Infosys Publishing Practice Blog

Content Strategies for Mobile Publishing

2012-01-25T01:40:39Z

Over 1.3 billion users are expected to access social media from mobile devices by 2016. This is almost double the number of mobile social media users in 2011, according to a report from Juniper Research.

]]> The report found "the trend to integrate social, local and mobile experiences is driving the geosocial phenomena. People want to find out not only what their friends are doing, but also their location and other available activities in the area. Geosocial networks are particularly suited to the mobile space as most smartphones now include GPS, and have an 'always on, always connected' experience."

This also means digital content strategies for mobile social media will need to be reconstructed based on how content is consumed on these platforms. Unlike the PC/notebook era, mobile devices come in a dizzying array of screen sizes, platforms and user interfaces. Add to that the context in which the user is accessing the content. Context could be a mashup of any or all of the following:

Device: Smartphone or tablet. Size of screen etc.

Location: Where is the content being consumed...at home, while commuting, in an outdoor environment, in a noisy indoor area like a restaurant or a mall.

Time: When is the content being consumed and what would be the most relevant information at that time.

Social Relevance: What is their network consuming probably at that time and location. Also what are other people in their vicinity consuming.

Personalization: To what degree can the content be tailored to an individual. One way of doing this would be through data analytics of user and group behavior to serve up increasingly relevant content.

Attention Spans: If web attention spans were low, they are even lower on mobile devices. According to a survey on mobile content consumption users typically consumed:

a) Less than three paragraphs of text

b) Less than 30 seconds of audio

c) Less than one minute of video

Mobile social media creates new and exciting ways for publishers to connect to their audiences. It also opens up new revenue opportunities. For instances publishers have long struggled to replace revenue lost from classifieds. Online classifieds have not managed to get back local businesses that were the backbone of the classifieds eco-system.

The mobile platform however provides a powerful and compelling tool for publishers to try and attract back this segment. The ability to target audiences at specific locations and times is a powerful tool for local businesses. Imagine a restaurant being able to send out its lunch special to customers within a defined geography.

Creating the right content for the mobile environment is both an opportunity and a significant challenge. What is clear if traditional web 1.0 content strategies are not going to cut it.

Digital content fulfillment: User experience will determine the winner

2012-01-18T16:20:15Z

Digital content has disrupted multiple traditional paradigms of the Publishing world. Monetization of content is the one where the disruption has been most profound. Third party retailers who control large digital market places (think Amazon) or control access devices (think Apple) are emerging as leaders in the evolving digital market place. In order to retain customer mindshare, Publishers need to provide best-in-class experience right through the purchase-to-consume process.

]]> Buying Experience

The boom in the eCommerce is through serendipitous discovery, social recommendations and frictionless ordering. Retailers like Amazon have leveraged behavior mining algorithms, social analytics to derive product recommendations. The buying process is instantaneous (potentially just a single click in both iTunes and Amazon). In contrast to this, publishers have replicated their brick-and-mortar models of pre-defined product bundles, static recommendations for cross-sell and up-sell options resulting in a poor customer experience

The buying experience needs to simple, transparent and user personalized.

Entitlement Experience

Once content is paid-for the entitlement needs to be seamless and near instantaneous. Presently, there are device, format specific rules that are complicated for customer to follow or keep track of. Premium publishers prone to dealing with institutional buyers need to provide robust entitlement management self-service capabilities. This will enable administrators to transfer, revoke and suspend entitlement for users to manage costs and enable their workforce through appropriate content products

Access Experience

User-registration is the single biggest barrier in letting customers sample content and also converting non-paying consumers to paid customers. Identity management is sometimes siloed across content products integrated through mergers or acquisitions. I have seen users get agitated in dealing with CSRs resolving access issues. Rather than dictating credentialing modalities, Publishers need to integrate with universal authenticating mechanisms like Facebook Connect, OpenID authorization to make access seamless without compromising on understanding user.

Publishers need to deploy solutions that offer their digital native customers a best-in-class experience to keep them in their native market place as against purchasing through 3rd party retailers.

From specialty magazines to specialty community platforms

2011-11-04T03:34:32Z

Faced with a powerful disruptive force that is redefining content consumption patterns, specialty B2C magazines have to move away from a content-centric to community-centric approach to compete.

The chart above is the story. Companies that either did not exist or where not considered competition even 10 years ago now control over 60% of the total online advertising revenue...and Facebook is just getting started on its monetization strategy. Analytics firm emarketer.com, estimates that online ad spending worldwide will rise to around 22% of the total ad spend, up from an estimated 16% today. This increase is coming at the cost of newspapers, magazines and directories...all of which are already seeing sharp declines in ad revenues.

Most magazine publishers have established a strong digital presence, and in fact, would boast of an increased combined readership across their print and online brands. However, this increased readership has not translated into revenues...with online revenue unable to make up the gap from falling print ad and subscription revenues.

I believe the problem is the way publishers look at the digital media. For most digital is an extension of their print strategy. The online experience they provide their readers is generally not too different from their print titles. Publishers do incorporate certain community tools like blogs, forums, chats etc., but these are all peripheral to the content.

However, the advent and popularity of social media has proved that personalization and community interaction are central to keeping users engaged and active in the online world. Therefore it is imperative to rethink existing content strategies and for magazines to reconstruct themselves as community platforms.

While the concept of community could defer from publication to area of interest. A community platform would broadly emphasize the following:

Personalisation: Move over editor's point of view. Hello readers' point of view. Personalisation begins from the home page with each reader getting a news feed most relevant to them. This can begin from a simple geographic location, with new users being served content related to or most relevant to their geographies. As their level of interaction with the site increases so too does the level of personalisation. Yahoo is an early pioneer (http://www.fastcompany.com/1770673/how-yahoo-got-to-a-billion-clicks), but I believe this is just the start.
Social Interactions: Or as fellow blogger Santosh GR calls it "giving social conversations a first class status." Basically the news feed incorporates social conversations from the community along with the core magazine content.
Curation: Now this could be a sticking point for some publishers. But online any content that your user wants/needs/can find relevant is useful content. It does not matter if that has not been created by your editorial team. The idea is to meet the end-to-end needs of your user so they don't tab off to another location to find what you are not providing.
Long tail: A community platform provides value for businesses along the long tail For example: It is viable for a local car dealer to reach potential buyers in their area on a car community platform. Doing this in a magazine would not be viable. Using other online media would not provide the kind of targeting possible on a special interest community platform.

A community platform also creates greater revenue opportunities for publishers. That, however, is best left for my next post.

Re-inventing editorial operations - Part 3: From print-first to web-first to media-neutral

2011-10-04T10:01:55Z

Consumer: I don't know where you get your content, but I get mine on the web.

Editor: I don't know where you want your content, but I produce mine first for , and not for the web.

Ironical, as it may seem in the post web 2.0 era, content collection, editorial, publishing and distribution systems are not geared for media neutral content delivery, let alone web delivery. However, we are now long past web 2.0, and in the tablet era. Not being media neutral is not an option (pardon the double negatives). Continuing to believe in print-first and web-next is also not an option. Let's see some key factors which affect a web-first philosophy.

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Reversals in the workflow

Content on web site has to be near instantaneous. Ok, that's no big deal; I can collect or author content, do minimal processing, and kick it out to cyberspace. I am a mean Lightning McQueen. But, that's not the way it works. My content does not always live on the edge of the sword (web). It goes through a longer processing, where editors enrich the content with human insights, there are intelligent systems which add automated insights like classification, entity tagging, inter linking, etc. That is a longer cycle, though not as long as an Entmoot. Post the longer cycle the content is re-published on the web, and also sent to non-web channels. Design your editorial systems for such double passes, and possible reversals in the workflow. Let's also learn from our past mistakes. Don't replace print-first blindly with web-first; instead try (I emphasize try) media-neutral-first.

Efficiency and automation

There is always a compromise between being fast, and being right. You cannot reduce the quality of content just because you want it published fast. You still want editorial enrichment of content in the form of topic and taxonomy tagging, summaries, linking relevant related content, etc. Yet, these are human intensive tasks, which will take time. However, there is hope from our friendly neighborhood research community. Automated classification, entity identification and fact extraction, text summarization, natural language processing have started to become mainstream. Use them to automate the enrichment process where possible. As a side effect, your editors will be relieved of mundane tagging, and get more time for adding 'real' insights.

Embrace metadata complexities

Metadata has gone first class, in fact, metadata has the same value as the underlying content - for instance think about the value of facets when you narrow search results. It comes in various forms. Topic, taxonomy, entity identification, classification are part of the metadata diaspora, if you loosen the definition. Reversals of the workflow add increased versioning needs; note that versions are manifested to your consumers and not just editors. If your web content has to refer the page number in the print version, then think about the impact of reversals in the workflow too. A space constrained mobile application might be smaller text, than the summary on the web site. Formatting rules are dragons crossed with chameleons - complex and differing across devices. All these are metadata complexity you need to embrace as necessities in editorial systems. Don't give them the step motherly treatment.

There is no 'one' pill panacea to the above. But, technology has evolved, architecture and design knowledge has grown to address these needs.

PS 1> I sincerely wish for a time machine, which can take us back in time to rename "web 2.0" to "user oriented web"

PS 2> In spite of "The web is dead. Long live the Internet" catch phrase, I use web to mean all forms of online internet enabled systems.

Re-inventing editorial operations - Part 2 : Lean is not mean

2011-10-04T09:29:17Z

We talked about business process as a key dimension of optimization for Publishers in the previous blog. An interesting approach to process optimization is adoption of lean methodology to prune non value-adding processes and steps.

]]> Lean methodology has been widely deployed by manufacturing operations. I was recently involved in a process optimization exercise for content operations through lean methodology. The first mention of lean in the content context drew a response: "We are not assembly line workers, we are creative artists". As we went through the process of breaking down the exalted art-form into scientific data-collection, statistical analysis and structured root-cause elimination, we were able to win over the initially reluctant audience.

Editorial processes in an effort to deliver quality content free of errors have workflows which include multiple cycles and types of reviews. This results in long cycle times and high processing costs. Each review done, with the knowledge that there is a review yet to be done, has been proven to be of moderate effectiveness. Focus on getting it right the first time - designed and enabled by right technology. The demands of various content fabrication systems are vastly different. I have worked on multiple flavors of editorial processes ranging from newsrooms that focus on time to market to the editorial systems creating assessment content with its extreme focus on being error-free. In the constantly evolving landscape, design-once and use-forever model is not appropriate. Fitness for purpose will have to be constantly evaluated through data-driven analytics: How many errors did each review cycle eliminate, how many times content failed to serve customer's needs. Such information is not easily available and when available, rarely acted on to improve processes.

Lean methodology has been widely deployed in the manufacturing industry to eliminate similar wastage by managing the following entities:

Value - what creates value from the customer's perspective?
The value stream - steps along the process chain to create value
Flow - identify key bottlenecks that reduce throughput of the process
Pull - design processes that are driven by customer demands/needs
Perfection - strive for getting it right the first time rather than iteratively eliminating errors through inspection

The process of optimization involves:

Creating value stream maps of existing processes with a focus on flow of work
Setup kaizen events with process owners for identifying ways to improve flow in the steps that have the longest wait times
Setup metrics and measurement tools to collect data on process step cycle time and wait time
Setup ongoing metrics based evaluation for elimination of 7 type of wastes in the process:
Creating value stream maps of existing processes with a focus on flow of work
Setup Kaizen events with process owners for identifying ways to improve flow in the steps that have the longest wait times
Setup metrics and measurement tools to collect data on process step cycle time and wait time
Setup ongoing metrics based evaluation for elimination of 7 type of wastes in the process:

Delay - internal customers waiting for service.
Duplication - having to re-enter data, repeat details etc.
Unnecessary movement
Unclear communication - having to seek clarification for further processing
Incorrect inventory - out of stock.
Opportunity lost - to retain or win customers
Errors - in the transaction

By focusing on continuous improvements and eliminating waste, lean methodology can be successfully deployed in editorial operations. Editorial processes tread the thin line between rich legacy and ancient relics where everything is above question. Establishing technology enabled tools that gather data on key metrics right through the content value chain are invaluable in bring scientific rigor and educated insight into optimization opportunities.

Re-inventing editorial operations - Part 1: The big asks

2011-10-04T07:57:16Z

Content is the heart and soul of Publishing. Access channels have fragmented, newer monetization models have emerged and customers have moved to digital formats. Despite this tumultuous change, customers are willing to pay premium for content that is enriched, structured, normalized, and referenced. The key differentiation between content freely available on the web and Publisher enriched content is authenticity, reliability and fitness for use.

]]> Most of the Publishers I have worked with have a rich legacy. Rich legacy is good for a brand's trust but by the same token is a burden to carry in terms of technology, organization structures and business processes. In order to compete with new-age information firms founded by 20-somethings in their turtleneck t-shirts, a complete overhaul of the editorial operations is paramount.

I find the transformation themes of the Publishers consistent across the globe. Being a content intermediary is passé. Free content has commoditized the game of aggregating and serving up content in its raw form. Content enrichment is the name of the game.

In this series of blogs, we will articulate the key initiatives that will enable Publishers to enrich content faster, better and cheaper through transforming the following aspects:

Business process: Antiquated process with multiple iterative reviews and serialized workflows hard-wired, significantly impact time-to-market and cost-to-produce. Objective evaluation of process through-put and configurable workflows will result in dramatic improvements.
Organization Structure: Product teams structured along channels - print, online, mobile have resulted in low synergy or in many cases conflicting priorities in serving the customer. Organization structures that facilitate seamless customer experience are critical to leverage synergies and differentiate from community and search disruptors
Technology: Highly complex architecture with multiple content stores, vendor choices and product-specific ecosystems are common across Publishers. Systematic rationalization of application portfolio will result in better maintainability, unlock content value, upgrade functionality and performance

These are challenging times for Publishers. Disruptions of existing business models present an excellent opportunity to re-tool the enterprise and stay competitive in the emerging landscape.