Check us out at the Frankfurt Book Fair. It was the first time we've paid for a booth at any show and I was unsure if it would be worth it; but many meetings were undertaken and we now have proposals being considered by three new publishers!
Just a quick note to say that I will be in Seattle next week for the annual SLA (Special Libraries Association) conference. If I haven't yet contacted you but you'd like to meet up during the show (for business or beers) then please do drop me a line: ginny@ardent-marketing.com or +44 (0)7738 730 875 or skype me at ardent-marketing.
Otherwise I hope to catch up with as many colleagues and clients as possible, so see you there! If you can't make it this year then stay tuned for the exciting bits of news I hope to pick up.
The Society for Scholarly Publishing’s (SSP) 30th Annual Conference on 28-30 May in
The anniversary theme was "Empires of the Mind: Inventing the Future of Scholarly Publishing" and I thought it would be the usual discussion about and run-down of who's doing what with social media and blogging etc (and indeed these topics were prevalent) but it was MIT's presentation that really grabbed me.
Their plenary talk entitled "Just-In-Time Information" was delivered by Pattie Maes, Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, who presented some of the experiments going on at the MIT Media Lab for integrating relevant information into our physical and personal context so that we do not need to interrupt our lives by using a mobile or laptop keyboard and browser.
One of the experiments, Reachmedia, involved wearing a bracelet or ring that would gather information from the objects we pick up in a shop via electronic ID tags in the product. This is what everybody was talking about at the Gala event to celebrate the Society's thirtieth anniversary.
I like that this conference brings real research developments together with the library and publishing communities, reminding us all what we're actually sharing/promoting/publishing information for and what technologies we should all be planning for in the future.
I am still basking in the glow of Jim Griffin’s talk at the UKSG annual conference a couple of weeks ago. Jim is a digital music pioneer and was involved with napster some years back.
His points were mainly around the restrictive pricing and bundling of information as compared to the “voluntary” fees for music tracks. But my main takeaway was that relationships and marketing will be the key success driver for scholarly publishing in future, not controlling access to information, and not a product-centric strategy.
He ended to great applause with the already infamous line that as publishers and librarians, “we will have succeeded when our information feels free without being free.”
While I’m big on Agile web development and User-Centered Design, and have dabbled in geek-like fashion in techniques such as gaze plots and heat maps, I specialize in Marketing because I know we really make the difference between people using a product and people loving a product.
Those who use your product/journal/book/website, do so because they really need it. Which is great. But those who love your product/journal/book/website, have had a say over the years in how it works and how it’s packaged. They feel ownership of it, and they feel valued, fulfilled and proud because they helped get it right. They have a relationship with you, and that means they’ve told others.
