Content Matters

BSEC Panel: The Quest to Know Your Customers

Depending upon how you look at it, Hal Espo had either the easiest or most difficult moderator role of the conference.
The last panel before lunch included three speakers, each with a strong combination of personality and insights.  John Blossom began the levity with the comment that "It's good to be in the position that I can't ask any questions".

John Blossom led off with a summary of a custom study that Shore had recently performed for Hoovers, looking at purchasing patterns of premium business information.   The study showed that, even for large companies, a significant amount of content is being purchased at the department and workgroup level.  In fact, 49% of purchases at large organizations were made via credit card. 
The study asked which types of content were most frequently used; web, news and other free content came out on top.  When the question was flipped to ask which were the most important sources of business information, market research and subscription databases were at the top.
John’s takeaways from the study are that there remains a strong demand for premium business information, that ease of use and access is key, and that publishers must sell to individuals, departments and institutions.

Lou Celi, of the Economist Intelligence Unit, walked us through a quick history of electronic content at the EIU.  He broke it into three phases:
During the 1980’s, it was selling “old wine in new bottles”, repackaging existing Economist content for delivery through LexisNexis, Dialog, MAID and others.
In the mid-90’s, that changed to “new wine in new bottles”, where content was developed specifically for the e-user.
More recently, Lou indicates that the business had moved “outside the bottle”, where they are a full e-business, integrating content directly within customer portals and applications, doing custom research and putting on conferences.  It has changed their entire business model.  While they still sell subscriptions and pay-per-view documents, they also offer flexible enterprise licensing as well as sponsorship for “thought leadership” events.