ItsDevelopmental - content + technology + people

One benefit of being ill . . .

Is that I am reading. Yesterday I read About a Boy by Nick Hornby. This was a page turner for me. Some very funny lines that made me hurt from laughing - I have a sore chest from an infection!

Funny, touching and altogether uplifting - good for me cos I'm feeling rubbish.

How good are journalists at marketing their content?

Adam's post sparked me to write this - I agree journalists cannot expect people to look at their content just because of who they are. I particularly liked this line on treating content a page at a time.

Each piece of content on the web lives on its own, freed from the constraints of the "package". And that can be frightening and liberating. And we need to figure out ways of building audiences one page at a time.

I recently spent some time with a colleague who works in one of RBI's lead generation businesses. I asked him what makes good content for lead generation ie content that people would find useful and click on which would then (hopefully) convert to a lead for a supplier. This is what he said . . .

You need to think about who you are writing for and why they might be reading what you're writing. With the transition to online, people aren't just looking for news anymore, and if they are, they aren't the type of person we are looking to attract with our content. We want one of two types of people:

Those who are researching information on a subject because they have an interest in learning more and becoming better at their job.

Those who are researching information on a subject because they have either been told to, or because they are planning a project.

The content has to be real-world useful and by that I mean, ask yourself the question "If I read/watch this will I learn something that is useful to me? Will it help me in my job?" If the answer is 'yes', then there's a good chance others will want to read it too - so go ahead and create it.

It sruck me that this approach by marketeers, copywriters, creatives - or whatever you want to call them - is exactly the approach all us who produce content should be adopting - and a page at a time.

This is an exciting time and area (but I would say that as I move into a new user experience role) - we need to challenge non-news content - what it is for and why. And we need to wake-up to the fact there are some very sharp 'creatives' who are very good at producing relevant and useful information (which is also helping to drive revenue).

Foreword to the People 1st State of the Nation survey

I was asked to write a foreword to the People 1st State of the Nation survey on jobs and skills in the travel and hospitality sectors. Here it is:

Over the last two years the travel industry has been through enormous change – and it isn’t stopping. Consolidation of the big four – MyTravel, Thomas Cook, First Choice and Thomson - into Thomas Cook and TUI Travel created a knock-on wave of consolidation throughout the sector.

And over the last 12 months the economic downturn has started to bite, with the collapse of the XL Leisure Group being the largest and most dramatic failure to date. Airlines have fallen by the way side, travel agencies and tour operators have gone out of business.

Now our worst fears have come true. We have a recession and the pressure on travel and tourism industry continues. However, all is not doom and gloom. Out of adversity comes innovation, focus and purpose.

Employers are starting to be creative with how they invest in their workforce. This report highlights, for example, that apprenticeships are becoming an increasingly popular way of attracting newcomers.

Developing a new business proposition

It has been a week since I posted which is lazy of me as it has been a really busy week in which I learnt a lot of new things.

For three days lst week I attended a corporate dragons' den in which three teams had to develop new business propositions and present them to a venture board on the last day.

Mine was a team that worked well together and through long, hard days developed an idea which was good enough to get some seed funding - we can take the idea to the next stage, which in our case is a period of testing out some of the assumptions that underpin the proposition.

This is what I learned:

• Big companies have hugely talented people in them - they may be overseas, they may be in your building but they are there. How to make the most of them is the challenge.

• You need to go through a rigorous and creative divergence in order to converge on the plan. And then you need to keep refining, refining and refining. 

• The team must have focus so that it keeps to time, is creative and progresses.

• The emotional impact of such work needs to be at least mentioned - ie it is a rollercoaster and you need to be able to go with it. Time pressure does funny things to people.

• Make sure you have a numbers person and interrogate your financial assumptions. and make sure they know how to use formulae in Excel.

• Research so you have facts on the competitive landscape.

• Have an elevator pitch you can say simply and explain simply.

• Work on your presentation and make sure you have a graphics/Powerpoint genius. Three days' work into a 20 minute presentation is a challenge.

And once you get the money - and our case we are in alarge corporate - work out how to manage the project.  Expertise across the business is a huge challenge - how do you bring people together who are already busy and who may work in a different country with big time differences.

Video: Time Berners-Lee talks linked data

Pulling all your feeds together

Had a great Elevenses session yesterday with some top tips from @karlschneider on how journalists can track a beat.

The advice was useful to anyone using RSS feeds to follow what's going on the/their world.

My main action will be to use Twitterfeed to pull RSS feeds from Google Reader into a dummy Twitter profile. I can then follow that Twitter account to get updates from my RSS feeds - neat.

And by creating a dummy Twitter account I will not be subjecting my followers to updates from my RSS feeds.

I want to pull feeds into Twitter because since I started using Twitter my use of Google Reader and email has decreased.

The challenge of ageing populations

Thanks to Dick Stroud for highlighting the the 2009 Ageing report [PDF].

Many interesting points come out of the report. This caught my eye - there will be a doubling of the old-age dependency ratio in the EU.

As a result of these different trends among age-groups, the old-age dependency ratio (people
aged 65 or above relative to the working-age population aged 15-64) is projected to increase
from 25.4% to 53.5% in the EU over the projection period. The largest increase will occur
during the period 2015-35, when year-on-year increases of over 2 p.p. are projected. Hence,
the dependency ratio is projected to more than double by 2060. This means that the EU would
move from having 4 working-age people for every person aged over 65 to a ratio of 2 to 1.
The increase in the total dependency ratio (people aged 14 and below and aged 65 and above
relative to the population aged 15-64) is projected to be even larger, rising by nearly 30
percentage points.

The impact on the working population will be significant, especially as more workers will be responsible for looking after older people (let alone a smaller workforce providing taxes to support the care of older people).

Useful links

Age discrimination Q&A from Personnel Today.

Google news RSS feed on UK age discrimination

 

How much longer for old world B2B publishing rivalries?

Read with interest John Welsh's comments on social media. Talking about opening up social networks, he said:

Instead of being secretive; we're open. Things will come to you that never came before.

Everyone, he said, had the chance to be a 'micro-celebrity' or 'the Stephen Fry of the B2B sector', citing the popularity of the editor of one of his group's travel titles as an example.

 

I think it is interesting to note that in the B2B space where there are head to head media rivals, that things aren't quite as open as we might think. In terms of content, the rivalry DNA has been and seems to continue to drive competition amongst each other rather than openness and engagement with the audience. Clearly the commercial rivalry remains acute. 

 

In many ways the brands act as they always have done - driven by a desire to scoop the other - and still in print (a hark back to 80s red tops). Take for example, today's leader comment in TTG by editor Lucy Huxley.

You may have read in another travel trade publication [this is what we said about our strategy at TW to which Huxley is referring] last week that weekly print magazines 'can no longer deliver breaking news' [her direct quote marks but not sure of the source].

 

It is the kind of comment you might make if you're regularly beaten to the scoops - but it was news to us here at TTG.

 

We're conscious of how the internet has changed the media landscape, but we consistently

break news in our print edition that gets delivered to your doors.

Aside from being a negative response to TW's plans and refresh of the print product Huxley is tapping into this highly competitive, head to head way of being – the old world rivalry DNA. Will the audience care about how we cover things when and where? Not as long as they get what they need - and metrics tell us that.