or thousands of author/contributors would be scrutinized. The prolonged wrangling broke the project's early momentum. It was assumed that the Academic Dream Team of Pearson's business authors and the faculties of Wharton and MIT would produce numerous thoughtfully written content modules. Surprisingly, none of the authors or profs chose to participate in the project. The project team reverted to Plan B by sending participation invitations to a large list of people affiliated with the sponsoring institutions. The response was enthusiastic and the community began to grow. Current membership is approximately 3500 with 650 individual wiki posts.

As the active participation increased, the project team learned another important lesson. Suddenly the community wanted to take over the project leadership and asked the project team to step aside. Even though the project team knew alot about community dynamics, they weren't ready for their own community to be so assertive and found it difficult to relinquish control. When they did step back, the community flourished.

How did the book by community turn out? One speaker reported that the journey was more interesting than the destination meaning that the content created was plentiful but uneven in quality and style. To yield an acceptable business book, it would be necessary to hire an accomplished professional author who would also handle the fact checking process.

That are the open questions and lessons learned from this project.

1. Why didn't the authors and professors participate?
Possible explanations included:
Generation Gap- Authors and profs didn't grow up with MySpace or Facebook. Web Communities are foreign to their professional milieu.
Status Issues- They are used to being the authority and weren't willing to have their writings publicly challenged. And they have already made their reputation so that they have little status to gain.
No Financial Benefit- Their time is very valuable and they expect to be paid for their efforts.
Lack of Passion or Connection with the Project- Community participation is not their avocation nor were they passionate about the topic.
Those that did participate did so out of a passion for the topic and seemed most motivated by the opportunity to build their reputation within the community. For many members, community participation is one of their hobbies. And they seemed not to desire any remuneration for their contributions.
Observation- Just like in the early days of the Internet, there is currently more cache attached to eyeballs and recognition than to traditional financial rewards. However, there are significant costs to forming, hosting and moderating communities. And the work of cummunities can be very valuable to companies of all sorts. New business models are emerging that will manage the costs and reflect the value of the contributions.

2. Given the uneven content and need to bring in a professional author, should anyone even try to write another book by committee?
It depends on the type of Book!! Wikipedia has demonstrated that this model is very effective in creating a comprehensive reference work. ( I suppose that some purists would argue that Wikipedia isn't really a book but rather a collection of content modules), For traditional authored book projects, communities might play a valuable role in helping authors research topics that are outside of their primary expertise and in reviewing the authors work for accuracy and clarity.

3. Will there be instances where community created content modules will compete with traditional published works?

Given the Google world that we live in, consumers of information often seek a terse answer to a specific question. And there is a definite trend towards the integration of content with the information consumers' workflows. For these information consumers, A well structured repository of content modules is potentially more valuable than traditional books.

5, So was the project aiming at the wrong goal?

Perhaps! Old habits die hard and many people in my generation have books to thank for alot of their professional knowledge. Maybe the goal of the project should have been to develop an outstanding repository of content modules and resources that could become an authorative source of information about communities and their role in changing and enhancing the ways that companies do business. In the long run, the mission critical task is creating outstanding intellectual property. Creating multiple media versions of that IP will allow publishers to reach a wider range of customers.

6. Will the many-to-many content model put traditional publishers out of business?

There is much more opportunity than risk for publishers.
Most of us would agree that we already suffer from information overload. Communities have the potential to raise that overload to an even higher level. Information consumers want to know that the content they are reading is accurate and authoritative. This has been the primary domain of publishers for many years. If publishers find new ways to harness the wisdom of crowds in creating new content and improving existing content, their future is bright. If not, someone else will seize the opportunity. And if they trivialize new methods of content creation as being less pure and authoritative than their time-tested editorial processes, they will face serious consequences. If you're not convinced, just ask your favorite encyclopedia publisher!!

That is my report on many-to-many versus one-to-many content creation models. Now I'm trying to figure out whether the few-to-few model refers to custom publishing or to an underperforming web community.

..

Posted by Steve Paxhia at 2:33 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)
and tagged: Barry Libert, community 2.0, Jon Spector, Martin Clifford, MIT, Pearson Educationa Publishing, Shared Insights, Sloan School, Steve Paxhia, Tim Moore, we are smarter than me, Wharton, Wikipedia, wis.dm
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I was pleased to attend the inaugural Community 2.0 conference this week. Sponsored by Shared Insights, it was an impressive gathering. Here are some of the highlights:
- John Hegel, the author of Net Gain (and other best sellers) gave his perspective on what has happened in the 10 years since he first wrote on the importance of communities to companies.

His equation for the benefits of communites is as follows: Shared ideas+shared discussions+shared relationships= shared meaning and shared motivation. This leads to higher customer loyalty and feedback that can help facillitate the development of better products and services in the future.

He feels that companies often lack the skillsets required to support successful communities. The key skills lacking are moderating, archiving, and attracting participants. He feels that companies often are afraid to give up the control of the community to the particpants and that is counterproductive.

Like all business practices, communities should be measured. He recommends calculating ROA- return on attention, ROI- Return on Information, and ROS- Return on Skills as the best measures of the impact of communities on the business in general. Space doesn't permit complete descriptions of these measures. Mr Hagel's blog and reading list can be found at www.johnhagel.com.

Ben McConnell author of "Church of the Customer" gave a fascinating keynote on the importance of word of mouth in marketing and the importance of communities in generating positive word of mouth. He also reported that only 1 percent of community participants actually contribute entries. However, that can be a large number!! For example, 68,682 individuals contributed to Wikipedia in just one month and 11,420 contributed to Microsofts's channel nine in a similar time frame. It is amazing how many people are willing to invest their time (while receiving no remuneration) to create information that will be reviewed and scrutinized by many peer reviewers. More examples can be found at ChurchoftheCustomer.com.

Similar statistics were reported during subsequesnt sessions

About.com reports that ih has 600 community sites with coverage of over 60,000 topics.
Shawn Gold of MySpace reported some staggering usage figures-- They currently have 165 million profiles online that generate 60 Billion pageviews per month. And there are 40,000 videosbeing added to MySpace each day.

The conference finished with a report on the We Are Smarter Than Me project. That will be the subject of another blog entry in the very near future!!

Communities have the potential to help publishers and publishing professionals to create new and different products and to improve the quality of their future products by getting greatly increased customer feedback. Cases and opportunities will be presented at the forthcoming Gilbane Conference in San Francisco from 4/10-4/12.

Posted by Steve Paxhia at 1:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
and tagged: About.com, Barry Libert, Ben McConnell, Church of the Customer, community 2.0, Craig's List, John Hagel, Microsoft Channel Nine, MySpace, Shared Insights, Steven Paxhia
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Blackboard Inc. has launched a new website--Scholar.com. It is an excellent web application that helps communities of people share bookmarks on topics of common interest. It is particularly helpful for high school and college students and their teachers and professors to use when doing projects or research. This is a great example of communities adding value to long established processes.

Posted by Steve Paxhia at 10:31 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)
and tagged: Blackboard, Inc, Scholar.com, Steven Paxhia
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MIT, Wharton, Pearson, and Shared Insights have developed a very interesting project. They have set up a wiki allowing a community of people to write a business book that will be published by Pearson in the fall. The overall premise is that communities can augment or even replace certain traditional business efforts. Marketing has emerged as the leading area for such efforts. I wrote a short section on the power of word of mouth in service marketing. The preliminary results will be shared at the Community 2.0 conference next week in Las Vegas.

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