Part 2 of 4 on Innovation

Having success in publishing is an intentional process.   Like any great meal there are fresh ingredients,  a careful process of preparation, timing and patience to get it right.   But like any process worth doing there are building blocks for any good cook to consider.  The following are the issues your team needs to discuss when looking at online ePublishing Content Management Systems, or for short because we love acronyms -  ePubCMS (electronic publishing content management system)

Focus on Content First

• Quality – no short cuts, sustainability starts here.
• Quality in conversion and presentation.  Stress the little stuff – don’t cut corners.   If you make it hard for your audience to read – they will move on.
• Curation – develop strong relationships with authors and be prepared to lead them.  If you are begging for content and authors/speakers – take another look at your overall goals and objectives.
• Workflow – reducing costs and improving speed are critical today.  The more “common’ your knowledge the more critical will be operation efficiency and speed to market.  Operation Efficiency includes positioning yourself to meet the distribution needs of your audience.
• Distribution – Deliver what they want, when they want it and HOW they want it.   You may not be able to meet all needs but the new norm for publishing is reader options.   Make sure you have strategies to reach any device – desktop, laptop, tablets, eReaders and smartphones.  Actual “reading” may not occur on all but discovering and searching might.

Types of Content

One of the most challenging and impactful questions organizations need to make is the decision on if they are prepared to make a commitment to XML.   XML and their related cousins HTML5 and ePub are the future of publishing but do require a commitment by your staff to change their tools and workflows as well as the cost to convert existing content to these new formats.

The three primary advantages of XML are

1) it allows you to more cost effectively transform and convert content to a number of forms without expensive and time consuming conversion costs

2)it provides structure to content making it easier to reorganize content into micro-transactions and bundling (discussed later)

3) Content is fully searchable if you allow it to be (PDF, Word, PowerPoint and other types of documents are typically not searchable online).

Publishers that are publishing ten’s of thousands of pages annually should strongly consider XML.  In doing so make sure you are considering the entire workflow and are willing to invest in the technology, training for existing staff and have a strong conversion partner to help get going.   A company to look at for solution ideas is RSI Content Solutions and their Rsuite product.

Content conversion expertise is also needed by many and a leaders in thought leadership her is Data Conversion Laboratory, Inc  DCL.

If your organization does have a significant amount of content to warrant investment in a publishing CMS another unique provider is Tizra.  The Tizra CMS platform allows you to publish standard PDF making the contents fully searchable yet retain the original structure of the file for displaying and printing.   The Tizra CMS platform provides all of the access control and eCommerce you would expect and then some, pre-configured in the CMS.  It also includes a user friendly maintenance utility to allow non-technical staff to manage the site.

Not all Publishers need a special “publishing” CMS.   Many open sources and fee based CMS’s can work with varying limitations.   The caution here is to have a good clear understanding of the feature you need (I go into detail with these next) so that you can make informed decisions on the cost to build those features into your CMS or if it is worth making the investment in a publishing CMS that has these features built in.

Features – what solutions must do:

•  Discoverability:  can your content be found on google (and other search engines).  While SEO is important for any publisher content rules search engines.   While still providing access control (discussed later) the more “content” that can be searched and indexed by search engines the better will be your search rankings.    Plus, if buyers can not discover your content – how will they know they can buy it?

• Search ability and Organization – two of the most important things organizations can provide is the ability to search and find content easily.   A central content knowledge center or portal where ALL of your content can be found then directed to the appropriate place – conference site, learning management, eStore – wherever, places a lot of power in the hands of your members and audience to quickly find what they need.
• Access Control – Maybe the key feature that is also VERY expensive to build is the ability for a online content management system to manage access.   For many organizations where there is value in content to capture, it is critical that access be controlled.    The magic is discoverability + access control.   The types of access control is also critical in the types of products you can provide – subscription, download – see blog post Monetization Strategies for a list.
• Meta-Data – Meta-Data is information that describes other information.   Typically it can include title, authors, page count or length, ISBN number, description and many other pieces of data that describe the content itself.   This data is useful to the ePubCMS software for organization and searching.
• Micro-Transactions – the iTunes model.  A good ePubCMS solution will allow you to break down content in it’s lost consumable form.  Much like iTunes changed how music is sold, digital content manage system can allow readers to access and buy content in smaller units (individual secession or chapters).
• Bundling – sort of the opposite of Micro-Transactions is the ability to create new products by bundling content together.   Getting access to multiple volumes, tracks of a conference, combination of related books, the printed and digital versions of publications.   It’s all about giving readers the ability to purchase content the way they value it.
•  eCommerce – the biggest challenge with eCommerce is a combination of making it easy for readers to buy giving the seller the most return on their dollar with clear reporting on tractions.
  • Easy – this process needs to be as much like amazon and ebay as possible.   When your products have multiple pricing (member vs nonmember the system should calculate that automatically.
  • Return on the Dollar – many vendors will take a percentage of the sales price as compensation.  Other solutions simply require your merchant account and all sales less credit card costs are deposited into your account.      Sellers need to weigh the upfront costs to build/acquire the technology with sharing of revenues.   Make sure you have a clear understanding of your market or you may be leaving a significant amount of profits in the hands of your vendors.   Vendors themselves have to weigh the risk of enough sales to justify their costs.    If they work with you, and they won’t if they don’t think your content will sell, they are already betting that their percentage of the sales will be profitable for them.
  • Buying Analytics – it is critical to have a clear view of what’s selling and what’s not.   Good Content Managers (the people managing the site in this case) will act on sales data to help feature high selling products to attract buyers.   Providing timely feedback to the rest of the organization on what’s hot and what’s not is critical for each area of the organization to improve it’s content creation.

NOTE on Integration:  A common challenge when first implementing these solutions is the relationship to an existing eStore and integrating the new ePubCMS solution with your accounting systems.   Because a good ePubCMS solution should be able to allow you to create hundreds, maybe thousands, it may be difficult and time consuming to put all those products into your eStore.    Integration could be simplified by simply exporting a excel file with sale data and importing that into your accounting software.   Bottomline, make sure the time and expense of integration translates to time savings or faster access to data to offset the cost of integration.

• Branding – a key issues and certainly not one of the least is branding.  It is critical for any organization who owns their brand that buyers and consumers are well aware of the site they are on and who is bringing them access to that content.   For lead Generation it is critical and for most organizations there is so much more to their organization than just the ePubCMS solution that you want people to know they are in your house.    Solutions that restrict or serious limit your ability to control the look and feel should be concerned they are giving away value.    It also adds some responsibility to own this because usability and design are in your hands.
• Site Management – the next most costly feature for any ePubCMS, next only to access control, is the maintenance of the site.    Non-technical users should be able to perform all actions to upload, modify and remove.  That includes easily changing price, adding products, and changing the location of content on the site.   Design and branding of the site may require some technical skills, but not most day to day management of the site.

Workflow

Workflow solutions may also be a need of an organization.   Typically it is driven by the volume of content being managed.  For many – excel and a good online document manage tool like drop box, may be all that’s needed.   The biggest challenge most likely will be to keep content that’s being worked on separate from content ready to be published.   Creating directory structures and file naming conventions can help.

The decision making process when you need a workflow solution is not just how much time it will save but also quality by reducing mistakes.   For an organization to see the full benefits of a workflow solution the entire team needs to be trained on how to use it.

Integration with Other Solution

eCommerce integration was already discussed above.   The other most common integration is with an AMS (Association Management Solution) or other CRM solution (customer relationship management).   Single-Sign-On is becoming a standard and quality solutions will have support for a few different methods to connect with other technologies.

Many of the other common technologies like Learning Management Systems (LMS) can be simple in that there are links from the ePubCMS driving into the LMS.

Conclusion

Your decision on what Content Management Systems (CMS) you use will be a major factor in your ability to embrace online digital publishing.    There are many CMS solutions to consider.  Most CMS’s were designed to manage hundreds of webpages….not thousands, or ten’s of thousands or even hundred’s of thousands of page of content.

It is important for the non-programmer to realize a CMS is only a collection of tools and an architecture to create more tools (sometimes at your expense, sometime free as open source).   Many publishers purchase a CMS and then realize their staff does not have the skills or the CMS won’t support the feature needed to fully be on online publisher.

Share your creative ideas on how your organization and innovate with your digital publishing efforts?