Take a listen as Marydee Ojala and Michelle Manafy wax eloquent on the theme of how we are all content creators are all publishers these days.

URL:  http://www.womensradio.com/content/templates/?a=3463&z=9

Certainly if I had the secret recipe, this revolutionary model, I would be one of the most employable editors in these dire times. Mind you, I am on the lookout. I sincerely believe that in this collapse of the media business, the information vacuum will need to be filled. There will be an opportunity to apply our skills to developing a content creation model that advertising can actually support. This advertising will likely be the web-based kind, which unfortunately doesn’t (yet, at least) pay the rates we get for print. The cold reality is that we have less money to work with, good economy or bad. Yet the digital advertising model can’t be sustained with less content than we’ve produced in print; it arguably requires more. So how do we make more with less?

I had a great talk with Dennis, a sales person from my sister publication, CRM Magazine. We were talking about a remarkable bit of news we read, that DogTime Media’s audience has grown to 8.5 million. Why is dogtime growing while many of the finest media companies are collapsing? Dennis suggested that it is because they don’t have as much to lose. They are flexibile, agile, have low overhead for content creation from the outset… all things stacked against existing media companies, which have built extensive infrastructure, employ vast staff to produce requisite content, and have an ad model based on print. How can they abandon all that has worked so well and for so long?

Today, I read an interesting Outsell story about DemandMedia, which “offers over 500,000 professional and member-contributed how to articles and 100,000 how to videos. The site has grown 171% in visits year over year according to Google Analytics and self-reports over 30 million visitors per month. With unemployment rising and the economy sinking, the number of searches and views of economy and personal finance related articles on eHow has increased 84% in just the last six months.” Outsell VP & lead analyst Chuck Richard explores how eHow is “adding editorial horsepower without adding salaried editorial staff, while adding content at a rapid pace.” Chuck will not be at BSeC, but Outsell founder Anthea Stratigos will be presenting a talk  on Trends, Strategies, and Tactics for coming out ahead. I’ll be listening. Join us and participate in the kind of discourse this event is known for; let’s work on developing the transformative strategies that will allow content companies new and old to thrive.

Brian Kim, COO Liferay

While social networking tools have steadily increased in popularity web-wide as well as inside the firewall, I’m getting a strong sense that they are getting an even more intense workout now that layoffs are a daily occurrence. As ever, we see that hard times often trigger good ideas. In this case, I’m seeing visible proof that these digital networks provide meaningful connections that can deliver real value.

An increasing number of enterprise application vendors recognize the popularity–and power–of social networking tools and are integrating some of the most popular features into content management, delivery, and publishing offerings. Liferay, best known for its Open Source portal solution certainly recognizes the impact that “social” has in the enterprise, as demonstrated by its emphasis on “social collaboration.” Company COO Brian Kim, who will be presenting a talk on “Putting Social on Your Portal for Better ROI” at this year’s BSeC, says the company is “encouraging users to think outside typical use cases of how  portals are used.” He plans to provide examples of organizations effectively using social content on their portals to create community and enhance the content base. He says, “Some of our clients use networking tools and to their advantage. They use them to build an ecosystem around their product: Users come to their site to see what’s going on, which drives interest and gets users to collaborate and contribute content. All of this activity and information brings users back to the site, which ultimately drives business.” Social networking is a lot more than fun and games; join us at BSeC to hear examples of how it can add community and content to your site.

The tables turned, in her own interview she describes a key trend as being the integration of free and fee content.

Her post below describes the conversation group at BSeC that will open the discussion to meeting attendees.  Or, please, feel free to comment here.

Steve Goldstein, CEO of Alacra

However the value of web content goes much further than the information it contains. Steve points to the “Dave Winer line about the internet, the more you send people away the more they come back.” According to Winer, “Now the fundamental law of the Internet seems to be the more you send them away the more they come back. It’s why link-filled blogs do better than introverts. It may seem counter-intuitive–it’s the new intuition, the new way of thinking. The Internet kicks your ass until you get it. It’s called linking and it works.” Right. No surprise: Alacra wants people to come back (and spend money). They believe that freemium approach will reveal potential new customers—which can be difficult and costly to pin down—and should help with incremental sales through the Alacra store. Freemium is more than finding the right balance of free and fee, it leverages the interconnectedness of ideas online to help lead customers to your door.

Order one?? Spend money?? Not wait until the ones they already owned were returned? Not go the ILL route? Wow.

Not long after I received an email that my book was waiting, a brand new tourist book for Prague. Excellent!

Two lessons here, I think. One, I didn’t approach the librarian. She took the initiative to approach me. Two, she perceived an immediate information need and fulfilled it in an extraordinarily timely fashion. She didn’t ask permission; she just ordered the book. I may take it out multiple times simply to justify her pro-active attitude.

Mobile Ads and Mobile Misses

The program at Buying & Selling eContent contains many perspectives on mobile media strategies, including a keynote by Marc Bookman, CEO, Mobile Content Networks.

I wrote earlier in this blog about how much hope I took from this book, seeing in it a truly inspirational message in our troubled economic times.

Now it’s your turn to help light a candle in the darkness.  The author is interested in gearing his remarks to the content industry.  You can help by either posting a comment here or filing a story at the Excellence Every Day web site.

Ever since reading the book, my co-chairs and I have been tossing around examples of excellence that we’ve witnessed in our daily lives.  Stories about how people can and do go out of their way to delight their customers.

When’s the last time you yourself were “delighted” during an information seeking experience?  What content provider made you feel warm in your heart?  Help shed some light on how good a user experience can be.

What the heck, you can even pat yourself on the back by sharing something that your own company did to delight your users.

Please comment here.

Organized by BST America’s Bill Noorlander and Carol Ginsburg, the Forum is all about maximizing the rules of engagement and usage for cost optimization and improved ROI. Sort of a mouthful, I know, but given the economy, absolutely essential information. Everybody’s budgets are under pressure. According to Noorlander, we need a totally different way of thinking. Information buyers need a new approach to their vendors and vendors need to consider being as flexible as possible. Information professionals should “focus on what has changed and what impact those changes have had on how people identify what they need to have, what they’d like to have, and what is just cool,” he said. “How much pain can be pushed down to end-users?”

We’re expecting content buyers, content sellers, and licensing experts to spend the afternoon discussing just what to do about cost constraints, return on investment, content distribution, and new models.

Panelists at the Forum include Nikolai S. Kopelev, GlaxoSmithKline; Catherine Porta, PriceWaterhouseCoopers; Craig Wingrove, KPMG; and Diane White, National Security Agency on the buyers side. They bring years of experience in the pharmaceutical, accounting, consulting, and government arenas. On the sellers side are Dave Oakley, LexisNexis; Steven Kaufmann, Dow Jones, and two other invited senior people from large international vendors.

The Forum is included in the registration fee for the conference, so if you’re not interested in golf, don’t feel like playing, or think you should concentrate on your cost optimization goals instead of your golf fame, I hope you’ll join me on Sunday afternoon at 2 p.m. for the Enterprise Content Buyers’ Forum. I’ll be in the audience, planning to learn a lot!

If you opt for golf, you’ll have a chance to hear a summary of the Forum on Monday morning. Bill will share the five top things, the “hot topics,” from the Sunday afternoon session.

John Girard Founder & CEO, Clickability

The temptation, of course, is to hunker down, cut costs and try to ride out the storm, but the next big thing might blow right by you in along the way. So how do you make sure you don’t miss out on the next big thing? John suggests “finding ways to experiment cheaply, then really back your winners.” He believes “in an evolutionary process in business through which you spend as little time and money to put thought experiments out there…and the ones that get responses, you then expand on.”

While he plans to provide examples from the content market as a whole in his BSeC talk “Future Proof Your Business,” he gave me one from his own sales and marketing efforts: “On the marketing side, we tried all kinds of ideas to get leads. One was our iPod campaign, in which we sent headphones to about 10 CIOs & CTOs and said, ‘if you take a meeting with us, we will bring the iPod.’ By spending a small amount of money, we were able to test the idea and measure or costs and the return. Then we tried it with 50 CIOs and CTOs… the hit rate was 30 to 40 percent.”

Ultimately, he admits that, “Figuring out what things apply to our business is tricky, but luckily there are a lot of people out there experimenting and many are willing to share their ideas so we can figure out what works.” Amazing that this will be John’s first time at our show, because that is exactly what BSeC is all about.