Scratching the seven-year itch

What were you doing seven years ago tonight?
Odds are it was more fun than what I was doing -- which was sitting at my desk and launching this blog.

I don't have a very clear memory of  that night -- and that seems strange to me now, given how important this blog became to my career. Rather, I have a hazy recollection of coming home and feeling sort of fed up. It seemed clear to me that the entire world of B2B journalism was entering an extraordinarily exciting and important era of rapid change. But my working life was filled with people who didn't share that belief. I really just wanted someone to talk to about this stuff. But my family, friends and coworkers weren't interested.

So I came home, turned on the computer, and started talking to ... whomever happened to be out there in the newly born blogsphere.

If you don't know what happened next, feel free to take a look at this post from September of this year. In it I tried to spell out how wonderful and important this blog became to me, but how I had lost my taste for it.

But if there's anything that has changed more than my relationship to this blog, it's the world that I wrote about here. B2B media is dramatically different from what it was in 2004. I'd like to think I played a small part in that change. And I'm grateful for the opportunity to do so.

Reviewing the past

Early this morning I received an email from someone who described himself as a "longtime fan" of my work. He wanted to share a link to a piece he'd read on FINS, the career site owned by Dow Jones. The article, titled "We're All Media Companies Now and We're Hiring," is about the extraordinary surge in hiring of traditional journalists to create content for non-publishers.

The writer of that email was kind enough to point out that the article "sounds like what you've been preaching for a long time." And there's no doubt that is true. This new world of content marketing (or, if you prefer, brand journalism) has excited me tremendously.

But I've also developed some concerns about this new world. If you're one of the hundreds of B2B journalists who has made (or is considering) a move into content marketing, I urge you to read my recent conversations with John Bethune. You can find them here and here. You should also read John's interview with Jesse Noyes, one of the better-known and more talented players in the brand-journalism world. (Note that Jesse draws an interesting distinction, calling himself a brand reporter rather than a brand journalist.)

Predicting the future

I didn't intend  to write anything about tonight's anniversary. But that email from a longtime reader left me feeling like I should say something.

Then, in the late afternoon, the Content Marketing Institute and Junta42 published their annual list of predictions for the upcoming year in Social Media and Content Marketing. Joe Pulizzi, the boss at Junta42 and CMI, had asked more than 80 people to share their predictions. But his favorite, according to his blog post today, was mine.

And I realized that I couldn't think of a better birthday gift for me and this blog than this:
Joe, as you probably know, is the father of the content-marketing craze. And I, at least for today, am his favorite child.

So as we enter 2012, as new challenges arise in B2B, and as this blog begins its eighth year, check out my predictions and those of some of the smartest folks in the content-marketing world.

(If you're interested, check out what I said on the six-year anniversary of this blog here.)

An interview with me on the woes of content marketing

As I said in a post a few weeks ago, I don't intend to blog here at the rate I once did.
But as I promised in that not-quite-a-farewell post, "I won't abandon this site, nor will I stop writing entirely about the news and business of business news."

Perhaps it would have been more accurate to say that I won't stop talking entirely about the news and business of business news. Because I still do a lot of that.

So if you're interested in such conversations, you might want to read John Bethune's interview with me about what's going wrong in B2B content marketing.

Always do what you are afraid to do

I don't want to be a blogger anymore. And that works out just fine, since I'm clearly not a blogger anymore. Or at least not in the way I was back in the early days of social media.
I launched this blog late in 2004. But things took off the following year. It seems remarkable to me now, but I published 272 blog posts in 2005.
But that volume dropped steadily as more and more people entered the game and as the game grew less interesting to me. Last year I posted just 12 times. The piece you're reading now is just my fourth of 2011.
I've never been one to insist upon a clear standard of what is, and isn't blogging. But it seems clear to me that whatever it is I'm doing on this site, it's no longer blogging.
I may be using blogging software. The search engines may still classify this site as a blog. But I'm not a blogger anymore.

But if I'm no longer a blogger, then what am I?
It was blogging that transformed my career. When I launched this site I was largely unknown in the world of journalism. I had launched one of the first B2B news sites in existence. I was an online producer at the early CNN property that later became CNNMoney. I was an executive in the early days at About.com. I had been given the good luck to be around in the early days of digital journalism, but no one knew me. I was just a guy with a moderately good resume, a substantially large ego and a firmly held belief that I had something important to say to the B2B publishing industry.
That was the perfect recipe for blogging. And it worked for me.
By 2006 I had morphed into "Paul Conley, the blogger." I was weirdly famous in some cool media niches. I hosted sessions at the Folio:Show, the College Media Advisors convention, the ASBPE national convention and ABM's Digital Velocity conference. By 2008, I had become "THE Paul Conley, the controversial blogger." I was the keynote speaker at both the ASBPE national convention and the Southeast Journalism Conference for student journalists.
Then something happened.
Two years ago this month I wrote a piece suggesting that the media revolution had ended. The previous decade, I said, had been one of "ceaseless change and challenge ...a madcap series of never-ending developments (that had been) glorious and exciting." But the heady days of the revolution, I said, had given way to a less interesting era of incremental change.
After that, the number of posts I made on this blog began to plummet.

Last night I took a look at a blog post by my friend John Bethune, who runs the B2BMemes site. It was, as always, a wonderful and insightful bit of writing.
As I reached the conclusion of his piece, I saw that at the bottom of the page he has a small list of sites that he calls Brilliant Blogs -- and my blog was on the list.
And I thought, "that's so nice."
Then my hand moved and my mouse drifted over the link to my blog and a little descriptor popped up that said "occasional comments on trends in B2B media."
And I thought, "that's so ... accurate."
I've gone from being "Paul Conley the blogger" to being "Paul Conley, occasional commenter."

A few months ago I came across a piece on Clientonomy, the wonderful site from Alistair MacPherson about the consulting industry. Mac asked the question I've heard asked a thousand times -- "How Often Should You Blog." His answer was the same that any sensible person would give you, "there are no hard-and-fast rules."
But it was the opening paragraphs of his piece that resonated with me.
"But let me ask you something," he wrote. "How many songs should a composer write? How many movies should a film director shoot? How many dances should a choreographer create?"

When I was Paul Conley the Blogger, things were simpler. (How many blog posts should a blogger write? Lots of them.)
But now that I don't think of myself as a blogger, now that no one thinks of me that way any longer, I need a different answer.
How many posts should an occasional commenter make?
How often should a consultant blog?
Or --- and this is the question that seems somehow right to me -- how many essays should an essayist write?

A mind that startled us
I had a little bit of free time this summer, and I spent much of it wondering what it was I should do with free time. Obviously, I didn't spend it blogging. Although I did spend some considerable hours thinking that I should do exactly that.
Nor did I get in shape, volunteer for a worthy cause, visit a museum or mount a protest against one of the world's many outrages. Although I did make plans to do all of those.
But I did accomplish one worthy goal -- I began to re-read Emerson.
When I was a young man in Boston, Ralph Waldo Emerson was a bit of a hero to me. I know now that I misunderstood much of what he wrote. That was inevitable. I was a cynical teenager, educated by rationalists. The work of the great Transcendentalist must remain elusive to such a child.
But something about Emerson stuck with me.
First and foremost, I wanted to be Emerson. I envied his intellect. I longed to think big thoughts, to understand nature and God and man. I envied, too, his lifestyle. There was no appeal to me in the solitude of Thoreau's cabin. I wanted Emerson's life: to write, to travel the country on speaking tours, to mingle with great minds and then return to a home in New England when the weather suited me.
I wanted to be a public intellectual.
I wanted, more than anything else in the world, to be an essayist.

At some point in adulthood, I drifted into an easier version of that dream. I wrote, although not of things of great importance. I found bright and articulate people for conversation, but maintained a working-class suspicion of well educated intellectuals. I moved often -- changing apartments and cities, but returned nearly every autumn to Massachusetts.
Then, I started blogging.
And what was my blogging life in 2006-08 if not some third-class version of Emerson's? Writing, travel, acclaim -- my work was hardly Emersonian, but I became a sort of Emerson lite, a semi-intellectual for B2B media, discussing meta tags rather than metaphysics.
And I loved every minute of it.

But that was then.
Now the blogosphere that once seemed so full of fresh ideas feels like an echo chamber. Once there was a revolution, and I yelled through the entire thing because Emerson taught me that "sometimes a scream is better than a thesis." Now the revolution is over. Where once I could not shut up about the media industry, now there seems little reason to talk, let alone to screech.
So I don't want to be a blogger any longer.
I want instead to be the man I wanted to be when I was child.

But even I -- as pretentious a man and writer as you are likely to ever meet -- has doubts that I can be anything more than what I have already been -- a blogger, a businessman, a consultant and journalist and executive.
And yet ...
Emerson, of course, found the answer more than a century before I asked the question:
"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till ... We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope."

Every artist was first an amateur
When I look back over recent posts on this blog (or, more importantly, when I look over the unfinished pieces that sit on my computer,) it seems clear that I've been trying to change the how of my writing. Whatever blogging might be, there has been less of it here than there once was. I've not put my heart into blogging for a long time. And it shows. The muse befriends me no more.
Instead, I'm yearning to write pieces that are longer, less frequent and more thoughtful. I yearn, too, to stretch beyond journalism, media and business. I want to write of the world, not its niches.
Whatever an essay may be (and brighter minds than mine disagree over their structure and tone), essays are what I want to write. That is the plot of ground I was given all those years ago. That is the soil I must till.

I'm not leaving B2B media. Nor am I closing my consulting business. There are mouths to be fed. Besides, I like working with the people of B2B.
I won't abandon this site, nor will I stop writing entirely about the news and business of business news.
But I will also write about other things -- things less timely and more timeless. Some of those things I'll publish here. Others will go elsewhere.

Because I'm no longer a blogger. Nor am I an occasional commenter.
I'm an occasional essayist with blogging software.

(Editor's Note: If you're interested in learning more about the craft and history of the essay, you should check out the work of my friend Dan Conley [no relation.] Dan has a website, a blog and soon a book about Montaigne, the French writer who invented the essay.)

A suggestion for my obituary

I've spent a considerable amount of time in the past decade or so trying to convince journalists (and their employers) of the value of the agnostic link. -- a link that points to a competitor or rival. My argument is that journalists have an obligation as journalists to point to information of value no matter where they find it. Thus if a competing brand publishes something that your readers should see, you should link to it.
I understand how difficult this can be for journalists. We are often, by our nature, fiercely competitive. I understand too how hard this can be for publishers -- particularly in B2B. They are often tasked with making money in very small niches where success depends on how much advertising money you can attract away from rivals.
But for me (and for others like me) the use of the agnostic link is a no-brainer. Journalism's purpose is to inform, amuse and educate. So when someone publishes something that is informative, amusing or educational, I should make sure my readers see it.

Recently I've been involved in a project that requires talking with a large number of journalists and publishers about agnostic links. What's been particularly interesting about this project is that there has not been much disagreement about the value of such links. It seems that much, if not most, of the industry has accepted the value of content aggregation, content curation and social media. And those three subsets of the publishing world are built upon agnostic links.
In fact, for every journalist in this project who wanted to argue about the value of agnostic links, there have been three or four who were far more interested in talking about how people once hated such links. These journalists wanted to know who were the first journalists to use agnostic links. They wanted to know when the major journalism brands started using them. And they wanted to know who came up with the phrase "agnostic link.'
As it turns out, the answers to those questions are, as near as I can tell,:

• Early bloggers created the idea of the agnostic link (although clipping services and the B2B newsletters that mimicked them engaged in a similar practice for decades.)
• As I mentioned in this earlier blog post, the big names in journalism embraced agnostic links in mid 2006.
• It might have been me. At any rate, I'm going to take credit for it.

Paul Conley, the journalist who coined the term "agnostic link," died today at the age of 135

So here's the funny thing. I used to be 100 percent convinced that I had heard and read the term "agnostic link' dozens of times before I started using it. But over time, I've run into more and more people who tell me that the first time they saw the phrase was on my blog. Or that the first time they heard it was at a speech I gave.
Then, just this morning someone asked me for some background on the phrase, so I plugged it into Google and found, as I have numerous times over recent years, that the top return is a piece I wrote in November 2006 called "Getting religion about agnostic links."
And I said to myself -- I give up.

I don't intend to be Bob Greene, the Chicago Tribune writer credited with inventing the term "yuppie." If my memory is correct, Greene spent years insisting he had done no such thing.
Nor, apparently, will I be Joe Pulizzi, who invented the term (and the industy) "content marketing." Content marketing has changed the very nature of the publishing game. "Agnostic links" also changed publishing. But it was the practice of agnostic links that were revolutionary. The term "agnostic link" didn't catch on and instead seemed to fade in popularity as the actual practice grew.
Still, I'll take any footnote I can get in journalism history.
So here's my request. If someday in the distant future, despite my best efforts, I should die, I want Folio magazine to write a brief piece saying that I coined the term "agnostic link." And I want that piece to link to obituaries on eMediaVitals, min, Junta42 and Publishing Executive.
Then I will rest in peace.

Am I big enough for marketing automation?

My career tends to be riddled with serendipity. I seem to find what I need through good fortune, rather than through any organized effort. Whenever I ask “how did I get here,” the answer is usually “because I got lucky.”
Let me tell you a story about what I mean:
I’m a consultant. That means I run a small business. But it’s about as small as a business can be. It’s a one-person operation with nothing to sell other than what’s in my head. If, heaven forbid, I were to get hit by a bus, my business would die with me. By the same token, if I decided to retire, my business would retire with me.
Lately, this has begun to trouble me. I’ve started thinking about ways to expand … looking for ways to turn my tiny consulting business into something that more closely resembles a real business -- with products, and employees and other such things. In other words, I started thinking about how I could convert Paul Conley Consulting into something that could exist without Paul Conley.
So I thought about it. And worried about it.
Then I got lucky.

Luck of the Draw
One day, staring at my Twitter stream, I saw that Jonathan Jordan, the business coach who tweets under the name @MindfullyChange, was offering a free hour of coaching to the first seven folks to respond to his tweet.
I responded … and I won.
A few days later, I spent an hour on the phone with Jonathan. It was eye-opening. I learned a tremendous amount, but one thing stood out: it became clear that I was uncomfortable with the tasks that are required to grow the business. I like to deliver consulting services. But I’m not crazy about selling consulting services. Thus I wasn’t selling.
Fortunately, this reluctance to actively market and sell my services has not been much of a problem. I’m booked solid nearly year-round. Between referrals, repeat business and the use of the Junta42 matching service, I find enough work to fill my time. But after chatting with Jonathan I realized that the only way to expand my business beyond what I can accomplish working alone would be to expand my marketing/sales role, while delegating more of the hands-on work to others.
(No doubt, entrepreneurs who are much smarter than I said something like “no kidding, that’s obvious” when reading that last paragraph.)
Yet with no real sales skills to speak of, I was perplexed about what to do next.
So I thought about my conversation with Jonathan. And I worried about it.
Then I got lucky, again.

Fortune Smiles
A few days after my chat with the business coach, I received an email from Junta42 saying I had been matched with a potential client. (I won’t go into all the details here, but if you’re a content provider in the B2B content arena, you really should be in Junta42’s vendor/customer matching system. For everyone else, you just need to know that Junta42 vets vendors like me, investigates our experience and then matches us with marketers who need help with content.)
I reached out to the prospect. We traded some emails. I had a few phone conversations with company executives. Then we struck a deal.
As is often the case when I land a new client, I have to rapidly get up to speed on them and their industry. That was true here as well. So I started researching my new client, a company called Whatsnexx, a new competitor in the marketing-automation space.
And several minutes into my research I realized that the answer to how to expand my sales/marketing efforts might be found in the world of marketing automation.
(No doubt, those smarter-than-I entrepreneurs just said “no kidding, that’s obvious” a second time and then hit the BACK button on their browsers. Everyone else may want to read a little further.)

Klaatu Barada Nikto
A few days ago my toddler daughter watched as I tried, and failed, to make a major repair in our home. Her heartfelt advice was “Don’t worry, Daddy. You can buy a robot to do it.”
That’s sort of how I’ve come to think of marketing automation. It’s the robot that does things I cannot do.

If you’re not familiar with marketing automation, I’ll try to explain it. But first, let me offer you a piece of heartfelt advice of my own: Don’t accept anyone’s definition of marketing automation.

In my entire career I’ve never run into an industry that has such a difficult time defining itself. Rather than agree on the parameters (in the way that all grocery chains accept that they are grocery chains or all car makers accept that they are car makers), marketing-automation companies seem to be engaged in an endless pissing match about who is and isn’t a marketing-automation company and what is and isn’t marketing automation.
Reading that stuff will make you nuts. No doubt talking to vendors in the space will do the same. So for now, let’s just use my definition: Marketing automation is a giant robot that can help you market things.
OK, so far?
Good. So let’s look at what’s inside the robot.

Connecting things to connect with your connections
Marketing automation is nothing more, and nothing less, than a system of making connections. Most marketing-automation companies do things that, for example, link your Web site analytics to your email-marketing efforts. Some marketing-automation companies connect CRM systems (like Salesforce) with other databases and communication systems. Some companies do large-scale integration of databases. My client, Whatsnexx, provides its services through a proprietary system that avoids the need for that integration. Almost everyone in the field is engaged in linking things that are not necessarily linked (PPC campaigns, call-center activities, ad placement, social-network marketing, etc.) Everyone in the field is engaged in making it easier for businesses to market and sell.
If you read this blog and are not a member of my immediate family, you probably work in editorial in B2B publishing or B2B content marketing. Odds are you’ve never heard of marketing automation. But odds are that your company is already engaged in it....or is looking at possible vendors.
But as I said at the beginning of this post, I’m not a big company. I’m a one-man operation. So the question for me was “Am I big enough for marketing automation?”
The answer is “yes, sort of.”

What's it cost?
Prices for marketing-automation solutions vary widely. But there are a number of players, including Whatsnexx, with prices that start at around $500 a month.
Some of the less-elaborate solutions such as Loopfuse and Genius offer free versions for small businesses.
The problem, however, is that all of these solutions require that you have some sort of marketing systems in place. If you don’t have anything to connect, then you’re not big enough for marketing automation.
I asked Jacques Spilka, the Senior Customer State Marketing Strategist for Whatsnexx, a version of the “Am I big enough for marketing automation” question. He said “All you really need to do MA is a list of contacts. Everything else is marketing to that list.”
But remarkably, for someone who has been running a business all these years, I don’t really have a list. I don’t have much of anything to connect. I run some Google ads. I have some basic Web analytics. Recently I started using the free version of Zoho to keep track of my customers and leads. But my prospect list is nothing more than a subset of my connections on LinkedIn and a handful of people that send me emails.
So before I can honestly say that I am big enough for marketing automation, I’ll need to get more serious about the whole sales and marketing thing and build a proper prospect list.
I guess it’s time for another session with my business coach.

Quantifying quality

I spend a lot of time thinking about content quality and how to measure it.
This won't come as a surprise to anyone who's worked with me in the past. Much of my consulting business involves quantifying-- how many pieces of content created, of what types, with which characteristics, over what time frame, collecting how many pageviews, generating how many leads, etc.

But those are simple metrics of performance and production. There's not much challenge in them.
Measuring content quality, however, is something else entirely.
That's hard. That's complicated, challenging and -- particularly to some journalists -- controversial.
But I like the the difficult and disputatious. Which probably explains why I run in circle-eights and giggle whenever a client asks "how do we know if our content is good?"

New gig
A client asked me a version of that question a few weeks ago. And so, for the next few months I'll be helping a major B2B publisher measure quality.
How? The way I always do it:
I'll work with editors across the company to get consensus on a list of content characteristics that indicate quality and can be measured objectively. (For example, one measurement involves scoring a piece of content against a quality scale, i.e., an enterprise story is worth more than a story based on a press release; a story based on a press release is worth more than an edited press release, an edited press release is worth more than an unedited press release, etc.)
I don't attempt to measure quality indicators that are subjective. For example, I admire a well-crafted sentence as much as the next guy, but I won't count the number of elegant phrases per 1,000 words, because I can't get consensus on what makes for an elegant phrase.

More, better or both?
There can be quality scores for individual writers, brands, departments, etc.
The truly interesting work begins when you analyze those scores along with other metrics.
Suppose, for example, a B2B brand has a below-average quality score, as well as poor Web metrics (low pageviews, uniques, etc.) and below-average output (content/per author/per week) figures. The most common reaction is that the editor should be fired.
But what if the brand served an industry that was contracting and where company research indicated that potential revenue growth is nonexistent.
In such a case does it make sense to hire and train someone new? Or should you stick with the sub-par performer and make plans to shutter the brand in the near future?
Or imagine a brand that makes great money, scores well-above-average on quality and where output per editor is nearly double the company norm. Should you cut the training budget and give those folks raises? Turn the editor-in-chief into the division's content director?
How about a brand with extraordinarily high quality scores, painfully low output numbers and pageviews that are half the size of its competitors? Sounds like senior-writer syndrome, to me. You've got a great journalist producing a small number of wonderful pieces per month. Does the brand have a monthly print product? If so, there may not be a problem. But does the cost/expense ratio suggest a Web-only future for the brand? Then you have a huge problem.

Culture clash
In my experience, measuring the quality of content inevitably leads to a discussion about the quantity of content.
The assumption is that there is an inverse relationship between quality and quantity. Journalists tend to argue that they can do more or they can do better, but they can't do both.
But my experience is that this is untrue.
First, as a general rule, I've found that the worst writers almost always also produce less content than their peers. (There are, however, some talented writers with low productivity, just as there are awful writers who produce an awful lot.)
Second, I've found that even the most talented and prolific people in any content operation often have work habits that hurt quality and lower productivity.

The relationship between quality and quantity was at the center of a recent blog post by the always insightful John Bethune.

Citing a recent ad from ReadWriteWeb seeking an editor "“to produce 5 solid web tech news articles a day, 5 days a week,” John suggests that to traditional, print-based journalists this "new ethos of digital productivity is not just foreign, it’s al-Qaeda foreign. They are publishing terrorists, threatening the placid print way of life."
John goes on to say that although he sympathizes with his fellow print veterans, he wonders if "it just our old print ways, our preconceptions and work habits, that make digital workloads look so extreme? We say that quality will invariably suffer with increased output. But does it?"
Before you answer that question for yourself, I strongly recommend that you read John's entire post.
And pay particular attention to the comments, where my friend Robin Sherman raises his concerns about the quality/quantity relationship, where John responds to those concerns, and where I said:
"As an industry, we’ve sunk into a seemingly endless series of arguments in which we compare apples to oranges. We argue over the quality levels that can be achieved with Twitter versus what is possible in long-form narrative. That’s as ridiculous as comparing the works of Shakespeare to a newspaper headline. The truth is that there are great plays and there are great hedes. There are great stories and there are great tweets. There are epics and sonnets and there is also haiku. There are wonderful stories written on the fly. And there are magnificent works that consume a lifetime."

It takes six years to become a doctor of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery... or to read this blog

Six years ago today I launched this blog.
My initial reaction to reaching this milestone is that I should say something about how quickly the time has slipped away. I feel I should say something like "it doesn't seem possible that six years have passed."
But that feels like a lie.

The truth is that when I look back over the past six years, it seems the time has dragged on forever. I want to scream "Six years! It feels like 600 years!"

Back when all this started, B2B journalism seemed so extraordinarily exciting. Time was flying. There was an urgency about things. Less than a year after starting this blog I had a sense that large numbers of journalists in B2B were making themselves unemployable by refusing to keep up with the pace of change. I wanted to do something to help. I felt invigorated and enthusiastic.
Now hundreds of those people are gone. But hundreds more remain. And as a result of the lingering malingerers, much of traditional B2B publishing turned into a technological and journalistic backwater.


But one man's stumble is another man's opportunity.
Thus the most amazing change from six years ago is how much of the B2B editorial world (both people and dollars) has moved into content marketing -- a term (and arguably an industry) that didn't even exist when I launched this blog.

A few hours ago, Junta 42 released its Content Marketing & Social Media Predictions for 2011 from 100 of the content-marketing industry's "thought leaders." (Disclosure: My predictions are included.)
I was excited to see the predictions. But before I even started reading them I was haunted by the question: Could anyone put together a credible list today of 100 thought leaders in B2B editorial that are NOT in content marketing?


For that in a nutshell is what has changed since this blog launched. At the start it seemed that each day introduced me to another remarkable, fascinating, ambitious person who believed that a new era of B2B journalism was emerging. Many of those folks were quite young. All of them were thought leaders. Getting to know them was the most extraordinary experience of my career. Those people were excited about B2B. And they kept me excited.

Now many of them are gone -- drifting off to law school, MBA programs and the like.

Many others, of course, are still in the business of B2B editorial. Perhaps half of those have moved into content marketing. Some others are still struggling to turn their traditional publications into something more suitable for the present era.

And so today, at the six-year mark, I feel I should say something to the folks who have been here since the very beginning:


Here we are. Six years later. And I'd like to thank you. Every comment, every email and every tweet from you has been great. More importantly, those all-too-rare meetings in the real world have been remarkable. You folks have been wonderful.
I'll be back with more posts in 2011. And you are all welcome to come visit. But I feel obliged to tell you something.
If you had enrolled in dental school on the day I launched this blog, you would now be an expert in pulling out other people's teeth. And certainly that has to be better than reading a blog that feels like having your own teeth pulled.
So think about that before you spend another six years here.

The excellence craze

(Editor's Note: A custom publisher interviewed me last week for its company blog. As it turns out, at least one executive at the company wasn't crazy about my thoughts on the state of publishing. So the company opted not to publish the interview. I, on the other hand, am crazy about my thoughts on the state of publishing. So I'm posting the interview here.)

Question: Content marketing: Integrating print forms, such as a magazine published by a brand, with digital platforms. What kinds of trends are you seeing?

Paul Conley: I don't see much interesting in terms of integration. It seems to me that electronic content has surpassed print in most respects ... particularly quality. There are exceptions (long-form narrative, for instance, still works best in print.) But very little of the print world is making a successful expansion into digital content. Rather, it seems to me that most brands have digital products that are becoming much better than their print products.

Here's why:

Traditional, print-based custom publishing is primarily a way to serve an existing, captive audience. Whether it's an airline magazine stuck in the slot in front of your plane seat, or the four-color magazine that you get every quarter when you join a trade association, the print product is designed to serve an existing audience. A custom-published magazine is a perk that an association gives to members, it's a reward that a company gives to customers.

That made sense given the traditional tools that custom publishers had: print magazines, mailing lists, distribution systems run by clients, etc.

In addition, traditional, print-based custom publications existed for years as part of a very small media universe. This is particularly true in B2B, where an industry might have had one or two trade publications and one or two custom publications serving the entire marketplace.

But with the rise of the content-marketing or brand-journalism movement, suddenly everyone could be a publisher. Companies that would never have spent the money needed to produce a custom-published print magazine, began leaping into online publishing at an extraordinary rate. I saw a study recently that said 26% of B2B marketing budgets in the U.S. are now tied to content marketing. I doubt that print-based custom publications every got more than 1% of the total B2B marketing spend in this country.

Obviously, brands are not dedicating that level of their marketing budget to reach existing customers. Instead, brands have learned rapidly that they can use content as a lead-generation tool. Instead of putting an article in a magazine and sending it their customers, they distribute it online, in social media, through content-aggregation services and syndication networks. They track who has read it, who passed it on, who signed up for more information, etc.

At first, this worked quite well and rather easily. It wasn't expensive. It was certainly cheaper than traditional advertising or custom publishing. But as the early adopters found success, everyone jumped in.

This has led to what I think of as "the excellence craze." In B2B, where I make my living, it seems like every company in every tiny niche of every industry has become a content creator. There are a thousand voices competing for very small audiences.

There's only one way to compete in that environment -- to be extraordinarily good. The only way I can ensure that my voice is heard is if my content is fantastic. That's completely new for B2B, where both trade publishers and custom publishers have seldom felt the need to be great. In a market with only three of four voices, only a crazy person would spend the money to become great. It was good enough to not be the worst.

I'm seeing money spent on content that is vastly more engaging than what was available just a few years ago. The other day I reviewed a bunch of material that UPS created to win customers in the pharmaceutical-logistics world. There were white papers and videos and loads of other items. And they were all great. Now UPS has an extraordinarily large budget. You would expect them to be able to spend the money to be great. But I see similar levels of greatness at loads of small businesses, consulting companies, etc.

All this is a roundabout way of saying this: brands that have put X amount of effort into producing print products are learning that they have to put 10 times that effort into producing electronic content if they want to compete.

Thus the electronic products (Websites, microsites, videos, podcasts, social-media campaigns, white papers, blogs, etc.) are of much higher quality than the print products that share the same brand name.

Question: That surprises me. I would have expected you to predict that the demand for higher quality electronic content would be coming soon, but you’re saying it’s already here. So how are these companies achieving higher quality in content? Especially the smaller businesses that may not have big budgets?

Paul Conley: There's really only one way to get higher quality content. You have to pay for it. What seems to be happening is that the giant brands (UPS, IBM, etc.) are pouring considerable resources into creating high-end material to use for content marketing. Often that involves hiring a content staff. For example, Intel recently launched a news service and hired a number of well-known journalists to run it. Folks like that are following the Symantec model. Symantec is a big player in tech-security news.

But not every company, even the large ones, are bringing content creators in house. Rather, they seem to be spending money on middle men. Sometimes those are well-established players in the advertising and public relations space like Interbrand. (Interbrand, by the way, runs one of the best content-marketing sites I know. Check out BrandChannel.) Sometimes these middle men are newer players ... boutique agencies that specialize in a vertical or a particular medium. LaunchSquad and SocialTract are among the companies in that space.

The smallest brands seem to be the ones that are most likely to do direct hiring. They're recruiting "social media experts" and such to create content. If you look through the ads in places like MediaBistro you'll find lots of gigs like that ... decent jobs for folks with little to no experience. These gigs don't pay a lot. Maybe they pay around $50,000 a year fully loaded. But most brands in B2B can take that money from their ad or marketing budget and move into content marketing in a big way. Maybe they drop the print ads they've been running in a trade magazine to pay for it. But what they get is constant, all-day interaction with their target audience through digital platforms.

The end result of all this is that there's a battle for folks with content-creation skills in digital media. A newspaper reporter with 25 years experience in print is nearly unemployable today. But someone who can write, record audio and video, and has worked with Twitter and Facebook for even a year can pick and choose among lots of opportunities. They can go to work for big brands, middle men or small firms.

Question: Do you expect this trend to higher quality will continue for the next five years?

Paul Conley: I do. The only alternative is to go with the low-cost models offered by the content farms. Those companies (DemandMedia, Seed, etc.) are likely to move into B2B just like they have made tremendous inroads in B2C. But those companies are volume plays. Their material is cheap ... but not very good. It's perfectly appropriate for search-driven content. But you can't engage an audience with it.

Question: Also, what kinds of devices are audiences viewing this type of content on? Are you seeing more content being created for specific devices, such as mobile or iPad? Are they getting any traction?

Paul Conley: I think it's too early to say. You may remember that I wrote on my blog for a long time that I expected we would soon see "an iPod of reading," a device that would change the way we consumed text, just like the iPod changed how we consumed audio. Well that day is clearly upon us. The iPad and the upcoming competitors will change how we read. They are already doing so. Most importantly, they are changing how we find content. I'm fascinated by Chris Anderson's idea that the Web era has ended. Apps may spell the end of search, serendipity, and the possibility of a nobody becoming a major content creator overnight. The Web gave us all that. But apps may take it away.

But as much as these new devices may change things, we can't say yet just how they will change things. It's sort of like those very early days of the Web browser. Anyone paying attention then knew that something remarkable was about to happen. But most of what did happen turned out to be different from what we expected.

But the smart players today aren't waiting around to see how things will turn out. Smart brands are already creating interesting app-based content. I still read and interact with a ton of content on my laptop at work and home. But when I'm not sitting at a desk, I read news (NYTimes and Bloomberg), shop (FreshDirect), plan meals (Jamie Oliver), exercise (RoundTimer), and play games (SmartGo) through branded apps.

But those apps probably don't represent what the market will look like in just a few years.

That's why one of my pet peeves is when executives talk about "needing a strategy" before they do something with apps or with Twitter. That's the same sort of thing that media folks said for years about the Web. But apps and social media will leave you behind, just like the Web did.You don't need a strategy. You need to get excited about possibility. If you wait until some platform has traction, you'll find that the way it gained traction was by spinning its wheels for awhile on top of your carcass.

Coffee's for closers

(Editor's note: As the world of B2B content marketing grows, ever-increasing numbers of journalists are moving into the field. In addition, a large crop of new grads are coming into the business ... often with little to no understanding of how content marketing works or what role journalism plays in it. This is the first of a four-part series on some of the cultural barriers that workers face in the new world of B2B content marketing. In this piece, I'll be making some suggestions about how folks with a journalism background can get past one of those barriers -- working with the sales staff. I'm hopeful that other folks will offer their suggestions as well. The second and third posts in this series will look at other cultural barriers. In the fourth and final part of the series I'll address how B2B journalists can preserve traditional ideas of journalism ethics in this new piece of the media world.)

Journalists don't like salespeople very much.
As a general rule, journalists don't like anyone. But journalists don't like salespeople even more than they don't like other people.
I'm a journalist. I've been one for decades now. And I assure you this is true. (Note: if you're a salesperson who is reading this, please understand that I don't mean you. I'm crazy about you. I'm talking about other salespeople. You're wonderful. And I love what you're wearing today. That's a very flattering color on you.)
I don't know if salespeople like journalists.
They probably don't. Most people tend not to like journalists.
And yet these two professions have managed to work together at publishing companies since the invention of the printing press.
And the key to their success was this: they didn't really talk to each other.
On the contrary, the publishing industry built an entire cultural infrastructure (separate offices, differing chains of command, ethics codes, etc.) to ensure that journalists and salespeople didn't talk to each other.
And that was fine in traditional publishing, where the value of the product required that sales not influence editorial.

But in content marketing, things are slightly different.
In this new world, content creators are judged (to a degree) on whether or not editorial influences sales.

Write ledes; Generate leads
As the content-marketing industry has grown in the past few years, B2B journalists have moved along a path that looks like this:
a.  working as creators of pure editorial supported by traditional ads, then changing to
b. creators of pure editorial supported by lead-gen ads, and then changing to
c. creators of pure editorial that is, in and of itself, a lead-gen tool.
(Note: becoming a creator of something less than pure editorial is a distinctly different path. That's marketing communications or public relations, and should not be confused with content marketing.)
B2B journalists who move into content marketing find they no longer have a sales team that supports editorial. Instead, journalists find themselves creating editorial that acts as part of the sales funnel.
And salespeople have no idea how jarring this is for us.


Life at the Movies
If you've been in the B2B publishing game for awhile, then consider the following questions:
Have you ever known a salesperson who decided to stop selling ads for his magazine and start writing articles instead?
Have you ever known a journalist who gave up his byline and decided he'd rather call prospects than call sources?
No?
Me neither.
Part of the reason for this is that the skills between the two professions don't transfer well (although I often tell young journalists that they need to develop some sales-type skills, i.e., the ability to handle rejection, a willingness to accept a pay-for-performance compensation structure, etc.)
But the core reason that journalists and salespeople don't exchange jobs is that the the two professions attract extraordinarily different types of people. They are as different as night and day. They don't mix well. They see the world in fundamentally different ways.
Here's what I mean:
Have you seen "Glengarry Glen Ross," the movie with the breathtaking, pitch-perfect dialog written by David Mamet? If so, then you know the famous "Coffee's for closers" monologue performed by Alec Baldwin.
The salespeople I know admire the Baldwin character. Sometimes it's an open admiration. Sometimes it's a grudging admiration. But most often it's a sort of joking, off-hand admiration that manifests with frequent quotes from the monologue itself. (This is similar to the way some of my friends from Wall Street frequently and jokingly repeat the "greed is good" quote by the Gordon Gekko character from the movie "Wall Street.")
But journalists don't like the Baldwin character.
We admire Mamet's writing. Hell, we adore Mamet's writing.
But we see Baldwin's character as repulsive.
And in our heart of hearts, we fear he's representative of the world of business.
And, more importantly, as we move from being journalists to being content marketers, we sort of worry that we're becoming just a little bit like him.

Getting to know you
So as I said earlier, we can assume salespeople don't like journalists. But what do salespeople think of journalists who become content marketers?
Let's return again to "Glengarry Glen Ross." Key to the tension between Baldwin's character and the sales staff are the nature of the leads. The salesmen aren't performing. Baldwin threatens them and their jobs. Shelley Levene, played by Jack Lemmon, complains that "The leads are weak."

To a salesperson, content marketing can seem an ill-defined and unfocused effort that delivers weak leads. And this is largely, I suspect, because salespeople are perplexed by content marketers' goals.
That shouldn't be surprising. Content marketing is growing like crazy in B2B companies that have no experience with editorial operations of any kind. Even the most experienced salespeople are novices at working with content marketers.
And in a sense, the salespeople are right. Content marketing often doesn't deliver leads that are easily closed. Content marketing is more about about creating an environment that can lead to sales. It's as much about though leadership as it is about lead-gen. It's as much about conversing with existing clients as it is about attracting new ones.
But content marketers do this because it's what works today. Business has changed. Buyers have changed. Content marketing is just part of a broad, systemic shift in how B2B industries buy and sell.
And we journalists/content marketers have no idea how jarring this is for salespeople.

Shelley's daughter
If B2B journalists are going to succeed as content marketers, we're going to have to find some common ground with salespeople. We have to get them to understand what we do, how we do it, and why it's valuable.
Traditional marketers have faced similar challenges for years. But for content-markers -- many of whom were traditional journalists or college students just the other day -- this is all new.

The good news is that people much smarter than I are working on these issues. For example, it's worth your time to read Jennifer Watson's recent piece for the Content Marketing Institute on how to communicate our value to the sales staff.
But allow me to make a few suggestions of my own.
First, become a salesperson. Spend some time every month selling your services outside your job. Make a little money on the side. Learn to prospect. Learn to move potential clients through your own sales funnel. Learn to close.
Second, ignore Baldwin. Years ago I watched "Glengarry Glen Ross" with a bunch of journalists. And I wasn't surprised to see that there was universal sympathy in the group for Jack Lemmon's character, Shelley "The Machine" Levene.
If you've seen the film (or the original play), you'll remember that Shelley is in desperate need of money to provide medical care for a sick daughter. Shelley behaves badly as a result. He commits a crime. He falls into sin, if you'll excuse the religious phrasing. He behaves immorally ... drifting toward becoming more like the clearly immoral figures played by Baldwin and Al Pacino.(Pacino's speech on morality is another high point of  Glengarry Glen Ross: "There's an absolute morality? Maybe. And then what? If you think there is, go ahead, be that thing. Bad people go to hell? I don't think so. If you think that, act that way. A hell exists on earth? Yes. I won't live in it. That's me.")
Levene also operates at a distinct disadvantage to the other salesmen -- he's from another time. As the Wikipedia entry on the movie puts it, "Levene's decline is due to the old-fashioned nature of his methods: his presentation as a grinning, successful, confident salesman with a casual swagger immediately telegraphs to modern clients his identity as a smooth-talking shyster looking to disarm them with reassurance; Levene has been unable to replace his obsolete tactics with new ones and suffers financially as a result."
Journalists, who have seen our own share of woes as our traditional employers have collapsed and our long-practiced skills have diminished in value, have a soft spot for Levene. We understand him, maybe even relate to him. He's the sort of person we're drawn toward -- complex, contradictory, troubled. In short, he's a story.
So here's my idea:
If you've made the move from traditional journalism to content marketing, it's time to stop seeing Alec Baldwin every time you see a salesperson. Learn, instead, to see Jack Lemmon.
Learn to see your coworkers as what they are -- regular people with sick children,  financial pressures and moral quandaries.
Just like me and you.
Third, become Baldwin.
If the first two approaches don't work, try a little Baldwin yourself. Never admit that content marketing offers anything less than the perfect, easily closed lead. Wave a stack of index cards in front of the sales team and say, "These are the new leads. These are the Glengarry leads. And to you they're gold, and you don't get them. Why? Because to give them to you is just throwing them away. They're for closers."

The seasons, they go round and round

Forgive me readers, for I have sinned.
It's been more than three months since my last blog post.

I didn't actually intend to take the summer off from blogging. But it seems I did.
At least part of that can be attributed to the ennui that I've come to associate with Web 2.0. In fact, it was a year ago this month that I expressed my sense that the revolution in journalism was ending ...that a new, more workaday era had begun.
And the truth is that it's just a lot easier to blog in the midst of a revolution than in the middle of another working day.
But part of this summer's blogging hiatus is also attributable to my long-standing attraction to the academic calendar. I just feel like I should be doing less in the summer. So sometimes I do.

But as long-time readers of this blog know, my obsession with the academic calendar means that September is the month when everything changes for me. (You can read earlier September posts here, here or here.) And this year is no different.

So let me fill you in on a few of the things that have changed for me. For perhaps they will point to things that are changing for others in B2B publishing as well.

1. My working life is now completely consumed by content marketing. As recently as December, most of my income derived from traditional publishers practicing traditional B2B journalism (although mostly on the Web, rather than print.) That is no longer true.

2. My working life is now completely consuming. My time is booked at well above 100 percent. Although my business did quite well during the financial crisis, I can't pretend that everything was perfect. There were a few weeks in 2009 and early in 2010 when I wasn't billing anyone for anything. That is no longer true.

None of this should come as a surprise to regular readers of this blog. Rather, my career track seems fairly predictable. I'm neither a prophet nor a visionary. I don't predict the weather. But I can feel it when the wind shifts.
And the wind is blowing hard, albeit from a different direction, and it's bringing lots of work for B2B types who can make the transition to content marketing. 

Or, as I said at the beginning of this year, "the old days are over. We're in the midst of a fundamental shift in how people consume information and how the cost of producing that information can be covered...(and all of us in the industry need to make changes so that) prosperity is possible and suffering is minimized."

In the weeks to come I'll write more about what this new world -- all content marketing, all the time -- means for me.

Buying a blog. Validating a concept

There's news this week about a very interesting little deal in the B2B world.

Canon Communications has purchased Pharmalot, the extraordinary little blog that has proven an inspiration to numerous standalone journalists. Ed Silverman, founder of Pharmalot, will join Canon as editor at large in the Pharmaceutical Media Group and will continue as Pharmalot’s editor. He's also being asked to "spearhead further development of Canon’s digital assets, including webcasts and podcasts" and contribute to Canon's existing brands in the pharma space.

Details about the purchase can be found here.

Most people familiar with pharma, blogging, journalism or some combination thereof will applaud this deal. It's a nice fit. It unites one of the smartest writers in the space with one of the smartest companies in the industry. Canon gets both a property and a personality (making the deal something more than what my friend Rex calls an "acqhire"), while Silverman gets money, support and validation for his years of work.

But my love of this deal -- and I do love it -- is based in something more personal.

Regular readers of this blog know I first wrote about Pharmalot two years ago when Silverman and the blog were still tied to the Newark Star-Ledger.

In that post I suggested that Pharmalot offered newspaper publishers a model for expanding into a more lucrative area by competing head-to-head with B2B publishers.

But anyone who has witnessed the ceaselessly poor decisions that have come out of the newspaper industry in recent years will not be surprised to find that the Star-Ledger, rather than backing Silverman, wound up cutting him and the blog loose.

And no newspaper that I am aware of has since attempted to duplicate the model.

But what regular readers of this blog don't know -- because I haven't written about it before -- is that several months after Silverman went out on his own, I tried to convince a client of mine to hire him and buy Pharmalot.

That client had asked me for help in moving into the healthcare-data space. But my suggestion that they move slowly and start by buying Pharmalot, led to some bad blood. The client thought my plan was neither big nor bold enough. I, on the other hand, didn't think the client had the skills or resources to tackle something larger.

In the end, the client and I parted ways.

And Pharmalot continued on as a standalone product.

But life is a circle. Things have a way of resolving themselves. And over time I've learned that my initial reactions to a situation are often proven right ... over time.

As of today that former client has yet to find a way to get into the healthcare space. But now Silverman and Pharmalot are exactly where they should be: helping drive the digital efforts of a B2B publisher.

And the only thing that could make me happier is if I could come up with a convincing argument about why someone should pay me a commission on the deal.

I want my, I want my, I want my B2B TV

I'm always on the lookout for interesting products and new developments in B2B editorial. And as regular readers of this blog know, I've found the pickings pretty slim of late.

But the news today about Reuters Insider reminded me that I did come across something awhile back that I found encouraging.

First, the background:

For anyone who hasn't seen the announcement, Thomson Reuters said today it was adding a video service to its subscription-based desktop products. The new service, dubbed Reuters Insider, offers business-news programming across industry verticals. Rather than try to compete on broad business news with the likes of CNBC, the new Reuters Insider is more like a slew of B2B niche TV newscasts.

Check out the New York Times' take here. Or read the Wall Street Journal's piece here.

Reuters Insider is set up to allow outside contributors to post videos to the service. Some fast-moving companies have already signed up, including Beet.TV.

So what does this mean for the average B2B publisher and editor?

More than you might think.

Consider, if you will, the typical B2B company's experience with video. I think we can all safely agree that much of the video produced by B2B brands in recent years has been poor. Some has been downright abysmal.

In fact, if the recent ASBPE/Northwestern University poll of B2B editors showed nothing else, it showed that our industry is not at the fore of visual journalism (more than half of B2B editors surveyed had never done any online audio/video work ... probably because editors in the survey ranked "recording, shooting, or editing audio and/or video" as the second-least important skill for achieving success in their jobs ... trailing only "mining online databases.")

B2B editors' lack of experience and interest in video -- as well as a shortage of talent (what video-savvy journalist would consider working at a B2B publisher?) and training (the median amount of training that a B2B editor received in 2009 was less than a half-day, according to the ASBPE survey) -- leaves the typical B2B brand with just a few options.

They are:

1. "Encourage" video skills. Through a combination of compensation changes, rewording of job descriptions, etc., it's possible to force editors to develop an interest in video.

Of course, being forced to learn video doesn't mean that you're forced to do it well. Which brings us to ...

2. Invest in training. But if there's one thing that everyone can agree on, it's this: there ain't much money in B2B these days for training. Besides, if you could get the folks who offer newsroom training to be honest about results, you'd find that turning talented writers into talented video journalists remains a largely impossible task. Which brings us to ...

3. Look elsewhere. Whether it's focusing your recruiting efforts on one or two of the best multimedia-journalism schools or contracting with an outside provider, it seems that B2B publishers are most likely to get good video by heading outside their own newsrooms.

Which brings me to a little company called WorkerBeeTV.

First, for the suspicious among you, let me assure you that I have no business relationship with WorkerBee. I just like the company. One of my clients uses their services. And I've found those services to be pretty impressive.

Take a look at WorkerBee's site here.

Or, even better, check out some of their newscasts. Here's one in the fruit and vegetable industry. Here's one in the hairdressing industry.

What you'll see is that WorkerBee has created a simple, branded product that can let even the smallest B2B publisher move into video production.

It's really pretty simple. Existing staffers work with WorkerBee's team to rewrite news stories into news scripts. WorkerBee does everything else -- shooting, editing, producing, etc. WorkerBee staffers act as the hosts of the shows. If a B2B brand already has video (either news footage from in-house editorial or "B-roll" from advertisers), it can be added to the show. If not, no problem.

If you're still struggling to get quality video on your brand's site, you could do much worse than to contact WorkerBee.

The video product you get may not be of the same quality as Reuters Insider ... but that's the price you pay for not working at a company with thousands of Nokia-toting, 'mojo" reporters scattered around the globe.

The Semantic Web and free time

I don't have to be at an airport for nearly 48 hours.

I don't have a phone call scheduled for another hour.

My daughter is out with her grandmother.

Jeez! This is free time! I remember this. It's really wonderful.

But wait.

I haven't updated the blog in ages.

Damn. I feel guilty.

Quick! Write something quick!

Here:

Just wanted to thank Bernard Lunn and the folks at SemanticWeb.com for the interview with me that ran last week.

It was great fun.

If you're interested in what Semantic Web technology means for you B2B company, check it out.

OK. That's done.

I'm going to drink coffee and stare at a wall aimlessly while I have the chance.

Meanwhile, at that other trade show ...

I spent much of last week chatting with student journalists at the College Media Advisers convention here in New York.

And since I was at the CMA conference, I could not be at the South by Southwest conferences -- the uber-events revolving around music, movies and emerging tech.

And that's fine. I'm really more the New York businessman type than I am tech enthusiast. And I much prefer chatting with college kids to networking with entertainment execs.

In fact, although it's a decidedly unhip thing to admit, I've never been to SXSW.

But it would be disingenuous to suggest that SXSW isn't important to me -- at least on the tech side. I need to know what folks at SXSW think is cool. Because, as we've seen with applications like Twitter, an item dubbed cool at SXSW often becomes crucial to the media industry.

So imagine my surprise and delight to find that the breakout application at this year's SXSW is apparently the QR code -- an application I've been promoting for ages and that I've written about here. I love the potential of QR codes, and I'm proud to say that one of my clients has had remarkable success using QR code to drive print readers to Web sites.

So I'm feeling positively hip and ahead of the curve.

Note: The news that the coolest app at SXSW is sort of old may mean that my sense "the media revolution is ending" is right. On the other hand, one student at the CMA convention suggested to me that the next "game changer" is the Sixth Sense device, from MIT.

I'd seen the demo of Sixth Sense from TED last year. But after reading about QR code at SXSW and talking to that student, I went back and looked at the video again.

Take a look at it yourself..

I think you'll agree that device is pretty interesting, even amazing ... but since it doesn't really exist yet, it's premature to call it a "game changer."

However, it's worth noting that the device will exist some day soon. And one of the things the device could benefit from is a world where QR codes are more common.

So now maybe someone will modify one of my older (and maybe better) ideas and use QR codes as an editorial tool by adopting the concept of spatial annotation.

Psst. Hey Kid. You want a job?

Ahh March.
You're my favorite month of the year. It's within your few brief weeks that I celebrate my birthday, watch as winter turns to spring, as Lent leads to Easter and as the clocks spring forward.
It's a month of beginnings and youth.
And, as longtime readers of this blog know, March is the month when my earnings take a tumble as I trade billable days for time spent with college kids.

Every year at about this time I find myself visiting campuses, attending college media conventions, etc. It's become a tradition for me. And, like many traditions, I find it both comforting and frustrating.
That's because as much as I love meeting journalism students, the majority of them turn out to be remarkably unprepared for the working world. So by the time April rolls around and I've met a whole new crop of rookies, I tend to be a bit worried about the future of the business.

I'll start my annual trek through academia at the College Media Advisers convention here in New York, where I'll join Dan Blank, director of content strategy and development for Reed Business Information, to co-host a session on "Surviving in a New Media World."
And I'll be using my time at CMA to try to fill at least four entry-level jobs for clients.
So if you're looking for work, get there early while I'm still feeling optimistic.

(If you're new to this blog, you may want to look at my post about last year's academic tour. Or read my four-part series from 2008. If you're wondering what I look for in a journalism recruit, read this post from 2007 called Three Job Tips for Students. )

Penton goes under

Penton is bankrupt.
The B2B publishing giant announced today that it is filing Chapter 11.
And as near as I can tell, the entire industry responded with a great, big yawn.
Because no one who pays any attention to B2B publishing could possibly have been surprised by the news.

Penton's announcement comes nearly a year to the day after I wrote that "I have no faith that a company that has a debt load the size of Penton's and is dependent on a troubled business model for cash flow, can ride out the economic downturn."
Well, now it appears that -- despite some desperate measures taken by Penton last year -- my lack of faith was justified.

So what does this mean for the folks who work at Penton?
Probably not much.
The company has squeezed just about everything that is squeezable, shrunk whatever could be shrunk, sold whatever could be sold, and shuttered the rest.
As a result, I don't expect that today's news will bring more layoffs or closures.
But in a sense, that's bad news.
Here's why:
If anything good was to come from the collapse of companies like Penton, Cygnus, RBI, Nielsen, Ziff et al it would be that those companies actually disappeared after they collapsed.
But what's happening instead is that these print-legacy, bond-selling dinosaurs get back on their feet and just lumber on ... holding on to valuable properties that could actually grow if they were owned by people with more vision and less debt.
It's a pity.
Penton, like many of its peers, employs some talented people who produce some valuable material. There's money to be made in that equation.
But unlike the days of old, there are not obscene levels of money to be made.
And as long as B2B's giant publishers hold obscene amounts of debt, then good people doing good work and producing moderate returns will always lead back to bankruptcy court.
Do you doubt it?
Consider this:
According to Folio magazine, the deal Penton has reached with its creditors as part of a pre-packaged bankruptcy deal would cut Penton's debt by some $270 million.
That's wonderful. It truly is.
But that leaves the company with some three-quarters of a billion dollars in debt. And adding insult to injury, Penton remains in the hands of the same people who borrowed too much, misunderstood the rise of the Web and then collected millions in management fees in exchange for their wisdom.

In other words, Penton and its peers may be dead ... but they're not quite dead enough that they won't continue to do harm.

(DISCLOSURE: Once upon a time I held the longest and most redundant title in B2B. I was the vice president for online content and editorial for Primedia Business Magazines and Media. That company later became Prism, which purchased Penton in 2006.)

Beware of geeks bearing gifts

Don't expect the geeks in your office to get much work done tomorrow.
Because Wednesday, Jan. 27, will be something akin to Christmas for geeks. For it is on that day that Apple will unveil their long-awaited, much-rumored ... something.
Most of the tech world expects the product Apple will unveil to be some sort of tablet-style computer, i.e., something sort-of, kind-of like a Kindle.
But better.
And cooler.
And as excited as I, a bit of a geek myself, may be about the arrival of the iSomething, I'm a little bit concerned about what it may mean for B2B publishing.

To understand why, let's look back at a bit of history.
In April 2007 I wrote a post in which I attempted to share my concerns about a pervasive and troublesome issue in B2B -- our industry's inability to respond to change.
In that post I said that " I expect someone will soon build an "iPod of reading" -- a new, portable device that changes how we read in the same revolutionary fashion that the iPod changed how we listen."
And I wrote that whatever the next big thing in media might turn out to be, in B2B "our next big problem is going to be our inability to respond to the next big thing."
Nearly two years earlier, in November 2005, I wrote a piece asking "How will we create/consume content in the future?"
In that post I wrote about my love of the Bloomberg terminal and my yearning for a user interface of the future that would ease both the consumption and the creation of journalism.

Now, it appears, the future is here.
It's possible, of course, that the iSomething will turn out to be iNothing. Or maybe the iJustaLittleDisappointing.
But given Apple's history with portable devices for consuming, communicating and creating, I'm expecting the iSomething could turn out to be the iChangesEverything.

But if you look around your newsroom today can you honestly say the people there are ready for something that changes everything?
Heck, how many of them are ready today for the stuff that changed everything a few years ago (mobile content, database reporting, multimedia production, Twitter, etc.)?

In other words, if the iSomething turns out to offer a better way to communicate and/or to create, I worry that only a tiny percentage of B2B editors have the skills to capitalize on that or have the mindset to find it exciting.
More troubling -- at least to me -- is that the iSomething may very well turn out to be nothing more (and nothing less) than a better way of consuming print-like material. That, in essence, is what the Kindle is. It takes print, with all of its limitations, and distributes it in a new, arguably superior, platform.
And there's nothing that worries me more than the illusion that the answer to B2B's many woes can be found by slapping print content on to a screen.
Even if it's the coolest screen ever.

Or, as Rich Maggiotto, chief executive officer of Zinio, said, "It’s one thing to shovel print content onto a screen. It’s another thing to think about how to reinvent your content for that medium. That’s the publisher’s responsibility."
And can you honestly say that your newsroom has the enthusiasm, the will, the interest or the budget for that in 2010?

Predictions old and new

(Editor's note: As many of you who follow me on Twitter or Facebook already know, my mother passed away on Dec. 30. Since then I've been overwhelmed by the kindness I've received from friends and acquaintances in both the real and virtual worlds. Thank you all.

As my Ma took a turn for the worse in mid-December, much of my working life had to be put on hold. So I wound up running late on many things ... including a long-promised follow-up to my predictions about 2009. But as Ma taught me, there's "a time to die ... a time to mourn" and a time to get back to work. So with no further ado, let's look back at 2009 and make some guesses about 2010. )

I hate to say I told you so, but ....

As 2008 turned into 2009, I wrote a a lengthy piece in which I argued that "the B2B industry as we know it is about to collapse."

If you've never read that piece, I'd ask you to do so now. If you have read it, then you know I was predicting a systemwide failure in B2B. The problem, it seemed to me, was clear: Too many people had been borrowing too much money and making too many preposterous assumptions about the industry. Complicating matters was that far too many B2B journalists -- who are the core of the business -- had failed to keep up with the changes in editorial.

Furthermore, I said that I'd grown remarkably disappointed in the majority of Web-only publishers who had emerged in B2B. Simply put, although such companies had mastered things like content aggregation, most of them had failed to move to the next level.

That's what I said

So let's review.

I made three specific predictions about 2009. They were:

1. The B2B publishing industry -- which is now dominated by giant print companies and smaller Web-only companies -- is about to collapse.
2. When the dust settles, B2B journalism will still be here -- but many of the companies that make up the industry will be gone.
3. The dominant business models of both the past and present will fail.

As troubling and unlikely as those predictions might have seemed in December 2008, it's safe to say that I was right.

In 2009 there were bankruptcies, shutdowns and creditors-take-control actions (Doubledown, Cygnus, Questex, Milo, Incisive, Advanstar), there were staff reductions (Cygnus, RBI, UBM, IDG, Edgell, Access Intelligence), there were salary freezes and pay cuts (Cygnus, Penton, RBI), there were closures of print products (Ziff, RBI, Penton, Crain, UBM, CMPMedica, Randall-Reilly, Nielsen and just about every other company you can name.)

And I'm sure I've forgotten a few ugly events too. I just don't have the stomach right now to read through this list of the major magazine-industry events of 2009.

And it's not like the tough times are over. Just last week we saw more shutdowns and a the-end-is-near memo from RBI's chief executive as well as more closures from Penton.

Follow the money

In 2009, everything that could go wrong, did.

And that's because, as I predicted, "the dominant business models of both the past and present" have failed.
Consider this:

I began the post with my predictions for 2009 by referring to a study by Outsell that forecast a 4.5% drop in print advertising in 2009. But halfway through the year, the drop in B2B print ads was already more than six times that level!

Online advertising rates -- already low -- also plummeted.

Traditional publishers, who had hoped that online ads could save them, found their optimism was misplaced. The newer, Web-only publishers found that low-cost operations with narrow margins had little room to maneuver when things got ugly.

Whether it was controlled-circulation print, SEO-driven long-tail sites or content-aggregation plays, we saw last year that B2B's center (free, ad-supported content) did not hold.

Retreat and delusions

So what's next?

I expect more closures, more layoffs, more trouble.

For example, it seems clear that RBI's parent company has no intention of staying in the business -- they'll close anything they can't sell. RBI will be gone by mid-year.

Nielsen seems to be taking a similar approach -- rushing to the exits by killing whatever brands they can't unload.

The simple truth is that for dozens of brands in B2B there's no way out. It makes more sense to walk away and take the write-off. So that's what companies will do.

I'm also expecting B2B will soon see an influx of the content mills that have caused so much trouble in B2C. That's going to cause havoc among content aggregators as well as original-content brands that have invested heavily in long-tail strategies.

The blind leading the blind

I'm also expecting a tremendous increase in the level of delusional thinking among B2B executives.

Watch for the same folks who forecast revenue surges in 2008 and a bounce-back in advertising in 2009 to predict that the end of the recession means ad rates will return to 2007 levels.

Watch too for executives and journalists to argue that the free, but generally poor quality content that is pervasive in B2B is suddenly worth paying for. (Note: if you're one of the folks who thinks he can salvage his brand by putting it behind a paywall, you may want to read Outsell's latest report on the challenges of the paid-content market.)

Change is good

My predictions last year were not meant to imply that B2B journalism itself was in any danger of disappearing. I was expecting change and shakeouts. And that's what we got.

I expect more of the same in 2010.

I also predicted that B2B journalism would soon be dominated by five types of companies (content marketing, data and tech, family-owned and other small firms, price-benchmark companies and entrepreneurs' networks.) A quick look around the industry today suggests that I was right about all of those except for the last.

At the same time, it would be misleading to suggest that the shift from the powerhouses of old is complete.

For example, content marketing had an extraordinary year in 2009. A year ago it was safe to assume that half the people in our industry had never even heard the phrase "content marketing." But that has changed. (Anecdotally, I can name a dozen or so top-notch B2B journalists of the top of my head who moved into content marketing last year. )

But there's clearly plenty more room for content marketing to grow.

There are still hundreds of B2B advertisers who haven't begun producing their own content ... yet. And my prediction that "sophisticated corporations (would begin) to purchase established B2B journalism brands and use them as the basis of their content-marketing efforts" has not come true ... yet.

For a detailed look at what I expect in 2010, you may want to read my predictions in Folio and Junta42.

But in summary, let me say this: the old days are over. We're in the midst of a fundamental shift in how people consume information and how the cost of producing that information can be covered.

There's no going back.

Ever.

Just like in 2009, there will be people who prosper amid the difficulties. And, just like in 2009, there will be people who suffer through no fault of their own.

Your task -- whether you're an editor, a salesperson, a publisher, marketer, c-suite executive, designer, j-student, etc -- is to position yourself where prosperity is possible and suffering is minimized.

In upcoming posts I'll write about the few bright spots I see in B2B as well as outline some of the moves that B2B companies and journalists should make in 2010 so that prosperity, not pain, dominates.

In the meantime, let me say "good luck."

I get the feeling we're all going to need it.