InfoInnovation

Looking back at 2008

People are saying that 2008 may have been a year “that will live in infamy” along with 1929 and that day in 1941.  (We can only hope that in time the election of the new president will have come to be regarded as more pivotal than the financial crisis.)  For me, it was a year of inconsistent blogging (to put it mildly…apologies to those who tried to follow and offered encouragement), but also consistent engagement with clients. 

Projects whose particulars can’t be disclosed don’t make for very compelling reading in this or any medium.  Suffice to say that they included: a “classic” strategic planning engagement leading to two initiatives now underway; multiple new product development efforts ranging from initial concept exploration to final confirmation of pricing and positioning; business development assistance; corporate presentation development; acquisition hunting and assessment; crisis management case studies (in, yes, financial services); win-loss and customer satisfaction / competitive positioning surveys; and technical editorship for a strong new book on social media-enabled marketing.  Topics, in no particular order, included: IT advisory programs, technical standards, humanities scholarship, engineering workflows, academic research grants, corporate innovation, federated search, investor relations, library information services, back-office content technologies, and social networking. 

So it was a “business year” in which my relatively new consultancy hit full stride…and built momentum into the (potentially) challenging year ahead. 

Video of my B2B Social Networking panel

The Software & Information Industry Association, producer of the recent Information Industry Summit, has posted the video of each session and keynote, including the panel I moderated on "B2B Social Networking: Content Provider Strategies."  The panelists each did a great job of illuminating the topic from the point of a large B2B trade publisher (IDG Communications CEO Bob Carrigan), consumer and business multimedia content provider (Michael Dunn, VP of Hearst Interactive Media), B2B information service (Hoovers CEO David Mather) and technology platform provider (Clara Shih of Salesforce.com).  SIIA's A/V partner Scribe Media helpfully annotated the video of the session with Clara's blog posting commenting on some of the issues we discussed.

Information Industry Summit and Social Networking

The SIIA's Information Industry Summit, now in its 7th year, is something I've been involved in developing since the beginning.  (And before, if one counts similar conferences of its predecessor Information Industry Association.)   As in recent years, it will bring over 400 high-level information industry executives to New York, for networking and a program that includes luminaries like Tom Glocer, CEO of Reuters (and of the expected Thomson-Reuters combination).

I have the privilege of moderating one of the first-day panels, on "B2B Social Networking: Content Provider Strategies."  All four panelists- IDG Communications CEO Bob Carrigan, Hoovers president David Mather, Hearst Newspapers Senior VP & Director of Digital Media Lincoln Milstein, and Salesforce.com's head of the AppExchange Directory program, Clara Shih - will have newly-announced products and initiatives to discuss.   It should be a great panel - if you have questions or topics you'd like to see addressed, please leave comments here (or contact me directly).  

What is this for?

Exciting.  Long overdue.  Liberating. 

That's the initial feeling.  Then, one comes to the "what is this about" or "what does it do" stage.   My  intended focus certainly includes the publishing and information services business - and its ongoing transformations by forces that, for convenience, can be labeled The Web.  Ideally there will be a symbiotic but independent relationship with SKS Advisors, Inc. a new consultancy that launches in August (following a non-compete/non-solicitation period dating from the August 2006 acquisition of a business for which I'd been working full-time, and in which I was, for better or worse, a minor shareholder).  There may be additional new blogs on this account (one on Manhattan-centric music comes to mind).  This one, as I hope the title conveys, is about an industry made up of organizations large and small who source, package, distribute, and/or apply information (as opposed to entertainment) content products and services that are specially valued by particular groups of users and their sponsors, whether business and professional enterprises, advertisers (esp. B2B), academic and research institutions, or individual users.

In my previous career, I've done plenty of reporting & analysis on trends in  digital interactive content and services both Before and After the Web.  (I date the Big Event from '92-93, when the WWW was released by CERN, and Mosaic was developed in at the U of Illinois.)  The thing is, that is already being done very well by others.  What's more, by the time the current Web 2.0 cycle has truly run its course, there will no doubt be an information industry news and intelligence "mashup" (with just enough "human" analysis) for every industry segment, function and taste.  So, though I expect I'll be chipping in thoughts on industry events and major developments, that alone wouldn't be a sufficient purpose imho.  What would?  Please join me as I embark on an answer.