Online Publishing Industry

Please meet Swan Insights !

2014-11-23T11:23:00.000+01:00

I recently joined Swan Insights as board member following their capital increase.

Swan Insights implements the Data-driven business by helping organizations take the most out of external data, fostering strategic decisions and laser-cut operations.

Mobile recruitement

2013-09-12T07:59:00.000+01:00

Join me at the earcu event in Central London where I'll be in the panel discussion on mobile recruitment.
Looking forward sharing my international view.

Speaking at both Adobe Digital Marketing Summits

2013-05-26T22:11:00.002+01:00

I was invited to speak at the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit of Salt Lake City early March 2013. I also spoke about how to bridge the gap between digital and relationship marketing in the Summit in London.
Great experience to do both summits. I really enjoyed sharing best practices with peers.

Social media adoption

2011-09-15T21:13:00.005+01:00

We did a viral campaign in Denmark. It actually got nice press coverage and gave us signal about which social network was really used. Check the result by your self....
Facebook is not a surprise but the fact that tweeter is lagging behind LinkedIn voice of share was for me unexpected.

Conference E-Commerce Paris 2011

2011-09-15T10:50:00.003+01:00

I'll be presenting how to maximise the return on new member acquisition throug an indepth analysis of the life cycle of visitors on the job board website.

Cu there !

http://ecommerceparis.com/2011/index.php?option=com_ebsession&id=951&Itemid=93#session_1

How to deal with Matrix organization ?

2011-05-29T08:36:00.003+01:00

Large organizations often have a matrix organization to help local entities achieving their business goals. This matrix is also creating tension because of a decentralized decision model.

I'm dealing with it everyday, and I'm wondering how you deal with that ?

This survey is to help to benchmark such matrix model and improve it so that the business goals are achieved more smoothly.

Click here to take survey

If are interested in the result, let me know, i'll be more than happy to share if you take part of the survey.

Many thanks

Impact of online reputation on job seeking process

2010-02-21T23:51:00.002+01:00

Research commissioned by Microsoft in December 2009 found that 79 percent of United States hiring managers and job recruiters surveyed reviewed online information about job applicants.

Most of those surveyed consider what they find online to impact their selection criteria. In fact, 70 percent of United States hiring managers in the study say they have rejected candidates based on what they found.

Review the results of the survey to see how online reputations impact people’s lives. The research comes from interviews with over 1,200 hiring and recruitment managers and 1,200 consumers in the United States, the U.K., Germany and France.

Survey available in English here

2009 Trends in Marketing Budget

2009-02-07T22:24:00.007+01:00

Interesting survey by Marketing Sherpa shows that yes, marketing budget are lower than last year- as expected- but it forces marketeer to move away from the traditional AIDA model, to a more user centric model, where the user is promoting the brand to his personal network

A total of 48% of the firms interviewed predicted that their spending on social media would increase in 2009, with just 20% predicting a decrease. This compares with print advertising, where just 4% predicted an increase and 60% a decrease, and Radio / TV ads which saw a dramatic 83% of companies predicting a decrease in expenditure in 2009.

Job description of an online media manager

2009-01-10T10:58:00.004+01:00

Did you ever envisaged to work for a celeb? And did you ever work to manage on a daily basis his/her online identity ? Well, if you have been to Harvard, you might have a chance to be the online voice of Birtney Spears. She is currently hiring an online media manager ! If you are not interested it's always interesting to see what are the requirement for such a position - Good luck

Source : Techcrunch

Return on Investment on Social media ?

2009-01-08T18:43:00.006+01:00

I'm working on a framework presentation for the business development community of WK... Purpose is to create awareness that social media is part of the marketing mix and can be used to "produce" content, of course simplified to the extend and condensed in one hour ppt, easy no ?

We have asked Caroline from RollingTalks to help us and I wanted to share with you an interview of Katie Pain, the godmother of analytics done by Jason Falls of Social media explorer

European Business Awards nominees

2009-01-07T15:42:00.003+01:00

The European Business Awards is an independent Awards programme designed to recognise and promote excellence, best practice and innovation in the European business community, in line with the broad aims of the European Union and business representative groups across the member states. Check the so called Ruban d'honneur section if you participate to the web2.0 competition!

The competition starts...

2009-01-05T09:55:00.004+01:00

Many of you are getting impatient to know where I go... Fair enough :-) Let's do a competition through various channels where I left some elements of answers, consider this as a game to enter what Marc Prensky call the digital native generation. I hope to understand the social network typology of my peers and you'll get a chance to follow my web updates.

Let's first recap what I told everybody :

It's not an internal move, I'm really leaving Wolters Kluwer :-(
It's also a European position, same list of airports and cities :-)
I'm joining an online group as head of product development
I'll be located in Brussels, Belgium

Some people knows more than others, there is one person in LTRE that knows the name of the company (hey you ! if you read this post, pls don't participate :-), there is one person that know the segment I'll join, there are some more persons that know what kind of revenue stream that group generates.

Where do I leave tracks :
LinkedIn : http://www.linkedin.com/in/christophederassenfosse
Facebook: http://fr-fr.facebook.com/people/Christophe-De-Rassenfosse/743260815
Delicious : http://delicious.com/cderass
Twitter : http://twitter.com/deras
Flickr : http://www.flickr.com/photos/business-trip/

Just listing them all should ring a bell, web2.0 is not mature! Social networking will be more integrated in the future because it's impossible to maintain so many channels :-)

No competition without a price:-) I'll see what I can do, but price will be from a kiss to a bottle of something.

Enjoy... and you'll know in the near future !

Do you know Juriforum?

2008-12-18T13:23:00.001+01:00

Ihr Browser kann leider keine eingebetteten Frames anzeigen:
Sie können die eingebettete Seite über den folgenden Verweis
aufrufen: Juriforum searchbox

New round of funding for LinkedIn

2008-10-23T14:27:00.003+01:00

I should stop borrowing you with Linkedin but I just can't :-) After having raised 53 mio USD in June they raised now $22.7 mio more. It's worth noticing that the publisher McGraw-Hill Companies is part of this strategic investment. LinkedIn is employing 320 people and that money is more than welcome !

Will the financial crisis filter out the web2.0 start up ?

2008-10-16T13:42:00.003+01:00

Obviously when the stock market crashes, don't expect too much to get easy funding for your new start up. actually even what we could consider as success stories could be impacted. Dailymotion and netvides are under pressure and one could easily predict that only killer app will survive the down turn. On the one side, we could be glad to get only the best surviving, but on the other side it will definitely slow down the innovation cycle we could expect with trends like RIA or growth of the online spending. Who'll survive will live for long !

Sequoia Capital on startups and the economic downturn

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: depression recession)

First online live broadcsting of a football game in Belgium

2008-10-02T19:38:00.010+01:00

Standard - Everton was live broadcasted on the rtlinfo web site (member of the RTL group). It's a unique experience in the Belgian media landscape and I must admit I was quite happy. I did watch the game from Goteborg in Sweden for and it was a great home feeling. It's also worth noticing that RTL didn'tforeseen to monetize the TV ad display over the internet. Net result for the online audience during the TV ad : open micro with privatejokes from the RTL team, funny live shoots while waiting an on AIR slot, scripting of the discussion for the second half and so on... The only ad we get for this live broacast - a introducing ad video and 2 footer display banners...Talking about Itv ?...Many opportunities for improvement :-)

LinkedIn to launch their own Ad Network

2008-09-30T11:42:00.002+01:00

LinkedIn already sells ads against this audience on its own site, targeted by industry, seniority, company size, geography, gender, and number of connections. Now, it will expand that targeting to other partner sites. Publishers will have to apply to become part of the ad network, but LinkedIn will probably try to sign up some of its existing content partners such as the Businessweek, CNBC, and the New York Times... and why not business to business publishers like Wolters Kluwer.

LinkedIn knows it has a valuable audience (see the demographic presentation here), and now wants to sell access to that audience to others. Although LinkedIn will always make more money off the ads it shows on its own site (since it doesn’t have to split those ads three ways with Collective Media and the partner sites). Perhaps LinkedIn realizes that it will never become a big enough site on its own to justify its recent $1 billion valuation. (Although employees can only sell shares at a $500 million valuation). This will create incremental revenues for LinkedIn. And for publishing site partners it offers a potentially more lucrative set of remnant inventory that it can throw ads up against.

Source : Techcrunch France

And now Chrome...

2008-09-10T14:51:00.006+01:00

What to say about this new Google initiative? Chrome is mainly build on the Mozilla basements and they (accidentally?) launched Chrome one week after announcing the sponsoring of the Mozilla foundation for about 57mio USD. I don't believe Google wanted to kick ass in the browser field, the trends is much more deepth than that. They are launching more and more SaaS applications and the browser is becoming the new operating system for the google native generation. Chrome sounds to me like a cement in a strategy to lock user on the "Google Operating System". We'll see what the future will looks like and surely how the hardware will evolve because today google is launching a browser for aPC, tomorrow I don't know what google will launch on a PSP like device :-).

While Google is on the spotlight, Yahoo release it's own desktop

ps: the image was found on rue89

Is LinkedIn really worth a billion ?????

2008-06-24T08:17:00.003+01:00

Linkedin get another roundtable finalized with Bain Capital Ventures and a PR campaign orchestrated from those new executive Board members.

Mash up model - Buzz around Xobni

2008-01-11T18:54:00.000+01:00

A mash up is extending the capabilities of an application, usually you mash up application together to create your own application. It's a powerful technique for web site publisher s to improve the capabilities of their own service, the flip side though is that revenue of the used application is not not always shared with the integrator... That might be why is not so popular in the professional publishing industry but well used by entrepreneurs that want to increase their traffic.

Having said that, I need you to test and add-on, which is close to a mash up in the sense that it's adding capabilities to an application. Interesting about the one I need you for, Xobni, is that it's an add-on for outlook that automate the classification of your inbox in a GMAIL style. It's using a viral technique to promote the launch of their beta (again the beta syndrome I mentioned previously!) and I can be invited quicker if you click on the button and sign in for the free account... So please, act now ! You are one click away of participating in a viral action :-)

Thanks

Business Model evolution in the music industry

2008-01-09T14:27:00.000+01:00

2007 is a cornerstone year in the music industry. Various business model have been tested and I guess that 2008 will see some trends emerging. Let's take the Radiohead example, no figure have been officially released but simply the fact that a well established band can produce, market and distribute his own music is already a revolution. The perception of the workload (and cost) is not always reflected in the price the people wanted to give away for the In Rainbow Record (average of 2.5£). Now that this action is closed and that the album is regularly distributed through I-tunes and XL recording, I'm wondering if it was just not a marketing action....

Madonna is another example, she signed an all in contract with the concert promoter Live Nation (Clear Channel), valued at 120m$ for 3 albums, concert organization, selling merchandising and Licensing her name. That contract is also unique because behind live Nation, clear channel owns a full supply chain for the music industry from Radio to ticketing and venue. The value add of such deal for Clear Channel is huge !

The open source model is also applicable for another segment of artists. Smaller artists (in term of audience ,not in term of quality !) can benefit from free distribution and social platform like Jamendo with their 2530.000+ users to create a buzz and get noticed by professionals.

To conclude, many other alternative where elaborated but in essence to go back to the primary objective of this blog (publishing industry), the value chain is not changing in the music industry. The content (the music itself) is more and more accessible for free on the web and the value added of the actors need to be refine to establish new business models. Orgnaization like the Rolling Stone (not sure if I can still call them band :-) needs a new record to promote a worldwide tour, the money is defenitely not generated by that new album. I can see similar trend in the publishing industry, the information is more and more available for free and adaptation are needed to monetize new value added.

ACAP - Automated Content Access Protocol

2007-07-06T11:28:00.000+01:00

Have you heard about the ACAP initiative ? Funded by the World Association of Newspaper, the international Publisher Association and the European Publisher Councils, this projects aims to create technical framework that enables content publishers to express permissions in a format that search engine can interpret. ACAP is currently a project that aims to :
(a) create the technical framework, re-using as much as possible existing mechanism (like robot.txt, robot metadata tags, ...)
(b) communicate to the industry and create awareness to use this protocol
(c) create a governance framework to manage the protocol in the future.

It's an interesting initiative to follow because it provides publishers a tool to expose more high value content in a managed way. So far, the major public search engine didn't show big enthusiasm to participate but I guess it's more a wait and see position than a pure rejection. Having in mind all the pending case they are facing, ACAP might bridge the gap of copyrighting interpretation between Publisher and search engine. The status details of the mid term conference are on the-acap.org. The next progress status are reported in December 2007.

Be connected all the time - Virginia Tech example

2007-04-19T11:55:00.000+01:00

The Virginia Tech shooting is horrible and I don't understand how such situation can occurs nowadays. Politics is not the purpose of this blog, so I won't elaborate on the shooting facts but it triggers an new expectation : We'll need to be connected all the time !
- The University has sent e-mail to warn every student that a shooting was taking place.
-Instant Messenger was used to explain the modus operandi to student in the Norris Hall, IM was a workable alternative to the overloaded Mobile network (Verizon claims a 400% volume increase during the shooting)
- Video shooting from Phones is more and more used in press coverage, Vtech drama video are visible on YouTube, even If it has no added value in terms of information
- Websites have been created to provide assistance to Vtech student
- Journalists used Myspace, Facebook or community site to find their information

We are really in a connected world, Internet social community plays an active role, Vtech is a dramatic example.

Image credit : planetblacksburg.com

Copyrighting and Google News Services

2007-03-06T14:33:00.000+01:00

I didn't elaborate on this before but you all have read elsewhere that a court in Belgium has upheld an earlier ruling against Google that prevents the search provider from copying newspaper headlines in its Google News service and search index. The case was introduced by Copiepress, an association of 18 Belgian newspapers. The sentence is confirmed but the penalties are reduced to 25.000€/day, which provide me material to estimate the revenue generated by Google on the Belgian market. In the US Google can refer to a fair usage to populate their service, in Belgium it will not be the case any more.

Google must remove all citations to newspaper article from his search index and from his cache because that can be subject to copyright. OK but.. By doing that, it's not only the search indexing that is sentenced, Any reference to cached content is considered : the formatted cached version but also the relevance ranking, Keyword in context, ... It's also funny to see that the publishers know the rules of the game. if you don't want to be indexed, fill in the robot.txt file. Have a look at one of the newspaper member of copiepress, le soir... lesoir.be/robot.txt is quite empty. Go to the homepage of this site and guess what tool they use for their statistic :-)

The beta syndrome - When does startup cross the chasm ?

2007-01-21T22:20:00.000+01:00

Have you read Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the chasm ? To move from a technology driven to a customer driven model you have to cross the chasm of an early adopter community to a model where you address the "mass market". In short to move from R&D to a real product in operation.
For the web2.0 is often the time where thing goes wrong for Entrepreneurs and they tend to extend the happy days where they served geek without too much consideration of operational excellence, even if the product is already adopted and often top of mind. Google is a good example, did you notice that Gmail is still in beta ? I call it the beta syndrome of the web2.0, check in your own startup list and you'll notice how much are in beta mode... Why do I care ? Well the blog platform you are reading this post from just cross the chasm ! Congratulation Blogger...