Today I’m blogging from the InfoCommerce Conference in Philadelphia.
InfoCommerce Group, led by Russell Perkins, is the premier consulting firm focused on database and directory publishers. This year’s conference brings a blend of traditional and new publishers, with particular focus on the role of quality in the content industry.
Richard Malloch, President of Hearst Business Media, was the keynote speaker. Malloch provided an insightful and rare peek inside a private company that often stays under the radar. Focusing on their healthcare business, Malloch outlined a company that has transformed itself to partner with its clients (hospital systems, pharmacy chains and others), and now can claim an average customer life expectancy of 40 years.
Chris Kenton, CEO of Global Fluency and Business Week Online writer and provocateur, spoke on “Making Quality Real”. In a compelling 20 minute presentation, Chris blew up many traditional marketing and b-school assumptions.
A hands-on workshop was led by Anne Holland, Chief Sherpa at MarketingSherpa.com. Anne provided updated results of their analysis of email open rates, best practices for email response forms, use of Heat Maps to better understand user behavior on search results pages and other key topics. One interesting point Anne raised was the huge focus on SEM, while investing in SEO will have a bigger impact for most clients. Her rationale for why we all focus on SEM is that marketers have spent their career focusing on the creative and on ad-buying. It’s easy and we know how to do it, while SEO is techie stuff focused on algorithms and quantitative data. So, if you like the creative side more, go find a specialist to help you on the SEO side. Anne closed her presentation with “sites for Content Companies to watch in 2006”. I was pleased that three of the five she mentioned are among my “50 Content Companies that Matter” list – De.licio.us, Wikipedia and Google; with Flickr and PubSub.com (a blog search engine) as the others.
My favorite session of the day brought three non-traditional publishing executives together. Jim Fowler, Founder of Jigsaw Data, Lou Morsberger, CEO of ValueStar and Tim DeMello, Founder of Ziggs. Each of these companies are focused upon user-contributed content with little or no human interaction. Jigsaw has pioneered the “business card swap” approach, applying lessons from eBay and others. Ziggs’ focus is enabling users to take control of their identity on the web. ValueStar is applying ratings to local services (plumbers, home repair, auto repair, etc.). Both Jigsaw and Ziggs are delivering astonishing growth rates – each adding more than 10,000 contacts per day. According to DeMello, there are more than 25 million people searches done on the web each day, and a typical professional probably gets searched about once per day.
Day two, tomorrow, should be equally compelling, with panels including representatives of Hoovers, Factiva, Aviation Week, Thomson Gale and others, plus drill-down sessions on SEO/SEM and RFID.
For more info on the InfoCommerce conference, take a look at John Blossom's blog notes from the show.
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