Content Matters

In an earlier post at the MarketingSherpa Selling Online Subscriptions conference, I promised to share some charts from Stefan Tornquist's presentation. Stefan is the MarketingSherpa Research Director and these charts are from a survey of 400+ content publishers.

I take these survey results with a grain of salt; publishers may respond differently based upon different understanding levels of the questions or simply because they want to seem ahead of where they actually are. That said, the year-over-year numbers are probably somewhat useful.

This chart asks b2b publishers to assess the impact of various Web 2.0 efforts. Again, my impression is that some of the responses are aspirational and that these publishers are not yet providing these capabilities, but that's just my gut. The key takeaway is the large amount of blue - publishers today largely have no idea of the impact of any of these things. But a few things surprised me, notably how they feel that tagging is having significant impact. I'm guessing this is simply use of Digg and other chiclets in the footer of an article. Meanwhile, uploading photos and videos is assigned minimal impact or no idea, again, I assume, largely because they're not doing it today.

The next chart asks the same b2b publishers for their impression overall of the effects of Web 2.0 initiatives. Three quarters of the respondents believe that it will increase the engagement of their readers, increasing page views and/or time spent on the site. Others are seeking awareness or improved customer retention.

This final chart asks the b2b publishers which Web 2.0 things they are currently doing or have set as a high priority and compares that number to the prior year. The biggest gain is in the use of video clips, which at 35% is much higher than I'd anticipate. Larry Schwartz noted that the 50% figure for blogs seems quite high as well, but I'd guess many trade publishers now have their editors doing some form of blogging, so maybe it's not unrealistic.