The Search Is ‘On’ for SIPAlert Daily Articles
Good news: SIPAlert Daily articles are now searchable on the SIPA Website. To commemorate the occasion, here are some popular clips of information from the past three months.
From the very first Road Taken member profile, the two most important concepts for Melcrum’s Robin Crumby:
First, keep it simple: Information businesses get complicated very quickly, so stick to the formats that work best. Second, squeeze the lemon: It is always tempting to diversify into other topic areas, but focusing on your core market yields the best returns.
From a post on Website Brainstorming and Solving Tech Headaches:
Harvard Business Review had its share of tech headaches before a Website-led expansion changed the focus to content and audience. “When I started here three years ago, our Website was product-centric,” Eric Hellweg, the editorial managing director, said. “We used a transaction-focused approach; our outreach was based on sales. There was no relationship or community building.
“So we decided to expand the Website and took the first steps—segmentation and building more engaging relationships in the community—while focusing on a group we call emerging leaders.”
With new blogs, daily stats, surveys, Webinars and articles, HBR’s Website went from six contributors to 40. Content started driving the Website; annual unique visitors soared from 200,000 to more than a million. Blog posts now garner 1.2 million page views alone each month. And they have a strong technology team to thank for many of the upgrades.
From a post on taking advantage of your expert status:
“The thing about being a specialized publisher,” says Ellen Smith, managing editor of Mine Safety and Health News, “is that you’re on the frontline. You’re someone who has been in the field for a long time. It’s an outlook no one else can have. Whereas an industry newsletter can see the trend, a specialized publisher will see trends even better.”
Smith was talking about her work as an “expert” during the last few months in media coverage of the tragedy in the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia. She appeared on PBS’s NewsHour, NPR, MSNBC, on the front page of The Washington Post, and other media outlets.SIPA members can take advantage of their uniquely clued-in status in a particular field in many ways.
From another Road Taken with ePublishing’s Thomas Chaffee, who once toured as a musician with The Beach Boys and Styx:
Without question, “context” is emerging as the guiding principle over the next few years—putting your reader, your “who,” in context. The natural extension is to serve your “who” with the what, when, where, why and how.
• What – is your content, advertising and eCommerce
• When – is about presenting your content when the reader wants it, at the time of need
• Where – can be location-driven (at work) or platform-specific, such as on mobile devices or an iPad
• Why – is about relevance: are you delivering relevant experiences for your reader?
• How – is the technology that ties your circulation, content management, CRM, eCommerce and email systems together to drive the relevant experiences and create more sales opportunities.
And finally, a post from the last day of last month’s SIPA 2010 Conference:
It was a great SIPA Conference—and then Kimberly Dozier spoke and it went off the charts.
The 34th Annual SIPA International Conference finished a thought-sharing, idea-provoking, amazing three days a few hours ago with the SIPF Awards Luncheon, followed by a stirring talk by Dozier, now with the Associated Press. The former CBS correspondent in Iraq recounted the 2006 car bombing that killed two members of her crew and nearly killed her. Speaking in a steady but emotionally-inflected voice, Dozier told the story of the bombing in incredible detail, all the way up to and past the point of her hospital stay, where she was told that she might not walk again.
“[Earlier in my life] I was told I wasn’t good enough for print”—she had told the audience of her early days working in the newsletter industry—“that I didn’t have the voice for radio, and couldn’t make it on TV,” she said. This would be one more obstacle that she would conquer.
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$147 early-bird rate expires today!
Mequoda/SIPA Webinar on iPad and iPhone Apps for Publishers
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August 24, 2010, 12:30–2 p.m.
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