BtoB Media Business - April 2010 - (Page 13)

FEATURE TE NOLOG CH United Publications, publisher of HME News, Security Systems News and the online-only Security Director News, has iPhone apps for each of its brands, said Sam Pfeifle, executive editor. The apps allow users to access stories and blog posts as they are published. “It reinforces our brand,” Pfeifle said. “If anyone searches ‘security news’ on their iPhone, I want them to find us. It’s about being where your readers are.” In addition to the brand benefits, Pfeifle said he thinks the company can eventually monetize the apps and is currently trying to determine if a sponsored or subscriber model would be best. S IE Analytics As many publishers know all too well, analytics present something of a good news/bad news scenario. The good news: Media companies are gaining access to huge quantities of data on both their content and their audience. The bad news: They face huge challenges in integrating that data because the information often comes from multiple systems. Publisher analytics tend to come from services or systems in three categories, Strohlein said: external services, such as comScore and Nielsen that look at site traffic and how the publisher stacks up against its competitors; internal platforms from vendors such as Omniture, which tell the publisher how many people are visiting, what they’re viewing and how long they’re staying; and marketing management systems that track search engine optimization, ad placement and other marketing metrics. “They live in three different worlds, and it’s pretty hard to integrate the disparate systems,” Strohlein said. “It’s an interesting problem in that it’s one of those places where more data isn’t necessarily better. You can lose site of the forest for the trees in some cases.” Working with vendors such as lead-generation software and services provider Demandbase, Carine Roman, senior VP-digital media at Ziff Davis Enterprise, has access to real-time information about her audience—being able to identify, for example, that a Web site visitor is a decision-maker from a particular company. She also receives analytics from other providers, including Google Analytics, Omniture and WhatCounts, but the various systems, in many cases, don’t speak the same language. “There’s no way I can get the big picture if I have to look at one system to know how many comments I’ve had on an article and another system to know how many people are coming from large companies and another system to know how many people clicked on an ad,” she said. Roman said Ziff Davis is exploring working with a master vendor that could aggregate data from all systems and present the information in one dashboard, but that option is costly. In the meantime, the company creates APIs between the various systems to make them compatible. TO WAT C BY MARY E. MORRISON G ame-changing technologies have a way of sneaking up on publishers, and it’s often anyone’s best guess as to which ones will go from being merely novel to mission critical. With that in mind, Media Business recently spoke to several b-to-b publishers about the technology tools and trends that are currently topof-mind. Some of the technologies they highlighted are cutting-edge; some are a few years old but presenting new opportunities and challenges every day. All are fodder for brainstorming and deserve some careful consideration this year. Mobile devices and applications With U.S. smartphone penetration reaching nearly 17% of mobile users last year, according to comScore, and with buzz about e-readers such as the Kindle and Skiff and tablets such as the Apple iPad (see e-reader/tablet sidebar, page 14) mounting, b-to-b publishers are exploring how mobile devices will change their business. “As the penetration grows for those devices and they become more predominant, at some point it becomes not a nice-to-have but a need-to-have in terms of survival,” said Marc Strohlein, chief agility officer at Outsell Inc., a research company that covers the publishing industry. Smartphones in particular hold significant potential for publishers, said Prescott Shibles, CEO of Vital Business Media. “It would be fairly easy to breathe new life into a buyer’s guide, for example, with an iPhone app with map overlays,” he said. H XML and semantic tagging Publishers that want to repurpose and recombine their content in various ways will likely need to have an XML and semantic tagging strategy in place. “The more we can relate content, the more likely we are to increase page views per visitor, which is a core metric,” said Mitch Rouda, principal of emedia consultingGroup. mediabusinessonline.com | April 2010 | Media Business | 13 http://www.mediabusinessonline.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of BtoB Media Business - April 2010

BtoB Media Business - April 2010
Table of Contents
‘IEEE Spectrum’ Takes Home Another Grand Neal
Publishers Strive to Increase Lead-Gen Revenue
Five Technologies You Should Consider Using
Sales & Marketing
M&A
Audience Development
Events
People
Benchmarks
Mission Statement Can Miss the Real Reality

BtoB Media Business - April 2010

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