Shaking the Cushions for Coin: A Preview of My Upcoming London Presentation

Here is advanced warning on some of what I will be discussing at the London SIPA meeting later this month.



SIPA UK Presentation
Tom Hagy
London June 2007


Title & Summary

Shaking The Cushions for Coin: Finding Revenue in the Content Cracks

• Developing High-Value Niche Content
• Leveraging the Information Lifecycle
• Slicing Content to Create New Products
• Driving Revenue through Repositioning & Improving Delivery

Biography

Tom Hagy is vice president at LexisNexis®, provider of Total Solutions for legal and corporate markets. Tom's role is to test and deliver new content solutions in often narrow market niches in alignment with customer needs and corresponding corporate initiatives. Starting out as a reporter covering legal topics in 1985, Tom moved from covering beats to helping decide what subjects customers needed his team to cover. Tom became managing editor and then publisher at Mealey Publications, which was acquired by LexisNexis®, a division of Reed-Elsevier, in 2000. Content responsibilities expanded beyond legal news to offering content in a variety of media. It is Tom’s role today to identify content solutions and deliver them in whatever media best suits the customer need. Content Tom has developed is delivered via online, email, podcast, RSS feeds, print, Web sites, and PDF, as well as via live events, Web cast and audio programs. He is editor of the SIPA U.S. blog. He served on the SIPA board of directors from 1998 to 2007, leaving his post as vice president to spend more time with his family. Tom lives with his wife and two teenage daughters in a suburb of Philadelphia. He continues to drum and watch way too much boxing. Don’t get him started.


Speaker Notes

Developing High-Value Niche Content

Gary Hoover, found of Hoover’s business information, recently said at the SIPA conference in Washington, DC that all the money is in the niches. He added that attendees should pay attention the word “specialized” in the name of our organization. He also said that everyone is looking but most are looking in all the wrong places. The concept of niche publishing, while not new to SIPA members, is worth revisiting just about every day. As companies grow they can become less satisfied with the revenues that a niche product might generate, or the time it takes to nurture a niche product and reap the rewards. Innovation guru Rosabeth Moss-Kanter said at another SIPA event recently that very few really big ideas started out that way. And yet, large companies tend to want new products that have the following attributes: guaranteed success, little investment, immediate returns, large revenues. There aren’t many great ideas that can meet those kinds of expectations.

Slicing Content to Create New Products

Thanks to technology, and thanks to the return of “content as king,” content creators can create products with little incremental investment. With the low investment can come an increase in the number of products you can offer. And with that, you can have “products,” or cuts of data that make very little revenue on their own, but when coupled with a number of other easy-to-create slices of data, start to add up. There may be a single large investment for you up front so your data are organized in a way that enables slicing into narrow offerings, but the investment will be a wise one if you have sufficient content. Once organized, not only can you offer slices, but you can offer them in a number of ways that satisfy the individual preferences of your readers. And, not only can you satisfy readers, you can use these slices to lure new readers.

What if a prospect comes to you with this statement: “I am generally interested in your subject area, but most of what you write is for a global audience, and my interest is just for what takes place where I live. Also, it’s often more information than I need. And, I don’t have much time during the day to read so I’d like to consume your data on my long train ride to work.”

Are you equipped to satisfy this prospect? Can you offer your data according to geography? What about the age of the reader and where they are in their career? What about their religion or race, or a fear or aspiration they have? What about a problem they are trying to solve or a task they are trying to perform? What about the lifestyle they lead? If you can carve data this way, you can create offerings that may not be big sellers in themselves, but add up in aggregate. Barry Parr of Jupiter Research, also speaking at SIPA’s recent conference, advised publishers to thing of content as data. I couldn’t agree more.


Leveraging the Information Lifecycle

Think of information, or its snooty cousin, knowledge, as something that evolves over time. We may wonder about the consequences of a potential change or event. Then, when that change or event becomes more of a possibility, we start to speculate, then when it looks like that change or event will actually transpire we start to anticipate and plan. Then when it happens we gather and absorb information, and then, as time passes and more context forms, we gain or seek an increasing understanding and clarity of what it means. Eventually the event or change becomes history, and from that we start to wonder what’s next.

Give thought to how you can serve your market along the way as ideas and information evolve and become more (or less) clear. A blog can be a great device for speculating, anticipating and gathering information, where a conference, or newsletter or book can be a great way to share a clearer understanding.

Conclusion

Finding and timing the right approach and vehicle – matched with the urgent and narrow needs of your market – is your challenge in finding coin in the cracks!