Non-Invasive Interview: Don Nicholas

TH: I enjoyed your presentation at the conference back in June. Thanks for doing it.

DN: Thanks! Always our pleasure.

TH: What are you working on right now? What’s the next big thing on your plate?

DN: The Mequoda Research Team is attempting to document how a specialized information publisher should operate their online business... we've focused on seven specific strategies that we've detailed in Seven Online Publishing Secrets... which is now in its third edition...

http://www.online-publishing-secrets.com/

The challenge is that this process and the best practices are evolving at break neck speed... it’s like trying to write a book about an event as it’s happening.

To keep up we have the following programs in process...

- 3 posts per week at Mequoda Daily that update some aspect of the system

- a monthly webinar that documents our current thinking on one of the seven strategies

- 2 annual conferences (Boston in the Fall and Napa Valley in the Spring) where 60 to 70

Mequoda operators gather to discuss the current thinking on all seven strategies. (http://www.summit.mequoda.com/)

- plus 2 or 3 private workshops per month that we lead to help individual publishers sort thru all the options for their online marketing and publishing programs

- and the consulting we do with the 18 publishers that are either running or building a Mequoda (or Mequoda-like) Online Marketing & Publishing System.

A few weeks ago, I spent one day with the American Quarter Horse Association and another with the folks at Harvard Law School... in both cases we spent the day defining the business processes (content sources, contact frequency, product mix, reporting requirements, keyword universe and so on) that will define their online marketing and publishing program.

These are all very smart people that know their audience and content backwards and forwards... my job is to help them define their online business processes with the same level of measurable specifics that we would use to define the steps in executing a direct mail campaign or producing an annual conference or publishing a monthly newsletter.

The version control alone really keeps us hoping, as operators invent new best practices and we move to validate them with other operators and then document them for the group.

TH: I'd like to think the benefits from our national meeting which takes place in June, continues to pay dividends for participants. Did you make new contacts there?

DN: Yes, lots. The SIPA conferences are one of our favorites for networking. Everyone is extremely candid and open about the challenges and opportunities they face on a daily basis. The culture of openness really helps all the members grow and learn from each other.

TH: Other than yourself, was there a speaker who really stood out for you?

DN: This shouldn’t be a big surprise: we really enjoyed Fred Marckini’s speech. Aside from the fact that his talk was articulate, well-presented and informative, anytime anyone other than us attempts to convince SIPA members of how important organic search engine optimization is, we smile. We feed proud. And happy.

TH: What would you say are the biggest new opportunities specialized information publishers have today that they didn’t have 10 years ago? What about challenges?

DN: One of the biggest opportunities, we think, is for specialized information publishers to reclaim their position as leading authorities on their topics online. Because some (ok, most) publishers have been asleep at the wheel, they allowed “pure-play” websites, those media organizations that didn’t originate in print, to completely dominate their niches online. The good news is that once specialized information publishers with strong brands figure out their online strategy and start becoming visible in Google, they can sometimes bypass, or at least legitimately compete with, their “pure-play” counterparts pretty quickly.

On the magazine side, a good case study we like to point to is People.com - 18 months ago their brand was subjugated to AOL and they were generating roughly 300K visitors a month. Time, Inc.’s Ann Moore stood up at the American Magazine Conference in 2006 and said that they were no longer going to fear the cannibalization of print. They were going to put their best and brightest in charge of their online properties and now, roughly 18 months later, People.com is seeing over 10 million unique visitors a month, according to compete.com.

TH: Where do you think all this Web 2.0 stuff is going? Web 3.0? Web 4.0?

DN: Trouble is, many publishers get caught up in the rush to figure out Web 2.0 without ever mastering Web 1.0. We’d be happy to see more specialized information publishers becoming much more visible in Google, becoming much better at converting traffic once it arrives on their sites and much better at monetizing that traffic through email newsletters, etc.

Assuming we mean UGC (User Generated Content), the web is an interactive medium by nature... encouraging users to comment, ask question and help each other must be part of your long-term online strategy. At the same time, users still want experts, authors and editors to lad their online communities. And publishers need to have a business strategy that integrates UCG into their overall online marketing and publishing business model.

TH: Any words of advice to niche publishers trying to compete with free content? Will it all be free one day?

DN: Define your media pyramid with free content as the foundation... most content will ultimately appear as free words on a search engine optimized web page at some point in its life cycle. And when it does it is creating value by attracting search engine and other traffic from other websites. It is every bit as valuable when it becomes part of your audience development program as the lists we rent to drive a successful direct mail campaign. Free content, correctly deployed, is the key to building a robust online audience.

It’s important to remember too, that as humans, we still value something called ownership. So even though we can access lots of content online for free, we still like to own magazines and newsletters. If a user needs a quick answer to something, the web is perfect. It’s a great reference tool. However if a user wants to become truly proficient in something, if they really want to master a subject, they subscribe to a newsletter or magazine. Differnet mediums, different modalities.

TH: Care to share your biggest professional challenge right now? Do you have a hero? A mentor? An antagonist? Forget that. What was your first pet’s name and the name of the street you grew up on? Is this what you wanted to be when you grew up? What can you tell us about yourself that other people wouldn't guess? (example: you are a champion bowler)

DN: I was a nuclear engineer by day and rock radio DJ at night on the USS Enterprise back in the 70s. When I left the Navy in 1978, I applied to PG&E to be a power plant operator and to CSUS to get a degree in journalism. After some coaching from my Dad, I dropped the engineering thing and went with the ambiguity of a career in media. It was a good choice. :)