Try Everything, Deliver Access and ‘Sell Vowels’

Meeting of the Minds – an article about sessions and keynotes from the recent SIPA 2010 Conference

Here are more teachable moments from the recent SIPA 2010 Conference and the link to order your audio archives.

1. In his keynote, Do We Really Need to Be Concerned About eReaders?, Forrester Research’s James McQuivey said that your customers still have time in their day to fill, and some type of electronic media is most likely to fill it. “Which media will succeed in taking those minutes?” he asked. He said that the average person’s time spent on electronic media has already risen from six hours to between 12-20 hours a day. (The 12-20 depends on whether you count our habit of doing two electronic things at once.) “If somebody does better at this than you, you’ll lose your customers. Delivering consistent access to content is the key.”

2. “The audience out there now expects to participate,” said another keynote, Mark Ranalli, president of Helium, Inc., “but you need to maintain your reputation for quality.” He spoke about readers wanting and expecting fresh daily content. “Competition always drives quality. The amount of [content originators] will force all of us to rethink the value we bring to our readers.”

3. “You try everything; don’t assume that something won’t work until you give it a try,” said Knight Kiplinger. “We want to give our readers whatever format they want. [On still using print] They’re staring at the computer all day, they may like at one point to hold something in their hand.”

4. “Is your company and industry creating enough value that people will take money out of their pocket and put it in yours?” Joseph Kayne asked. His ideas on creativity and opportunities are very much worth hearing.

5. Matt Bailey, founder and president of SiteLogic Marketing, talked about checking www.google.com/trends to see what people are searching for, and then come up with content to match. “Push context—within an hour, get it out there. Your chances [will be good] of getting it in Google news if you’re going on a hotness level.”

6. “We are on as many platforms as we can handle,” said keynote speaker Kevin Delaney, managing editor, online, for The Wall Street Journal, unveiling their latest NOW edition. “Use a business model for all these platforms.”

7. “All new formats are addictive,” said Forrester Research’s James McQuivey. “Know your demographics, the parameters of your content, and the cost of adapting it to a more interactive experience.”

8. The final session featured the always-popular best ideas of the Conference; this alone will be worth the price of the audio tapes. Though everyone was still reeling a bit from Kimberly Dozier’s amazing talk, a packed room assembled one more time to hear the ideas. They included:
“Sell shorter bits of content” or “we now sell vowels” as someone suggested it.
“Follow your processes.”
“Go on your site and search for stuff that is old and out of date. It can be very disconcerting.”
“In getting a sponsor for your Webinar, you may not be able to guarantee attendees, but you can guarantee a lot of good publicity to your list.”

We can also guarantee that SIPA 2010 was valuable in so many ways, and we’re very fortunate to have some of those ways preserved on tape.

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SIPA 2010 Annual International Conference
The SIPA 2010 Annual International Conference provided an amazing array of information,
step-by-step plans and new ideas. The fact that so many of the sessions are available
on audio – to go along with a host of handouts – is a wonderful thing.
It’s a must-have compendium of subjects across the specialized publishing world,
from analytics to Webinars, from Adwords to SEO.

and purchase the whole show or choose just a few of the sessions.
This is your chance to bring all that great
information and training home!

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