Disruption, development and divestment: lessons to learn from the B2C market

Richard Padley, CEO, Semantico

Richard Padley, Chairman and CEO of Semantico kicked off the Disruption, Development and Divestment seminar with a session reflecting on what publishers can learn about providing services to the end-user. How are the 'new' users actually buying and consuming content and services?

There has been a shift for publishers from Intellectual Property landlord to IP traders. (This model is drawn from an MIT study on business models).

Search exerts incredibly powerful forces on all our business. There is a whole industry of search engine optimisation. But we don't seem to spend a lot of time thinking of that. Some businesses have a focus on it, some don't. We don't have nearly enough emphasis or ownership on SEO in the industry.

When Semantico implemented SEO strategy on one product they saw 3000% increase in unique users - new and repeat. But then it flatlined - clearly Google changed the rules. What they essentially had was a freemium model, but Google decided that this could only apply to newspapers. In the end they had to change the strategy for that product to respond. Google have a thing for free content - politically as well as from search point of view.  A couple of years ago they stopped indexing content behind paywalls, except for journal articles. There is a whole range of virtuous properties of doing search right. Search is incredibly powerful and incredibly important because of that.

User experience is the manifestation through products and services of business needs and the expression of customers needs. UX runs entirely through a business. You can liken it to an iceberg: there are the elements above the water you can see (MS submission, etc). But what about those underneath? In some cases, we have incredibly byzantine routes to content (number of clicks for a Shibboleth login). We still force our users to use logins, passwords and other protocols in a way that would never happen in the B2C world.

With mobile there's a bit of 'build it and they will come' mentality. But if you are seeing low levels of usage, that will probably be because your site is not responsive and users can't use it effectively. Responsive design makes your site fluid and flexible so you can retain, branding, user experience and flow of site. Think about the proportion of users that will instantly benefit. On PDFs: are we going to build faster horses? PDFs are incredibly difficult to read on mobile. ePub3 is far superior. Again, build it and they will come.

Richard finished by considering big data asking: how scientific are we being in deterring growth areas for programme development? Exactly who are we turning away? Are we looking at analytics in a way B2C businesses do? Are we considering conversions? It's not just about sales, but also downloads - how well are you converting user journeys from Google through into actual downloads? Some of this is about being proactive rather than reactive. Also about looking at the net effect on consumers.

Richard Padley spoke at the ALPSP seminar Disruption, development and divestment held in London on Tuesday 17 March 2015.

ALPSP Plenary Interview: Bernie Folan on publishing for the born-digital community

We are delighted that Semantico are gold sponsors at the ALPSP International Conference and Awards 2013.

With the conference just a couple of days away, their Business Development Director Terry Hulbert spoke to one of our key plenary speakers, Bernie Folan, and asked her what organisational restructure she anticipates companies responding to meet the demands of the born-digital community will make.

This is an extract from the interview. You can read the full article on the Semantico blog.

"I don’t think there is one right or optimal structure, so I’ll talk instead about qualities. I think looking out and making real time for learning about the world of research is vital and I’m coming around to thinking that the only way to make it happen in busy working lives is to build in that time in some formal way. I like the thinking behind Google’s 20% time although I wouldn’t suggest it’s the only way and read recently that it is dying out as work levels increase. Nevertheless some research has shown we are most creative when at rest or play.

I think it’s important to have the right people in the right roles so the innovators are not stuck in reports and spreadsheets whilst the detail people are not trying to come up with the next big thing. However, I think there should be some simple mechanism for gathering ideas from all employees. We all live in the world and whether we do it within a university or not, we are all learners.

Organisations need to be agile too. Do we really still need all of those people over there whilst we are hiring over here? Matching skills to roles and getting the numbers right overall as business changes are important and mean that companies need to invest in and develop strong leadership and prioritise honest, open discussion and brave decision-making over short-term comfort."

The ALPSP International Conference and Awards starts on Wednesday 11 September at The Belfry, near Birmingham. Follow the action via the Twitter hashtag #alpsp13 and bookmark this blog for updates.

ALPSP Plenary Interview: Semantico's Terry Hulbert talks to Fred Dylla

We are delighted that Semantico are gold sponsors at the ALPSP International Conference and Awards 2013. In the run-up to the conference, their Business Development Director Terry Hulbert spoke to one of our key plenary speakers, Fred Dylla, about trends and insights in the policy arena. This is an extract of the interview. You can read the full article on the Semantico blog.

Fred Dylla

"We do not need a revolution to achieve open access, and in fact, we are already evolving toward a model of publishing where the public enjoys reasonable free access to federally funded research while journals continue to play a central role in science by publishing peer-reviewed research and maintaining the highest standards.

A similar evolution in publishing has already occurred over the last generation. Just 20 years ago, the business model of all academic publishers centered on print journals, and virtually none had any sort of online presence. Today the publishing industry has largely evolved into business models centered on the web. This didn’t happen overnight. There were many experiments and forays into digital archiving that came up short. But today researchers everywhere enjoy easy access to archives that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.

I think that public access policies will similarly evolve in the next five–10 years, and scientific publishers will be evolving alongside. There are plenty of examples in nature of creatures that co-evolve—like Darwin’s flowers and finches on those isolated Pacific islands. Co-evolution is the healthiest way forward for public access and scientific publishing. Kill off the finches, and the flowers may whither on the vine."

The ALPSP International Conference and Awards starts on Wednesday 11 September at The Belfry, near Birmingham. Follow the action via the Twitter hashtag #alpsp13 and bookmark this blog for updates.

ALPSP Conference Day 2: Apportunity Knocks - advice from Semantico's Rob Virkar-Yates

Rob Virkar-Yates shares Semantico wisdom

Rob Virkar-Yates provided advice on mobile digital strategy from an industry supplier perspective for delegates at last week's ALPSP conference.

He questioned whether apps are the VHS or Betamax to the academic world and asked whether apps represent an opportunity for the scholarly market and can you make any money out of them? He presented Semantico statistics to illustrate some of the issues to consider:

• 68% of 15-24 year olds (UK) use the internet on mobile phones
• 11% of UK households have a tablet
• Younger audience are heavy users of mobile
• Only 5% of sessions served in 12 month period for some big publishers has been from mobile site
• 50% of people have downloaded an application and actually used it.

The type of apps that tend to be most successful are those that deliver micro-experiences. These are experiences that do not overwhelm or perplex the customer, are relevant, small and beautifully formed. He cited good micro-experiences as: Tools of Change app, his bank's fast balance app and Spotify (amongst others) as they are focused, they do one thing, but they do it well. With the arrival of the iPad comes the macro-experience: that adds significant value and richness and provides experiences that go beyond the text. Good macro-experiences included: The Wasteland app.

He went on to define the recipe for a good micro-experience as:

1. take on sharpened proposition - do one thing really well, fight one battle
2. reduce content aggressivly - content should be be ‘glanceable’
3. think small - architect from the ground up
4. push back - resist pressure to add more
5. be agile - not software, move fast, iterate.

Consider content that is location specific or for quick reference. Think about discovery and bookmarking, cost and value. Understand your options and don't forget the cost of reach through an app or via a mobile website. If you already have a mobile site what can you do? Make an ‘app’ with a responsive design solution: a web app! This can serve a single source of content and be laid out so as to be easy to read and navigate with a minimum of resizing, panning and scrolling, on any device. When you get it right, you get a really nice, simple app site which is like a micro-experience app. While this can be seen as a defensive move, the pros are that it is low risk and high reach, has comprehensive browser support, is future proof and has a single code base. The cons: it's not a specific content set, it front loads process, is network dependent and isn't an ‘app’!

Is there an opportunity? Probably. But micro- or macro-experiences will depend on the nature of your content. Can you make money? The low cost and potential reach of web apps might be the best option for the majority.